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User’s Manual

User’s manual for Hegel

Don’t misunderstand me, it has never been my intention to come out

in support of improvisation. It’s true, I detest those who spend a great

part of their lives dissecting cadavers of thought. But I do not want to

preach philosophical approximation either.

Quite to the contrary, I would like to approach philosophers with

that broadminded lightness that I learned from rhizomatic style – as a

tool box, as Deleuze and Guattari said about philosophical concepts.

Open the box, rummage around nervously, put aside the pieces that

are not useful, take what might be useful to complete a passage, to

make fear pass by, to open a window, and then move along with the

disjointed step of a schizo craftsman.

Our dialectics weren’t derived from Hegel’s cunning.

Through the battle din it burst into our verse

When bullets from our guns sent bosses running

The same as we had run from theirs at first. (‘Aloud and Straight’, in

Mayakovsky, Selected Works, 284)

My generation took part in the final battle about which Vladimir

Mayakovsky spoke.

Because we did not learn the dialectic from Hegel. We spoke Hegel

because there was no other way of relating the story in which we were

then living – and we said: one divides into two, and in this unity there

is a struggle, and without struggle no unity emerges – because it was

the simplest way of speaking about what was happening. We believed

that the infinite complexity of events in the world could be reduced to

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