Abstract
This concluding chapter to the handbook contains the editors’ reflections on the state of the relationship between theory and German Idealism by way of a narrative from the founding of “French theory” in the 1960s, through recent post-poststructuralisms, to conjectures about the future of the relationship. In particular, the editors describe the role of Nietzsche and the various returns to Kant in constituting the traditional image of German Idealism in theory and the recent splintering within theory among competing post-poststructuralisms, including the “speculative realist” movement and the “new materialisms.” The chapter ends with the idea that the relationship between theory and German Idealism will endure, first, because of the constitutive role of reading in any study of idealist philosophies and, second, because of the significance of German Idealism to the constitution of a “new humanities.”
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth recalling at this point that the current volume (and so the current set of conclusions) does not cover the relations of French feminism or Frankfurt School (and post-Frankfurt School) critical theory to German Idealism, as these are being treated in separate volumes. For current purposes, we also leave aside the thorny issue of the tacit interrelations that might hold between Italian theory and bio-philosophy and the German Idealist tradition.
- 2.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau (1947), trans. James Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). A partial list of those who attended these lectures can be found in Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 225–7.
- 3.
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1946), trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
- 4.
Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1929/1951). The resonances of this view can be seen in Paul Ricoeur’s “Hegel and Husserl on Intersubjectivity,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II (1986), trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 227–245.
- 5.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).
- 6.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993). For the mid-century French reception of Hegel, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Roth, Knowing and History; Bruce Baugh, French Hegel From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003); Gary Gutting, “French Hegelianism and anti-Hegelianism in the 1960s: Hyppolite, Foucault, and Deleuze,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. 1: Philosophy and the Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 246–271. Both Baugh (French Hegel, 1–7) and Gutting (“French Hegelianism,” 247) take the view that Kojeve’s importance has been exaggerated.
- 7.
These are the terms S. T. Coleridge uses to explain his turn away from Schelling, as he found Schelling’s Naturphilosophie exceeding its promised containment within transcendental philosophy (Collected Letters, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–1971], 4.874). On the nineteenth-century French reception of Hegel, see Kirill Chepurin et al. (eds), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming 2023).
- 8.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), x–xiii.
- 9.
David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977). At a time when little French theory had been translated into English—Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology and no major work by Deleuze—Allison’s collection included essays by Alphonso Lingis, Deleuze, Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Derrida, as well as Martin Heidegger, Eric Blondel, and Sarah Kofman.
- 10.
Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
- 11.
Michel Foucault, “The Prose of Actaeon” (1964), trans. Robert Hurley, in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 123–35; Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense (1969), trans. Charles Stivale and Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 280–301; Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (1974), trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 67–84.
- 12.
Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche (1945), trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992).
- 13.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), n. trans. (New York: Vintage, 1970), 327; Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (1963), trans. Charles Ruas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
- 14.
See, for example, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). See also François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co., Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 316.
- 15.
See Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), especially Chapter 5 (“History or the Abyss: Post-structuralism”) and Chapter 8 (“Paul de Man: The Rhetoric of Authority”); John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), especially Chapter 4 on de Man.
- 16.
Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), xi–xvii.
- 17.
Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); see especially Chapter 5 on “Kant and Derrida” and the preceding one on Baudrillard, “Lost in the Funhouse.” Norris also devotes much of the “Introduction” to positioning Paul de Man, whose Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) has three chapters on Nietzsche as a thinker of critique. De Man, according to Norris, resists a “Romantic” misappropriation of Kant that risks leading to Hegel in favor of a “vigilant awareness of the dangers” of not “respect[ing] the powers and limits of the various faculties (19–21).
- 18.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1985), trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 185. Habermas is not uncritical of Kant, wanting to go in a more intersubjective direction; but his emphasis on the public sphere and on modernity as rationality is aligned with a broadly Kantian-Hegelian axis, against the kind of thinking that follows in the wake of Nietzsche (i.e., Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida).
- 19.
Jacques Derrida, “Deconstructions: The Im-possible,” in French Theory in America, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16.
- 20.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bourdieu is in dialogue with Kant at many other points, but, whatever their differences in terms of Bourdieu not subscribing to the universalism of the Enlightenment, Bourdieu’s project is broadly speaking one of practical reason.
- 21.
Many of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972]) are on, or include, Hegel. In particular, “The Ends of Man” (1968) moves through a long Idealist tradition (Hegel–Husserl–Heidegger), but culminates in Nietzsche and is framed throughout by a Nietzschean rhetoric of thresholds, change, and rebirth.
- 22.
This is Paul de Man’s criticism of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). One can later make the same criticism of de Man himself, but at this stage literature for him is its own deconstruction and begins “on the far side of this knowledge” (ibid., 17). Hence one cannot bracket the “question of the author’s knowledge of his own ambivalence” (ibid., 119), as it is not the text that needs to be deconstructed but the first commentaries on it (ibid., 139–141).
- 23.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), trans, Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993); Forget Foucault (1977), trans. H. Beitchmann and M. Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987); The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), trans. B. and C. Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 97. For Nietzsche’s influence, see Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet (2001), trans. Chris Turner (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–6, 22, 40.
