Hegel or Spinozafirst appeared in 1979 after an eight-year near-hiatus in Macherey’s work. As Warren Montag argues, it marked a divergence in the philosophical paths of Pierre Macherey and his mentor and colleague Louis Althusser, each responding in his own way to the violent misreading of their work as a so-called structuralism and the resurgence of humanism (or, perhaps more correctly, an anti-antihumanism) in France at the time. Montag suggests thatHegel or Spinozabegan a new phase in Macherey’s work, one that could be viewed as “a displacement, neither a rejection of nor a return to the past,...

On July 30, 1816, the Pro-rector of the University of Heidelberg wrote to Hegel, then principal of the Gymnasium of Nuremberg, to offer him a chair as tenured professor. He explained his offer in the following manner: “Heidelberg, for the first time since the founding of the university, will have a philosopher—Spinoza received a call from Heidelberg, but in vain as you undoubtedly know.” Actually, we are familiar with the letter of March 30, 1673, “to the very illustrious and very distinguished Dr. Louis Fabritius, professor of the Academy of Heidelberg and advisor of the Elector Palatine” in which...

For Hegel, everything begins with the realization that there is something exceptional and inescapable in Spinoza’s philosophy. “Spinoza constitutes such a crucial point for modern philosophy that we might say in effect that there is a choice between Spinozism and no philosophy at all (du hast entweder den Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie).”¹ It is necessary to “pass through” Spinoza, because it is in his philosophy that the essential relationship between thought and the absolute is developed, the only point of view from which reality in its entirety is revealed and in which it appears that reason has nothing outside itself...

Hegel critiques Spinoza first for the place he assigns method in philosophical knowledge and also for the particular content of this method. According to Hegel, Spinoza locates himself as a follower of Descartes by borrowing the procedures of demonstration from mathematics, a model of organization of rational discourse; in effect he subordinates philosophical truth to a guarantee of formal evidence, an exterior and abstract rule. In this way, even though he declares himself a monist in affirming the absolute unity of substance, he reestablishes a kind of dualism through the separation he imposes between form and content within knowledge itself....

Hegel’s objections concerning the question of the relation of the attributes to substance can be situated within and expands on the same perspective as his critique of the proceduremore geometrico. The preceding discussion bears essentially on the conditions of a real knowledge, and it thus puts into play the position of thought in relation to the real. Yet the intervention of the categories of substance and attribute in the treatment of this problem reveals an essential divergence between Spinoza and Hegel. For Hegel thought and the real are fundamentally united in that they arise from the same process in...

AS HEGEL SAID IN HISLectures on the History of Philosophy, Spinoza had a rather grandiose phrase. We will return it to its context and discover that what it says does not have a lot to do with what Hegel finds there, which is, rather, an abyss of meaning. We can even ask ourselves whether this phrase—which he translates as “die Bestimmheit ist Negation” (Logic) or further, “alle Bestimmheit ist Negation” (Lectures)—was not written by Hegel himself, insofar as a statement belongs to the one who makes use of it. In any case, the use he makes of...