With The Self-Emptying Subject, Alex Dubilet enriches the hitherto humble literature on Hegelian kenosis (Entäußerung) by offering an original and surprising interpretation of Hegel as a thinker equally concerned with Entäußerung as with Aufhebung (sublation). Given the substantial literature that already exists on the Hegelian Aufhebung, Dubilet devotes his attention solely toward explicating the Hegelian Entäußerung. In so doing, the book focusses heavily upon the Phenomenology of Spirit, but also draws substantiation from Faith and Knowledge and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

Aufhebung denotes the overcoming of a contradiction by sublating two antithetical positions into a coherent whole while still preserving their differences. Entäußerung, on Dubilet's reading, describes a kenotic system of ‘letting go’ (92), or ‘self-emptying’ (96), in which both the divine and human thoroughly dispossess themselves of their individualities so to manifest an immanence that surpasses their differentiation. This radical re-interpretation of Hegel as a thinker also heavily focussed upon Entäußerung forms a key subplot of the book's wider effort to free the theory of kenosis from the historical, disciplinary and metaphysical shackles in which Dubilet considers it to be restricted.

Specifically, Dubilet takes strong exception to the oft-espoused distinction between that which is thought to be theological and medieval (including the work of Meister Eckhart), and that which is considered secular-philosophical and modern (including Hegel). The over-simplified theological/philosophical binary, Dubilet suggests, serves to suppress the liberating immanence that lies dormant within the work of Eckhart and Hegel by categorising them alongside systems that are centred around transcendence. The medieval/modern binary, moreover, is said to prevent fruitful dialogues between thinkers of different eras that can help to uncover unforeseen elements of their thought systems.

Contra the traditional assumption that the theological implies transcendence while the philosophical-secular implies immanence, Dubilet demonstrates that transcendence has proven inevitable on both sides of this problematic binary. He agrees with Gilles Deleuze and François Laruelle that philosophical critiques of transcendence often themselves imply transcendence, meaning that both the theological and philosophical worldviews are liable to point their adherents toward a transcendent entity. This, according to Dubilet, is to subject them to a life of failed ‘instrumentality’ (19) in which they are made subservient to an unreachable ideal: ‘Transcendence, whether in its theological or secular form, acts as a ruse of legitimation and subjection […] [toward] a future that always remains merely a future’ (174).

As an antidote for this ‘matrix of striving, labor, and mediation’ (19), Dubilet establishes a revised approach to kenosis that is posited as leaving no room for transcendence of any kind. It confutes transcendence by arguing that processes of self-emptying prove the self/other distinction to be subsumed within a non-differentiation between God and humanity that exists ‘[b]efore and in excess of all subjection that installs the subject in its proper site’ (19). This is described throughout the book as ‘radical immanence’ (33), ‘the breakdown of all teleological structures’ (56), ‘a life without a why’ (37), ‘uncreated’ (40), and ‘the site for the (self-)dispossession of all finite subjectivity’ (132). This lexicon, Dubilet suggests, can act as a basis for an ethics of self-emptying that undermines the self-other distinction and thus circumvents the ethics of the self and of the other that respectively dominate the field in their Foucauldian and Levinasian forms.

Dubilet establishes this vocabulary via a multi-disciplinary and trans-historical engagement with Meister Eckhart, Hegel and Georges Bataille, whose work is shown, with some admitted variation, to coalesce on the topic of kenosis. Meister Eckhart represents medieval theology and acts as the book's protagonist, Hegel is assigned the role of deuteragonist as a modern philosopher, and Georges Bataille, representing postmodern transdisciplinary thought, serves as the tritagonist. Via this analysis, Dubilet outlines a multi-disciplinary and trans-historical ‘counter-archive’ (175) of self-emptying that attempts to remove the possibility of transcendence and to undermine the problematic medieval-theological/modern-philosophical binary that it is intertwined with.

In Chapter One, ‘Meister Eckhart's Kenotic Lexicon and the Critique of Finitude’, Dubilet turns his focus toward Eckhart's Sermon 52, or Beati pauperes spiritu, in which Eckhart proclaims that ‘[a] poor man wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing’ (29). According to Dubilet, Eckhart does not venture to fulfil these criteria via ascetic self-negation, but instead prescribes ‘the absolute relinquishing of one's own will’ (31), a process which requires that one empties oneself of all misjudged binary distinctions between themselves and others. In so doing, they may encounter ‘the innermost’ (32), a singular site that is antecedent to the separation of God and world.

In Chapter Two, ‘Conceptual Experimentation with the Divine’, Dubilet considers the methodology of Eckhart's engagement with the Bible with a view to demonstrating that Eckhart's work is not as straightforwardly theological as many interpreters assume. Eckhart's method is shown to be an ‘experimentalism’ in which ‘he decomposes verses, purposefully mistranslates passages, and extracts statements from their native semantic contexts in order to transform them into occasions for speculative thought’ (64). Eckhart's interpretation of Jesus’ incarnation in the Gospel of John, for instance, is posited as a basis for his pre-ontological identification of the human with the divine. Inherent to the incarnation, says Dubilet's Eckhart, is not only the divinity of Christ, but also the divinity of human nature, an interpretation which ‘enables a kind of universal theosis […] in which divine immanence is not only divine, but configures life itself as fundamentally immanent and univocal’ (81).

