In the following paper I shall be developing a critical discussion of the contemporary interpretation of Hegel proposed by a Yugoslavian, and more specifically Slovenian, philosopher named Slavoj Zizek, whose principal theoretical allegiance is to the thought of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The very existence of this body of work raises many intriguing questions about the theoretical, cultural, and political context from which it has arisen. Why, for example, should the notoriously obscure and difficult thought of a Parisian psychoanalyst be of such interest not just to Zizek, but indeed to a whole circle of Slovenian intellectuals? Furthermore, why should a Lacanian approach be considered the most promising way to unlock the ‘secret of Hegel’? And why should Zizek and his fellow thinkers insist on the convergence of the thought of Hegel and Lacan, even in defiance of many of Lacan's own pronouncements on the matter?

In a sense, the answer to the first of these questions already provides the answers to the other two. It is necessary to bear in mind that, for the most part, Yugoslavian philosophical life since the Revolution has been dominated not by the creaking orthodoxies of Soviet-style dialectical materialism, but by the far more plausible and congenial positions of what has come to be known as the Praxis School. The Marxism of the Praxis School, whose tradition still lives on, in the form of the journal Praxis International, is much closer, indeed can be seen as part of the philosophical current known in the other half of Europe as ‘Western Marxism’.

In the English-speaking world it is not clear that any of the later Schelling's critique of Hegel has ever directly been part of serious philosophical debate, though its indirect effects, via the work of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and others, are often unconsciously present in contemporary debates. How this fact looks in terms of a Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy is a question that would require more space than I have here. What I want to suggest is that the confrontation with Hegel of the later Schelling, as well as some aspects of the earlier Schelling, open up conceptual issues which are present in contemporary philosophical reflections on modernity and post-modernity. This happens, however, in ways which have hardly become common currency in these reflections. The basis of my argument is the re-interpretation of Schelling's arguments by Manfred Frank.

The main philosophical impetus behind the post-modern is the idea that the attempt to establish any essential identity between being and thinking, of which Hegel is usually seen as the classic representative, must be regarded as a metaphysical dream from which we must awaken, if we are not to miss the possibilities of the new time in which we are living. In this view the illusion of identity threatens to block our access to the diversity available if we realise that this illusion must be renounced. If it is true that the history of Western metaphysics consists in the attempt to articulate the presence of the infinite within the finite, then such arguments can be seen as making a certain degree of sense: once philosophy has achieved this articulation the consequence can seem to be a closure in which the new always reveals itself as ultimately the old.

“Linguistic turn”, “pragmatic paradigm”, “Destruktion”, “deconstruction”, “condition postmoderne”, “pensiero debole” are not only philosophical labels. They are not only indices of intellectual positions which have inscribed themselves, as consequences as well as preconditions, in the end of traditional metaphysics. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals announces, describing the empty space which the metaphysical concepts have left; and in doing so opening up a seemingly boundless dimension for new developments of thoughts. The dilemma of these developments of modernity is that the vacuum they left, caused by their ruthless critique, cannot be refilled. So the outlook of modernity remains necessarily heterogeneous and unstable, meandering towards the colourful and fashionable-macabre extremes of postmodemity which gain from the tragic certainty of rien ne va plus the happy imperative of anything goes. But these are also ciphers of a particular philosophical-historical constellation, a work situation, in which the potencies of reason, being verhimmelt for a long time, now are going to be situated into their real contexts. Only, as Habermas puts it, “under the premises of an unexcited postmetaphysical thinking”, the once heroic concept of theory, which was meant to explain the world of human beings and their history as well as Nature out of onto-theleological principles of rationality, falls to pieces.

In an engaging recent paper, Ian Hacking has argued that Hegel is “speaking to us” once again, after a long period (in Anglo-American philosophy, at least), in which he appeared to be speaking to another audience, located in another world. He has our ear once more because our philosophical thought has once again begun to incorporate Hegelian themes, after decades in which our respective paths did nothing other than diverge. The aim of much Anglo-American philosophy has been to combine a Kantian “conceptual scheme” idealism with a late Wittgensteinian picture of the individual subject as embedded within a system of shared norms, practices and understandings; this has meant that it is now receptive to a form of “internal realism”, which also has a social, historical, contextual dimension, and it is this that many claim to have found in Hegel. As Richard Winfield has noted recently, after decades in the wilderness, Hegel is now an inspirational figure for the anti-foundationalism, anti-Cartesianism and anti-realism of the “new orthodoxy”: