ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the context of Derrida’s and Nancy’s readings of Hegel, with a particular eye to the questions of the political and of community. Central to the author’s concern is the way in which Derrida and Nancy, each in their own way, destabilize Hegel’s logic of the concept, which in the latter’s thought aims to secure a certain sense of unity and unification. In their reading of Hegel, as the author shows, Derrida and Nancy do not straightforwardly reject the Hegelian enterprise, but rather question it, demonstrating its instability. Their attempts, as the author goes on to argue, should be understood as reinventions of a philosophical terminology. Derrida’s readings of Hegel assist him indirectly with developing conceptions of archive, and trace, clandestination and destinerrance, with which he responds to the problem of Heidegger’s version of the political destiny of philosophy. Nancy’s destabilization of Hegel opens up a space of reasoning as no longer circumscribed by Hegel’s concept of the concept in which a new conception of community arises.
