Étienne Balibar on Hegel

“Inverting Sentences from Hegel”

June 2, 2026 at 15h Paris time (9AM NYC time)

Columbia Paris Global Center, 4 rue de Chevreuse, Paris 75006

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A note from Étienne Balibar:

In this last session of Hegel 13/13 for 2026, which I see as a “guest seminar” offered to me by Bernard Harcourt as a kind of prize awarded for a long series of contributions to his philosophical colloquium (from which I benefited immensely), I will not exactly address the question “Hegel and the Future” that had been announced in the initial program, or I will do it only obliquely. What I want to do is select, for a free-flowing commentary, a sample of Hegelian sentences, which notoriously enjoy a strategic place in the interpretation of the Hegelian oeuvre, or have become emblematic of the intimate link between a dialectical modality of inverting concepts and the orientation of these same concepts towards an expression of the Absolute. I hope to show that these Hegelian sentences are signalled with an intrinsic plasticity.[1] This does not only refer to the fact that, dialectically, “conceptual sentences” (where key categories are associated with a speculative proposition or presented in the form of a foundational assertion) change meaning as they are developed within successive steps of the system’s elaboration : more interestingly (in my view) it refers to the fact that, qua actions of writing (therefore also iterated actions of writing in different conjunctures, to borrow a Derridean trope), their meaning proves essentially unstable. This instability has two aspects: these Hegelian sentences are in search of their meaning, which is never completely determined, and this meaning becomes displaced, even inverted within the history of the system and beyond that history, in “post-Hegelian” developments which, in reality, exhibit virtualities of the system  (as typically in Marx, who claimed to “reverse” the interpretation of Hegel, but not only). In my understanding, this phenomenon is ultimately rooted in the fact that, even in a dialectical modality (where, as we know, contrary to the “analytical” standards, the fixity of meaning is not imposed, or the plasticity is intrinsic), philosophical writing, as a material practice, always exceedsits intentionality. What is written escapes control, it disturbs the reasons why it was written, and sets in motion a process of “contra-diction”.

I select three privileged examples (or constellations of examples) which arise from my own experience of working with Hegel and his Marxian continuation, by reading and, so to speak, re-writing his sentences, uncovering their latent prerequisites and their ambivalent implications. [Continue reading here]

Bibliography

Main sources

G.W.F. HEGEL: The Philosophy of Right (the Preface)

G.W.F. HEGEL: Lessons on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction (“Reason in History”) (extracts)

G.W.F. HEGEL: Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter IV (introduction); chapter V C. a. The Spiritual Kingdom of Animals and Deception; or the Crux of the Matter(die Sache selbst); chapter VII C : Revealed Religion.

G.W.F. HEGEL: Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion (section on the “perfect religion”)

Karl MARX : The Communist Manifesto  (with Friedrich ENGELS)

Karl MARX: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (preface)

Karl MARX: Capital, Volume One, Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

Additional sources

Etienne BALIBAR: CITIZEN SUBJECT AND OTHER ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Trans. Steven Miller (Fordham University Press), Chapter 5: Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit’s Dictum

Etienne BALIBAR:  “Tod des Todes”: from the Philosophy of Religion to the Phenomenology,” Paper presented at the International Hegel-Conference, “Second Nature”, 14-17 June Stuttgart, Germany

Etienne BALIBAR: “The Expropriators are expropriated” (now published in Marx’s Capital after 150 Years. Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, Edited By Marcello Musto,  2019 by Routledge))