ZfL Berlin

The aporia inherent in Kojève’s discussion of the end of history stems from the temporality implicit in the moment of inscribing the end of history in philosophy. Hegel’s Phenomenology as the unfolding of absolute knowledge stands at the last moment in history, without necessarily constituting its end. Reading the post-NEP (New Economic Policy) Soviet ideology through Kojève demonstrates that the doctrine of “socialism in one country” similarly situates itself outside historical time as history’s last moment, marked by the coincidence of being and concept, the disappearance of negation, and classless society without an historical agent. In the reconceptualization of labor in Stalinist ideology as a temporalization of being without negation, the representation of time in five-year plans radically reinvents temporality as a suspension of history in the perpetual deferral of its end. Going beyond Kojève, the immanent logic of temporality of five-year plans enables a non-teleological reading of Hegelian philosophy with regard to the status of its method and the function of the end of history.

Reconstructing the theories of encounter and individuation among Novalis and his contemporaries affiliated with the Freiberg Mining Academy, this article reconsiders German Romanticism through a Spinozan materialist tradition. Countering the reception of Novalis as a poet and an idealist philosopher of subjectivity belonging to Jena Romanticism, I advance an alternative constellation of his interlocutors that comprises an intellectual tendency around 1800, herein referred to as Freiberg Romanticism. This tradition is characterized by a materialist approach to the questions on forms of life, complexity, and power in the processes of emergence and becoming. In their respective theories of individuation, I show how Novalis, Johann Ritter, and Franz Baader share Spinoza's materialist ontology of immanence and transindividuality offered in recent interpretations of Spinoza in continental philosophy. In his engagement with Ritter's theory of Galvanism, Novalis develops a Spinozan logic of integration of individuals in nature. In his appropriation of Baader's theory of elementary physiology, Novalis articulates the immanent causality in the determination of individuals. Interrogating Novalis's, Ritter's, and Baader's respective epistemo-ontologies through Spinoza's thought, this article demarcates the limits of Freiberg Romanticism and its potential lapses into animism and vitalism. While Spinoza contributes a strong concept of substance to Freiberg Romanticism, regulating and problematizing the equivocations of Novalis and his contemporaries, Novalis contributes to the Spinozan tradition a strong concept of encounter.

Deleuze locates an alternative to the otherwise dominant Platonism in the Epicurean tradition, and in the thought of Lucretius in particular, which finds its modern counterpart in Spinoza. The distinction between these two traditions, I will show, hinges on divergent understandings of the concept of the whole – on its two conflicting, and mutually exclusive, forms. Starting from Deleuze, I propose that both Lucretius and Spinoza share a concept of a modal whole that is characterized by finitude and precarity. Comprising a tendency opposed to Platonism, this tradition rejects all qualitative hierarchies in representation and being, which amounts to thinking all wholes on what Deleuze calls ›the plain of immanence‹. To think the modal whole – i. e., to think the whole in terms of its finitude and instability – is also to affirm the plurality of wholes and the internal heterogeneity of each whole, which cannot be summed up in a totality. As I will argue, the modal whole necessarily entails a conceptualization of its form as dynamic and processually constituted.