Plasticity Hegel Malabou INTRO

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The Future of Hegel:Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic1

CATHERINE MALABOU

Translated by Lisabeth During

At the center of Catherine’s Malabou’s study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel’srelation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have takenHegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse,open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of “plas-ticity,” and shows how Hegel’s dialectic—introducing the sculptor’s art into philoso-phy—is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithfulreader, and allows her classic “maître” to speak, if not against his own grain, at leastagainst a tradition too attached to closure and system. Malabou’s Hegel is a “plastic”thinker, not a nostalgic metaphysician.

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEMATIC

A. IS HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY A “THING OF THE PAST”?

The Future of Hegel is a title that presents itself in the affirmative, as if itknows there is a positive answer to the question it anticipates, “Does Hegelhave a future?” Inevitably, at the end of this century, the question must stillbe posed. For in this time, philosophy, while acknowledging the stature ofG. W. F. Hegel and its debt to his thought, has suspected speculative idealismof submitting to a totalizing or even a totalitarian structure. If speculativephilosophy has not been entirely rejected, it has been at the very least keptat a distance. It is impossible, therefore, to consider Hegel’s future today assomething already guaranteed, as an established and recognized fact. This fu-ture itself needs to happen. It remains to be demonstrated, and to be examined.Such an examination is what the present work intends to provide.

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By “future of Hegel,” one must understand first of all the future of hisphilosophy. “Future” (avenir) has the ordinary meaning of the time to come(futur), the time yet ahead. Etymology confirms this connection: the future(l’a-venir) means that which is to come (ad-vient). But it denotes also thatwhich is capable of lasting: to “have a future” is to be capable of having a pos-terity. Now, and this is the fundamental problem, can the philosophy of Hegelhave a genuine posterity? Can it still hold out a promise? Can it still cause astir? Can it continue to make an impact on the tendencies of our times (com-ment pourrait-elle . . . orienter les temps), when time has shown it to be an en-terprise that brings time to an end?

Time: it’s with time that everything began; it is because of time that thedivorce between Hegel and contemporary philosophy was announced. To acertain degree the famous conclusion to the Phenomenology of Mind signed thedeath sentence of Hegelianism:

Time is the Notion itself that is there and which presents itselfto consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason Spirit nec-essarily appears in Time, and it appears inTime just as long as ithas not grasped its pure Notion, i.e., has not annulled Time. Itis the outer, intuited pure Self which is not grasped by the Self,the merely intuited Notion; when this latter grasps itself it setsaside its Time-form (hebt seine Zeitform auf), comprehends thisintuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuit-ing, Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity ofSpirit that is not yet complete within itself (der nicht in sichvollendet ist). (Hegel 1977, 487; Hegel 1941, 2:305; Hegel 1970,3:584–85)

Many interpreters have concluded from this discussion that time was forHegel nothing but a moment to be passed by. And it does appear that time it-self, unwilling to forgive absolute knowledge for having ordained its dialecti-cal supersession, has demanded reparations. This demand is articulated mostpowerfully by Martin Heidegger, who argues that the time transcended (auf-hebt) by spirit at the moment of absolute knowledge is simply the vulgar notionof time. The “vulgar understanding of time” is a conception that Heideggerbelieves has dominated the entire history of metaphysics and has now come toan end with the completion of that epoch. Heidegger’s stereotype reaches itsradical conclusion in a paraphrase: “The Hegelian notion of time represents, asno one has properly noted, the most radical development at the level of theconcept of the ordinary understanding of time” (Heidegger 1984, 428).2

Aristotle was the first to give conceptual elaboration to this “ordinaryunderstanding of time,” which he understands as a sequence of “nows,” passingby without beginning or end and making up the uniform flux within which thesequence of events unfolds: “Time appears to the vulgar understanding as a

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succession of nows constantly “present-at-hand,” that pass by and arrive at thesame moment. Time is understood as a sequence, as a “flux” of nows, like the“stream of time” (Heidegger 1984, 422). In Heidegger’s view, the paragraphsdevoted to time in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences simply reiterateterm by term the Aristotelian problematic of the “stigme”(“point”) developedin Book IV of the Physics. Hegel fulfills the classical idea of the instantaneousby determining it conceptually as “punctuality” (Pünklichkeit). It is Hegel whomaintains that:

The negativity which relates itself to space as point (die sich alsPunkt auf den Raum bezieht) and develops its determinationswithin it as line and plane, exists also as something for-itself andfor its determinations in the sphere of externality (des Außer-sichsein); yet at the same time as positing those determinationsin the external space, it appears indifferent to the immobilejuxtapositions (das ruhige Nebeneinander) of space. Posited thusfor-itself, negativity is time. (Hegel 1970, 1:229)

A spatial determination—the point—serves to characterize a temporal de-termination—the instant. But such a concept of time, seeming to reduce tem-porality to nothing but the form of juxtaposition, strikes us today as a tem-porality stripped of all future.

The ordinary understanding of time is what constitutes for Heidegger theunity of the philosophical tradition summed up for him in the name “meta-physics.” This tradition conforms to an understanding of Being reduced to“presence” (ousia, Anwesenheit), thus privileging the present tense (Gegen-wart) with respect to the other dimensions of time. From that perspective, thepast and future must necessarily appear as either a present time which is justpast,3 or a present which is to come (“a not yet now”). To conceive time as ahomogenous milieu in which things occur—a milieu in which nothing thathappens can truly come unexpectedly (survenir)—represents for Heideggerthe dominant view in philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to Husserl. Hegelstands out from the other philosophers because he takes to its logical conclu-sion this traditional privileging of the present. In the speculative conceptionof time, the future is not even a time like other times: it lacks the power to preserveitself, giving way to the lead—that is to say, the ontological priority—of thepast understood as the previous mode of the present.

In his lectures of 1930 on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger claimsthat “[u]ndoubtedly Hegel occasionally speaks about having been, but neverabout the future. This silence fits with the fact that (for him) the past is itselfthe decisive character of time, and for a good reason: time is both the passingitself and what passes; it has always passed away” (Heidegger 1988, 82; trans-lation modified).4


Time in Hegel’s thought is understood as the past tense of spirit: spirit mustpass over (übergehen) into time in order to fulfill its own identity as absolute,eternal, and in itself. That identity, in its turn, is itself a past but a past notyet temporally past.5 It is the timeless antiquity of “presence,” the “Parousia”of the absolute. From its standpoint, everything that occurs can be only theindication of what has already come to pass; everything still in the future issimply a potential return to self.

In fact, for Hegel, isn’t it the case that everything which occurs has done sotoo late? Isn’t youth itself, in its very novelty, already belated? In the Philosophyof Spirit of The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, at the moment where heanalyses “the natural series of the ages of life,” Hegel demonstrates preciselythat the characteristic of youth is to believe in the future, to think that theworld is not yet all it really is: “The exalted spirit of the youth does not recog-nize that the substantial universe, in its essence, has already achieved in thisworld its development and its actuality” (Hegel 1971, 55). The youth mustwait to grow old to understand that the world “possesses the absolute power toactualize itself and that it has done so in our time; that it is not so impotent thatit needs first to await its effective realization” (Hegel 1971, 55).

The absolute does not wait, has never been expected (ne s’est jamais atten-du), will never be awaited; the intense turning towards the unexpected (l’in-attendu) is only one of youth’s illusions, one which Hegel himself remembers ashis own before the crisis of Frankfurt. But too late. In its twilight discourse, atthe beginning of its night, philosophy may be nothing but the announcementof this truth: it is too late for the future.

