Synopses & Reviews
Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theoryHegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Coles
The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegels dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson.
By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegels famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book will revitalize dialectics for the twenty-first century.
Review
“Coles The Birth of Theory is a daring, ambitious, and fabulously capacious work. The readings of Plotinus, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Deleuze would themselves be enough to recommend this wildly important book, but together they set the record straight once and for all: contemporary theory is born under Hegels shadow. But Coles Hegel is not the dialectical scapegoat of a Nietzsche or a Deleuze; he is the Hegel who returns to the medieval period and, in particular, to the medieval dialectic in order to establish the play between identity and difference that has defined theory from its beginnings, even in its Nietzschean and Deleuzian versions. In truly Hegelian fashion, Cole mobilizes the force and joy of his philosophical intelligence—as only a theoretically inflected medievalist could—in the direction of the most persuasive account we now have of theorys origins. Brilliantly argued and beautifully written, this book shows us not only how theory was born but also why it is still very much alive and, in Coles hands, why it has such a compelling future.”
Review
“‘Everybody is Hegelian without knowing it, Lacan famously maintained. Cole, in this highly original book, shows not only that this holds for the sworn anti-Hegelians, say Nietzsche and Deleuze, but also that most Hegelians at large are far less aware of what is at stake in dialectics than they can imagine. The aim of the book may seem paradoxical: to restore and rethink the premodern, the medieval and feudal setting of the origins of dialectical thought, yet this is the dialectical move par excellence: to return to the past in order to open up a new future. From Plotinus to Bakhtin, from Nicolas of Cusa to Fredric Jameson, from lord and bondsman to Wal-Mart, this work practices in grand style what dialectical thinking for our times ought to be.”
Review
“In this elegant and erudite book, Cole shows us a Hegel looking both backward to medieval philosophy and forward to contemporary theory. The result is a novel, brilliant interpretation of Hegels dialectic that makes it once again fresh and powerful today.”
Review
“Cole here sheds new light on the dialectic from an unexpected source: medieval thought and the medieval tradition. This is an exciting and groundbreaking work.”
Review
"Birth of Theory is first and foremost a rehabilitation: one that cuts through the 'scrim' of what Hegelianism has become and takes us back to who Hegel himself was and what he 'actually said.' . . . The Birth of Theory reveals itself as not just an impressive combination of historical calibration and theoretical intervention, but rather as a methodological clinic in how to do theoretical and historical work now. What Cole demonstrates, in a final Hegelian lesson, is that we can no longer have one without the other."
Review
"An extremely important and timely book. . . . By arguing that Hegel recognized the cotemporality of the feudal and the modern-capitalist in his own time and thus was engaged in a form of 'materialist analysis' that is imbued with deep conceptual rigor, Cole can indeed make Hegel not only 'presciently Marxist' but valuable for future 'dialectical interpretation' of all sorts. We can look past the 'mediating scrim,' i.e., vacuous anti-Hegelian pronouncements, in so much theory, and recognize the close affiliation between Hegel’s dialectic (medieval and otherwise) and genuine critique. And by doing this, Cole has performed a great service to us all."
Synopsis
Hegel, had he the chance, would have called the whale 'dialectic.'” In "The Birth of Theory," Andrew Cole makes clear for the first time the medieval roots of the modern dialectic; namely, he demonstrates how G. W. F. Hegel’s notion of the dialectic, so important for later thinkers, such as Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, emerged from the philosophical practices of medieval thinkers. Hegel’s adoption of the dialectic in its distinctly medieval formation, as elucidated in Plotinus, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa, was a risky move in the seventeenth-century German philosophical milieu that had little interest in the potential of the categories of “identity” and “difference.” As Cole argues, whatever theoretical debt is owed to Marx for making the use of “dialectical” as widespread as it is in the educated public and in the academy today, a prior acknowledgment needs to be made to Hegel, since Marx and later critics all use this precise application of (medieval) dialectic in their own writings. What the Middle Ages was to Hegel, modernity is to Marx; what feudalism was to Hegel, capitalism is to Marx. By demystifying the Hegel that we have come to know through modern critics, this book changes the way we understand Hegel and his curious life-long obsession with the Middle Ages—even as he struggled to comprehend emerging modernity—and the way we conceive of the history and development of philosophy and theory. It will have wide appeal across the humanities, including students of medieval history and philosophy, Marxist historiography, Hegel scholarship, and literary studies.
About the Author
Andrew Cole teaches in the Department of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer and coeditor of The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory.
Table of Contents
Preface: Very Like a Whale
Acknowledgments
Part I: Theory
Chapter 1: The Untimely Dialectic
Chapter 2: The Medieval Dialectic
Part II: History
Chapter 3: The Lord and the Bondsman
Chapter 4: The Eucharist and the Commodity
Part III: Literature
Chapter 5: Fürstenspiegel, Political Economy, Critique
Chapter 6: On Dialectical Interpretation
Notes
Index