thought and its historical epoch, as Hegel does, Derrida re-
mains concerned with the transhistorical assertions of meta-
physics and its critical counterpart, skepticism.
Hegel in his Phenomenology of Mind( 1807 ) posits a realm
of absolute knowledge attainable at the end of history. (The
latter-day Hegelian Francis Fukuyama asserted in 1992 that the
end of history had arrived, although Fukuyama later retracted
this apparently premature conclusion.) The philosopher who
has gone through the entire history of thought—none other
than Hegel himself—can arrive at the promise of absolute
knowledge, and perhaps even at absolute knowledge itself.
There is no right or wrong position in philosophy, in the
Hegelian approach. Instead of trying to determine the merits
of particular philosophical views, Hegel recounts these views
in their historical succession, with great ingenuity and dra-
matic flair (and in prose so virtuosic and self-reflexive it can
seem stunningly opaque at times). Plato yields to Descartes,
who gives way to Hume, who is overturned by Kant... and
then all is fulfilled in Hegel himself. Or so Hegel tells us. Phi-
losophy for Hegel, then, is simply the whole history of the
ideas developed by philosophers through the ages. If we re-
count this story with care and devotion, we will be narrating as
well the career of the Spirit (in German,Geist): the universal
mind to which only philosophers are fully attuned.
Hegel was a central presence in twentieth-century French
thought. Alexandre Kojève, a Russian exile in Paris and a glam-
orous ladies’ man (and lately accused of being one of Stalin’s
spies), introduced a number of French writers and thinkers to
Hegel in the 1930 s, through his well-attended weekly seminar
on the Phenomenology.Among them were Raymond Aron,
Georges Bataille, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and
Jacques Lacan: a truly star-studded cast (Reckless 122 ). Bataille
30 From Algeria to the École Normale