On the surface, M. A. R. Habib's Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory provides an introduction to Hegel's philosophy, followed by an analysis of its influence on major thinkers ranging from Ferdinand de Saussure to Judith Butler. But there is a more urgent concern underlying this, because the ‘foundations of literary theory’ involve the foundations of a problem. The tools of self-analysis Hegel bequeathed to critical thought proved so powerful that philosophy became paralysed, nowhere more so than in the realm of politics. What's more, in its hostility to grand narratives and preference for difference over unity, theory has come to mirror the very contradictions and fragmentation of late capitalism. The way forward, Habib argues, involves a return to Hegel himself.
Habib situates Hegel in a broader enlightenment project that began to take apart once-stable philosophical categories. The first half of the book provides a lucid account of Hegel's political and psychological theory, and the way in which each worked on the other to move core concepts into a state of flux. Subjectivity itself became the product of interaction, and identity dependent on recognition. Language intervened between thought and reality, negating the world as given. Most influentially, reason came to be seen as a process rather than a technique, historical and social in its very nature. What made Hegel unique, however, was not just the extent to which he pursued this dismantling of thought but the confidence with which he subsequently rebuilt his own system in the triumphant third stage of his dialectic. He stands as the last major philosopher to achieve such resolution even as he places the very concept on shaky ground (‘the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing’, as Derrida puts it). Hegel's enlightenment scepticism is saved by a Romantic vision of totality, and a bourgeois faith in historical progress.
Marx, of course, responded to Hegel's quasi-religious synthesis with his own firmly secular resolution. Literary theory (here in its broadest post-structural sense) inherited Hegelian critique without faith in either conclusion. Theory became painfully alert to the self-blindness of a closed, totalising metaphysical system, especially one with a colonial will to swallow all concepts in its path. Yet none of this insight was possible without Hegel himself. The Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève introduced Hegel's philosophy to 1930s Paris in a series of seductive and idiosyncratic lectures attended by almost every thinker set to define the intellectual tone of the next decades, from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to Bataille, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida and Foucault. But what they wanted were the means of destabilising the edifice of philosophy, not of constructing a new one. And, in Habib's account, the place they ended up was a cul-de-sac.
Habib traces a familiar pattern in each case. Julia Kristeva, for example, deployed the divided self of psychoanalysis to reveal Hegel's vast system as an archetype of philosophy's paranoiac dream of unity. She sought to recraft language as a means of resistance to such oppressions, but ultimately withdrew from any overtly political programme, disillusioned. Her revolutionary experiment in writing stands as representative of the broader linguistic turn in theory, providing an unprecedently acute analysis of power while restricting any opposition to the domain of language alone. Even when Habib turns to the more overtly political meditations of the Frankfurt School he finds a similar story, in so far as their ‘second stage’ Marxism focuses on the particular rather than the whole, providing a technique of critical investigation that struggles to move beyond critique.
As such, the dialectic is arrested in its second stage, the moment of scepticism and deconstruction. We recognise the oppressive binary oppositions of thought—woman and man, for example, or East and West—but can transcend them only negatively by seeing them as performative and co-dependent. The effect, for Habib, is that while literary theory arose out of a rejection of the complacent, liberal positivism of the New Critics, in its retreat into ever further negation it replays the classic modes of bourgeois thought. Far from presenting a subversive challenge to liberal humanism it becomes a comfortable extension of it.
Most troublingly, where theory is left merely sifting the pieces, capitalism thrives on fragments, happily positing the market as the only organising force. This act of totalisation, Habib argues, needs to be resisted by alternative ones. Hence the extensive presence of Marx in this book, ostensibly as a vehicle through which Hegel informed theory, but evidently haunting Habib's thoughts as a symbolic alternative to deconstruction. In this background opposition, between a philosophy of difference and a more unifying, systematic anti-capitalism, it is hard not to hear echoes of broader contemporary debates over the future of left-wing politics. But Marx's specific significance for Habib concerns his emphasis on the human. It is this that helps Habib build towards his own synthesis, a ‘dialectical humanism’ founded on an appropriately complex understanding of subjectivity.
The post-structuralist idea of the subject as merely an emanation of language is regarded here as an expression of humanity in its current, constrained form, not of our full, self-creative potential. Hegel already provides the means of superseding this. From Hegel's philosophy, Habib wants to retrieve some core concepts: identity as relational, a dialectical, self-correcting notion of reason, and a conception of totality that is open rather than oppressive. This demands wresting reason back from the grasp of technological capitalism to which it has been indentured (as well as from the scepticism of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault, for whom reason will always be entwined with the exercise of power). But for Hegel (and Habib), reason is inseparable from ethics. Crucially, it is not something merely given to us, but something we must achieve in dialogue with others. Habib concedes that Hegel's vision of reason is employed in the service of a racist, Eurocentric view of history, but its best features can be salvaged, and the idea that we can somehow abandon it altogether is neither fruitful nor realistic. In perhaps the most controversial aspect of his argument he suggests that, through an excess of scepticism, Western culture finds itself unable to define or defend its values, with the usual examples of fascism and Islamic fundamentalism provided as requisite foes.
Habib is conscious of the challenges faced. His vision of a way forward depends on ideas of consensus that will feel fragile for some time. And perhaps this is a good thing: our wariness with regards to imposing values as universal, when they turn out to be both regional and oppressive, has been hard-won. At times, Habib underestimates the liberating force of critical theory when it comes to gender, race and postcolonial thought. He acknowledges that the situation is not always as clear cut as he makes out, and concedes the contribution of figures such as Derrida, Žižek, Frederic Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Martha Nussbaum and Elaine Scarry to public discourse. But, he claims, ‘they have done this precisely by utilising, not jettisoning, what we might call “communal” reason’ (320).
The overarching thesis leaves little room for other founding thinkers who might bring Hegel's own contribution into relief. His predominance here as a source risks a deadening totalisation of its own. But the study is enriched by its scope and the sensitivity with which Habib is able to focus on individual intellectual relationships. I've sketched the broad argument of Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory, but a strength of the book is its close readings: deep, extensive chapters on Hegel and Derrida are one highlight, especially Habib's attention to Glas in which Derrida sets up his own mischievous dialectic between Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Jean Genet's Thief's Journal. Habib's demonstration of the ways in which Hegel's theories of language anticipate the work of Saussure and Barthes presents semiotics in a new light. His section on ‘The Politics of Recognition’ considers Hegel's seminal master-slave dialectic through the prism of ‘allegorical’ readings by Deleuze and Derrida—Deleuze enlisting Nietzsche as he projects mastery and slavery into the abstractions of the dialectic itself, Derrida drawing on Bataille in his attempt to unsettle the metaphysical enterprise by highlighting traces of comedy and risk. Habib provides an authoritative account of these exchanges while also, thanks to his firm grasp of the Hegelian texts, shining a light on misreadings and misrepresentations.
This strategy is useful when he turns to Žižek, concluding the section on Hegel and Marxist literary theory. Žižek's radical rereading of the dialectic via Lacan, in which Hegel is presented as the first ‘post-Marxist’, admitting antagonism and impossibility into ideology, gets an extensive section of its own. So does Hegel's problematic relationship with gender, in which Habib acknowledges Hegel's profoundly sexist positioning of women outside of civic life (a theory based on the mythical Antigone rather than any flesh and blood woman), before assessing responses by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, as well as Hegel's legacy for feminism more broadly. Throughout, Habib's passion, purpose and even occasional humour makes even the knottiest of encounters readable. If, as Derrida saw, ‘we will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel’, it becomes clear that this is because he touches on an irresolvable tension at the heart of philosophy.
