Tilottama Rajan

The encyclopedia and the university of theory: idealism andthe organization of knowledge

The Enlightenment is often described as ‘the age of the encyclopedia’,1 aterm meaning ‘circle of learning’, which is involved in questions of howwe construct disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. As such, encyclopediasshare something with universities, which also try to accommodate a mul-tiplicity of knowledges, while organising them into disciplines and facultiesthat raise questions of what qualifies as knowledge, and where it is centred.Encyclopedias are proto-universities which at certain points in historyconnect with conceptions of the university. In the Middle Ages and Renais-sance, the encyclopedia’s archive fever, its multiplication of areas of knowl-edge and thus fragmentation of Knowledge (with a capital K) was held incheck by the trope of the book as mirror of creation. The long eighteenthcentury, however, witnessed several new encyclopedic enterprises con-nected with the constitution of modernity, which Gianni Vattimodefines as ‘the epoch in which simply being modern’ becomes ‘a decisivevalue in itself’.2 In France Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie modelledknowledge as being up-to-date, with a bias towards politics and a Baconianbias towards the pragmatic. The Encyclopedie, which to be sure includedentries on aesthetic forms, also had entries on taxation and the jurysystem, and more particularly the mechanical arts. It also consolidated,even if it did not invent, the form of the encyclopedia as alphabetized dic-tionary. In the long term this form reduced the encyclopedia to a secondaryreference system that stored rather than synthesized knowledge, and thusinscribed a conception of knowledge as information or technology ratherthan philosophy. The Scottish Encyclopedia Britannica was different, butno less a form of epistemic management connected with the institutingof a certain modernity. Its early editions retained as their goal to organizerather than simply to provide an inventory of knowledge. Thus the Ency-clopedia Britannica presented systems of several individual sciences towhich short entries on terms were attached or cross-referenced. Consideredalongside the production of dictionaries of individual sciences, and the role

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that Scottish as distinct from English universities were assuming in themodernising of knowledge, the EB took on three related tasks: the conso-lidation of new fields that would be sciences rather than arts (thus chem-istry instead of alchemy), the professionalization of these fields; and thespecialization and disaggregation of disciplines, leading eventually towhat Bourdieu calls an autonomization of fields that goes against thevery concept of a circle of learning.3 Despite their different formats –one alphabetic, the other systematic though it abandons the notion of asingle system for multiple separate systems – the French and Scottish ency-clopedias also share one further thing: namely a promotion of the conceptof science that places knowledge on a newly positivistic basis. Again, in alarger history which leads through St. Simon and his erstwhile discipleAuguste Comte, this elevation of science inaugurates a shift in the positionof the humanities. For after Comte, the consolidation of the social scienceswill drive a wedge into an older organization of knowledge wherein artsand sciences were together, with significant consequences for both thearts and the sciences. Hereafter the humanities are either reduced to arts,belles lettres occupying an increasingly marginal position of gentlemanlyindolence, or seek to merge with the social sciences as ‘human’ sciences:a field constituted by its mimetic desire for the signifier ‘science’.

But in roughly the same period Friedrich Schlegel criticized theFrench encyclopedia, suggesting Idealism as a better basis for knowledge.Schlegel’s ‘encyclopedistics’ as Ernst Behler calls it, borrowing Novalis’term, ‘resists systematic structure’,4 and is not in any bibliographicsense an encyclopedia, but rather consists in the encyclopedic range ofhis fragments. In this paper, I will not take up Schlegel or Novalis,whom I note only to place them in a broader Romantic encyclopedism,which I will follow through the different but related path it takes in thework of Hegel. The philosophical Encyclopedia of Hegel seeks in Ideal-ism a basis for maintaining the connectedness of knowledge in anenvironment no longer guaranteed by the totality of the book as amirror of creation. Importantly, however, I will approach this IdealistEncyclopedia as a sub-set of a broader Romantic encyclopedism bywhich it is infiltrated to the point of effectively deconstructing such Ideal-ist cliches as absolute knowledge. This Romantic encyclopedism, alsoexemplified by Coleridge’s Notebooks, is not a compilation of knowledgebut an encyclopedic thinking: a perception about the disseminative inter-connectedness and incompleteness of knowledge.5 Encyclopedistics, inthe Romantic sense developed by Novalis, is precisely not governed bywhat Bataille calls the restricted economy of fields ‘as particular oper-ations with limited ends’, but is a general economy wherein a particularphenomenon or discipline cannot be studied as ‘an isolatable system ofoperation’.6 Thus as Novalis explains it, ‘the encyclopedization of a

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science’ occurs when one ‘employ[s] all other sciences in the developmentof a particular science’, and, conversely, thinks its relevance to all othersciences.7

To be sure, the encyclopedia as what Roger Caillois calls ‘diagonalscience’8 is not strictly Hegel’s plan. Hegel’s work has a totalizing sweepthat profoundly distinguishes it from the Notebooks of Coleridge whoalso flirted with editing an encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Metropolitana,and had schemes for organizing disciplines like those of Hegel. Yet Ideal-ism is an ‘idea’ in Kant’s sense,9 a desire for total knowledge that developsas a project within a Romanticism that unravels these goals. For as animpulse within Romanticism (paralleled by Blake’s system, or Words-worth’s imagining of The Prelude within the architectonic of TheRecluse), the Idealist encyclopedia ends by rethinking the very nature of‘absolute’ as infinite knowledge.10 Indeed for Schelling, in On UniversityStudies, absolute knowledge means not total knowledge but simply theopposite of historical knowledge, which is knowledge prejudicially institu-tionalized within the discourses of the time.11

Hegel’s Encyclopedia consists of three parts: Logic, Philosophy ofNature, and Philosophy of Mind, initially in one volume and then extendedto three, as he found it necessary to go into more and more detail.12 TheEncyclopedia was begun just before and continued through the years ofHegel’s professorship at Berlin, though its origins go back to his days inJena before his break with Schelling. Berlin was the university designedto take the place of Jena, which had been destroyed in the Napoleonicwars. J.G. Fichte, Wilhelm Von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacherall wrote plans for the new university, and Hegel’s work can similarly beconnected with these plans and seen as his reflection on what constitutesknowledge in the university. The Hegelian encyclopedia is of particularinterest in a genealogy of the European university, because on the onehand Hegel makes education a way of thinking rather than a content ofpositive knowledge, like Schlegel, who distinguishes method, as the‘spirit’ and ‘inner life force’ of philosophy, from system, as its ‘letter’ andexternal ‘organization’.13 But on the other hand, unlike Schlegel’s work,Hegel’s also has the form of a system, not the least because he wants topose his claim for the centrality of philosophy against the assumptionsof the new French and Scottish encyclopedias and their constitution of autilitarian university, dominated either by the sciences or by ethics,civics and history. Scottish universities, to be sure, claimed to emphasizephilosophy, but meant by this moral and natural philosophy, later callednatural science. Hence Hegel’s complaint that in ‘England Newton [is]celebrated as the greatest’ philosopher, and that the ‘recent science ofPolitical Economy’, known in Germany as ‘Rational Economy of theState... has in England appropriated the name of philosophy’.14

