A Dialectics of Encounter

Abstract

What forms of knowledge and nonknowledge continue to haunt contemporary debates, and in what ways were they ‘known too well’ in the aftermath of 1968 to precipitate the falling out of favor of Marx and Marxism and the recasting of Macherey along with the rest of Althusser's circle as ‘structuralist dinosaurs’? And what might we learn from the staging of this encounter between Hegel and Spinoza, both in terms of the specific points of application and the method of enquiry? Macherey offers an answer to these questions not only in Hegel or Spinoza but also in a series of papers addressing Hegel's prior uptake in France—an engagement that had solidified tendencies in Hegel that were also, not coincidentally, the points of Hegel's misreading of Spinoza. Read together, they offer us a fuller picture of the long shadow—cast initially in Hegel's misinterpretation of Spinoza and amplified subsequently in the uptake of Hegel in France. To return explicitly to Hegel in 1979—even if to ‘surpass’ him—was in part to exhume a corpse, to demonstrate the ways that Hegel continued to haunt philosophy. Hegel or Spinoza was a response to the long and still active legacy of what we might call (borrowing from Macherey) Hegel à la Française.