mcgowan's emancipation after hegel is perhaps the clearest work i've read on modern hegelian thought. this is not a standard reading on hegel, and i would not recommend this text as a first introduction to his work, but readers who have a basic familiarity with the hegelian canon and psychoanalysis will almost certainly enjoy mcgowan's synthesis of the two. mcgowan, as always, stands out from many poststructuralist thinkers by the clarity of his writing, and emancipation after hegel is a joy to read.
hegel's work has been traditionally read against contradiction, as a bildungsroman of the history of reason as it evolves and conquers the contradictions it encounters on the path to absolute knowledge. in contrast, mcgowan's reading of hegel is one in which contradiction is an inevitability. the goal of the work is to examine a reading of hegel in which reason does not "overcome" some contingent contradiction, but makes peace with a necessary ontological contradiction.
summary
mcgowan's project in this book circles the central (titular) theme of contradiction, positing that contradiction is a necessary part of hegel's philosophy. in contrast to the tired reading of hegel as "thesis, antithesis, synthesis", mcgowan reads hegel's work as a situation in which reason finds itself encountering contradictions wherever it goes. the reason for this, and what i think is the most important move that mcgowan makes, is that contradiction is ontological.
The birch tree lacks pure self-identity because it is always in the process of becoming something else. It never simply is what it is. The birch tree is never the same entity from one moment to the next. There is no one moment that identifies the birch tree apart from the other moments that constitute it. The birch tree becomes what it is not and ceases to be what it is. This is what it means to exist as a finite being.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 64
i found the discussion of contradiction in this section, birch trees and subjects, particularly valuable because it helped clarify a prior (mis)reading of hegel. my understanding of hegel was previously mostly through his detractors (namely, gilles deleuze). in claire colebrook's understanding deleuze, she reads hegel's discussion of "the identity of identity and difference" as the claim that any identity must establish itself by differentiating itself from what it is not. mcgowan acknowledges this reading, but suggests that this does not go far enough for hegel, because it only establishes epistemological difference rather than ontological difference. it only discusses whether i can know an identity, and does not constitute a structural claim about the existence of identity.
the ontological claim is best summarized by mcgowan's claim that
There is, for Hegel, no such thing as a substance that is a purely self-identical being. There is no being that is entirely independent and self-sustaining.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 90
this is why mcgowan reads hegel in conversation with psychoanalysis. the key insight of psychoanalysis is that the subject is split, divided between the conscious and unconscious. it probes out an inherent contradiction in subjectivity that fits nicely into the hegelian framework. the book, of course, is about hegel and not psychoanalysis, and thus delegates only one chapter explicitly to this relationship, but the unspoken lacanian edge of mcgowan's thought pops up again and again throughout the text.
mcgowan's other major contribution in this book is to, based on the concept of ontological contradiction, reformulate hegel's relationship to history and freedom. history becomes the road along which, rather than eliminating contradiction, reason encounters more and more contradictions everywhere it goes. it achieves absolute knowledge at the end of history when it recognizes that contradiction is ontological and inescapable, and this is the moment at which freedom becomes possible, because
History is the arena in which we discover the contradictions that strip the authority from figures of authority. Each discovery frees the subject from its investment in the authority, until there are no more figures of authority left.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 135
contradiction
while the book on the whole is clear and coherent, there are a few things that i believe hold back the argumentation on the whole. specifically, mcgowan's treatment of the relationship between the law of identity and the principle of noncontradiction left me somewhat confused about what exactly contradiction is in his work. considering the central role contradiction plays in this text, this is an issue that i wish had been addressed with more rigor.
there are two types of contradiction that mcgowan addresses in his text,
logical contradiction and ontological contradiction. the prior is a
refutation of the principle of non-contradiction, a claim that it is possible
for both
mcgowan is ultimately the strongest when he writes on hegel's contradiction as an ontological claim, and the weakest when he writes on it as a logical claim. however, mcgowan's writing (especially in his treatment of formal logic) threatens to collapse the two. i argue that mcgowan's account does not adequately clarify the relationship between ontological contradiction and logical contradiction, and at several points the distinction appears to collapse without substantial argument.
the introduction, divided he falls, and chapter one, the path to contradiction, represent mcgowan's most formal attempt to negotiate with formal logic and clearly lay out a defense of hegelian contradiction that does not collapse into trivialism or dialethism. he argues that the principle of non-contradiction is itself contradictory and that this can be derived from hegel's critique of the law of identity, writing that
Sense seems to require adhere to the principle of noncontradiction, which is just the negative version of the law of identity. If one violates the law of identity by saying an apple is not an apple, one falls into contradiction.
The attempt to formulate an identity through a proposition inadvertently reveals how the identity is not purely itself. In the Science of Logic, Hegel states, “Such talk of identity ... contradicts itself.” It does so because the propositional form entails a “movement of reflection in the course of which there emerges the other.”
...
Identity depends on what negates it. In this sense, Hegel’s challenge to the law of identity is inseparable from his questioning of the principle of noncontradiction.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 6-7
mcgowan, however, makes clear that hegel is not a mere trivialist or dialethist. he writes that hegel
...probes the foundations of the distinction between something and an other in order to reveal the point at which it contradicts itself. This does not license him to abandon the distinction between something and other altogether or to brazenly put forward contradictory claims. Instead, he must resolve the contradiction he encounters in order to discover the point at which contradiction becomes irreducible.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 31-32
...which seems to lend credence to the reading of hegel as merely an ontological thinker of identity and difference (which is clearly the reading mcgowan emphasizes throughout the work). nevertheless, mcgowan also seems to use "contradiction" in strictly logical terms as well, writing that
Hegel sees that the invention of a new logical system will always result in Russell’s paradox—that is to say, in a point at which contradiction undermines its logical consistency.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 28
russell's paradox is very clearly a logical paradox and not the contradiction of identity that mcgowan writes about in the rest of the text. if the endpoint of the dialectical process is the recognition that contradictions are true, mcgowan seems to risk collapsing back into dialethism. mcgowan in fact seems to court this reading himself, writing in a footnote that
There are many significant followers of Hegel who claim that he does not at all reject the principle of noncontradiction. For instance, Karin de Boer argues that “Hegel considers the concept of contradiction to give rise to a particular philosophical principle. Yet this principle has nothing to do with the classical principle of contradiction.” Karin de Boer, “Hegel’s Account of Contradiction in the Science of Logic Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48, no. 3 (2010): 364. De Boer is certainly correct to note that Hegel expands the notion of contradiction beyond the confines of the classical principle of noncontradiction and that he obeys the principle in his philosophy. But he does also reveal that it ultimately doesn’t hold.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 224
the fundamental issue here is that mcgowan seems to be hesitant to embrace a reading of hegel as a dialethist, instead emphasizing hegelian "contradiction" as moreso a reading of ontological identity and difference. when mcgowan articulates contradiction in this way, his account is clear and persuasive. however, he at times seems to gesture toward a reading of hegel in which logical and ontological contradiction collapse into one another. the claim that hegelian contradiction is ontological contradiction is strongly supported throughout the book, but the application of hegelian philosophy to formal logic is never defended with comparative rigor. mcgowan clearly wants to read ontological contradiction and logical contradiction together, but the book noticeably lacks an account of hwy this conjunction does not ultimately commit one to dialethism or trivialism.