The philosophical sources of contemporary politics of identity in G.W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: a critical reading of Charles Taylor and Jean Hyppolite

Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of the subject that is supposed to underline the prevalent understanding of “identity” in contemporary politics of identity and recognition. There are two aims of the thesis: First, is to trace back the philosophical sources of identity politics by opening its fundamental assumptions regarding the subject. And second, is to complicate these assumptions with the explication of the ways in which “difference” is articulated into the constitution of the subject in Hegel’s philosophy, particularly in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the light of two divergent readings of the Hegelian subject, Charles Taylor’s and Jean Hyppolite’s, this thesis at explicating the dialectical and non-dialectical thinking of the constitution of the subject in the Phenomenology with regard to articulation of “difference”. The central argument of this thesis is that only one way of thinking the constitution of the subject in Hegel’s philosophy has come to dominate the contemporary political thinking on identity and difference: It is the dialectical thinking of the relation between self and other that results in the overcoming of contradiction between self and other in and through the dialectics, the “sublation” of difference in an ultimate synthesis that manifests itself in the self-realization and the unity of the subject, and finally in reducing the experience of subjectivity to the psychologically defined vicissitudes of the human subject. The major theoretical contribution of this thesis is that, in the light of Jean Hyppolite’s reading of the Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it brings out the disregarded alternative interpretation of the differential structure underlying the constitution of the subject in Hegel’s philosophy – that puts forward a non-dialectical thinking of the relation between identity and difference. Thinking the relation between identity and difference non-dialectically is very important for thinking new forms of political subjectivity to avoid any essentialist, a-historicizing and reductionist view of difference; and rather to think difference in its absolute alterity and its irreducibility to the economy of the same.