The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit

In this major new study the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text <i>Phenomenology of Spirit</i>.<br>In contrast to those who see the Phenomenology as a closed system ending with Absolute Spirit Jameson’s reading presents an open work in which Hegel has not yet reconstituted himself in terms of a systematic philosophy (Hegelianism) and in which the moments of the dialectic and its levels have not yet been formalized. Hegel’s text executes a dazzling variety of changes on conceptual relationships in terms with are never allowed to freeze over and become reified in purely philosophical named concepts. The ending on the aftermath of the French Revolution is interpreted by Jameson contra Fukuyama’s “end of history” as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social which is here extrapolated to our own time.