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Hegel discusses encyclopedias and their construction around an axialdiscipline in his ‘Introduction’ to the first recension of his Encyclopedia,where he criticizes compilations that are ‘mere assemblages of information’and that include ‘pseudosciences’ such as heraldry. These pseudosciencesare the technologies (in a Heideggerian sense) covered in the Encyclopedieand other post-Baconian encyclopedias. Hegel does not exclude sciencesthat have a positive content and ‘exist for themselves outside of philosophyin general’, but he wants to think them philosophically.15 His encyclopediais to comprise philosophical and not empirical or practical sciences. For‘science’ and ‘system’ are as important to Hegel as to the Scottish encyclo-pedists, but have very different meanings.16 They are not to be associatedwith any kind of positivism, a notion which, contrary to common under-standing, existed before Comte, and which connotes a securing of knowl-edge as what can be positively known, or positively ‘instituted’, in WilliamGodwin’s sense of that term in Political Justice. Thus for Schelling, whouses the term in his lectures On the Method of University Studies, positivesciences are those ‘that attain to objectivity within the state and in functionof it’, thus becoming a ‘power’ and becoming ‘organized into so-called fac-ulties’.17 Positive sciences, as Derrida says in commenting on Schelling, arethose that enjoy ‘an institutional existence... and public legitimacy’.18 ForHegel, who takes up the term epistemologically rather than institutionally,positive sciences are limited by the circumstantial nature of their content.More important, they are limited by an assumption of their self-sufficiencyand refusal to accept their ‘finitude’19 – a notion later taken up by Fou-cault, who makes the analytic of finitude one of the central deconstructivefigures in the epistemology of disciplines.20 For positive sciences constituteeach sphere of knowledge as self-contained, whereas the encyclopedia, as a‘circle of circles’,21 subsumes each sphere into another and (I will argue)unravels one through the other.

Encyclopedias are conventionally divided by historians of the forminto two kinds: the alphabetic and the thematic, which may become thesystematic, as in Hegel’s case. Though motivated alike by a need for epis-temic management provoked by the burgeoning of the archive, the alpha-betic and systematic differ and (in the case of the early editions of the EB,to which I will return) also overlap. The alphabetic has now become a sec-ondary reference system within the field of information: an instrumentdesigned to store facts outside the mind. The thematic and systematicare attempts to organize areas of study into knowledge, which is housedin the mind, having gone through a process of Erinnerung that protectsit from the entropy to which information is subject. I assume here a distinc-tion between information and knowledge. While the alphabetic makesinformation available for selective retrieval, the systematic is to be readin its (im)possible entirety. As an early example of the alphabetic, the

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Encyclopedie is still partly thematic, projecting a proto-university orientedto technology, science and politics. In the longer term, however, its parcel-ling of knowledge into alphabetized entries done by separate hands lays thegrounds for an instrumentalizing and contracting out of knowledge, andfor current (social) scientific models of collaborative research. The resultingdiffusion of knowledge and of the responsibility for knowledge, thereduction of knowledge to sound bites of information, may well be atthe root of German Idealism’s hostility to the new encyclopedias.

It would be easy to see the alphabetic encyclopedia as mobilized by aradical empiricism, and the thematic by a desire for synthesis intensified inthe systematic. However, the thematic encyclopedias quasi-systematized inthe Middle Ages and Renaissance through the figure of the world as bookoften fell back into arrays of subjects that were proto-alphabetic in theiropenness.22 Moreover, under the rubric of the ‘mirror of creation’, sub-categories of knowledge could be endlessly added on, with the resultthat the order they constructed was only loosely systematic. Furthermore,the empiricism of the alphabet was not entirely an Enlightenment inven-tion. Thematic encyclopedias such as that of Bartolomeus Anglicus con-tained some alphabetized sections.23 On the other side, the EBattempted to reintroduce the systematic within the alphabetic. Theeditors of the fifth edition complain that in previous encyclopedias thealphabet, instead of being a mere ‘index’, had been made ‘supremearbiter of the whole arrangement’. Thus the ‘different sciences’, ratherthan being the ‘subject of distinct and connected discussion, were cutdown into detached parts’, so that the alphabet became ‘an instrumentof disorder’, and an alibi for avoiding a more ‘Philosophical arrange-ment’.24 The EB, from its first edition onwards, therefore ‘digested’ eachdiscipline into a ‘treatise’ or system, providing an alphabetic arrangementof the subordinate terms which are referred to their respective disciplines.25

Thus the encyclopedia in general is mobilized by competing impulsestowards particularity and systematicity. This tension places an almostunmanageable strain on a project which, in German Idealism (thoughnot Romanticism more generally), takes the arrangement of areas ofstudy beyond the thematic to the systematic. Coleridge defines a systemas a total whose ‘integral parts or members...are interdependent and redu-cible to one and the same law’,26 and Idealism seeks to integrate knowledgeunder the law of philosophy. The promotion of philosophy as the centraldiscipline had begun with Kant, but tentatively, and with a certain fudgingof the term ‘philosophy’. For in Kant’s essays on the organization of theuniversity, entitled The Conflict of Faculties, philosophy had waveredbetween being a defined subject and a more general ‘faculty’ that containedsubjects we would now consider empirical rather than philosophical, suchas history and natural history.27 And as a faculty it had been merely the

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fourth, lower faculty after the professional faculties of medicine, law andtheology. Kant inherited this institutional organization from the MiddleAges, where philosophy or the facultas artium was also a lower faculty,debarred from granting doctorates. Kant himself, who held only a teachinglicense, began the covert revaluation of the lower as the higher which kept aplace for speculative thinking and thus for what Schelling will later call‘freedom’. But in the years after Kant philosophy claimed a new authorityas the systemizing principle of (inter)disciplinarity and the central facultyof the German university. Indeed for Hegel philosophy takes in the fieldsof medicine (in The Philosophy of Nature) and law (in Elements of the Phil-osophy of Right), thus ambitiously sublating (or more dangerously, interna-lizing) Kant’s ‘conflict’ of faculties.

Fichte in his writings on the university, constantly refers to the ‘ency-clopedia’ as a central part of the course of knowledge. The encyclopedicssketched by Schlegel, Novalis and Hegel project different, yet-to-be rea-lized ‘ideas’ of a Romantic university that would always exceed any insti-tutionalism, any hypostasis. Coming after Kant, the Idealistencyclopedia on which I will focus for the rest of this paper greatlyexpands the role of philosophy in knowledge. To take one example, theincorporation of medicine into the philosophic encyclopedia is part ofwhat Schelling calls the project of ‘introducing [Idealism]... into all thesciences’,28 which continues into the attempts of Sartre and Ludwig Bins-wanger to move from empirical psychology to existential psychoanalysis inthe 1930s. Idealizing the sciences means grasping the ‘universal’ and con-ceptual possibilities within the ‘particular and specific’, as Hegel says of theGermans’ reworking of John Brown’s empiricist medical theory.29 Existen-tial psychoanalysis is, we could say, an ‘idealization’ of psychology. To seepathology phenomenologically, as a ‘showing’ in Heidegger’s sense, an‘appearing’ of something with cognitive value, is to idealize the scienceof psychology. And, on the other hand, in Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory ofthe Emotions, we see the other side of this transection of the philosophicalby the empirical: namely a use of empirical psychology as a thought fromthe outside that uncannily disrupts the potential positivism of a purelyidealist psychoanalysis.30

