2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
tation, would have to abandon its ambitions and be reduced to a void speculation better con-
fined to textbooks.
On the other hand, to renounce the positive side of the essence, the playful dimension
of God’s love playing with itself, is disastrous as well, since it gives up the possibility that
the circle of knowledge will ever close. And this is fatal to the whole argument, since, as
we have seen in detail, the possibility to escape the meaninglessness of philosophy passes
for Hegel necessarily through its closure. The end of philosophy can be reached only if the
two sides of Spiel are kept together. Philosophy itself, therefore, appears as linked to Spiel
and to the possibility of thinking and making sense of a concept of Spiel that recompre-
hends the playful and the serious, the childish and the tragic.
Unfortunately, Hegel’s interpreters are not much help on this point, although their re-
action to the problem I am outlining is quite interesting. In fact, the interpretations of abso-
lute knowing fall in two different camps, each one corresponding to a reduction of the issue
to one side, or moment, to use Hegel’s language. In a somewhat outdated but still useful
terminology, we can call them the “panlogicist” and the “pantragicist” camps, two labels
originally used to refer to different periods in Hegel’s evolution.
The so-called Pantragicist interpretations puts all the stress on the dramatic work of the
negative and emphasizes, as a consequence, the intrinsic “openness” of the Hegelian sys-
tem.
The following programmatic statement by Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek, although possibly not the most
accurate, can be assumed as one of the most salient characterizations of the pantragicist
camp:
the most consistent model of such an acknowledgment of antagonism is
offered by Hegelian dialectics: far from being a story of its progressive
overcoming, dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure of all
such attempts—’absolute knowledge’ denotes a subjective position which
finally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal condition of every identity. 8
7. This is, again, Schelling’s position, according to Hegel, that reduces everything to an indistinct abyss:
“a Spirit that casts the differences back in the abyss of the Absolute and declares that therein they are
all the same” (490)
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