Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Andrew Cole. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 235 pp. 

Review by Mark Miller

29 January 2016

The Birth of Theory makes two closely intertwined arguments: that Hegelian dialectics is essential to the work of critical theory, even in thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze who seem resolutely antidialectical; and that understanding Hegelian dialectics depends on appreciating G. W. F. Hegel's medievalism. Readers who may be inclined to balk at the claims registered on behalf of Nietzsche's Hegelianism or the origins of Hegelian dialectic in Plotinus would do well to keep reading and thinking along with Cole. This is not conventional intellectual history. Cole is after the way the self-understanding of any historical present, and for that matter the determination of any thought depends on a past that demands recognition, but that does so in forms that exceed its own time and place (p. 161).

Cole makes his arguments with an exemplary combination of conceptual and historical precision. The argument for Hegel's medievalism, for instance, zeroes in on the central Hegelian insight into contradiction as the driving force of identity production. Cole carefully unpacks the logic of ancient dialectic, which he argues cannot yield a dialectic of identity and difference akin to Hegel's, and contrasts it with that of a medieval tradition descending from Plotinus, which does precisely that. Cole further shows how Hegel's best-known version of this concept, the so-called master-slave dialectic, offers a trenchant analysis of the feudal relations that still prevailed in much of Hegel's Germany: properly translated as the "lord-bondsman dialectic," it depends on social relations distinct from those of slavery, relations that did not exist before the middle ages.

It is impossible in the space of a short review to do justice to the contributions of The Birth of Theory. I will briefly mention three that emerge from the book's historical perspective on Hegel. First, Cole corrects a hasty condemnation of Hegelian idealism by showing how Hegel anticipates Marx's insistence that critique must be grounded in an account of material relations, concrete forms of labor and modes of production, rather than just ideas. In doing so, Cole reveals the way the emergence of a critical self-consciousness depends on medieval forms of life that continue well into modernity. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Cole offers a model of critical practice as that of tracking the dialectical movement internal to all thought, a movement that requires attention not only to the dialectic of identity and difference but to that of figure and concept. In his explorations of the conceptual logic of figures and the figural work of concepts, Cole points the way beyond the invocation of an antidialectical Deleuze, as seen for instance in some accounts of affect, object-oriented ontology, and the recent polemics around symptomatic reading.