Idealization and Idealism are of course not quite the same thing.Idealism at the end may be left with nothing but the method of idealizationas distinct from positivism. In what follows I suggest that the hegemonyIdealism grants philosophy is unravelled by its very comprehensiveness.For Hegel’s Encyclopedia31 is not just the three volumes so titled, butincludes elaborations of its parts like the Aesthetics that complicate thesystem, and that force the cogito of Philosophy up against its unthought,nonphilosophy. Moreover, this encyclopedia is not just Hegel’s, but isthe work that travels between Hegel and Schelling. It is in this secret

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errancy that cracks emerge which are Idealism’s legacy to the future. On theone hand, if Hegel imagines the encylopedia as systemizing all knowledge,Schelling in his middle work, becomes his dark interpreter for whom thecircle persists only in its ruins. On the other hand, even in those ruins,Schelling, and those who follow him evince a Hegelian desire to see thefailure or nomadism of the part encyclopedically as reconfiguring thewhole. Though this is a larger subject, the ruin of the encyclopedia or itspersistence as a deliberately broken circle, can be seen in the work ofWalter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Georg Simmel andothers. These post-Hegelian thinkers microcosmically develop only partsof Hegel’s encyclopedia, as in the case of Lukacs who develops histheory of the novel as the loss of epic totality out of the sections on Roman-ticism in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Or Simmel, who develops the sciences ofObjective Spirit as cultural sciences, but with a profound sense of theloss entailed. The encyclopedia as broken circle persists even more radicallyin the encyclopedic bricolage of deconstruction, best summed up byMichel Foucault’s The Order of Things, which is an encyclopedia of thedifferent kinds of encyclopedisms from the Renaissance to the present.

It will be clear that the genealogy I am sketching connects the Idealistencyclopedia with a more contemporary ‘Theory’ as encyclopedic inter-discipline. As Hegel’s Berlin Encyclopedia imagined a university where phil-osophy was absolute knowledge, so the encyclopedia in ruins explores themargins of philosophy to intimate a university equally different from themodern technical university:32 one based, as Derrida’s work on the univer-sity brings out, in the humanities rather than the ‘human’ or ‘social’sciences. To be sure, Hegel’s Encyclopedia figures a university of Spirit:the University of Bildung that Bill Readings critiques in Humboldt fromthe perspective of a university of dissensus.33 For although Humboldtwrote the plans for the University of Berlin, it was Hegel’s Encyclopediaproject, which Readings overlooks, that implemented Culture as the syn-thesis of Subjective and Objective Spirit. But Hegel also defined Spiritin the Phenomenology as dissension rather than synthesis, producing ency-clopedias of particular subjects that sometimes dissent from the Encyclope-dia. This is to say the Encyclopedia in its very exhaustiveness is the site of acertain ‘autoimmunity’, in Derrida’s terms, whereby an organism orsystem ‘tends to destroy... some organ or other, one or another of itsown immunitary protections’.34

Schelling never actually published an encyclopedia, though he saw hislectures on University Studies as an ur-version thereof,35 and it was his earlywork across the disciplines that may have led Hegel in his Jena periodbeyond the restricted study of religion. Hegel, on the other hand, see-mingly constructs a multicomponent system to contain all his moredetailed sub-systems, organizing all knowledge through a dialectical

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thematic of the development from nature to Spirit. Yet the archeologicalshifts he introduces make system in Coleridge’s sense impossible, inways Hegel never quite confronts, but that Schelling explores in hisconcept of ‘asystasy’ as the inner conflict that generates knowledge.

Schelling’s first stab at something like an encyclopedia is The Philos-ophy of Art: a microcosm of the aporia in his larger system between absoluteidentity and particularity.36 Schelling solves this disparity at the heart ofencyclopedism by arranging art into ideal and real series that he claimsare synchronic. Although this system collapses in on itself, it providesthe model for a larger organization of knowledge, begun in Schelling’svarious works on the philosophy of nature, that will similarly align ‘real’disciplines like physics and chemistry with ideal ones like philosophy byintroducing Idealism into all the sciences. Culminating in ‘organics’,Schelling’s work was supposed to provide a system of nature as the uncon-scious alphabet of spirit. For Hegel, who completed this circle, biology as itadvanced to physiology and unravelled into pathology, jeopardized theidealist synthesis in ways paradoxically disavowed by Hegel but acknowl-edged by Schelling in the Freedom essay.37 But the early Schelling avoidstarrying with the negative by never getting to ‘organics’. He leaves offthe bookends of the Hegelian series of ‘real’ disciplines: mechanics orthe resistance of matter to Spirit, and organics as its problematic finitude.Instead he elaborates a visionary physics that deals only with the atemporalenergies of electricity and magnetism, thus claiming that what is differentin ‘appearing’ or temporalized ‘Nature’ exists in ‘true Nature... all at onceand in an eternal fashion’.38 Schelling knew he must ground this faith inexperience by dealing with the life sciences. But his later Ages of theWorld, with its focus on the difficulty of beginning, can be seen as the auto-biography of this first decade, in which he recommences his work as ‘Ideasfor’, ‘First Outline’ of, and then ‘Introduction’ to a philosophy of nature,without ever getting beyond these prolegomena. Eventually he abandonsthe project, without writing the ‘scientific physiology’ which he says could‘alone’ complete the project of developing the circle of natural science soas to fit it into the larger circle of learning.39

In the same period Hegel began what later became the Encyclopedia.Hegel would accuse Schelling of too much idealism, and inattention to dia-lectic as the working through of concepts in experience. While the earlySchelling synchronizes them, Hegel traces an evolution from nature toSpirit, having brought historical and biological models into the heart ofknowledge. The circle of learning is thus temporalized: we must remember,repeat and work through the philosophy of nature before reaching the dis-ciplines of subjective and objective Spirit. Before finishing with naturalscience, we must struggle up from mechanics, through physics andgeology to ‘organics’, culminating in the emergence of man. This scale

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of disciplines is based on the Great Chain of Being which, however, Hegeltropes as an order of learning in the form of a psychic history. For Hegelprojects Spirit’s enlightenment, as it comes to know itself through the dis-ciplines that study nature, as nature’s own Bildung from matter to form.Spirit must therefore perpetually struggle with its nature, taking accountof contingencies that lead to natural science being not one teleologicallyunified discipline, but several sub-systems each of which has a differenthistory to tell Spirit.

