Memory is of the future. Remember. These are the opening words of Angelica Nuzzo’s most recent book on Hegel. And to whoever decides to walk along the path she has traced for her readers, these words will become not only an invitation to enter the way of a very rigorous philosophical search. They also describe an ethical demand: a responsibility to address our historical present with the questions offered to us by the history of philosophy; a responsibility also to re-read this history in the light of our present, and to renew our contemporary debates with the force of our own unexplored philosophical past. In this sense, Nuzzo’s book is a very successful attempt to put Hegel in direct dialogue with contemporary philosophical discussions. It does so not by turning Hegel into a proto-postmodern figure, but rather by showing how his modern and critical perspective on his own epoch can serve as an example of a thinking that creates its own history, and hence, the possibilities of its own future.

Nuzzo’s book is precisely devoted to the question of how Hegel addressed this historical character of thought, and how history becomes a central feature in the development of his system. The question presents itself in Hegel’s work, according to Nuzzo, together with a systematic reflection on the role of memory (Erinnerung), the development of which will produce a major turn in Hegel’s conception of history and of philosophy as a whole. Nuzzo’s main purpose is to show, on the one hand, on what grounds history becomes for Hegel a necessary subject for philosophy—instead of being taken either as a presupposition or as an optional question with which philosophy could eventually do without. On the other hand, the book inquires how Hegel’s understanding of history itself develops from a phenomenological approach—based on a notion of ethical memory—to a conception of history guided by the principle of justice—a ‘logical’ rather than an ethical conception of justice, as Nuzzo will show.

Since the task is to lay out these two philosophical models of history and to inquire into their bearings on the question of memory, Nuzzo proposes to concentrate on those works by Hegel that address the system as a whole and the question of methodology in particular. Instead of looking therefore at the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the book focuses mainly on the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. While this is already a very original move on Nuzzo’s part, it becomes even more so once one realizes that her reading brings to light a different way into Hegel’s system. What this means, for Nuzzo, is to address the very complex links between philosophizing and remembering.

Chapter 1 begins with an original approach to the Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of what Pierre Nora has called lieux of memory. For Nuzzo, the Phenomenology is the work where Hegel starts to develop a fundamental connection between memory and method. In this sense, Nuzzo writes, memory is ‘the force at work and the immanent method from within the activity of philosophizing’ (21). The Phenomenology is also a site where memory is produced in such a way that history crystallizes, simultaneously testifying to the end of an epoch and producing this closure itself. Memory, primarily in the shape of collective and hence ethical (sittlich) memory, is responsible for making spirit aware of its own historicity. It is the force capable of accomplishing the Phenomenology’s main task, namely, the transformation of substance into subject. The Phenomenology is therefore the place where this awareness and transformation take place: it is the work of a memory of the historical present and a reflection on what shape should philosophy take once this work is accomplished. And it achieves this goal, first, by transmuting history as a random collection of facts into a coherent narrative and, second, by making spirit aware of itself as a creative and representing subject, producing history as a philosophical result of the entire phenomenological—and thus memorializing—process.

Nuzzo argues, however, that it is through this very process that memory becomes dialectical and hence ahistorical. Once memory is itself recognized as a product of history, it directs its gaze at itself, letting history free itself from (ethical) memory and conceive of itself now in logical terms. The Phenomenology, Nuzzo writes, is a ‘memorable’ text, because memory is not only the object of investigation, but also the subject that, in writing its own history, goes through a process of self-transformation. In writing its own history, memory parts ways with history, becomes absolute and produces the closure of its own experience, opening the path towards a radically new beginning in the Science of Logic.

This is the paradoxical gesture of Erinnerung which the book then continues to develop throughout its chapters. To remember means not simply to trace back what happened but, more fundamentally, to produce for the first time the object to be remembered. Nuzzo shows very clearly—and this is one of her main claims—how for Hegel memory is essentially a power of transformation. Its alleged ‘search’ for something lost is part of an illusory scheme whereby what seems to be a mere given has in fact been posited for the first time in the act of its ‘remembrance’. In Chapter 2, Nuzzo develops this point through a highly original reading of the Science of Logic. Showing how Hegel enacts in this work a reflection on the logical structure of history, she brings out how pervasive the operation of memory is in Hegel’s conceptualization of the system as a whole. As she sees it, the Science of Logic, developing a logic of ‘formal transformative changes’, is the text in which Hegel truly addresses the question of how history begins and advances. And the answer to this question lies in a systematic attention to the various operations of memory throughout the text.

According to Nuzzo, Hegel’s step toward the Logic is thus the result of the operation of Erinnerung at least in two different senses. First, it is the product of the end of the Phenomenology, where a final process of recollection has brought about the need for an absolutely indeterminate beginning, that is, the immediacy of being and nothing with which the Science of Logic starts. However, as Nuzzo argues, the Science of Logic only properly begins once Erinnerung has taken place within the Logic itself, that is, once the logical process has advanced from being to essence. Essence is for Hegel the logical past and the dialectical memory of being, and thus, the very production of being as a possible object for thought:

By producing the logical past of being, essence, as Erinnerung, produces the logical structure of the past itself, and therefore the very possibility of history. Philosophy begins, and in beginning, it creates and produces history. Its task consists in producing every time anew the ground that gives way to a new narrative of the present. Hence, if the Phenomenology ends with a move from a more concrete historical realm to the logical dimension of absolute memory, it is the Logic, according to Nuzzo, that brings back into the activity of philosophizing the entire weight—and responsibility—of the historical dimension.

