KOJÈVE'S HEGEL

In L'Ange, the book he published with Guy Lardreau in 1976, Christian Jambet asserts that the world has two histories, that of law and that of grace. They are radically heterogeneous to and discontinuous with each other. History as grace is what commonly remains unthought and unsaid within history as law, arriving more or less abruptly and dramatically to interrupt it, only to be swallowed up by it again. Jambet subscribes to a conception of history founded on the crucial significance of historical grace as intermittent, a sporadic and uncommon event. The arrival of history as grace indefinitely resists what Jambet calls ‘the Hegelian formula’, which reduces history to the status of ‘“universal gaol”’ (LA: 49). It forbids all final historical synthesis, and logically points towards an ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’ (LA: 50).

This book is about the occasional interruptions of diurnal history by unprecedented, unexpected and unparalleled events for the good. That, in its largest and most general definition, is what intermittency means, the term deriving from Daniel Bensaïd (and more loosely from Françoise Proust). What I mean by the good will have various different aspects in the book, by no means necessarily political. But the concept of justice is never very distant from it; justice and the good, for example, as represented by Barcelona in 1936.