This announcement brings with it a feeling of constriction, as if ontologyhas closed us in. The System thus seems to be a tight loop which envelopseverything—all exteriority, all alterity, all surprise. Hegel asserts that spirit hasno absolute other than itself, for the absolute there is no absolute alterity: “Forspirit, nothing exists which is absolutely other than itself.” That is why “[a]llaction of spirit is nothing but a grasping of itself, and the aim of all genuinescience is only this, to know that spirit recognizes in itself everything there isin heaven and on earth” (Hegel 1971, 1).

Spirit, whose task is to grasp itself, to anticipate the finding of itself ineverything that is now and is to come, can never encounter anything whollyother, can never come face to face, in a sense, with the event. What place,therefore, is there in Hegelian thought for the question of the future, if every-thing has already been permeated by spirit and, in this fashion, already com-pleted?

Scattered throughout recent philosophical writing, we find no shortage ofanalyses drawing attention to this arrested, congealed, mortified character ofspeculative thought. Alexandre Kojève himself, although committed to stress-ing the timeliness of Hegelian thought as a means with which to think the

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future, nonetheless defines absolute knowledge in terms of “the end of time.”Now is there any temporality which can correspond to this “end of time”except time’s stasis in the congealed form of a perpetual present? Heideggeragrees: “The Hegelian presentation of the true notion of being . . . with whatit says about time, it is nothing other than a farewell to time as the routetowards spirit which is eternity” (Heidegger 1988, 147).6

Has Hegel’s “farewell” to time reversed into a farewell of time to Hegel?Indeed, is not time as it exists for speculative philosophy not actually time atall, but rather the flattening or leveling-down (Nivellierung) of time itself, ofthat genuine time called by Heidegger “primordial temporality”? Primordialtime can not be conceptualized through the present, for its most fundamen-tal “exstasis” is the future. Primordial temporality, Heidegger writes, “tempor-alizes itself primarily out of the future” (1996, 329). Thus the authentic future,in Heidegger, is no longer a simple moment of time, but is conflated in a certainway with time itself.

I do not intend to stage a confrontation between the Hegelian and Hei-deggerean conceptions of time. However, it is impossible to be unaware of thechanges in the way the future has been thought about over the course of thetwentieth century. If we were to ignore, so to speak, the “future life” of the ideaof the future, then we would be ourselves guilty of “leveling-down” that futureand, in a sense, lagging behind it.

Indeed the reading ventured here is far from wanting to be reactionary ornostalgic. The success, the “future” of this approach will depend on its capac-ity to remain open to those arguments that oppose it. In particular it must re-main open to that analysis according to which the absence of a conception ofthe future in Hegel implies the absence of a future for the philosophy of Hegel.To say, with Heidegger, that Hegel never speaks about the future amounts tosaying that Hegel does not have a future. Against this, by affirming that indeedthere is a “future of Hegel,” the present work contests the validity of Heideg-ger’s assertion, all the while acknowledging the significance it is owed, as wellas the philosophical concerns it continues to provoke.

B. THE PROMISE OF PLASTICITY

With this end in view, we intend to construct a concept, that of “plastici-ty,” as foreshadowed in our title: “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality,Dialectic.” To “form a concept” in the sense intended here means first of all totake up a notion (plasticity), which has a defined and delimited role in thephilosophy of Hegel, only in order to transform it into the sort of comprehen-sive concept that can “grasp” (saisir) the whole. Here the double sense of grasp,“taking” (prendre) and “understanding” (comprendre), is authorized by the ety-mology of the word “concept.” Transforming plasticity into a concept is a mat-


ter of showing that plasticity “captures” (prend) the philosophy of Hegel andallows the reader to “comprehend” it, appearing at one and the same time as astructure and as a condition of intelligibility.

To form a concept means in the second place to develop to the fullest extentan example (une instance) capable of imparting a form to that which it grasps.Hegel indeed asserts this many times: if the concept is a logical form, it mustnot be considered like an empty receptacle, rather as a power which can fash-ion its own content. By giving plasticity a mediating position between “fu-ture” and “temporality,” my title: “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality,Dialectic,” already indicates that plasticity will be envisaged as the “instance”which gives form to the future and time in Hegel’s philosophy. That is to say,their relationship is constructed in the mode of plasticity; time and the futureare mutually involved in a dialogical process governed by plasticity. From thisit follows that the concepts of the future and of plasticity need to be treatedconcurrently: one clarifying the other as a title is clarified by its subtitle.

This relation of “synonymy” is turned around in the second place into arelation of asymmetry. Indeed, to posit “the future” as, in effect, “plasticity”amounts to displacing the established definition of the future as a moment orperiod of time. And indeed in the title such a displacement was announced:“the future” (l’avenir), that which is “to come,” will not be restricted in mean-ing by the immediate, predictable connotation, that of the “future” as “futuretime.” Thus it is not a matter of examining the relations between past, pres-ent, and the conventional sense of the future presented in the discussions oftime in Hegel’s different versions of a Philosophy of Nature (1970).7 Rather,these texts themselves demand that we renounce the “well-known” and fa-miliar meaning of the future and, as a consequence, the “well-known” defi-nition of time. The possibility that one temporal determination—the future—can be thought differently, beyond its initial, simple status as a moment oftime—of “that which is now to come”—makes it immediately clear that time,for Hegel, cannot be reduced to an ordered relation between moments. Rather,we will understand “plasticity” as primarily the excess of future over the future;while “temporality,” as it figures in speculative philosophy, will mean insteadthe surplus of time over time.

These preliminary remarks indicate at the start of the game that my workwill not follow the path set out by Alexandre Koyré and Kojève, although bothdo pursue this question of the “future” in the philosophy of Hegel. The former,in his article on “Hegel at Jena,” the latter in his Introduction to the Reading ofHegel, agree: in the “Systems” of the Jena period, the future had “prevalence”or alternately, priority, over the past and the present. Thus both writers showhere the proximity of the thought of the young Hegel to that of Heidegger. Butthe kind of treatment represented by Koyré and Kojève, despite its interest andits significance, does not give us the means to respond to the question of the

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future in Hegel. Besides the fact that the problem of an “orientation towardsthe future” is in no respect a Hegelian problematic, this way of reading Hegelleads, as Koyré and Kojève both admit, to an impasse. They end by arguing thatthere is an unresolved contradiction in the philosophy of Hegel: it can onlygrant the future a priority over the other moments of time by suspending at onceall future yet to come.

Koyré, on the one hand, argues that for Hegel, “time is dialectical and . . .is constructed from the vantage point of the future,” and on the other hand,that “the philosophy of history—and in that respect the philosophy of Hegelas a whole, the system, so to speak—can only be a possibility if history has cometo an end, if it has no more future; if time can stop” (Koyré 1971, 189).

Hegel was never able to “reconcile” the two meanings that the notion of thefuture takes on in his System: on the one hand, a chronological future, whosedynamic is the foundation of all historical becoming/development; and, on theother hand, a future as the logical “happening” (advent) of the Notion, thatis, the Notion in the “act-of-coming-to-itself” (Zu-sich-selbst-kommen) (Hegel1976b, 841; 1981, 390).