- 24.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Fatal Strategies (1983), trans. Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990); The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney: Power Institute, 1987); The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1990), trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993).
- 25.
See, for example, Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997); Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999). For Gilles Simondon, see Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2005), trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Parts of this work had appeared between 1964 and 1989.
- 26.
Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 212.
- 27.
That is, from the mid- to late 1990s onward, the expansion of the corpus of poststructuralism and, more broadly, theory has been largely due to the belated recovery of numerous further theorists and texts beyond the canonical ones introduced in the 1970s and 1980s.
- 28.
Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (eds.), The New Schelling (London: Continuum, 2004), and Jason M. Wirth (ed.) Schelling Now (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). The first collection contained essays by Iain Hamilton Grant, Alberto Toscano, Žižek, Habermas, and Manfred Frank (on Schelling and Sartre); the second included essays by Žižek, Martin Wallen (on Schelling and Deleuze), David Farrell Krell, and a section on Schelling and contemporary philosophy that takes up Emmanuel Levinas and Nancy, as well as Heidegger.
- 29.
See the essays in Tilottama Rajan and Sean McGrath (eds.), Schelling After Theory, special issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 19:1 (2015), 1–197.
- 30.
David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). In connection with Krell’s Contagion, see Jacques Derrida, Life Death, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, trans. Pascale Anne-Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
- 31.
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985), trans. David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Kittler proposes two discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme): the logocentric one of 1800 figured by the hand and voice, and one of 1900, figured by the prosthesis of the typewriter as a figure for writing and introduced by Nietzsche’s trauma over technology.
- 32.
Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), 139–143.
- 33.
The influence of Werner Hamacher’s readings of Hegel (as well as Friedrich Schlegel) cannot be overestimated here; see Pleroma—Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the anthropology (or specifically madness), see, for example, Daniel Berthold-Bond, Hegel’s Theory of Madness (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); Kirill Chepurin, “Subjectivity, Madness, and Habit: Forms of Resistance in Hegel’s Anthropology,” in Hegel and Resistance: History, Politics and Dialectics, ed. Bart Zantvoort and Rebecca Comay (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 101–16; On the Philosophy of Nature (including medicine), see Tilottama Rajan, “(In)digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 217–236 and “Hegel’s Irritability,” European Romantic Review 32: 5–6 (2021), 499–517; Wesley Furlotte, The Problem of Nature in Hegel’s Final System (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
- 34.
E.g., Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth, and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); H.S. Harris, Night Thoughts (1801–1806) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
- 35.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 26. Despite unusual and illuminating comments on the Aesthetics, for example, Jameson himself does not discuss anything but the Phenomenology in detail.
- 36.
Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (1963), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xi–xiii.
- 37.
Karl Jaspers, Kant, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, 1957), 45–46; our emphasis.
- 38.
In order of publication Lyotard’s significant engagements with Kant are in: “The Sign of History” (1982), in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 393–411; The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983), trans. Georges Van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), which takes up Kant at many points but also folds in a version of “The Sign of History” (151–181); “Judicieux dan le Différend,” in Jacques Derrida, Vincent Descombes et al., La Faculté de Juger (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985), 195–236; Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History (1986), trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); “Sensus Communis” (1986), Paragraph 11:1 (1988), 1–23; “The Interest of the Sublime” (1988), in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 109–132; Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); and several essays taking up the sublime in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988), trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Mentions of Kant are also to be found throughout Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming (1979), trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is guided by the Kantian motif of the contest of faculties (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984]).
- 39.
Lyotard, The Differend, 161–171.
- 40.
Thus, Coleridge, following a Romantic tradition of “understanding the author better than he understood himself,” comments on “The Letter vs. the Spirit of Kant”: “I could never believe, it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon,… than his mere words express” (Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions [1817], ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 155).
- 41.
Dews, Logics of Disenchantment, 143.
- 42.
A transcript of the workshop appears in Ray Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism,” Collapse vol. 3 (2012), 307–450.
- 43.
See Levi Bryant et al., The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism (Melbourne: Re Press, 2011); see further, for example, Lee Braver, “A Brief History of Continental Realism,” in Continental Philosophy Review vol. 45 (2012), 261–89.
- 44.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006), trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2009), 42.
- 45.
Ibid., 45. It is these two properties that lead to Meillassoux’s diagnosis of late twentieth-century European philosophy as “fideist.”
- 46.
Graham Harman in Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism,” 381.
- 47.
See, particularly, Alberto Toscano’s contributions to Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism,” passim.
- 48.
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7. The full quote gives a sense of the topological imaginary at stake in this project: “Contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us … that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere” (ibid.).
- 49.
Ibid., 4–5. Meillassoux defines the correlation as follows, “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (ibid., 5).
- 50.
These four options very crudely correspond to the projects outlined by, respectively, Meillassoux, Harman, Grant, and Brassier.
- 51.
The “turn” imagery persists even when much of this trend is under scrutiny (particularly for its awkward relation to gender); see Katerina Kolozova and Eileen Joy (eds), After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy and Feminism (New York: Punctum, 2016).
