Toward the Critique of Historicism

This talk draws from an essay that opens Hegel’s Science of Logic. “With What Must the Science Begin?” is preoccupied with how to ground critical theory in ways that neither take its starting point for granted nor smuggle in uninterrogated dogmas. My talk highlights resonances between presuppositionless philosophy and the historical processes of enslavement, the latter of which can be understood as erasing the contingencies of capture. The more distant the slave was found from their point of origin the more one could assert the slave appears as a slave, in their simple immediacy, in a way that defies any standard for legitimation. The more slavery and blackness become practically and conceptually inseparable, that is, the more the slave appears on the world stage as presuppositionless, absent meaningful structures for political-familial belonging. The Hegel-Marxist logical reconstruction of slavery exposes both the limits of historicism and available resources for critical thought.