Introduction: Reading Hegel

Werner Hamacher raises the question of whether it is possible to read Hegel without catching and keeping and thus murdering and burying him. It is a question that resonates through the history of the reception and interpretation of Hegel's thought from his most immediate successors to the present.2 As many commentators have pointed out, Hegel's work is open to being read in so many different ways that any given interpretation, however historically sensitive or philosophically sophisticated, can be accused of silencing (murdering, burying) other Hegels.3 The question of reading Hegel is at the heart of this book in a double sense. On the one hand, the book seeks to demonstrate how approaches to reading Hegel…