6 - French Hegelianism and its discontents: Wahl, Hyppolite, Kojève

Summary

The importance of Hegelian themes and the critique of Hegelianism for modern French philosophy can hardly be overestimated. Having discussed the way German Hegelianism drew on Hegel to theorize modernity, intersubjectivity and recognition, I now turn to the rich tradition of French Hegelianism, which foregrounded the unhappy consciousness, the master/slave dialectic, and transformed Hegelian dialectics. In this chapter, I shall explore the work of some of the most significant French Hegelians, commencing with Jean Wahl (1888–1974) and Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), who set the agenda for the more famous work of Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojève, whose work in turn shaped the following generation of thinkers, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Bataille, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, even Deleuze and Derrida. The Hegelian theme of the alienated or “unhappy consciousness” proved decisive for these thinkers, since it was a figure that could express equally well the existential alienation of the human subject, or the historical and social alienation of the individual under modern capitalism. To this we must add Hegel's account of a struggle for recognition and the famous master/slave dialectic, both of which inspired a good deal of existentialist as well as Hegelian-Marxist thought. As I shall argue, it is the highly original interpretations of these key Hegelian themes that gave French Hegelianism its distinctive character as combining existentialist and Marxist motifs. Indeed, French Hegelianism can be understood, I suggest, as a sustained meditation on the fate of the alienated subject in modernity, a fate to be overcome either by an existentialist embracing of finitude or else a Marxist transformation of society.