and Breton were already presences in French intellectual life;
the others would become famous later on.
Kojève was fond of referring to Hegel eagerly penning
the final lines of his Phenomenology as Napoleon’s guns
sounded victory at the battle of Jena, the town where Hegel
lived and taught. Napoleon was the world spirit writ large,
monumental and unavoidable proof of history itself. With
Napoleon spearheading Enlightenment, overthrowing princes
and ready to impose the power of reason on Europe in the
form of tolerant local regimes, political and philosophical
history confirmed each other. Hegelian thought and world-
historical events moved in perfect synch.
For Hegel metaphysics is a total project, reaching with
soaring ambition and grand intricacy toward its culmina-
tion in Napoleonic Europe.Consummatum est:the story of
Western thought was complete—now that it had been under-
stood by Hegel himself. (Great thinkers are not usually mod-
est, but Hegel probably takes the cake when it comes to self-
confidence.)
Derrida, always insistent on the importance of Hegel,
remains doubtful about Hegel’s emphasis on the totalizing
power of reason, its vaunted ability to complete itself. He
shares with Hegel the idea that philosophy is really the history
of philosophy. But he interprets the thought of the past by em-
phasizing its ambiguities and contradictions rather than its
slowly increasing grasp of the truth, as Hegel does.
For Derrida, Hegel is an arch-logocentrist. Derrida’s most
fundamental concept is probably logocentrism. The term can be
defined as the prizing of a reasonable account, one provided by
lucid thought—and the elevation of such lucidity into self-
sustaining empowerment. In Greek,logosmeans word, reason,
account, or story. It is opposed to mythos:also story, but in
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