Kojève, for his part, wants to affirm both: he maintains on the one hand that“the Time that Hegel has in view . . . is characterized by the primacy of theFuture” (1947, 367), but on the other hand, “man,” when he achieves thestandpoint of Absolute Knowledge, has no more future:

The Man who no longer relates himself . . . to an object givenexternally, thus has no further reason to negate it for the sake ofremaining in existence and conserving his self-identity. Andthe Man who no longer negates has no real future. (Kojève1947, 387)

The exposure of a supposed contradiction which, by its very nature, couldnot be dialectical as it remains irresoluble: this is an impasse noted by manyinterpreters of Hegel from the first half of the 20th century. But the work ofa new generation of French commentators—Bernard Bourgeois, Pierre-JeanLabarrière, Gérard Lebrun, Denise Souche-Dagues8—establishes on the con-trary that “historical becoming” and “logical truth” form a dynamic unity inHegelian philosophy. These studies admittedly have not resolved the problemof the relation between “eternity” and “historicity” in Hegelianism, but theyhave sufficiently clarified it so that it no longer needs to be thematised here assubject. If my approach does not return to this problematic, neither does itorganize itself around an analysis of the structural relation connecting the Phe-nomenology and the Science of Logic. Nor, finally, does it undertake the exami-nation of the relation between a philosophy of history and the immanentderivation of the Notion within the confines of the System. These problemswill be continually referred to in the course of my inquiry, but they do not con-stitute its themes.


The possibility of affirming the “future of Hegel”—in the double meaningof a future “of” his philosophy and a future “within” his philosophy—dependsin the first instance on posing the question of the future where “one does notanticipate it.” Consequently it is plasticity which will be presented as the“unforeseen” of Hegelian philosophy.

To this extent, the future of the notion of plasticity must be put into play.Its viability depends on the success of an epistemological operation whichresembles, in its method, that defined by Georges Canguilhem in terms thatwould become famous:

To work on a concept is to explore the variations in its exten-sion and its intelligibility. It is to generalize it by including in itthe traits of its exceptions. It is to export it outside its own do-main, to use it as a model or conversely to look for a model forit, in short it is to give to it, bit by bit, through ordered trans-formations, the function of a form. (Canguilhem 1970, 206)

Such an operation will guide us, throughout the entire scope of this work,in testing the plasticity of the notion of plasticity itself.

HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE TEST OF PLASTICITY

A. ORDINARY MEANINGS OF THE CONCEPT OF PLASTICITY

To “work on” the concept of “plasticity” will, following Canguilhem’s use,amount to “giving a formal function” to a term which itself, in its first sense,describes or designates the act of giving form. The English and French substan-tives “plasticity” or plasticité and their German equivalent, “Plaztizität,” en-tered the language in the eighteenth century.9 They joined two words alreadycurrent which had been formed from the same root: the substantive “Plasti-city” (die Plastik), and the adjective “plastic” (plastisch). All three words werederived from the Greek plassein, which means “to model, to mould.” “Plas-tic,” as an adjective, means two things: on the one hand, to be “susceptible tochanges of form,” malleable—clay is a “plastic” material—and on the otherhand, “having the power to bestow form, the power to mould,” as in the ex-pressions “plastic surgeon” and “plastic arts.” This twofold signification is metagain in the German adjective plastisch. Grimm’s dictionary defines it thus:“that which takes or gives shape, or figure, to bodies” (körperlich . . . gestaltendoder gestaltet).10 La plasticité, or “plasticity,” just like Plaztizität in German,describes the nature of that which is “plastic,” that which is at once capable ofreceiving and of giving form.

These definitions help to clarify the “hermeneutic circle” in which my ap-proach has been caught ever since the formation of the concept “plasticity”required that the word itself be defined. The defining and the defined are the

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same. Admittedly, if we are to separate one from the other, “the extension mustbe changed.” But these alterations themselves take advantage of the signifi-cation of the term “plasticity”: indeed, the word’s evolution in the languagereveals already its “exportation outside its original terrain.” The homeland ofplasticity is the field of art. Plasticity is clearly intrinsic to the art of “mod-eling” and, in the first instance, to the art of sculpture. The plastic arts arethose for which the central aim is the articulation and development of forms;among these are counted architecture, drawing, and painting. Now, by exten-sion, plasticity signifies the general aptitude for development, the power to bemolded by one’s culture, by education. We speak of the plasticity of the new-born, of the child’s plasticity of character. Plasticity is, in another context,characterized by “suppleness” and flexibility, as in the case of the “plasticity”of the brain, yet it means as well the ability to evolve and adapt. It is in thissense that one calls upon in speaking of a “plastic virtue” possessed by animals,plants, and living things in general.

The “extension” I have been drawing out must be understood in a particu-lar way. By analogy to a malleable material, children are said to be “plastic.”However, the adjective “plastic,” if it is certainly opposed to “rigid,” “fixed,”and “ossified,” is not to be confused with “polymorphous.” Things that are plas-tic preserve their shape, as does the marble in a statue: once given a config-uration, it is unable to recover its initial form. “Plastic,” thus, designates thosethings that yield themselves to being formed while resisting deformation. Fromthis it is possible to understand a further “extension” of this term into theterrain of histology, for which “plasticity” represents the ability of tissue to re-form itself after a lesion.

Plasticity’s range of meanings has not come to a halt and it continues toevolve with and in the language. Plastic material is a synthetic material whichcan take on different shapes and properties according to the functions in-tended. “Plastic” on its own is an explosive material with a nitroglycerine andnitrocellulose base that can set off violent detonations. The plasticity of theword itself draws it to extremes, both to those concrete shapes in which formis crystallized (sculpture) and to the annihilation of all form (the bomb).

B. HEGEL’S NOTION OF PLASTICITY

To construct the concept of plasticity as it figures in Hegel’s philosophyrequires first of all that we uncover the way in which Hegel himself gives shapeto this idea. Through such an elaboration, we find that three areas of meaningare mutually implicated. In each case that double connotation of the adjective“plastic” is present: capacity to receive form and capacity to produce form. Itis this double signification which enables us to treat the adjective as itself a“speculative word,” in Hegel’s special sense.


The first relevant field of signification is that of the “plastic arts.” The words“plastisch” and Plastik appear frequently in Hegel’s discussions of Greek art,especially in the Aesthetics, where sculpture is defined as “the plastic art parexcellence.” This more familiar sense of “plasticity,” when drawn upon andextended, permits the philosopher to develop his notion further: it acquires agreater range and complexity in its second signifying field, where it applies tothose he entitles “plastic individuals” or plastic characters. In Hegel’s account,“plasticity” describes the nature of those Greek figures who represent an indi-viduality he names “exemplary” (exemplarische) and “substantial” (substan-tielle). “Pericles, . . . Phidias, Plato, and above all Sophocles, as well as Thucy-dides, Xenophon, Socrates” are “plastic individuals”: “They are great and free,grown independently on the soil of their own inherently substantial personal-ity, self-made, and developing into what they (essentially) were and wanted tobe” (Hegel 1975a, 719).

Hegel insists on the fact that: “This sense for the perfect plasticity of godsand men was pre-eminently at home in Greece (dieser Sinn für die vollendetePlastik der Göttlichen und Menschlichen war vornehmlich in Griechenland hei-misch). In its poets and orators, historians and philosophers, Greece is not to beunderstood at its heart unless we bring with us as a key to our comprehensionan insight into the ideals of sculpture and unless we consider from the pointof view of their plasticity not only the heroic figures in epic and drama butalso the actual statesmen and philosophers. After all, in the beautiful days ofGreece, men of action, like poets and thinkers, had this same plastic anduniversal yet individual character both inwardly and outwardly (diesen plas-tischen, allgemeinen und doch individuellen, nach außen wie nach innen gleichenCharakter)” (Hegel 1975a, 719).11

These “plastic characters” give form to the “the spiritual in its embodiment”(Körperlichkeit des Geistigen). Thus the theme of plastic individuality itselfrepresents a middle term, mediating between plasticity in its first signifyingdomain, that of sculpture,12 and its third: philosophical plasticity.

