The Problem of Nature’s Spectral Haunting of Hegelian Subjectivity

Abstract

Concentrating on G.W.F. Hegel’s controversial Naturphilosophie (1830) and his Anthropology as developed in his Wissenschaft des Geistes (1830), this essay attempts to develop an intense sense of the problems that revolve around Hegelian subjectivity and its grounding in the anteriority of natural materiality. Its central claim is that Hegel’s thought offers us the conceptual tools with which to think with precision the myriad of ways in which finite subjectivity is perpetually haunted, to a degree that is underappreciated in the secondary literature, by the traumatic fragmentation that characterizes Hegelian nature. In order to develop the force of this thesis the essay first develops an interpretation of Hegelian nature that insists on the extimate fragmentation of the natural register. Subsequently, the essay focuses on what this interpretation must mean in terms of the emergence of finite subjectivity from the domain of natural materiality and therefore it concentrates on Hegel’s anthropological writings. Tracking Hegel’s conceptual analysis of the body and his bizarre yet fascinating discussion of ‘madness’, the essay attempts to develop  a sense of how the natural register ambivalently and spectrally haunts Hegelian subjectivity: it is both its basal ground and the source that outlines the possibility of its annihilation. Concluding, the essay attempts to situate what such a reading of Hegel’s system might mean in terms of the broader socio-historical context of the late Enlightenment.