Absolute knowledge depends on interpretive reading with no privileged author

Evidence

Judging from the conclusions we have reached so far, the ‘backward look’ which philosophy ‘directs’ onto ‘its own knowledge’ could not be a look of passive contemplation, but rather an act of reading. In lieu of an author, the System necessarily has interpreters. Absolute Knowledge engages thought in the movement of speculative hermeneutics, in modalities unknown and unforeseen. According to Hegel, there is no such thing as an immediate grasping of the absolute, neither, it follows, will there be any such thing as an immediate transparency of meaning. For Absolute Knowledge to come on the scene, it is assumed that the discursive conditions both for its announcement and for its reception must have been produced. … The responsibility for this final and definitive formulation (mise en forme) – requiring as it does an idiom, a form of utterance, a discipline of reading – falls to the philosopher. Philosophy’s Self, or absolute subject, would indeed remain formless unless shaped into a style by a particular philosophical subjectivity. In return, it is only Absolute Knowledge which gives philosophical subjectivity its rightful form. Thus speculative hermeneutics must consist of a mutual gift of form, from the Self to the self. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1130

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s enmity/agency thread: the ‘formless Self awaiting a style’ is a passive-receptive site that a particular subjectivity must shape — a condition for tipping receptivity into agency. — connects to: Absolute Knowledge transforms sublation rather than arresting dialectical progress — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1066; Absolute Knowledge gains form only through a particular philosophical subjectivity — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1131; Incomprehension of philosophy stems from reading habits, not ignorance — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1195