The expression “philosophical plasticity” must be understood in two differ-ent ways. On the one hand, it characterizes the philosophical attitude, thebehavior specific to the philosopher. On the other hand, it applies to philoso-phy itself, to its form and manner of being, that is to say, to that rhythm inwhich the speculative content is unfolded and presented.

In the Preface to The Science of Logic of 1831 Hegel states: “A plastic dis-course (ein plastischer Vortrag) demands, too, a plastic receptivity and under-standing on the part of the listener (einen plastische Sinn des Aufnehmens undVerstehens); but youths and men of such a temper who would calmly suppresstheir own reflections and opinions in which original thought is so impatient tomanifest itself, listeners such as Plato feigned, who would attend only to thematter at hand (nur der Sache folgender Zuhörer), could have no place in a mod-

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ern dialogue; still less could readers of such a disposition” (Hegel 1976b, 40;1991c, 24).

The plastic individuality of the Greeks thus acquires the value of a modelfor the ideal philosophical attitude.13 Plasticity in this connection designatesprimarily the ability of the philosophizing subject to attend to the content, the“matter at hand,” by purifying the form of all that is arbitrary and personal, allthat is immediate and particular. However, as we have seen, “plasticity” doesnot mean “polymorphous.” The philosophic reader or interlocutor is of coursereceptive to the form, but they in their turn are led to give form to that whichthey hear or read.14 In this sense they become comparable, thinks Hegel, tothose Greek exemplars of plastic individuality. If, like those models, the idealphilosophers are both “universal and individual,” this comes from the way theyacquire their formative principle from the universal—the Notion—while atthe same time bestowing a particular form on the universal by incarnating it orembodying it. Thus the individual is now understood as becoming the “Da-sein,” the “being-there” (l’être-là) of Spirit, the translation of the spiritual intothe materiality of sense. It follows that plasticity appears as a process where theuniversal and the particular mutually inform one another, and their jointoutcome is that particularity called the “exemplary individual.”

These remarks draw us to think further about the second connotation ofphilosophical plasticity. For what is a “plastic discourse” (em plastische Vortrag)?A passage from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit helps clarify thisdefinition:

Only a philosophical exposition that rigidly excludes (strengausschlosse) the usual way of relating the parts of a propositioncould achieve the goal of plasticity (diesjenige philosophische Ex-position würde es erreichen plastisch zu sein). (Hegel 1977, 39;1941, 1:55)

As a philosophical proposition is normally understood, the subject of theproposition is thought of as a fixed instance: it is given predicates from outside,and not able to produce them itself. “To exclude rigorously the usual relationbetween the parts of a proposition” implies a reconceptualizing of this relationas a process of substance’s “self-determination” (Selbstbestimmung). One con-ception of substance’s relation to its accidents passes into another: this is un-derstood by Hegel as the passage from the predicative proposition to the spec-ulative proposition.

Elevated into its speculative truth, the propositional relation between sub-ject and predicates is characterized by “plasticity.” Within the process of self-determination, the universal (the substance) and particular (the accidents assomething independent) give form to each other through a dynamic like thatat play in the “plastic individualities.” The process of self-determination is


the unfolding of the Substance/Subject. In the process, Substance withdrawsfrom itself in order to enter into the particularity of its content. Through thismovement of self-negation Substance will posit itself as Subject. As BernardBourgeois remarks, “(t)he Subject is that infinite activity, or, more precisely,negativity, whose identity is in this way made true, concrete, and mediated,and which actualizes itself in its internal self-differentiation, in its division ororiginal scission (ursprungliche Teilen), that is to say, in its ‘judgment’ (Ur-teil).The identity that belongs to the subject affirms itself in its difference whereasthe identity at the level of substance can only be affirmed in the negation ofdifference which is also implicit in that identity” (Hegel 1988, 201, Note 3).

Self-determination is the movement through which substance affirms itselfas at once subject and predicate of itself. In the Science of Logic in the Encyclo-pedia Hegel defines the “relation between substantiality and accidentality,”or the “Absolute Relation,” as the “activity-of-form” (Formtätigkeit) (Hegel1991a, 225). Indeed it is this “activity” that indicates precisely the very plas-ticity of substance itself, its capacity both to receive form and to give form to itsown content. With this consideration of self-determination, seen as the “orig-inary operation of plasticity,” we arrive at the very heart of the present study.

C. THE DIALECTIC AND THE “WAIT AND SEE”

This heart has a “pulse,” whose rhythms are spelled out by the last termof my title—“The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic.” Themovement of self-determination is in fact the very principle of the dialecticalprocess. Its energy is born from the contradictory tension between the preser-vation of determination as something particular and the dissolution of ev-erything determinate in the universal. In the Encyclopedia Science of Logic,Hegel demonstrates that this same tension is operative in the way a “first term,”posited “in and for itself,” a moment which has the appearance of “self-sub-sistence” (absolute self-identity), displays itself as “the other of itself” by dis-solving the fixity of its position (Hegel 1976b, 833–34).15

In the logical unfolding of the “substance-subject,” the possibility of thisdynamic of preservation and dissolution takes shape, as is clearly shown in thePreface to the Phenomenology: “On account of its simplicity or self-identity(Sichselbstgleichheit) it appears fixed (fest) and enduring (bleibend). But this self-identity is no less negativity, therefore its fixed existence passes over into itsdissolution (Auflösung)” (Hegel 1977, 34; 1941, 42).

The dialectical process (my italics) is “plastic” because, as it unfolds, it makeslinks between the opposing moments of total immobility (the “fixed”) andevacuation (“dissolution”), and then links both in the vitality of the whole, awhole which, reconciling these two extremes, is itself the union (conjugaison)of resistance (Widerstand) and fluidity (Flüssigkeit). The process of plasticity is

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dialectical because the operations which constitute it—the seizure of form andthe annihilation of all form, emergence and explosion—are contradictory.16

Now we can see the connection linking the three concepts—“Plasticity,”“temporality,” and “dialectic.” For this is nothing less than the formation of thefuture itself. Plasticity characterizes the relation between substance and acci-dents. Now the Greek word “symdedakos,” “accident,” derives from the verb“symdanein,” which means at the same time to follow from, to ensure, and toarrive, to happen. Thereby it can designate continuation in both senses of theword, as consequence, that is, “what follows” in the logical sense, and as event,that is, “what follows” in a chronological sense. Self-determination is thus therelation of substance to that which happens. Following this line of thought weunderstand the “future” (a-venir) in the philosophy of Hegel as the relation, theconnection, which subjectivity maintains with the accidental.

To understand the future other than in the ordinary immediate sense of“a moment of time” requires by the same token an opening-out of the meaningof time: an extension made possible by the very plasticity of temporality itself.The deployment of the Hegelian conception of time is not fixed by referenceto the places and the times—to the “moments”—of its treatment within theSystem. Time is an agency (une instance) characterized by dialectical differen-tiation; if it finds itself divided into definite moments, these determine it onlyfor a moment.

