Hegel on what cannot be said
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2020-01-15
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en
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It is often claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of absolute knowledge cannot accept that something would remain beyond what language can express, and that his thought therefore systematically represses the possibility that something cannot be said. By analyzing Hegel’s account of the ineffable in the chapter ‘Sense-certainty’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that Hegel does not repress, but firmly confront the problem of what cannot be said. With the help of Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the ineffable in the context of ‘Sense-certainty’, it is shown that Hegel’s conception of the ineffable must be understood from the perspective of his understanding of language. The ineffable in Hegel’s thought is linguistically constituted, and cannot be said to remain external to and independent from the dialectic of language and Spirit.
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Faculteit der Filosofie, Theologie en Religiewetenschappen