French Hegel Book

The first two and half chapters of this book are excellent, and would have been a great long article. Baugh explores the role of Delbos, Wahl, and Koyre in the French reception of Hegel, foregrounding the proto-existentialist 'unhappy consciousness' interpretation of Hegel put forward Wahl as well as Delbos' notion of 'duplicity', which would link Hegel with the 'futural' account of temporality provided by Heidegger and other interwar phenomenologists. Baugh has researched well and his account is detailed and insightful.

Unfortunately, the book devolves into a standard secondary text on 'French Theory'. Baugh rehearses terminology from Bataille, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. Little insight is given into what these arguments actually amount to, and by the end of the book no attempt is even made to relate them to the thought of Hegel. Ultimately, Baugh celebrates that Foucault and Deleuze have managed to 'transcend Hegel' because they focus on 'concrete empirical investigations of singularities.' That Baugh put forwards these Deleuzian catchphrases as if their assertion amounted to anything like a sophisticated epistemology is astonishing. There is no mention of Hegel's explicit responses to empiricism in 'Perception' and 'Force and the Understanding'. The discussion only ever directly refers to the 'Sense Certainty' argument, and all other discussion of Hegel involves vague references to a totalising and uniform logic that 'can't account for difference'. The suspicion remains that Baugh didn't read beyond 'Sense Certainty' and so couldn't respond to Deleuze and Foucault using Hegel's more conventionally naturalistic and empirical moments.

In summary, this is a great short analysis of the French reading of Hegel with and against Kierkegaard followed by mechanical summaries of 'French Theory' loosely tied to a caricature of Hegel.