Drawn into what could be called a “dialectical composition,” the conceptsof “the future,” “plasticity,” and “temporality” form a structure oriented to-wards anticipation, a structure operative in subjectivity as Hegel conceivesthat. To distinguish this structure from the future as ordinarily understood,we will name this structure the “Wait and See” (le “voir venir”), obeying Heg-el’s insistence that we philosophize in the language itself. Voir venir in Frenchmeans to wait while observing, as is prudent, how events are developing. Butit also suggests that there are intentions and plans of other people which mustbe probed and guessed at. In this way an expression can refer at one and thesame time to the state of “being sure what is coming” (“être sur de ce qui vient”)and “not knowing what will happen” (“ne pas savoir ce qui va venir”). It is on thisaccount that the “wait and see” can represent that interplay, within Hegelianphilosophy, of teleological necessity and surprise or novelty.

The structure of “wait and see” creates its own specific boundaries. Onthe inside of the system, there is the “limit” controlling its functioning withinHegel’s thought; externally, there is a “limit” which will decide on the futureof Hegel’s thought. Our method is to “work on” all the occurrences in Hegel ofhis concept of plasticity, and then at the same time to “alter the understand-ing” by means of a regulated “extension” of its meaning. But this amounts tothe following: revealing the link between these two boundaries, internal andexternal, and, no less, discovering the way “form” appears (“la manière dont laforme prend”) in the Hegelian system and after it.


Plasticity is, therefore, the point around which all the transformations ofHegelian thought revolve, the center of its metamorphoses (centre des méta-morphoses).

HEGEL AND HIS TWO FORMS OF TIME

Time, as deployed in this philosophy, is neither a univocal nor a fixedconcept. In fact, Hegel works (in) on two “times” at once. Section 258 of theEncyclopedia stands as a proof of this. “Time,” Hegel states in this paragraph, is“the being which, in being, is not and in not-being, is” (Hegel 1970, 1:229–30;1969–1979, 9:48).17 A “dialectical” understanding of this phrase brings out of itits necessary “double meaning.” Normally, it can be understood in the initial,primary way. Time is and is not to the degree that its moments cancel eachother out; the present is a “now” which exists, but as it is something whichpasses, will soon, almost immediately in fact, exist no longer; this is the presentas an instant hanging between two non-existents, the past and the future. Fur-ther to this, Hegel writes in the next paragraph, sec. 259 (Hegel 1970, 1:233):“The dimensions of time, present, future, and past, are the becoming of exte-riority as such, and the resolution (Auflösung) of it into the differences of Be-ing as passing over into nothing, and of nothing as passing over into Being.”But to understand “becoming” (devenir) as the co-implication of presence andnothingness, as a twofold negation of the “now,” while it is accurate as far as itgoes, is incomplete. If time is “the being which, in being, is not and in non-being, is,” then this means also, rigorously put: “Time itself is not what it is.”Time is not always (simultaneously, successively, and permanently) the sameas itself. The concept of time has its own moments: it differentiates itself andthus temporalizes itself.

LOGICAL DIFFERENTIATION

From a careful reading of Encyclopedia sec. 258 and sec. 259, this differen-tiation emerges clearly. Time is in fact presented at once according to its class-ical Greek determination, that of Aristotle, and according to its modern de-termination, that of Kant. If the analysis of the now, the definition of timeas “a being which in being, is not” (Aristotle 1984b IV, 10, 218 b 29) is effec-tively borrowed from Physics IV, the definition of time as “the pure form ofsensibility”—Hegel writes, in fact: “Time, like space, is a pure form of senseor intuition; it is the non-sensuous sensuous (das unsinnliche Sinnliche)” (Heg-el 1970, 1:230; 1969–1979, 9:48)—is clearly taken from the Critique of PureReason (Kant 1996).

By claiming, in the Remark to sec. 258 (Hegel 1970, 1:230; 1969–1979,9:49), “Time is the same principle as the I=I of pure self-consciousness (dasselbe Prinzip als das Ich=Ich),” Hegel absorbs the conclusions of Kant’s analysis

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and recalls the identity of the “cogito” and time itself. This identity of time andthe “cogito” cannot be reduced to a continuum of instants; rather it appears asa synthetic unity (instance synthétique), as a “wait and see.” It is evident that bydefining time as a “sensible non-sensible”—a reference to the Kantian defi-nition of the pure form of intuition—Hegel is not reducing the understandingof time to a mere series of nows. In this connection, Jacques Derrida remarkshow Heidegger never utters a word about the fact that Hegel introduces Kant“into his paraphrase of Aristotle.” He fails to “relate this Hegelian concept ofthe ‘sensuous non-sensuous’” to its Kantian equivalent (44).18

The Hegelian analysis of time is not directed towards the single “now”; nordoes time appear in it as “that in which” becoming has its place. Hegel clarifiesthis: “It is not in time that everything comes to be and passes away, rather timeitself in the becoming.” Derrida comments: “Hegel took multiple precautions ofthis type. By opposing them to all the metaphorical formulations that state the‘fall’ into time, . . . one could exhibit an entire Hegelian critique of intra-temporality (Innerzeitigkeit)” (45).

The same conclusions can be drawn about the reference to Aristotle. Hegelclearly adopted the Aristotelian problematic of the “stigme” and, in definingtime, followed the first phase of the aporia as it is set out in Physics IV: timeis composed of “nows.” But Hegel also takes on, although not explicitly, thesecond part of the aporia: time is not composed of “nows.” Derrida urges ourattention on precisely this point. Aristotle’s argument, in the second phaseof the aporia, maintains the impossibility that the parts of time can co-existwith one another: “A now cannot coexist, as a current and present now, withanother now as such” (Derrida 1982, 54). Derrida concludes: “The impossibil-ity of coexistence can be posited as such only on the basis of a certain coex-istence, of a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, in which the alterityand identity of the now are maintained together in the differentiated elementof a certain same (un certain même). . . . The impossible—the co-existence oftwo nows—appears only in a synthesis . . . in a certain complicity or compli-cation maintaining (maintenant) together several current nows (maintenants)which are said to be the one past and the other future” (55).

The writer draws attention to the little word ama (hama), which appearsfive times in Physics IV, 218a, and means “together,” “all at once,” “both to-gether,” and “at the same time.” This locution “is first neither spatial nor tem-poral.” The simul, here, “says the complicity, the common origin of time (thepossibility of the synthesis of the coexistence of the nows) and space (thepotential synthesis of the coexistence of points), appearing together (com-paraître) as the condition for all appearing of Being” (1982, 56).

The exposition of Physics IV allows us to see how Aristotle understands timeat the same “time” as a sequence of nows and as an instance of synthesis.

Hegel, in his analysis of the relation between space and time, shows that he


carries on here this same understanding of the synthesis. In reference to spacehe writes: “It is inadmissible to speak of spatial points as if they constituted thepositive element in space, (because on account of its lack of difference), spaceis merely the possibility, not the positedness of a state of juxtaposition andwhat is negative” (1970, 1:223; 1969–1979, 9:42).

Space, to the degree that it is a synthesis, is the originary possibility ofseparation.19 Much the same is true for time, whose synthetic unity is called byHegel “a negative unity.” The dialectic of “Sense Certainty” in the Phenom-enology of Spirit explicitly reveals the difference between the “here” and the“now” understood on the one hand as punctual phenomena, and on the otheras that synthesis which represents the “now which is many nows.”

