Blond on secular knowledge

Anyone who wishes to hold on to a finite account of cognition, in short anyone who would hold to a secular epistemology, will recognise, to use the Hegel of Glauben und Wissen, ‘something higher above itself from which it is self-excluded’. This situation (whether acknowledged or not) has produced in all subsequent secular thought a relationship with the higher which can perhaps only be described as sublime.

Philip Blond, Post-secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. Routledge,  s.8

Kurt Wallander och Hegel

Upptäckte just att Zizek, i sitt kommande mastodontverk om Hegel, använder sig av Kurt Wallanders målande far för att illustrera skilnaden mellan Hegels och Deleuzes syn på "difference":

In Henning Mankel´s police procedural series, Inspector Kurt Wallander has a father whose means of survival is painting - he paints all the time, making hundreds of copies of the same painting, a forest landscape over which the sun never sets (therein resides the "message" of the painting: it is possible to hold the sun captive, to prevent it from setting, to freeze a magical moment, extracting its pure appearance from nature´s eternal circular movement of generation and degeneration). There is, however, a "minimal difference" in these otherwise identical paintings: in some, there is a small grouse in the landscape, while others are without the grouse, as if eternity itself, frozen time, has to be sustained by a minimal variation, a kind of stand-in for what really distinguishes each painting, it´s unique, purely virtual intensity.

Deleuze´s most radical anti-Hgelian argument concerns this pure difference: Hegel is unable to think pure difference which is outside the horizon of identity or contradiction; Hegel conceives a radicalized difference as contradiction which is then, through its dialectical resolution, again subsumed under identity. 

Slavoj Zizek - Less Than Nothing

Få saker skulle just nu roa (eller oroa) mig mer än en redogörelse för vad Zizek konsumerar i form av text och film under en genomsnittlig vecka.
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Uppdatering: Tydligen är det inte första gången Zizek refererar till Henning Mankells skrivande. Om detta har @Ludviger bloggat här!

Förnuftet känner inga gränser

"For reason, there is nothing beyond, as there is in a mere opposition of the understanding, because in speaking of a beyond reason is already encompassing this beyond, which is within reason and not beyond it. In this Hegel was right, for in thinking of anything as beyond something else, even if this something be the whole of what is finite, one is already thinking of two sides and of either side as caught up with its opposite through some infinite that is neither this side nor that side, neither here nor beyond, but simply all-encompassing. There is no going beyond this true infinite, since going beyond it is always still only reinventing it. Reason, in its own infinite movement, is always already beyond any attempt to set any limits beyond which it cannot go. [...]

There is no way of setting a limit, because reason is always already beyond that limit in its encompassing movement. What we have demonstrated, however, at the end of metaphysics, is the existence of, or rather the necessity of affirming, a Being that totally transcends anything reason can encompass in its grasp."

Oliva Blanchette, Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics (CUA Press, 2003), 526

Hegel om epistemologins dilemma

We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. … But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.

Gillian Rose. Hegel contra Sociology. Athlone, 1981. s. 43-44

Om epistemologins död

“Now, the analysis of “thought,” “reason,” “understanding,” and so on - in general, of the cognitive, contemplative, passive behavior of a being or a “knowing subject” - never reveals the why or the how of the birth of the word “I,” and consequently of self-consciousness - that is, of the human reality. The man who contemplates is “absorbed” by what he contemplates; the “knowing subject” “loses” himself in the object that is known. Contemplation reveals the object, not the subject. The object, and not the subject, is what shows itself to him in and by - or better, as - the act of knowing. The man who is “absorbed” by the object that he is contemplating can be “brought back to himself” only by a Desire; by the desire to eat, for example. The (conscious) Desire of a being is what constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say “I….” Desire is what transforms being, revealed to itself by itself in (true) knowledge, into an “object” revealed to a “subject” by a subject different from the object and “opposed” to it. It is in and by-or better still, as “his” Desire that man is formed and is revealed-to himself and to others - as an I, as the I that is essentially different from, and radically opposed to, the non-I. The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire.

—Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 3

Idealiskt sätt att studera tysk idealism

Jag har ju tidigare tipsat om det bästa sättet att studera Hegel. Här kommer dock vad som måste vara det näst bästa sättet: good ol´ BBC. Torrt, sakligt och ljuvligt brittiskt!

(Tipstack till Ludvig!)

How to best study Hegel

Informativ instruktionsvideo om hur man enklast tillgodogör sig Hegel: