ONLINE FIRST
published on February 8, 2025
?lavoj ?i?ek

https://doi.org/10.5840/harvardreview20252757
From Hegel to Heidegger .?.?. and Back
For decades, Robert Pippin was defending Hegel¡¯s thought against the post-Hegelian attempts to undermine it, inclusive of Heidegger¡¯s reading of Hegel as the culmination of Western metaphysics. However, his latest book Culmination, Pippin changes his position and basically endorses Heidegger¡¯s reading of Hegel: in Hegel¡¯s Absolute Knowing, the reduction of Being to discursive categories, i.e., to logical structures, reaches its highpoint. In my critical reading of Pippin (and Heidegger himself), I try to demonstrate two things. First, Hegel sustains his own version of the irreducible finitude and contingency of human existence. Second, not only is Hegel¡¯s entire system based upon a notion of the ¡°night of the world¡± which reaches deeper than Heidegger¡¯s being-in-the-world; Hegel¡¯s self-relating negativity also precludes the Nazi temptation to which Heidegger succumbed and opens up the space for radical emancipatory politics.