- 52.
See, canonically, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
- 53.
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 4–5.
- 54.
Harman in Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism,” 368.
- 55.
Iain Hamilton Grant, “The Chemistry of Darkness.” Pli vol. 9 (2000), 45. Grant had previously translated Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy as part of the “Nietzschean moment” in theory narrated above. However, the relation of these earlier forays into theory to his work on Schelling and, indeed, the extent to which these earlier translations or, for that matter, this brief “speculative realist” alliance matter for understanding the trajectory of Grant’s thinking is not yet clear.
- 56.
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 3, 6.
- 57.
Ibid., 61, 158.
- 58.
Iain Hamilton Grant, “Schellingianism and Postmodernity: Towards a Materialist Naturphilosophie,” available at: www.bu.edu/wcp/papers/cult/cultgran.htm. Grant concludes elsewhere, “The enemy in all of this is all post-Cartesian European philosophy’s elimination of the concept, even the existence, of nature, a deficiency common equally to Kant and the postkantians” (Philosophies of Nature, x).
- 59.
Grant, Philosophies of Nature, 5.
- 60.
Grant, “Schellingianism and Postmodernity.”
- 61.
Quentin Meillassoux in Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism,” 409–10.
- 62.
Ibid., 412. Meillassoux continues, “To be a contemporary realist means, in my view, to efficiently challenge the Fichtean fatality of pragmatic contradiction; not exactly to challenge the very thesis of the Science of Knowledge, but the mode of refutation which is therein invented” (ibid., 413).
- 63.
As well as the contributors included in this volume, see Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
- 64.
In addition to the previous note, see Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum, 2009); Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (New York: Punctum, 2012); Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
- 65.
For example, his introduction to Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of The World, ed. Eugene Thacker (New York: Repeater, 2020).
- 66.
Michael C. Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 67.
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (1996) (London: Routledge, 2005), xviii.
- 68.
Ibid., 163.
- 69.
Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2014), trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Policy, 2015), xiii.
- 70.
Catherine Malabou, “Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?,” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy vol. 28, no. 3 (2014), 245–6.
- 71.
Ibid., 246.
- 72.
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27.
- 73.
Malabou, “Relinquish the Transcendental,” 246. Meillassoux’s word is actually “abandon” (ibid., 243)
- 74.
Malabou, Before Tomorrow, 2.
- 75.
Ibid., 3.
- 76.
Ibid., 15.
- 77.
Ibid., 19.
- 78.
Ibid., xiv.
- 79.
Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
- 80.
Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man” (1968), in Margins of Philosophy, 134–136.
- 81.
Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 2012); Tom Cohen, Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012).
- 82.
Tom Cohen, “Interview,” 5 November, http://noise-admiration.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-interview-22012-tom- (last accessed: 2 July 2016); Cohen, “Toxic Assets: de Man’s Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary (An American Fable),” in Theory and the Disappearing Future, 107.
- 83.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (1971), trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 4, 7, 15, 71.
- 84.
According to the Schelling of 1795, intellectual intuition is beyond words, concepts, philosophical articulation, or any form of determination whatsoever. See F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, ed. and trans. Fritz Marti. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 78, 85, 110.
- 85.
Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dès, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012). The title alone testifies to the above point: Meillassoux eschews the more obvious “reading [lecture]”, in favor of “déchiffrage.”
- 86.
See, for example, Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of “progressive universal poetry” (Athenaeum Fragments [1798], in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 31–32); or Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concept, possibly influenced by Schlegel, of understanding an author better than he understands himself through a “divinatory” reading (“The Hermeneutics: The Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” trans. Jan Wocjik and Roland Haas, New Literary History vol. 10 [1978], 9).
- 87.
We refer to a tradition that runs from Georges Canguilhem (obviously a direct influence on Foucault and Derrida) to several non-theoretical studies that take up Kant, Schelling, and a range of work in the life sciences that is in dialogue with them. See Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life (1965), trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); see also, among many others, Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982); Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Philippe Huneman (ed.), Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007); and John Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
- 88.
Two studies that have begun to move in this direction in taking up the Kantian and Hegelian inheritance in art history are Mark Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
- 89.
Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition” (1998) in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–9.
- 90.
F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies (1803), trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 9, 12, 17. “Titles” and “Sendoffs” are two of the papers written in 1982 for meetings held in connection with GREPH (Groupe de Recherches sur l’Enseignement Philosophique) and included in Derrida’s two-volume Right to Philosophy (1990). See Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 195–249. The idea of a university without condition alludes back to the more concrete suggestions made in these papers, which in effect propose an empirically informed transcendental program for the dissemination of philosophy.
- 91.
Jacques Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” in Eyes, 64–80; F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 13.
- 92.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 367–74.
- 93.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: das Allgemeine Brouillon (1798), trans. and ed. David W. Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). See the chapter by Tilottama Rajan in this volume for elaboration.
- 94.
Derrida, Eyes of the University, 213.
- 95.
Ibid., 224.
- 96.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 32–7; Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 54–69.
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Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (2023). Editors’ Conclusions: The Past, Present, and Future of the Theory–German Idealism Relation. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_23
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