If Hegel’s shift to the diachronic is his first break with the earlySchelling, his second is his conception of the system as a subject, whichties the concept of system in to the very Romantic notion of process: to edu-cation, Bildung, but as process. For if the Encyclopedia is a monument toeducation as Absolute Knowledge, Hegel’s Absolute Subject is the Absoluteas Subject, which means it is a ‘movement of becoming other to itself’. AsSlavoj Zizek argues, system too is caught in this movement. As such, it must‘pass’ through the ‘shapes’ of knowledge ‘over the long passage of time’,‘tarry[ing] with the negative’40 such that any ‘moment of the Absolutecan posit itself as its own Centre’.41 Such ‘accident[s]’, in which a partdeparts from ‘what circumscribes it’ to acquire ‘a separate freedom’, are,Hegel says in 1807, two years before Schelling’s Freedom essay, the very‘energy of thought’.42 Thought as absolute knowledge, in Schelling’ssense, is unconditional knowledge, as Derrida will describe it in arguingfor a ‘university without condition’ where one has ‘the right to say every-thing even if it be’ as ‘fiction and the experimentation of knowledge’.43

Hegel builds this thought into his encyclopedia through the doublingof ‘levels’ as ‘spheres’. Thus a domain of knowledge that is a level in anascending totality (as nature is a level subsumed into spirit) can becomea sphere in its own right, sub-divisible into further subaltern spheres.Mechanics and organics are levels in the sphere of natural science, whichis a level leading to the sciences of Spirit. But organics is also sub-divided into geology, botany and physiology, which contains the sphereof pathology. The logic is that of Leibniz’s Monadology, where individualmonads with their own entelechies exist in a pre-established harmonybecause they are all part of the supreme monad who is God, but whereeach monad (including God) is infinitely deconstructible into furtherdifferences.44 Similarly as Hegel compounds his tripartite divisions ofknowledge into larger unities, he trisects the original disciplines intofurther sub-disciplines. Gerard Genette describes, in Romantic genre-theory, this madness of the system that takes in difference by reintroducingthe whole triad into the very parts established to divide and disaggregate‘kinds’ of knowledge.45 This is precisely the embedding of triads withintriads that governs Hegel’s own procedures, for instance in the The Philos-ophy of Nature.46 Genette links this embedding to Friedrich Holderlin’s

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theory of the three genres as ‘an endless chain, with each genre alternatelyleading and following’. Tragedy is thus ‘supplemented by lyric, lyric byepic and so on’.47 Genette suggests in the end, citing Goethe’s descriptionof the three genres as ‘a circle that loops back on itself’, that the circle canbe closed.48 But though it may be closed mathematically, according to alogic in which the three genres yield no more than nine recombinations,the principle of mixing in the Romantic encyclopedia is also chemical.And as Michel Chaouli has argued with reference to Friedrich Schlegel’suse of chemistry as the underlying principle for his poetics and, wemight add, encyclopedics, chemical combinations are at once more contin-gent, unpredictable, and multiple than mathematical ones.49

In Goethe’s circle, instead of a hierarchical, though ramified arrange-ment in the branching structure of the traditional encyclopedia’s arborscientiae, we have a chain of supplements that loops back or returns intoitself. This circle of supplements means both that knowledge is constitutedthrough transference or metaphor, and that it is fundamentally recursive instructure. Arkady Plotnitsky, linking Hegel to Leibniz, describes the archi-tecture of Hegelian conceptuality as a baroque superfold:50 a figure one canextend to the very structure of the encyclopedia. Though the encyclopediaas a progress from nature to Spirit echoes medieval encyclopedias that are‘mirrors of creation’ with theology as their summit, the baroque superfoldcannot culminate in an anagogic level. Rather it is a structure in which onedomain of knowledge metaphorically folds into another, as philosophy isrethought through art in Hegel’s Aesthetics, or ontology through geologyin Schelling’s Ages of the World.51 Thus the superfold as the Aufhebungof all these folds, results in an infinitely transferential process in whichthe self-certainty of an individual domain is unbalanced by its translation,its reflection, through other domains.

An example of this autoimmunity is the last section of Hegel’s The Phil-osophy of Nature, ‘The Disease of the Individual’. Medicine was often includedin medieval and Renaissance organizations of knowledge, but as a practicalart. For Bacon it was part of applied science, which included printing andnavigation; in the early nineteenth century it was still a trade, as surgeonsbelonged to the guild of barbers. It is thus significant that Hegel integratesit into his ‘philosophical’ encyclopedia, which distinguishes itself from ‘ordin-ary encyclopedias’ by excluding ‘positive sciences’ that bring ‘the concept intocontact’ with the ‘contingency’ of ‘empirical facts and the phenomena ofexperience’.52 Hegel wanted to think medicine theoretically, as he had saidin the Preface to the Phenomenology.53 Yet the translation of philosophyinto pathology would seem to radically jeopardise the philosophical narrativeof a development from nature to Spirit.54

What Hegel had in mind in so strangely ending his transition to Spiritwith illness can be seen if we turn to a parallel epistemic organization

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projected by British Idealism from Erasmus Darwin onwards. In thisarrangement, which founders in Coleridge but is completed by hisfriend J.H. Green,55 pathology, as the traumatic kernel within nature, isreintegrated into a circle of learning that is also a ‘ladder’ proceedingfrom the physical to the life sciences, and onwards to the human sciences.Pathology is no more than a level in normal physiology, which goes beyondzoology to study higher life forms. Physiology in turn is a level in the studyof man, hence its development as part of anthropology by J.F. Blumen-bach, and the Idealist division of anthropology into ‘physiological’ and‘pragmatic’ by Kant.56 To be ‘scientific’, as Schelling implies, physiologymust include pathology.57 But the aim of studying illness is to understandhealth, vitality and eventually the workings of life itself as Spirit.

Hegel too sought to integrate pathology into a whole complicated bythe chemistry of its parts. That he elaborated the parts in such detailmarked his response to developments in France and Scotland, for theEncyclopedia Britannica was having experts write systems of specific sub-jects, thus legitimating new sciences. But the EB was part of an emergentmodernity of specialization that is the opposite of encyclopedics. Its relin-quishment of totality is implicit in its omission of the traditional diagramof an Arbor Scientiae or map of knowledge to visually simulate the unity ofknowledge, in its multiple authorship after the early editions, and in itsevolution into a reference tool for the retrieval of information by severalreaders. The EB’s differencing and particularization of knowledge is alsoimplicit in the Hegelian structure of sections within sections. Yet as thework of a single subject, to be read by a single subject, the philosophicalencyclopedia resists the autonomization of fields implicit in the EB.Rather it retains totality as at least a negative category, such that when apart asserts its separate freedom, this departure retro-acts on the wholeof knowledge. We could also see in the Hegelian structure a parallelwith the Encyclopedie’s use of the renvoi or cross reference, which SrinivasAravamudan has seen as giving ‘readers the power to link topics usingpersonal priorities and motivations’.58 Yet the renvoi is tactical and prag-matic, whereas the transferences that occur in the Hegelian encyclopediareact back on the very onto-epistemology of philosophy.

Thinking medicine philosophically, Hegel must let philosophy too beaffected by medicine. Or perhaps, because The Philosophy of Nature isstructured by an anthropomorphism that reads nature as pathologizedspirit, he must let philosophy become its own psychoanalysis. For themetaphoric transfers that operate in encyclopedism are not just the siteof a radical deconstructibility. They are also the condition of possibilityfor yet unnamed inter-disciplines, for example, psychoanalysis (as AndreGreen recognizes in connecting Hegel to Freud).59 In his work on the uni-versity, Derrida refers to these as ‘intersciences’, meaning ‘any thematic,

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any field... that the map of institutions at a given moment does not yetgrant stable, accredited form’.60

Briefly, Hegel builds his system of normal physiology around thewell-known tripartite scheme of sensibility, irritability and reproductionthat Idealism adapted from Albrecht von Haller and John Brown.61 Hefurther uses this scheme to describe the stages of self-consciousness. Thescheme is also the background for the analysis of abnormal physiologyor disease, as the usurpation of the normal process by its middle stage ofirritability. Thus, given the metaphoric transfers set up between physiologyand philosophy, illness also generates a set of problems for self-conscious-ness. More specifically, irritability becomes a way of thinking through thecrucial philosophical category of negativity and its economization withinthe Hegelian system. In irritability a part of the body separates itselffrom the whole and becomes ‘for the self’, but as the negative of itself,impeding the health of the whole.62 If the irritability of illness cannot beworked through, then there are obvious consequences for the productiveuse of negativity, which we see for example, in Hegel’s discussions of bar-barism and war.