The end of the Logic shows that dialectical memory coincides with the absolute method precisely because in the production of the former it is the subject itself that, through its recollection, becomes subject, appropriating its own contents and relating freely and creatively to them. Chapter 3 is for that reason devoted to Hegel’s account of subjective spirit in the Encyclopedia. Nuzzo’s main interest in this chapter is methodological. She offers a detailed reading of paragraphs §440 to §468 in order to confirm what her reading of the Logic has shown already, namely, on the one hand, ‘that Erinnerung is one of the forms that dialectic as method assumes in Hegel’s philosophy of spirit’ (87) and, on the other, that memory precedes thinking rather than presupposing it. What I find most interesting in this chapter, however, is Nuzzo’s reflection on the relevance of narrative and recollection in Hegel’s psychology. She brings her reading of Hegel to bear on what I would describe broadly as feminist approaches to psychology and the self. It is in its capacity to tell its story and communicate it to others, Nuzzo contends, that the subject begins its process of both exposure and appropriation. Moreover, it is by story-telling that both what is unknown to the subject and what has been recollected as one’s own meet continuously, opening the door for other, fragmented ways of telling one’s story, and even for the silent presence of the untold. In this notion of personal subjective history lies the potential of a resistance to a ‘rational historiography’ that assimilates everything to the collective level of objective spirit. This is one of the few places where Nuzzo explicitly addresses the relevance of Hegel’s own position to contemporary debates on memory, trauma and history. Even though such debates are mentioned from the beginning of the book, and reintroduced periodically, mostly in footnotes, some readers like myself will probably wish Nuzzo had developed her own ideas on these topics more consistently throughout the book.

Chapters 4 and 5 of the book collect the results of Nuzzo’s investigation. With astonishing clarity, she shows what kind of conception of history comes out of the turn from a phenomenological to a logical approach to both history and memory, and what are the possible relations between them given this turn. Instead of being measured in relation to memory, Nuzzo agues, ‘it is now history that measures the justice and truthfulness of memory’ (109). As in Schiller’s final verses in Resignation, the final judgement belongs to history itself (Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht). History is the disruptive movement of the judgment (Ur-Teilung): the judgement produced by the present as a result of history’s wide-open contradictions. Historical judgement is not therefore a redemptive, messianic or teleological judgment. Quite the contrary, justice is for Hegel the incarnation of the power of contradiction, and history not only displays its operation but makes us fully aware of it. Justice is therefore understood in this context both as the crisis necessary for the advancement of action and as a critique that can thereby produce difference, discriminate and judge. Hence, if on the basis of the logical method Hegel has transformed the metaphysical problem of the origin into the logical question of the beginning and advancement of history, he also turns the theological problem of the final judgement into the philosophical question of historical action.

Justice, however, as history’s last word, is not Hegel’s last word on history and its relation to memory. Nuzzo’s final chapter addresses this question, by shedding new light on Yerushalmi’s saying, announced enigmatically at the beginning of the book, that ‘the opposite of forgetfulness is not remembrance but justice’ (12). What seems to be at stake in Nuzzo’s reading of Hegel in this last chapter, as I understand it, is a kind of justice—even though she never calls it such—brought about by a very particular kind of memory: a creative, poietic memory that Nuzzo relates to the activity of absolute Spirit in Hegel’s system. This is a kind of remembrance that includes rather than opposes forgetfulness and, by doing so, reconciles in another, ‘higher’ realm the contradictions proper to historical judgment. On Nuzzo’s reading, this is the kind of memory that operates in art, religion and philosophy. Through a voice that is both radically singular and has the potential to be heard and received by all, it remembers what has been violently subsumed, forgotten or neutralized by world history. Literature, art, and philosophy can thus offer living and plural representations of the past that, from the dimension of the present, articulate otherwise irresolvable historical violence and contradictions. They may be always too late to change or undo what history has brought about, but they can point to another realm of memory; one that, by retracing history’s steps and narrating them in a different kind of language, can introduce into the historical present the possibility of new, alternative beginnings.

From the beginning to the end of the book, from the workings of memory in the Phenomenology, through the logical operations of Erinnerung in the Science of Logic, to the absolute dimension of memory in the Encyclopedia, Nuzzo follows a path that sheds new light on the many ways in which Hegel’s philosophy can speak to the present in a language that may very well be ours as well. While Nuzzo’s book exemplifies a scholarly approach to Hegel’s philosophy, it breaks new ground by reading the Phenomenology as a work of memory, relating the Science of Logic to practical philosophy and philosophy of history and, last but not least, by showing the pervasive role of memory in Hegel’s system. Memory, Nuzzo writes, ‘cuts out the shape of a meaningful event from the indifferent flux of existence declaring it dead and past, yet worthy of collective remembrance, that is, of life in a new context’ (30). Her book is a good example of how a truly careful approach to the history of philosophy can time and again open for us new possibilities of understanding our present and thereby of mobilizing history in new meaningful ways.