Hegel's last words and the critique of speculative idealism

This study offers an exposition and analysis of the concept of critique as elaborated by Kant and brought to completion in Hegel's speculative idealism. The speculative completion of the concept of critique is shown to involve neither the closure of conceptual determination nor the achievement of a secure meaning. This study argues that critique designates the infinite processuality of the self-interrogation of any putatively fixed position.;Kant's first Critique (1781) involves the rehabilitation of the ancient Greek juridical notion of critique (krisis); the first chapter accordingly begins with a reading of the exemplary juridical proceeding of the Athenian democracy, the trial of Socrates. Socrates' defense exposes the gap that is opened whenever radical critique encounters the need to articulate its own criteria: critique must of necessity differ from and critique itself. This constitutive self-difference is further analyzed in an engagement with Jacques Derrida's understanding of the difference between critique and deconstruction.;In the second chapter the critical force of Kant's tribunal of pure reason is shown to rest on his reference to "complete indifference." Not a position in itself, and therefore without ground or the ability to ground, indifference opens the space for reason's self-interrogation.;Hegel's "The Essence of Philosophical Critique" (1801) uncovers the fundamental crisis of the critical philosophy: Kant's tribunal fixes critique as a position and so renders it one position among others. The critical judgement is then indistinguishable from the Machtspruch, an illegitimate decision backed only by force. By extending rigorous critique to the concept of critique itself in the Phenomenology (1807), Hegel articulates the logic of the self-critical self that characterizes the various shapes of spirit. This constitutive self-critique prevents the speculative subject from reaching the closure and self-sufficiency often associated with the Hegelian absolute; the "essence" of critique is accordingly shown to consist not in separation and the establishment of pure distinctions but rather in the articulation of relations and mutual dependence.;Engaging the recent work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this study concludes by briefly exploring how speculative critique might address the aporias of democracy and community evident in Socrates' trial.