Abstract
This chapter discusses the criticism of Hegel by poststructuralist authors like Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Hegel revival in the early years of the Ljubljana-based Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in the 1980s with thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar. The vantage point of the contribution is a 1962 article “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” where Louis Althusser disentangles Marx’s political historical analysis from Hegelian dialectic. The central focus of this chapter thus falls on the concepts of contingency and anachronism as the points where Althusser and Deleuze criticized Hegel’s take on social contradiction as the driving force of history. The chapter then analyzes Hegel’s notions of the “ruse of reason” and the “end of history” and discusses whether these patently Hegelian concepts indeed permit no such thing as contingency or anachronism.
