Cara S. Greene

When former U.S. Congressman and pathological liar George Santos was criticized for repeatedly lying about being Jewish on the campaign trail, Santos notoriously insisted that he claimed he was “Jew-ish.” This is arguably the most famous of Santos’ lies: 122 articles written about Santos between 2019-2024 include “Jewish” or “Jew-ish” in the title compared to 153 that include “lie” or “lies.” I contend that the “Jew-ish” proclamation’s outsized impact can’t be adequately understood using the categories commonly utilized to describe false statements, “lying” or “bullshitting,” as I show that these concepts presuppose metaphysically narrow conceptions of truth and fail to express the ways that Santos’ “Jew-ish” proclamation captures the spirit of contemporary American post-truth politics. Instead, I argue that the concept of “cunning” is a more practical concept for understanding ambiguous linguistic gestures like Santos’, as cunning—as developed primarily in the work of Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer—points to the fact that both epistemic truth and subjective teleology are mediated by history and society. First, I trace the genesis of cunning in the 18th and 19th centuries through Smith, Mandeville, and Hegel, who position cunning as a historical and economic mechanism that paradoxically brings forth overall collective benefits from individual self-interested actions. Next, I describe Adorno and Horkheimer’s 20th-century retrieval of the Hegelian concept of cunning, which supplements the earlier philosophical and economic conceptions with a linguistic conception of cunning. I chronicle their development of cunning via Adorno’s 1933 Kierkegaard study and 1944-1947’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno and Horkheimer present cunning as an intersubjective tool that rational individuals use to deceive others, and in so doing, unconsciously deceive themselves: Adorno and Horkheimer flip Hegel’s progressive conception of cunning upside down, arguing that, in the modern world, self-interested cunning produces adverse outcomes on both individual and historical levels. Finally, I contend that, viewed through a value-neutral conception of cunning, Santos’ “Jew-ish” proclamation implicitly reveals the ideological ineffectiveness of positioning truth as metaphysically independent of self-interest and historical contingency, as his “false” proclamation expresses the “truth” of contemporary politics as unconcerned with a straightforward representation of reality.

In “Modern Abstract Sacrifice in Robespierre’s Terror and Hitler’s Holocaust,” I use Hegel’s analysis of Robespierre’s Terror in the Phenomenology and Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the Nazi Holocaust in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to identify what I term “modern abstract sacrifice” as the dominant kind of instrumental destruction that took place during these nation-building mass-sacrifices. As I show, these events relied upon a justificatory instrumental logic—a sacrificial story—even if that sacrificial story broke down or was abandoned in practice, in which case the destruction became indiscriminate rather than targeted. First, I analyze Hegel’s critique of the Reign of Terror, which he sees as a product of the immediate identity of the general will and the individual will: the revolutionaries collapsed the will of all and the will of each, rendering individuality as such logically impossible. As a result, all individuals became objects of suspicion worthy of sacrifice by guillotine, for the sake of guaranteeing the triumph of the state based on reason. Next, I analyze Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the fascist sacrifice of the Jewish people using their political-economic and pathological theories of antisemitism. Adorno and Horkheimer see fascist antisemitism as a manifestation of the logic of substitution, operative in both liberal capitalist ideology—in which the Jewish people represent the forces of capital, obsolete pre-modern tradition, and statelessness—as well as fascist ideology—in which the Jewish people represent the metaphysical forces of evil and “negativity as such.” Finally, I assert that the principal commonality between modern abstract sacrifice in the Terror and the Holocaust is the fact that the victims were all reduced to exchangeable representatives of an abstract category, in spite of the fact that their unique identities were indispensable for the ideological justification of these mass-sacrifices.

In ‘The Genesis of a False Dichotomy: A Critique of Conceptual Alienation’, I locate the origin of the conceptualist-realist debate in the medieval debate between nominalists, realists, and conceptualists; subsequently, I trace the development of realism and conceptualism through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s critique of the Kantian concept in his Logic, but conclude – alongside Sohn-Rethel – that the Hegelian concept failed to capture that all things, including concepts, appear dichotomous under capitalism. Next, I detail the ways in which the division of word and thing mimics the mutual exclusivity of exchange and use. Finally, I claim that Marxist Psychoanalysis has the unique capacity to expose the connection between the concept, the objective world, and the individual; and in turn, reveal our subjective participation in the creation of the objective ‘terms’ of our lives.

Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian and Fanonian philosophy, and sheds new light on the connections and divergences between the two thinkers. By engaging in close textual analyses of both Hegel and Fanon, the chapters in this volume disambiguate the philosophical relation between Sartre and Fanon, scrutinize the conflation of Self-Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History in light of Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought, and flesh out the pivotal ontological role of violence in Fanon’s work. In particular, this volume underscores the necessity of Fanon scholars to pay heed to the distinction between Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Kojève’s master-slave dialectic, as the latter—an anthropological interpretation of a Hegelian epistemological gestalt of consciousness—is what enables Fanon to engage with the former as a historical dialectic. This review emphasizes that Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a pedagogically significant text, and ultimately concludes that this volume is a vital resource for Continental Philosophical scholarship on Fanon and Hegel.