Following his larger system, Hegel wants to make irritability theprelude to reintegration. He therefore narrativizes his three-part schemaas a dialectic, and ends with reproduction as the return to a productivemoment. He valorizes acute over chronic illness, because in the formerthe morbid matter is worked through in fever, while in chronic illnessthe body hangs on to its negativity.63 But the discussion of illness afflictsthe dialectic in ways it cannot wholly contain. First, chronic illness resur-faces in the ‘inborn germ of death’64 that we carry throughout life. Thenthere is the climactic position of this material in Hegel’s corpus, at the tran-sition from nature to spirit. Coming at the very end of The Philosophy ofNature, at the threshold of Spirit, illness stands as an unassimilable confes-sion that thwarts Idealism’s alchemizing of nature into Spirit. Moreover,because illness makes a place for negativity as selfhood, it also has impli-cations for other sub-systems of the Encyclopedia. For instance, by wayof the physiological-cum-political notion of ‘constitution’ as the inherenceof parts in a whole,65 illness affects how we think about the irritability ofsubjective spirit in relation to the demands of family and state. Medicine,in other words, is integrated with the political, as a psychoanalysis of thepolitical, on the grounds of a difference between them which it is thetask of philosophy, as encyclopedism, to unravel.

Hegel may not foreground these ramifications, which Simmel laterdescribes as ‘the tragedy of culture’: the sacrificial logic of ObjectiveSpirit.66 But the interference of areas of knowledge with each other isimplicit in the very concept of the encyclopedia, particularly when thesystem itself is conceived as an organism. For the body, like the tree, is a

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common figure for the organization of knowledge, used by Chambers’encyclopedia, which describes itself as ‘so many distinct Parts of Knowl-edge’ or as ‘constituting a Body thereof’.67 The body is no more than ametaphor for Chambers. But for Hegel it has a dangerously different integ-rity from the plant. The plant ‘differentiates itself into distinct parts’, and isthe basis for a number of individuals’ – leaves, buds etc. –, whereas thebody is ‘a subjective unity of members’. The plant, ‘ramifying into anumber of individuals’, is not yet ‘liberated out of individuality into sub-jectivity’.68 The plant keeps its individual parts separate, whereas subjectiv-ity is the interconnectedness of these parts. Interestingly, Hegel’s figure forthis interconnectedness is not the building or even the anatomical system,as in Kant’s ‘Architectonic’. Rather it is ‘fluidity’, a term associated withprocess rather than with structure. The body, as the ground of subjectivity,has a ‘fluidity’ that overrides the separateness of its parts: in health, ‘allorgans are fluid in the universal’.69 But disease also involves the whole,and can be worked through only when the illness or asystematicity of apart is no longer concentrated in that part but released into the larger con-ceptuality of the system.70

The ‘ordinary encylopedia’ would be at best like a plant: such ‘assem-blages’, which ‘are gathered extrinsically’, involve no more than an ‘order-ing’.71 But the philosophical encyclopedia risks being like a body, with allthe attendant dangers. To be sure, Hegel does not extend fluidity from phys-iological to epistemic systems.72 But this profoundly deconstructive inter-disciplinarity, is the terrain of Schelling’s middle work, which does not somuch abandon the earlier work as disclose its aporias. As we have seen, Schel-ling never wrote the book on the life sciences that would prove the identity ofthe ideal and real, though he pursued medical work that remained uninte-grated into his Identity philosophy. Abandoning the real disciplines after1805, he proceeds in the Freedom essay to what he calls the ‘ideal portion’of his system.73 To be sure, he still wants to integrate nature and Spirit,but differently. For now, it is ‘God’ who ‘is a life, subject to suffering andbecoming’.74 In Ages of the World Schelling further continues the idealportion of philosophy by approaching Spirit through its history, and yet ahistory that is profoundly transcendental in being its own psychoanalysisrather than a production of events or contents. In writing the history ofSpirit as human nature, Schelling also returns, as his title suggests, togeology, as a way of thinking ontology within a return and retreat of origins.

In effect Schelling now releases the work on the life sciences that hadbeen a source of blockage in his early system, into a larger fluidity, so as toexplore its implications for history, ethics, and Spirit. The middle work isan instance of the deconstructive potential of Romantic encyclopedism,bearing in mind that, as Derrida says, deconstruction always concerns‘systems’, with a view not to bringing them down but of opening onto

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other ‘possibilities of arrangement’.75 Thus Habermas and Zizek have bothread Schelling’s grafting together of ontology and natural science as invent-ing dialectical materialism,76 or more precisely (and rather differently,given the philosophical force of materiality as an inhibition of phenomen-ality), negative dialectics. And as Zizek’s sometimes awkward reading ofSchelling alongside Lacan indicates, Schelling could also be seen as invent-ing a kind of psychoanalysis in the margins of philosophy. Yet the fact thatthis psychoanalysis is invented in the margins of philosophy, and not aspsychoanalysis per se but as a psychoanalysis of history, makes thispsychoanalysis not a science but an inter-science, or in Foucault’s termsa counter-science that constitutes a ‘perpetual principle of dissatisfaction’with the consolidation of any science.77 This is to say that if Schellinginvents ‘psychoanalysis’, what he invents is not a positive, institutedform of knowledge, but a knowledge constituted as the deconstructionof its own potential positivity.78

What makes possible this fluidity in which one form of knowledge isdeconstructed by the trace of another, thereby also creating a space for theemergence of a further inter-science that exists transferentially rather thanpositively, is a new concept of system. For system no longer involves theunity Kant assumed by his term architectonic, yet it is precisely somekind of system that allows new connections to emerge from the deconstruc-tion of existing systems. Thus system in the sense Schelling intends in con-tinuing insistently to use the word, means something closer to connectionthan to structure: not a whole that is consistent throughout, but an organ-ism in which the waywardness of parts has effects throughout the whole.

