2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

76
T HE END OF PHILOSOPHY
damental intuition, but knowing is external to substance. (It. 414)
In the section of the Lectures devoted to the Dutch philosophers he further specifies his
thoughts by adding:
This Spinozian idea has to be considered true and grounded. It is an absolute
Substance; this is the True. But this is not the whole True; the substance
must also be thought as active and living in itself and consequently self-determining
as Spirit. The Spinozian substance is the general and therefore abstract
determination [of the Spirit].(105)
What matters is the total harmony of the subject with the world that he has discovered as
his and in which he can (and must) lose himself in order to come back to himself. The har-
mony does not exclude, rather it requires, the alienation, the Entäußerung, the work of the
negative. Harmony can exist, in this context, only in what we may call an agonistic mode:
as a confrontation with the other that is required by mediation itself. But the true meaning
of this agonistic moment, the reason why it really constitutes an agon, is that the subject is
such only in the confrontation: he will be himself only by losing and finding himself again.
The process, the agonistic process, is logically and ontologically prior. We are not faced
with a subject who “proves” himself, who start from an identity of some sort to “try it out”
and see his worth with or against the other who faces him. As in the master/slave dialectic,
the subject finds such an identity after the confrontation, on the rebound, after having lost
or having been ready to lose everything that mattered—life itself. And this is true in both
cases: for the master-to-be, who is ready to die in the fight for recognition and achieves it,
although in an imperfect form, at the precise moment in which everything is lost; and for
the slave as well, who begins to realize his truly “subjective” identity only after he has been
reduced to a totally subjugated entity who is literally nothing since his life is wholly for the
other and nothing for himself.
If the Absolute is expressed in terms of God and God’s Love, as Hegel contemporaries
loved to do, then the word “God” has to be more than a mere name pointing to a simply felt
but empty communion as the only possible exitus. Rather, the Absolute has to be under-
stood and comprehended in its determinations and this can only be done by focusing on the