The Osseous Spectre of Hegel: Edifice, Casting Off, and Ossification

Abstract

The spectre of metaphysics is itself haunted by a Hegel that cannot be put to rest. Today Hegel is that figure who looms over the history of philosophy, as both its end and greatest height. Yet, the dual height of absolute knowing and of the concept is an end not in this way. That this is not the nature of the Hegelian telos (end) will be demonstrated by the present account, which is of the concept of ossification. This great wake of the Hegelian corpus persists today; a terrible dirge that, foremost in Heidegger, could not be put to rest by a capitulation to the poets and to gods long dead. How then is mastery to be attained over Hegel as master: by inversion; by destruction, or deconstruction? Yet for Hegel, that jester of philosophy, we are as Hamlet, in awe of a skull. This comic should not be mistaken for a figure whose fatal end is determined — that hubris is our own. It is clear, according to Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel, that with plasticity the dialectic is not only well received, but finds itself at home. The tragedy of Hegel is then an osseous spectre that is at first dispelled by the concept of plasticity; perhaps ossification may exhume some consequences of the corpus that were not yet rendered as commentary. Ossification being the concept that denotes a movement which becomes ossified out of its own self movement. Ossification at first came to be in immediate reference to Hegel and Malabou, but each philosopher must mourn Hegel in their way. Not that here I presume to present ossification as the last word on the Hegelian corpus; only, in deference to the character of Malabou’s account, to add a further note to this canon of lamentation — one that is also a recollection of the corpus in the positivity of itself, and not a simple negation.