Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Though more studies have been dedicated to the place of Kant in Agamben’s oeuvre, Hegel – that other major Enlightenment philosopher indispensable to modernity – holds an equally formative, if perhaps more subtle, place in his work. From the very earliest to the latest texts, Agamben’s work seeks to surpass the horizon of Western metaphysics through a philological engagement with the negative, formed in large part through a complex confrontation with Hegel. Agamben’s grappling with the dialectic in search of its idling is not merely strategic, but as he puts it, ‘one of the most urgent tasks today’ for a Marxist philosophy shored on its wreckage (IH 39). In ‘The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic’, Antonio Negri claims that the work of Agamben enables a ‘discreet dialectical rediscovery’ typifying left Hegelianism and the young Marx, resulting not in ‘the triumph of the Aufhebung‘, but in ‘the heroism of the negative’.1 Rather than valorising the negative, however, as Agamben painstakingly argues in his early text Language and Death, it is precisely the negative structure of the Voice, or, in Hegel’s terms, the ‘bad infinity’ predicted on division, that Agamben’s thought seeks to absolve (LD 100).