Andrew Cole

Hegel's philosophy of the concept is also a philosophy of the figure, a demonstration of conceptuality by other means. Neither images nor symbols, Hegel's figures (primarily, circles) image the motion of thought usually described as the Bewegung (movement) of dialectical processes. To be sure, Hegel diminishes the faculty by which we think geometric figures, the Understanding or Verstand, but he nonetheless demonstrates a variety of dialectical dynamics in the way figures, like circles and triangles, relate to one another. Vividly, he animates circularity in his famous passage on the "circle of circles" by translating this image, through mental rotation, into a three-dimensional sphere, indeed a Bild borne of figures.

This essay is a critique of actor-network theory (ANT), vitalism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO, or “speculative realism”), as advanced by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Graham Harman and his colleagues. It focuses on the contradiction within these newer philosophies. Each holds that objects interact with one another in their own hidden ways, that objects are mysteriously indifferent to the human world, and that human subjectivity itself is just another object. Such a view is described as “posthuman” and is often called “flat ontology” (after Manuel DeLanda). The problem, however, is that each of these newer philosophies exhibits a very strong humanism and a rather traditional ontology in that they claim to hear things “speak,” recording things’ voices, registering their presence, and heeding their indifference. Indeed, this ontology is so traditional as to be just another instance of logocentrism and ontotheology, those ancient traditions in which things speak their being and call out yearningly to the observer. This essay contends that scholars working in these areas would recognize these problems if they adopted a more inclusive conception of the history of thought—a history more attentive to medieval philosophy and mysticism (Meister Eckhart and John Duns Scotus) as well as certain strains of modern idealism (Fichte) and vitalism (Bergson)— in which the resources of medieval mysticism are addressed. Failing to adopt a perspective genuinely open to the Middle Ages, these areas sustain a humanism that is anything but posthuman.

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his _Legitimacy of the Modern Age_ describes the “modern age” as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In _The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages_, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of _Memoirs of My Nervous Illness_ (1903). Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s _Empire_, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. _Contributors_: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel.

Excerpted and available here are the Preface, explaining the central argument of _The Birth of Theory_. Chapter 2, demonstrating that the logical categories of "identity/difference," which are the central terms that govern the dialectic as the "unity of opposites," merge with the discipline, and thus name, of dialectic in the Middle Ages, thus constituting a "medieval dialectic" that Hegel himself borrows in his dialectic of "identity/difference." Chapter 3, on Hegel's master/slave or lord/bondsman dialectic, here showing that Hegel uses this particular dialectic to describe late feudal agrarian conditions in contemporary Germany, i.e., this dialectic is not a reference to "slavery," or Haiti, nor is it only a transhistorical figure for struggles across time. No, it is deeply medieval in significance and feudal in its economic relationality between the Herr (Lord) and Knecht (Bondsman), revealing to us that Hegel indeed launches a critique of the "material conditions" of his time, regardless of what Marx later says about him. Publisher's abstract: Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory—Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole’s _The Birth of Theory_ presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, _The Birth of Theory_ will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, _The Birth of Theory_ places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book will revitalize dialectics for the twenty-first century.