In this capacity to differentiate itself from itself time shows exactly the signof its plasticity. Yet this differentiation itself further requires a twofold under-standing. For it is, on the one hand, synchronic—the Hegelian concept of timedoes not reduce to a singular meaning. And on the other hand, it is diachron-ic—to say that time is not always what it is signifies also that it differentiatesitself from itself in time, that it has, to put it another way, a history.

B. CHRONOLOGICAL DIFFERENTIATION

In the Encyclopedia paragraphs on space and time, the implicit references toAristotle and Kant make it possible to clarify a fundamental characteristic ofHegel’s thought. The “wait and see,” the structure of subjective anticipation,which is the originary possibility of all encounter (vis-à-vis), is not the same inevery moment of its history, it does not “see things coming” (voir venir) in thesame way, it does not have the same future (avenir). Subjectivity itself “comes tobe” (advient) in two fundamental moments: the Greek moment and the modernmoment, which prove to be, both in their logical unity and in their chronolog-ical succession, “subject as substance” and “substance as subject.” Hegelianphilosophy synthesizes two understandings: ousia-hypokemenon—the Greeksubstance-subject; subjectum-substantia—the modern substance-subject.

In the advent of Christianity, which he saw as the “axis on which the his-tory of the world turns” (Hegel 1991b, 319), Hegel saw the emergence of themodern conception of subjectivity which dialectically sublates (relève) theearlier Greek conception. The subject thus differs from itself chronologicallyand logically. First the “substance-subject” shows itself as a substance-subject,then as a substance-subject; one needs to respect the accentuation here, in-sisting on, to repeat the terms of Bernard Bourgeois, “The substitution of theprimacy of Christian thought, which is subjectivist (‘the subject is substance’),for the primacy of pagan thought, which is substantialist (‘substance is thesubject’)” (Bourgeois 1992, 68).

We will attempt to bring to light both the logical and chronological differ-

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entiations of these two “trials” (procès) of the “wait and see.” They appear, inHegelian philosophy, as the two great moments of subjectivity’s coming-to-be,the first the epoch that stands under the name of Aristotle, the second the onewhich belongs to Kant.

The power of Hegel’s thought comes from his transformation of the rela-tion of these two modalities of the “wait and see” from a historical successionto a “face à face” encounter at the level of philosophy. The first modality arisesfrom what it is possible to call the originary synthetic unity of a teleological move-ment in potentiality and in action. The other modality stems from the originarysynthetic unity of apperception, the foundation of representation (Vorstellung).Now it is the double sense of the locutions “in itself” and “for itself” whichdemonstrates this claim. The speculative content itself follows the movementshaped by this contrast between the “in itself” and the “for itself,” a movementconceivable in two ways. On the one hand, it opposes what is “potentiality” towhat is “actual”20; on the other hand, it opposes the truth known in the formof “certainty” (truth’s subjective moment) to the truth known in the form of“truth” (truth’s moment of objectivity).

At the core of his philosophy, Hegel determines a speculative relationbetween the teleological circularity and the representational linearity, which re-calls representation to its Greek past and announces a posteriori to Greek phi-losophy its representative future. In return, Greek thought appears as much thefuture of representation as representation the future of Greek thought. Thisgame of the double “wait and see” makes reading Hegel more trying than read-ing almost any other philosopher. Reading Hegel amounts to finding oneselfin two times at once: the process that unfolds is both retrospective and pro-spective. In the present time in which reading takes place, the reader is drawnto a double expectation: waiting for what is to come (according to a thoughtwhich is linear), while presupposing that the outcome has already arrived (ac-cording to the teleological ruse).

There has not yet been any study dedicated to uncovering what these two“great moments of subjectivity” promise: nothing less than the immanenttemporalization of the System. For these two moments don’t belong to thesame rime. By configuring itself in both perspectives, Hegelian thought an-nounces the arrival (l’advenue) of a new time. And here awaits the underlyingquestion of my work: if there is a time that is the synthesis of its own content,thus as much a logical form as a chronological one, how can we explain itsnature?

C. SPECULATIVE EXPOSITION AND TRANSCENDENTAL EXPOSITION

Indeed the Philosophy of Nature has already driven time out of nature, there-by revealing that the concept of time exceeds its initial definition. This excess


is not, however, exhibited for itself within the System. No moment of thespeculative exposition can occupy the overarching position: there is no spec-ulative “arche-moment.” The “wait and see” does not enjoy a transcendentalstature. Any transcendental instance necessarily finds itself in a position of ex-teriority in relation to that which it organizes. By its nature, the condition ofpossibility is other than that which it makes possible. Yet the Hegelian con-ception of a system implies precisely the opposite: the absence of any “outside”of the System. Dialectical philosophy is systematically non-transcendental. Thereis no place, in Hegel, for a specific analysis of the concept of time, one thatwould demonstrate its plastic character.

In this regard, our approach shall be not so much thematic as strategic. It is astrategy driven by the two concepts—of “plasticity” and “voir venir”—whoseconstruction is the keystone of this project. An economy of sensible translation—to borrow the Kantian definition of “hypotyposis”21—is itself figured sen-suously by these concepts. This translation of the concept into the form ofthe sensuous is in essence systematic, an operation which the transcendentaldeduction cannot account for.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel declares, “The singular individual is,on its own terms, the transition of the concept into external reality; it is thepure schema itself (das reine Schema)” (Hegel 1977, 143; 1941, 1:201). Theliving being can construct its own schema for itself, and this, the unification ofthe concept with empirical existence, cannot be explained by anything ex-ternal to the system. The scarcity of references to the notion of plasticity is thusevidence of its distinct mode of presence, which is that of the originary syn-thesis, maintained only in the interval between presence and absence. It is forthis reason, because plasticity works within the body (au corps) of the system-atic presentation, without ever extending above it or overdetermining it, thatit is revealed as the concept capable of accounting for the incarnation, orincorporation, of spirit.

IV. A READING OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT

At this point it is possible to bring together the lines of force whichdetermine the strategy of this reading. The “wait and see” (voir venir) stands forthe operation of synthetic temporalizing in Hegel’s thought, which means itis the structure of anticipation through which subjectivity projects itself inadvance of itself, and thereby participates in the process of its own determina-tion. Plasticity for its part guarantees the differential energy which moves atthe heart of the “wait and see,” appearing as the condition of possibility for thisprojection.

The “wait and see” is doubly differentiated. Logically, it gathers together thedifferent significations of the Hegelian understanding of time: a whole and a

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relation of moments (past, present, future), a synthetic structure (self-determi-nation), a sensuous translation of the concept. Chronologically, it has itself ahistory, which is unfolded in history within being reducible to it. The sub-stance-subject is “seen to come” (se voir venir) through two moments of its ownidentity, the Greek and the modern. These two major moments each possesstheir own conception of the relation between the ecstases of time, one havinga conception of it as synthesis or self-determination, the other as hypotyposis.Furthermore, the “infinite elasticity of the absolute form (unendliche Elazizitätder absolute Form),” from which follows the temporalization of the “process” ofthe substance-subject, is that which can determine, in every moment of thesubstance-subject, its “form (Form)” (Hegel 1971, 291). The form, we can say,is the “relation (Verhältnis) which self-consciousness takes to the body oftruth” (284).

