The Hegelian dialectic colonized war discourse into philosophy

Evidence

The dialectic may at first sight seem to be the discourse of the universal and historical movement of contradiction and war, but I think that it does not in fact validate this discourse in philosophical terms. On the contrary, it seems to me that it had the effect of taking it over and displacing it into the old form of philosophico-juridical discourse. Basically, the dialectic codifies struggle, war, and confrontations into a logic, or socalled logic, of contradiction; it turns them into the twofold process of the totalization and revelation of a rationality that is at once final but also basic, and in any case irreversible. The dialectic, finally, ensures the historical constitution of a universal subject, a reconciled truth, and a right in which all particularities have their ordained place. The Hegelian dialectic and all those that came after it must, I think and as I will try to demonstrate to you, be understood as philosophy and right’s colonization and authoritarian colonization of a historico-political discourse that was both a statement of fact, a proclamation, and a practice of social warfare. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 75

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the dialectic’s operation as a colonization of historico-political war discourse into philosophical contradiction.
• XREF: Directly relevant to Islamophobia field readings: the dialectic as containment of counter-hegemonic discourse parallels how critique gets domesticated. — connects to: Fascism appropriated the Hegelian idea of a national spirit to justify state power — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2124; The dialectic neutralized a prior historical discourse of race struggle — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 298; Althusser rejected the Hegelian ‘expressive totality’ conception of society — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 617 (+4 more)

Related

• The dialectic neutralized a prior historical discourse of race struggle (similarity 0.85)

Broader Connections

• Althusser rejected the Hegelian ‘expressive totality’ conception of society #expands (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 617
• Western scholarship’s Hegelian grid cast Africa as manufactured barbarism #expands (0.72)
• Marx’s core socialism can stand without his Hegelian dialectic #complicates (0.72) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2857