The least accessible of the book's five chapters is Chapter Three, ‘From Estrangement to Entäußerung: Undoing the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit’. Here, Dubilet sees in Hegel a distinct Eckhartian influence. Accordingly, Dubilet's Hegel does not advise, as Foucault does, that it is necessary ‘to move beyond the false moment of the Entäußerung’ (93), but conversely suggests that ‘Entäußerung is what remains at the very end’ of the Phenomenology (116). Central to this argument is a dense but convincing re-consideration of the role played by the Unhappy Consciousness in the overall narrative of the Phenomenology. The Unhappy Consciousness's inability to overcome its own internal contradiction and to recognize its fundamental harmony with God is no longer a call for further attempts to force the unification of the self with the other. All attempts at overcoming this separation have proven counterproductive, whether they have tried to do so by turning away from the other, as in the Master-Slave dialectic, or by appealing to a transcendent being, as in the Unhappy Consciousness. Instead of calling for a teleological unification of the self and other, these dialogues pave the way for Hegel's realization that, as per Eckhart, spirit denotes ‘a reciprocal self-emptying and externalization that affirms its immanence as preceding and exceeding any structure of oppositional severence’ (117). Having been developed in the ‘Revealed Religion’ section of the Phenomenology, this realisation of an immanence that eclipses the separation of the divine and the human constitutes the fundamental message of the section on ‘Absolute Knowledge’.

Chapter Four, ‘Hegel's Annihilation of Finitude’, sees Dubilet attend to Hegel's engagement with finitude in Faith and Knowledge and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The lesson of these texts, for Dubilet, is that ‘finitude must be annihilated, taken absolutely as nihil’ (123). On this count, Hegel disbands himself from a pool of his peers, including Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose philosophies all, in various ways, are considered as ontologically prioritizing finitude. Such affirmations of finitude are no better than affirmations of transcendence. They merely affirm the opposing side of the infinite/finite, God/world divide, and in so doing reinforce the veracity of this binary, a binary which itself is the basis for theorisations of transcendence and of finitude's taxing and impossible efforts to unite with it. Accordingly, Dubilet's Hegel sees fit to pull the proverbial rug out from under this binary by annihilating finitude in professing ‘an infinite immanence that precedes and exceeds the division of thought and life into the poles of the subject and what is transcendent to it’ (143).

Bataille is brought into the conversation in the book's final chapter, ‘Sans Emploi, Sans Repos, Sans Réponse: George Bataille's Loss without a Why’. Here, Dubilet portrays Bataille as a thinker who follows Eckhart and Hegel in proposing that kenosis uncovers ‘an immanence that precedes and exceeds’ the God/world binary (150). Bataille's thought is traditionally considered separate from Hegel's on the basis of his critique of Hegel in Inner Experience. Here, Bataille understands Hegel's as a system of teleological oppression in which subjects work for a supposedly greater good. Hegel is said to equate existence and work and as such, in Bataille's words, ‘he reduces the world to the profane world’ (152). Dubilet contends that Bataille's critique of Hegel is specifically a critique of Alexandre Kojève's Hegel; that is, of a Hegel who is merged with the Marxist notion that productivity constitutes humankind's foremost priority. Bataille's critique does not, however, apply to Dubilet's Hegel, with whom Bataille's thought is more compatible. This is made clear in Dubilet's exposition of Bataille's interpretation of the end of history. This concept:

There is an evident continuity here between Bataille, Eckhart and Hegel on account of their shared rejection of transcendence and affirmation of immanence. Bataille's immanence is, however, dourer than that of Eckhart and Hegel, and in this sense there is variation between their systems. Hegel's (and particularly Eckhart's) rejection of transcendence leads to the discovery of an immanence in which life is beneficially no longer plagued by an unsatisfiable longing for unity with an other. Bataille's immanence, by contrast, is said to still yearn for the sense of direction that it once (albeit illusorily) found in transcendence.

Altogether, Dubilet's is a compelling, ambitious, and coherent project which admirably seeks to undermine the problematic medieval-theological/modern-philosophical binary via an engagement with an unusual and interesting array of thinkers. The book does, however, fall into the trap of constructing alternative binaries to help overcome those that it condemns. At the end of Chapter Two, Dubilet concludes:

While later discussing Hegel's treatment of finitude and infinitude, by contrast, Dubilet suggests that binaries inevitably ‘establish a relation of imbrication of the positions that are meant to be posited as independent’ (144). It is regrettable, then, that Dubilet sees fit to consider immanence and transcendence as being rigidly separate. As the work of scholars writing on Hegelian panentheism – including Robert C. Whittemore, Jolyon Agar and Robert R. Williams – has attested to, Hegel's metaphysic is the site of highly complex interactions between immanence and transcendence which challenge Dubilet's strict delineation between these spheres.

The book's Eckhartian interpretation of Hegel will likely displease many scholars on the basis of its radical novelty. Indeed, Dubilet's interpretation raises more questions than it answers. Most notably, it remains uncertain whether the evidence for the Hegelian Entäußerung can equal that for Aufhebung, and to what extent Dubilet's Hegel is reconcilable with the Science of Logic, which is hardly mentioned. Nevertheless, The Self-Emptying Subject is a dense text and a wealth of substantiation for Dubilet's reading—particularly his sharp analysis of the continuation between Eckhart and Hegel—lies within it. Ultimately, Dubilet makes a strong case for Entäußerung as a central tenet of Hegel's system, and his Entäußerung-centred Hegelian kenosis provides a new perspective for scholars researching Hegel's philosophy of religion. Dubilet's book promises to generate important scholarship within this branch of Hegel studies.