Macherey and the Critique of the Critique of the Dialectic

Abstract

From Macherey’s position it is not possible to oppose a materialist Spinoza to an idealist Hegel, an operation that would necessarily involve suppressing the contradictions, discrepancies and lacunae proper to both philosophers. It would transform Hegel into his own other, an improbable Hegel who had somehow freed himself from the contradictory development that he argued repeatedly made the history of philosophy intelligible. Instead, Macherey, by taking as his object Hegel’s critique of Spinoza, shows us the impasses to which Hegel’s thought sometimes lead him, but also the moments at which he abandons a path he has painstakingly cleared when he discovers that it will lead him to Spinoza. In order to attribute to Spinoza ideas, especially those concerning substance and its relation to the attributes and modes, that are incompatible with the any statement found in the Ethics, Hegel is compelled to find them elsewhere or to fabricate them himself. But Macherey is not interested in correcting Hegel’s inaccurate reading of the Ethics: the hypothesis that guides his analysis is that the points at which Hegel is most critical of Spinoza are not only those where his account of Spinoza’s actual arguments is strikingly contrary to what Spinoza explicitly says. More importantly, these are the points at which Hegel’s own trajectory threatens to converge with Spinoza’s.