In ‘On The Nature of Philosophy as Science’, Schelling reflects on thelife of systems, by recognising asystasy as their condition of possibility.79

Asystasy means ‘inner conflict’, a kind of asystematicity, or resistance tosystem. Picking up a key figure from encylopedias, Schelling uses thebody to theorize this asystatic relation between parts of knowledge. Hehad already used this figure in the Freedom essay, where he had discussedthe part-whole relationship in the body in terms of freedom: ‘The individ-ual member, such as the eye, is possible only in the whole of an organism’but ‘it has a life for itself, a kind of freedom, the proof of which isdisease’.80 In the later essay, he extends the figure to knowledge so as tointroduce asystasy into the heart of system. Whereas the vocabulary ofhealth judges this aystsasy negatively, that of freedom makes a case fordisease itself as innovation. As the body is a system made up of sub-systems – nervous, digestive etc. – so the body of knowledge also harboursparts that depart from the whole.81 At the same time, if thinking of systemorganically allows parts to bear a diremptive relation to the whole, remem-bering that the body is an organism reminds us that differences are stillalways to be thought beyond their particularity. For though a body has

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different parts, it is one subject who inhabits them, and similarly onesubject who ‘proceeds’ through different areas of knowledge as it traversesthe circle of learning.82 Yet to speak of one subject is not to postulate anykind of unified subject. For if the subjects of thought are different, thesubject too must be self-different: indeed if she were to remain in oneform of knowledge, ‘life and evolution would be inhibited’.83

The Romantic encyclopedia, then, can be seen as a horizon openingonto contemporary Theory, and eventually what Derrida calls the ‘univer-sity without condition’. In the essay so titled, Derrida argues for a renewedHumanities based on Theory as an articulation of multiple inter-disciplines: a deconstructive rather than humanistic Humanities. TheHegelian encyclopedia, as one prong of a broader Romantic project,attempts an early version of this reorganization of the university aroundthe humanities, in contrast to the universities projected by the Frenchand Scottish encyclopedias. The university of Theory, as I suggest else-where,84 finds its most suggestive presentation at the end of The Orderof Things, where Foucault outlines, albeit silently to avoid any hypostasis,what Derrida will later call a university without condition.85 Here Foucaultdivides the field of knowledge into sciences, human sciences, and counter-sciences, so as to deconstruct the human sciences through various counter-sciences. I will not elaborate on The Order of Things here, except to note itsspectrally Hegelian structure: there are three forms of encyclopedism thatprecede Foucault’s own analysis of the human sciences, which in turndivides the field of knowledge into three kinds of sciences in which atriad of sciences each has its corresponding human science. Displacingearlier organizations of knowledge from the Renaissance to the nineteenthcentury with his own experimental encyclopedia, Foucault constructs hisself-reflection on the nature of disciplinarity around a post-Kantian decon-structive reason articulated through the four analytic figures that he namesthe empirical and transcendental, the cogito and its unthought, the analyticof finitude, and the return and retreat of the origin. This last section of TheOrder of Things, then, can be seen as a kind of schematic container and setof onto-epistemological protocols for what I am calling the University ofTheory. And, as with Hegel’s Encyclopedia, much subsequent thoughtincluding Nancy’s work on community or Lyotard’s on technology, willemerge in the cracks opened up by Foucault’s architectonic.

But why return to Theory or Idealism now, when many see them asoutdated? One answer is provided by the implicit dialogue betweenDerrida and Foucault from the 1960s to Derrida’s later work on the univer-sity. In Of Grammatology Derrida had described himself as concerned with‘writing’, ‘the history of metaphysics’, and ‘science’,86 in other words withthe organization of knowledge; but it had been Foucault in The Order ofThings who explicitly took up these concerns in terms of disciplinarity

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and thus the contest of faculties. In the aftermath of 1968, Foucault aban-doned his attempt to rethink knowledge, turning instead to the realities ofgovernmentality and power. Thus it was Derrida, in the 1980s and there-after, who returned to the project of a university to come, refocusing thebroader field outlined in Of Grammatology through the question of the uni-versity that Foucault had never explicitly engaged, and thereby also rethink-ing deconstruction – and the role Derrida gives in it to philosophy in itsrelation to institutionality – as at heart a project that pertains to the univer-sity. In taking up questions of the organization of knowledge at the site of theuniversity, Derrida has sought not only to place deconstruction within alarger history of knowledge going back to Kant, but also to bring it intorelation with the sphere of publicity, Offentlichkeit, as Kant calls it, andthus to affiliate the new Humanities of Theory ‘to the age of Enlighten-ment’.87 He has further tried, especially through his work on Kant, tothink the Idea of the university in relation to the fact of ‘institution’ or dis-cursive power. For arguably it was Foucault’s failure to do this that led Fou-cault to abandon the idealism of a university of dissensus for a stubbornattachment to the realities of power.

The new Humanities as a resumption of the post-Kantian encyclopediacan be posed against two other organizations of knowledge whose origins,like those of deconstruction, can also be traced back to the period of theEnlightenment and Romanticism. The first is the human sciences. Thehuman sciences as distinct from the humanities or arts, are part of a techno-logization of the university to which Lyotard first pointed in The PostmodernCondition,88 and are thus part of what Derrida calls the ‘end-orientation’ ofresearch.89 Arguably they have never really taken root in the North Ameri-can curriculum, even if they did exist in France when Foucault wrote TheOrder of Things, especially in the theoretically updated form of structural-ism, and even if they thus continue to exist as a governmental fantasy. Butthe bureaucratic fiction of the human sciences is matched by another dis-course or ‘institution’ in Godwin’s terms, internal to the university andindeed to faculties of humanities, namely Cultural Studies, which can alsobe posed against the university without condition whose origins Derridatraces back to Kant and Schelling, if not Hegel. If the human sciences, aterm introduced by Dilthey, are the hard version of the humanities’ captiva-tion by the charisma of science, Cultural Studies is a softened version of thiscorporatization. Cultural Studies, as I have argued elsewhere,90 can be seenas a two-tier organization of multiple disciplines and themes, and in thissense an encyclopedia of, rather than, like the human sciences, an organiz-ation of knowledge. On the one hand there are studies that theorize thehuman as a function of economics or technology, or ones that apply this the-orization to literature and culture; these could be called pseudo-scientific intheir accommodation to the reality principle. On the other hand there is the

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array of thematic fields referred to by David Simpson as the ‘academic post-modern’91 – postcolonialism, gender studies, and so on – which function asthe interpellatory apparatus by which humanists, trying to domesticate thesocial sciences as the arts and crafts of everyday life, are drawn into acceptingthe hegemony of the social as the only ground of thought. Insofar as itthereby fulfils certain agendas of representative democracy, CulturalStudies is an oblique outgrowth of state power. This is to say, in Derrida’sterms adapted from Schelling, that Cultural Studies, like the humansciences, is a collection of positive sciences and arts that have attained toobjectivity, not within the state per se, but within the state’s liberal surrogateof civil society.

As a modern formation, though one that goes back to the Enlighten-ment public sphere as theorized by Habermas,92 Cultural Studies sharesthe characteristic of modernity identified by Vattimo: namely that it sees‘simply being modern’ as a ‘decisive value in itself’.93 As against this pre-sentism, I would like to return in conclusion to the encyclopedia and itsfurther declension in theory, as a history or perhaps chemistry of ideas.To be sure the history of ideas, which Jochen Schulte-Sasse traces backto Hegel,94 can be seen as a humanistic discipline in the old sense. By con-trast the deconstructive humanities emerge in Derrida and Foucaultthrough the Nietzschean gesture of declaring ‘the end of man’, which isto say the end of a European anthropos predicated on an end of historythat had rendered this anthropos absolute. Yet Derrida no more believesthat we can live without history than does Nietzsche, least of all in hismore recent work. Rather the end of man and the end of the book areforms of asystasy, strategic moves designed to bracket the European tra-dition in its systematicity or standing-together, so as to allow for new pos-sibilities of arrangement. Habermas refers to Foucault’s work as an‘erudite-positivistic historiography in the appearance of an antiscience’.95

As anti-science, the encyclopedia that is the history of ideas has the formof a positivity to be sure, but one that, to adapt Foucault, is incompleteand thus also ‘promises that very infinity it refuses’.96

