Hegel's thought is a mark rather than a concept. A suspension rather than a conclusion. A dash rather than a full stop. Speculation is the thought that thinks its own suspension: in order to jump better—further, higher, today, tomorrow. Welcome to this book—!
Jean-Luc Nancy
It was a common tendency of recent French philosophy—Foucault and Deleuze as much as Althusser—to rise up in arms against the totalitarianism and idealism of the Hegelian dialectic. After mangling Plato, postmodern philosophy thought it would be useful to mangle Hegel too, always on the pretext of his supposed idealism. But in truth, neither Plato nor Hegel were idealists in the sense established by Kant. What Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda have shown, quite simply by reading Hegel's actual text, is that the dialectic dwells equally in chance, in uncertainty, in the 'perhaps,' like a country path to an unknown destination. But this in no way impedes, on the contrary it entails, that the absolute is always with us, at once necessary and hard to decipher—an indispensable compass to orient us on this interminable pathway that we must forever keep retracing.
Alain Badiou
The Dash is a vibrant and engaging book on Hegel's importance for contemporary theory, emphasizing that it is the most speculative of his notions—absolute knowing—that most deserves our critical attention. There is no other book quite like this, vacillating between a meditation and a romp, pursuing Hegel's complex thought with intensity and clarity. Comay and Ruda propose that Hegel's speculative thought exposes experience to its own impossibility and that the relation between logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit will be rethought once we grasp Hegel's ultimate rejoinder to Kant: the 'beyond' of experience is immanent to experience itself. Focusing on Hegel's punctuation brings us closer to this hesitation in thought that is part of its very operation. Just as empiricism and formalism finally converge in the Phenomenology, so exposition comes to coincide with its object in both texts. The convergence, however, is fleeting. This transitory encounter with a transitory object is marked not by a name, but by a dash with performative power, one that disorients us from the accepted coordinates of everyday life only to promise disorientation. We are then left with the demand to start anew, the occasion for decision. The dash, then, as the very point of transformation, proves important for a new reading as well as a new political orientation, one that emerges paradoxically from within Hegel's metaphysics.
Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
Using the method that Althusser once described as 'thinking at the extremities,' two renowned Hegel scholars, one who had investigated revolutionary terror (Comay), one who had investigated the rabble of society (Ruda), gather to elucidate … what? a dash, that punctuates/punctures, joins/disjoins the two major works: Phenomenology and Logic. They split the dialectics and uncover its impossible function: to identify the speculative and the empirical, thus leaving us no place for security, neither subjective self-certainty nor objective substantiality. Only the inconsistency of the absolute, or the necessity of contingency that is our material condition. Readers, fasten your seatbelts! But also enjoy wit and intellectual dramaturgy on every page.
Etienne Balibar, Department of French & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University