To study how this device (dispositif) functions in each of its epochs, we willenter into the “forward march of spirit,” embracing its temporal deployment inthe places where time is supposed to be absent: in the Philosophy of Spirit of theEncyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. The last edition of 1830 will be the basisfor this reading. In his Remark to sec. 387 (Hegel 1971, 25), Hegel displays theprocess of spiritual anticipation:

and so in spirit every character under which it appears is a stagein a process of specification and development, a step forward(Vorwärtsgehen) towards its goal (seinem Ziele), in order to makeitself into, and to realize in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step,again, is itself such a process, and its product is that what themind was implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer)it is for itself—for the special form, what spirit has in that step.. . . In the philosophical vision of spirit as such, spirit is studiedas self-instruction and self-cultivation in its very essence, andits exteriorizations (seine Außerungen) are stages in the processwhich brings it forward to itself (seines Sich-zu-sich-selbst-Her-vorbringen), links it to unity with itself (seines Zusammensch-ließens mit sich), and so makes it actual spirit.

The reading offered here intends to pay particular attention to that struc-ture within the Philosophy of Spirit which leads from the “sleep of spirit” (Schlafdes Geistes)—the “passive nous of Aristotle” (Hegel 1971, 29)—to the “intel-ligence which thinks itself”: Aristotle’s idea presented in the citation fromMetaphysics which closes the Encyclopedia (Aristotle 1984a, 7, 1072b, 18–30).The Philosophy of Spirit forms a space extending from nous to nous. However,between potentiality and act there develops in another place a time whichdoes not move forward according to a teleological deployment: the time ofrepresentation,


which gives to the instances of the content of the absolutespirit, on the one hand, a separate being, making them presup-positions towards each other and phenomena which succeedone after the other (aufeinander folgender Erscheinungen). (Hegel1969–1979, 10:3)

Central to our analysis is the way these two perspectives, Greek and modern,are constructed and detailed.

The Hegelian exposition of Aristotle’s passive nous is found in the “An-thropology”: the exposition of the temporality of representation in “RevealedReligion”; and it is the citation from the Metaphysics which brings “Philoso-phy” to its completion. The substance of the present work will consist of areading of these three moments of the Philosophy of Spirit: the first moment ofsubjective spirit; the penultimate and the final moments those of absolutespirit. These three times of the reading will be titled, respectively: “The Hu-manity of Hegel” (“L’Homme de Hegel”); “The God of Hegel”; and “The Phi-losopher of Hegel.”

The choice of this triad—“Humanity, God, Philosopher”—intends a delib-erate allusion to Heidegger’s articulation of “onto-theology.” The challengehere is to produce (provoquer) an interpretation of this triad that uncovers allthe surprises it has in reserve for a reading concerned to present Humanity,God, and the Philosopher of Hegel not as if they were fixed and substantialentities but as perspectives open to the crossroads of time.

What does that mean? Humanity, God, and Philosopher need to be con-sidered, to adopt Hegel’s own phrase, as the “steps” (Stufe) in the developmentof the substance-subject. One could think about this as if “steps” implied atonce a process of progressive intensity and a succession of stages, as if the lifeof the concept were governed by the rhythm of Humanity, God, Philosopher,and as if it required an achievement of the concept by itself which, although itis manifested in history, has no history of its own, in the sense that it does nothave to make time for itself (faire son temps).

But in fact, Humanity, God, Philosopher, far from being subjects consti-tuted in advance, turn out to be the sites where subjectivity forms itself. Theyare the plastic instances (instances plastiques) where the three great moments ofself-determination—the Greek, the modern, and that of absolute knowledge—give themselves the “form” of moments; in other words, where they createtheir specific temporality. From this perspective, the notion of “step” loses itsevaluative content, and only signifies the break or interruption—the operationof breaking (coupe(s))–– in the self-formation of time itself.

If one begins with the idea of such breaks, a discourse is invited that isnot content to argue either for the unity of the logical genesis or for that ofthe chronological genesis, but instead tries to locate the space of their com-mon origin within the speculative development. Such a discourse—where the

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times meet and intersect—draws from the source of that which it tries todescribe: from a speculative suppleness which is neither passion nor passivity,but plasticity.

In what follows, at each moment of this triad, we need to select for ex-amination a primordial modality of substance in its self-determination and itsrecurring negativity. By doing this, we will take a contrary approach to thesort of discourse which believes it can discard the anthropological, theological,and philosophic material whose novelty Hegel brings to light. For within thisdetail will be revealed the unique perspective of a philosophy of the event.Further, if we take this thought to the limit, we find the possibility open toHegel’s philosophy to register itself as an event. By means of the discipline ofplasticity in its reading, the Encyclopedia, the ultimate expression of Hegelianthought, will disclose all the gentleness of its maturity.

NOTES

We very warmly thank Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin for granting permission topublish this translation.

1. First published as the introduction to Catherine Malabou, L’Avenir de Hegel:Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique. Paris: Vrin, 1996, pp. 11–36. A full translation of thework into English is forthcoming with Routledge Press, London. Ed

2. Joan Stambaugh translates this passage as follows: “Because Hegel’s concept oftime presents the most radical way in which the vulgar understanding of time has beengiven form conceptually, and one which has received too little attention” (Heidegger1996, 390). For the original in Sein und Zeit, see Heidegger (1984, 428). Trans.

3. Compare Heidegger’s formula in Sein und Zeit (Heidegger 1984, 424): “a right-away that is no longer.” Trans.

4. I have used the French of Heidegger’s Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit cited byCatherine Malabou. The English translation of this passage reads: “Hegel occasionallyspeaks about having been, but never about the future. This accords with his view of thepast as the decisive character of time. It is a fading away, something transitory andalways bygone.” [The passage appears in the French translation by Emmanuel Mar-tineau in Heidegger (1984, 13). Trans.] Heidegger declares in the same lecture seriesthat Hegel develops a fundamental view of being according to which what is a genuinebeing is “what has returned to itself ” (Heidegger 1984, 146).

5. “The German language has preserved essence in the past participle (gewesen) ofthe verb ‘to be’ (sein); for essence is past—but timelessly past—being” (Hegel 1976b,389).

6. Emad and Maly give, “Hegel’s explication of the genuine concept of being—inthe passage just indicated, where time is mentioned—is nothing less than leaving timebehind on the road to spirit, which is eternal” (Heidegger 1988, 147). Malabou citesthe French translation, Hegel (1941, 224). Trans.

7. That is, the versions of Jena (1804–5 and 1805–6) and that of the Encyclopediaof Philosophic Sciences in its three editions (1817, 1827, 1830).


8. In particular, Bourgeois (1991); Labarrière (1970; 1986); Lebrun (1972),especially chap. 8; Souche-Dagues (1986; 1990), especially chap. 3, “History,” and(1994, Part 3), “Time and History” and “Conclusion.”

9. The word entered the French language in 1785 (Dictionnaire Robert). TheBrockhaus Dictionary shows that Plazizität was introduced into German “in the age ofGoethe (dead in 1832).”

10. I reproduce here what is written in Grimm’s dictionary under the heading“Plastik,” “Plastiker,” and “Plastisch.”

PLASTIK, feminine noun, from the French, plastique, from the Greek(“techne”), the creative arts, which create organic forms out of matter(by cutting, chiseling, casting), in the narrow sense of the word, the“modeling arts.” “The objective of all those arts, which, to honor theGreeks, we will henceforth call ‘plastic,’ is to display the dignity of thehuman through the medium of the human form” (Goethe). “The plasticarts are only effective on the highest level” (Goethe). “Painting enjoys afar wider domain, and greater freedom, than anything possible to theplastic arts” (Hans Meyer).

PLASTIKER, masculine noun, creative artist. “Dädelus, the first cre-ative artist” (Goethe).