It is this infinity of the past which is to come that Foucault addressesin The Order of Things, where he too proclaims the end of man ‘like a facedrawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.97 Just as Derrida introduces the issueof anthropology in Of Grammatology through the Nambikwara, Foucaultbegins with the Chinese encyclopedia, as the outside of various Europeanattempts to organize knowledge. For Derrida the encyclopedia is a specifi-cally Western, Hegelian protection ‘against the disruption of writing’.98

But The Order of Things, as a history of encyclopedisms, returns theconcept of the encyclopedia itself to the space of writing. For Foucault stra-tegically ends his text with the end of man, rather than beginning, asDerrida does in Of Grammatology, with the end of the book. Ending

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with the end of man, Foucault allows for no further movement except intothe past. This is to say that The Order of Things, rather than being a pro-grammatic text, becomes what Foucault describes in ‘Fantasia of theLibrary’: an archival text whose space is the library.99 The library is a tro-pological space, no more than the visible surface of an archive that containsmuch more: everything that has been thought as well as what remains yetunthought. And the encyclopedisms that Foucault describes, released bythe end of man from the fantasy of a ‘universal ...tabulated order’,100 arealso libraries, their organizations of knowledge existing in relation to thisunthought, by which they are drawn into the space of writing.

This space yields a new concept of the materials that Hegel sought toorganize in his Encyclopedia as Geisteswissenschaften. For the Encyclopediais predicated on the conflagration of the archive: only by repressing the‘murmuring prose’ of the archive, Foucault writes, can one achieve any‘clarity’.101 But the encyclopedia as library, which is what Foucault’s textis, opens onto the archive as its very condition of possibility. In The Archae-ology of Knowledge Foucault reflects on the resulting two forms taken by thehistory of ideas, as a connectivity within the archive that ‘crosses theboundaries of existing disciplines’. On the one hand there is the familiarform of the history of ideas as a human science, a discipline of ‘beginningsand ends’, which, even if it ‘describe[s] obscure continuities and returns’,does so in the linear form of history. On the other hand there is thehistory of ideas as counter-science, not ‘the history of the sciences’ butof ‘transient writing . . . [and] sub-literatures’.102 From this perspective,Hegel’s Encyclopedia may have begun by wanting to institute the Ideaof a European university through a science of science. But its very structureas an encyclopedia that tries to take in all the folds of knowledge has madeit an archive of possibilities for other thinkers such as Benjamin, Lukacs,and Foucault himself, who have retrieved ideas as a site of writing so asto constitute a New Humanities. Or as Foucault says, even as we try toescape him, there remains, and precisely ‘in that which permits us tothink against Hegel’, something profoundly Hegelian.103

The University of Western Ontario

Notes

1 Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and EnlightenmentCulture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 277.

2 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 1.

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3 For Bourdieu fields are characteristic of ‘highly differentiated societies’ andthus of modernity. ‘The social cosmos is made up of a number of such rela-tively autonomous social microcosms’, each with its own logic and‘network... of objective relations between positions’, its rules of ‘competency’,and each possessing ‘a species of capital... that is efficacious’ in the given field. Afield is not static, but is governed by certain ‘regularities’ that preserve itscapital: ‘As a space of potential and active forces, the field is also a field ofstruggles aimed at preserving or transforming the configuration of theseforces’ (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to ReflexiveSociology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], pp. 97–101).

4 Ernst Behler, ‘Language, hermeneutics, and encyclopaedistics’, in GermanRomantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),pp. 260–98. See p. 284, p. 282.

5 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. andJ.R.deJ. Jackson. 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

6 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley(New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 19–22.

7 Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (The Universal Brouillon), trans.David Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming).On Novalis, see David S. Ferris, ‘The Question of a Science: EncyclopedisticRomanticism’, The Wordsworth Circle 35.1 (2004), pp. 2–6.

8 Roger Caillois, ‘A New Plea for Diagonal Science’, in The Edge of Surrealism: ARoger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham: Duke University Press,2003), pp. 343–47.

9 Concepts are definite notions produced by the ‘understanding’ while ‘ideas’such as freedom or justice are produced by ‘reason’ and are not necessarilygrounded in experience, hence can only be regulative and not constitutive.As Karl Jaspers comments, reason ‘makes things too big for the understanding’while the understanding ‘make[s] them too little for reason’ (Kant, trans. RalphManheim [New York: Harcourt, 1957], p. 46). Jean-Francois Lyotard andJean-Loup Thebaud define the idea as a ‘maximization of concepts outsideof any knowledge of reality’. ‘The Idea is an almost unlimited use of theconcept: one has concepts and then one maximizes them’ (Just Gaming,trans. Wlad Godzich [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985],p. 75).

10 Idealism can be defined as a specifically philosophical movement committed todialectical totalization, identity, and system. However, Romanticism is thelarger literary-cum-philosophical context within which Idealism emerges asan idea that is continually put under erasure. For as the author of ‘TheOldest Systematic Program of German Idealism’ (thought to be Hegel, Schel-ling, or Holderlin) says: ‘The philosophy of the Spirit is an aesthetic philos-ophy’ in which “ideas” are made “aesthetic, i.e., mythological’ (in Philosophyof German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler [New York: Continuum, 1987],p. 162). For further discussion of Idealism versus Romanticism see PhilippeLacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Lit-erature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester

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(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 39–40, pp. 122–23;Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s TheStar of Redemption (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp.8–12, pp. 18–19.

11 F.W.J. Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan (Athens: Univer-sity of Ohio Press, 1966), p. 81. On absolute knowledge as an infinite researchprogramme see my ‘First Outline of a System of Theory: Schelling and theMargins of Philosophy, 1799–1815’, in Derrida and the Legacies of Romanti-cism, Studies in Romanticism (forthcoming, Spring 2007).

12 See G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, trans.Stephen A. Taubeneck, in Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outlineand Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990) pp. 45–263; Logic (the ‘Encyclopedia Logic’), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clar-endon, 1975); Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon,1970); also ‘Preface to the System of Philosophy’, trans. A.V. Miller, in Ency-clopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, pp. 1–43.

13 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy’, in Theoryas Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. JochenSchulte-Sasse et.al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),p. 255.

14 Hegel, Logic, p. 11.15 Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 53.16 On system as understood in Britain see Clifford Siskin, ‘The Year of the

System’, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin(London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 9–31; also Yeo, pp. 175–76.

17 Schelling, On University Studies, p. 78.18 Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug

et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 71.19 Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, pp. 53–4.20 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

(New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 312–18.21 Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 51.22 Thus Comenius’ Ianua has a section on games (see Tom McArthur, Worlds of

Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer[Cambridge University Press, 1988], p.114), while Bandini includes heresiesand famous women in his encyclopedia (see Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias:Their History Throughout the Ages [New York: Hafner, 1966], pp. 70–1). InVincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Maius the circle of learning includes subjectssuch as crafts (see Collison, pp. 60–1).

23 The De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartolomeus Anglicus, which follows themodel of the mirror of creation, uses an alphabetic arrangement in itssection on birds (See M.C. Seymour and Colleagues, Bartholomeus Anglicusand his Encyclopaedia [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992], p. 136). Indeed, thoughalphabetic encyclopedias became the dominant form in the Enlightenment,they actually go back a long way: for instance Johann Jacob Hoffmann’sLexicon universale (1677–83) is arranged alphabetically (see Collison, p. 89).