“Who dares to write poetry, and is ashamed of language and rhythm,is like the plastic artist, who builds pictures out of air” (Platen).

“A plastic poet: our two greatest Romantics, Goethe and August vonSchlegel, are at the same time our greatest creative artists” (Heine).

PLASTISCH, adjective and adverb, “physically forming, shaping,or shaped, useful or appropriate to plasticity”: “Belief, love, hope . . . oncethey felt a plastic drive in their nature, they joined together with ener-gy and produced a charming creation . . . , patience” (Goethe). “Plasticanatomy” (Goethe). “The plastic nature of men” (Schiller). “Plastic rep-resentations” (A.W. Schlegel). “Gervinus the plastic artist”; “plasticpoet” (Heine); his “plastic poetry,” whose forms seemed to emerge rightout of the body (Heine). “To present plastically, to paint plastically”(with forms strongly grounded), “to delineate with plastic clarity” (Le-nau); “plastic peacefulness” (Auerbach); “plastic acts of violence,” “steal-ing treasures of sculpture” (Klopstock); “the act of sculpting, of model-ing.” [Rough rendition of Grimm’s nineteenth-century language. Trans.]

11. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel 1991b), Pericles is described asthe paradigm of a “plastic individual”: “Pericles was a statesman of plastic antiquecharacter” (259). It was at Pericles’ instigation that there originated “the productionof those eternal monuments of sculpture”: his orations were addressed “to a band ofmen whose genius has become classical for all centuries” (260–61). We find here thesame examples: Thucydides, Socrates, Aristophanes. Alexander himself is character-ized as a “plastic spirit”: “(He) had been educated by the deepest and also the mostcomprehensive thinker of antiquity—Aristotle; and the education was worthy of theman who had undertaken it. Alexander was initiated into the profoundest metaphys-ics: therefore his nature was thoroughly refined and liberated from the customary bondsof mere opinion, crudities and idle fancies (dadurch wurde sein Naturell vollkommen ge-

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reinigt und von den sonstigen Banden der Meinung, der Roheit, das leere Vorstellens befreit).Aristotle left this grand nature as untrammeled as it was before his instructions com-menced; but impressed upon it a deep perception of what truth is, and formed the spiritwhich nature had endowed with genius, to a plastic being rolling freely like a spherethrough the ether” (272; translation modified).

“Plastic,” in all these instances, clearly stands for “that which has the characterof mobility.” Comparing Athens to Sparta, Hegel describes the former, cradle of the“plastic individuals,” as the exemplary home of “great industry, susceptibility to ex-citement, and development of individuality within the sphere of ethical spirit (einegrosse Betriebsamkeit, Regsamkeit, Ausbildung der Individualität innerhalb des Kreises einessittlichen Geistes).” In Sparta, on the other hand, “we witness rigid abstract virtue—alife devoted to the State, but in which the mobility, the freedom of individuality areput in the background (aber so, dass die Regsamkeit, die Freiheit der Individualität zurück-gesetzt ist)” (261–62).

In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Hegel 1955), Vol. 1, Hegel calls Greekphilosophy “plastic” (Introduction, 152); later we find the description of Socrates as a“plastic” individual (393).

12. For these individuals are in fact called “plastic” with direct reference to sculp-ture: “All of them are out and out artists by nature, ideal artists shaping themselves,individuals of a single cast, works of art standing there, like immortal and deathlessimages of the gods, in which there is nothing temporal and doomed. The same plas-ticity is characteristic of the works of art which victors in the Olympics made of theirbodies, and indeed even of the appearance of Phryne, the most beautiful of women,who rose from the sea naked in the eyes of all Greece” (Hegel 1975a, 2:719–20).

13. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says of Socrates’ interlocu-tors: “Such personages are, as we already saw in connection with Socrates (Hegel 1955,1: 402), plastic personages as regards the conversations: no one is put there to state hisown views, or, as the French express it, pour placer un mot” (Hegel 1955, 2:17; Hegel1971–1978, 3:402). [Also in the History of Philosophy, Hegel sees fit to remind us thatSocrates, the son of a sculptor, was brought up to practice this art (Hegel 1955, 1:389).Trans.]

14. In one of its synonyms, plasticity signifies “malleability” (Bildsamkeit), mean-ing flexibility, docility. Its second meaning—“the power to give form”—finds illustra-tion in the Hegelian vocabulary of information, or communication; one can think inparticular of the substantives “Ein-und Durchbildung.”

15. Catherine Malabou cites the French text (Hegel 1981, 379); the German(Hegel 1969–1979, 6) is on 561. Trans.

16. In the conclusion of his essay on The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law,Hegel shows that spiritual development in its different moments (still characterized inthis epoch with the term Potenzen) emerge at once from an appearance and an explosionof form: “The absolute totality restricts itself as necessity in each of its spheres, pro-duces itself out of them as a totality, and recapitulates there the preceding spheres justas it anticipates the succeeding ones. But one of these is the greatest power . . . it isnecessary for individuality to advance through metamorphoses, and for all that belongsto the dominant stage to weaken and die, so that all stages of necessity appear as suchstages in this individuality but the misfortune of this period of transition (i.e. that thisstrengthening of the new formation has not yet cleansed itself absolutely of the past)


is where the positive resides. And although nature, within a specific form, advanceswith a uniform (not mechanically uniform but uniformly accelerated) movement, itstill enjoys a new form which it acquires. As nature enters that form, so it remains init, just as a shell starts suddenly towards its zenith and then rests for a moment in it;metal when heated does not turn soft like wax, but all at once becomes liquid andremains so—for this phenomenon is the transition into the absolute opposite and so isinfinite, and this emergence of the opposite out of infinity or out of its nothingness isa leap (ein Sprung). The shape, in its new-born strength, at first exists for itself alone,before it becomes conscious of its relation to an other. Just so, the growing individualityhas both the delight of the leap in entering a new form and also an enduring pleasurein its new form, until it gradually opens up to the negative; and in its decline too it issudden and brittle (und auch in ihrem Untergange auf einmal und brechend ist)” (Hegel1975b,131–32).

17. “Sie ist das Sein, das, indem es ist, nicht ist, and indem es nicht ist, ist.”18. Derrida adds that “it is well known that Heidegger considered Hegel to have

covered over and erased Kant’s audaciousness in many respects” (Derrida 1982, 44).19. Hegel uses Auseinandersetzen in the sense of “juxtaposition” as well as “sep-

aration.” Trans.20. See, for example, Hegel on Aristotle: “the ‘dunamis’ is the disposition, the ‘in

itself,’ the objective element: also the abstract universal in general, the Idea, insofar asmerely potentia, ‘For itself ’ means ‘in act’: L’energeia is the actualizing element, nega-tivity which relates itself to itself” (Hegel 1971–1978, 3:518, 519). [The English trans-lation gives this: “It is first in energy, or more concretely, in subjectivity, that he findsthe actualizing form, the self-relating negativity” (Hegel 1955, 2:138). Trans.]

21. “All hypotyposis . . . consists in making a concept sensible, and is eitherschematic or symbolic” (Kant 1987, 226).

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Bourgeois, Bernard. 1991. Éternité et historicité de l’esprit selon Hegel. Paris: Vrin.———. 1992. Sur le Droit Naturel de Hegel 1802–1803. In Etudes hégéliennes. Paris:

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———. 1991b. The philosophy of history. Trans. J. Sibree. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.———. 1991c. Preface à la seconde édition de la Science de la logique de 1831. Trans.

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