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24 Encyclopedia Britannica: or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Lit-erature; Enlarged and Improved, fifth edition, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Constableand Company, 1817), p. v.

25 Ibid., p. vii.26 Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, II. 1109.27 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1992).28 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797/1803), trans. Errol E. Harris

and Peter Heath. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 272n.29 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, p. 437.30 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet

(London: Methuen, 1962).31 I use the word without italics to refer to a larger project not entirely contained

in the three volumes of the Encyclopedia.32 See Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. p. 23, for a discussion of threeforms of the university: the medieval guild university still in existence atOxbridge in the nineteenth century, the utilitarian university of the enlighten-ment, and the research university founded by Humboldt at Berlin. Themodern techno-bureaucratic university critiqued by Bill Readings in TheUniversity in Ruins as well as by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition is anattempt to graft the second onto the third model.

33 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1996), pp. 62–69.

34 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Psacale-Anne Brault andMichael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 124.

35 Schelling, On University Studies, p. 41.36 Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (1800–04/1859), trans. Douglas W. Stott

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).37 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and

Related Matters, trans. Priscilla Hayden-Roy, in Philosophy of German Idealism,Ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 217–84.

38 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 272.39 Ibid., p. 272n.40 Hegel, ‘Preface to the System of Philosophy’, p. 16, p. 18.41 Slavoj Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom, in Slavoj Zizek and F.W.J. Schelling, The

Abyss of Freedom/ Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1997), pp. 1–104. See p. 13.

42 Hegel, ‘Preface to the System of Philosophy’, p. 18.43 Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’, in Without Alibi, ed. and trans.

Peggy Kamuf. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 203–37 See p. 203.44 G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, in Nicholas Rescher’s G.W. Leibniz’ Monadology:

An Edition for Students (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991),pp. 17–29.

45 Gerard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1992), pp. 50–51.

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46 Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).47 Genette, The Architext, p. 41.48 Ibid. p. 51.49 Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of

Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 82,p. 104, pp. 124–25.

50 Arkady Plotnitsky, ‘Curvatures: Hegel and the Baroque’, in Idealism WithoutAbsolutes: Philosophy And Romantic Culture, eds Tilottama Rajan and ArkadyPlotnitsky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 123–28.

51 Schelling, Ages of the World (1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2000).

52 Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 54.53 Hegel, ‘Preface to the System of Philosophy’, p. 29.54 For a fuller discussion of this section of The Philosophy of Nature, see my essay

‘(In)digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature’,in Eating Romanticism: Cultures of Taste, Theories of Appetite, ed. TimothyMorton (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 217–36.

55 Joseph Henry Green, Vital Dynamics: The Hunterian Oration Before the RoyalCollege of Surgeons in London, 17th February 1840 (London: WilliamPickering, 1840).

56 Kant distinguishes physiological anthropology, or ‘what Nature makes ofman’, from a pragmatic anthropology concerned with ‘what man makes,can, or should make of himself as a freely acting being’ (Anthropology Froma Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell [Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1978], p. 3). The distinction is analogous to thatbetween nature and Spirit.

57 Schelling, Preface to On The World Soul (1810), quoted in Ideas for aPhilosophy of Nature, p. 272n. Schelling’s reference to the incompleteness ofhis earlier Ideas presumably alludes to his work on medicine, which drawson the ideas of the Scottish medical theorist John Brown. Schelling attemptsto bring medicine into his early systematic work in his 1799 First Outline ofa System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2004), pp. 158–72. However, he can onlydo so ‘in the form of an appendix’ (p. 159).

58 Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 297–98.

59 Andre Green, ‘Hegel and Freud: Elements for an Improbable Comparison’, inThe Work of the Negative, trans. Andrew Weller (London and New York: FreeAssociation Books, 1999), pp. 26–49.

60 Derrida, Eyes of the University, pp. 205–6.61 Brown does not actually use the terms mentioned, instead using only the term

‘excitability’. Schelling, however, sees irritability and sensibility as forms ofBrownian excitability in the Appendix on disease in his First Outline.

62 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, p. 429.63 Ibid., p. 434–35.64 Ibid., p. 441.

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65 The notion, which is implicit in Hegel’s and Schelling’s analyses of the part-whole relationship in illness, is elaborated by Coleridge (Shorter Works andFragments II.1027); John Abernethy, Introductory Lectures, Exhibiting Someof Mr. Hunter’s Opinions Regarding Diseases (London: Longman, Hurst andRees, 1823), pp. 101–02, p. 269; and J.H.Green, Vital Dynamics, p. 82.

66 Georg Simmel, ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’, in Simmel on Culture,ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997),pp. 55–74.

67 Quoted in Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, p. 128.68 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, p. 336, p. 311.69 Ibid., p. 428.70 Ibid., p. 432, p. 435.71 Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 53.72 For further discussion of ‘fluidity’ and of the physiological as distinct from ana-

tomical body as a model for knowledge in Schelling’s work, see my ‘FirstOutline of a System of Theory’.

73 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom andRelated Matters, p. 218.

74 Ibid., p. 274.75 Jacques Derrida, Points... Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans.

Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 83, p. 212.76 Habermas, ‘Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea

of a Contraction of God and its Consequences for a Philosophy of History’, inThe New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman. (New York:Continuum, 2004), pp. 43–89; Zizek, The indivisible remainder: an essay onSchelling and related matters (London: Verso, 1996).

77 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences(New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 373.

78 I discuss Schelling’s deployment of a proto-psychoanalysis further in ‘Spirit’sPsychoanalysis: Natural History, The History of Nature, and Romantic His-toriography’, European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 187–96; and ‘“TheAbyss of the Past”: Psychoanalysis in Schelling’s Ages of the World (1815)’,Romantic Praxis (forthcoming).

79 Schelling, ‘On the Nature of Philosophy as Science’ (1823), trans. Marcus Bullock,German Idealist Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 210–43.

80 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom andRelated Matters, p. 228.

81 Schelling, ‘On the Nature of Philosophy as Science’, p. 213.82 Ibid., p. 215.83 Ibid.84 See my Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida,

Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp.190–98.

85 See also my ‘Derrida, Foucault, and the University’, Mosaic (forthcoming).86 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 3.

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87 Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’, p. 203.88 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984).

89 Derrida, Eyes of the University, p. 167.90 See my essay, ‘In the Wake of Cultural Studies: Globalization, Theory, and the

University’, Diacritics 31.3 (2001), pp. 67–88.91 David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report

on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).92 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas

Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 57–116.93 See Vattimo’s The Transparent Society.94 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Mediality in Hegel: From Work to Text in The

Phenomenology of Spirit’, in Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy andRomantic Culture, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2004), pp. 72–92.

95 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans.Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 248.

96 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 314.97 Ibid., p. 387.98 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 18.99 Foucault, ‘Fantasia of the Library’, in Language, counter-memory, practice, ed.

Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 91–92.100 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 247.101 Foucault, ‘Fantasia’, pp. 87–8.102 Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and “The Discourse on Language”

(1969, 1971), trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972),pp. 136–37.

103 Foucault, ‘The Discourse on Language’, in The Archeology of Knowledge and‘The Discourse on Language’, p. 235.

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