Review: Thinking Unrest

Thinking Unrest: The Unsettled Legacy of German Idealism #

Edited by Kristina Mendicino State University of New York Press, 2025 (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)

Mendicino, Kristina, ed. 2025. Thinking Unrest: The Unsettled Legacy of German Idealism. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 979-8-8558-0430-0 (hardcover), 979-8-8558-0432-4 (ebook).

This volume grew out of a May 2023 conference at Brown, and it opens with a wager that has become almost obligatory for work on German Idealism: Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Fichte are not museum pieces but the working vocabulary of the present. Mendicino makes the case elegantly. Nancy's "constitutive unhappiness" of the modern world is Hegel's unhappy consciousness wearing contemporary clothes; Žižek's account of abstract universality erupting violently into social life cannot be gauged without the Phenomenology's pages on the Terror, where death has "no more meaning than chopping off a head of cabbage." Even Latour, who expressly rejected dialectics, turns out to reproduce Hegel's method of letting a discrepancy between knowing and object generate a "new, true object"; his hybrid quasi-objects arrive right on dialectical schedule. The legacy, in short, remains unsettled: still productive, still contested, not yet read out. While the collection contains some of the strongest close reading now being done on the idealist archive, I will argue that it never pays its own opening wager; the present figures as an atmosphere rather than an object, and "unrest" hardens into a uniform honorific, which is exactly the kind of fixed thought Hegel wanted set into fluid motion. Eight essays by a strong roster, Angelica Nuzzo, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, Gerhard Richter, David Farrell Krell, Tilottama Rajan, Mendicino herself, Simon Horn, and Jan Mieszkowski, take up the wager.

An introduction that is actually an essay #

Editors' introductions to conference volumes usually summarize and retreat. Mendicino's argues. Her central exhibit is a strange moment in Schelling's Freedom essay where thoughts appear as independent powers: "the thought generated is an independent power, continuing to act on its own, indeed, growing within the human soul in such a way that it restrains and subjugates its own mother." From this she draws a genuine thesis: thought in German Idealism is not an instrument the subject wields but a force with its own unforeseeable life, arising "probably" from the soul, exceeding conscious intention, exposed to history in ways that cannot themselves be thought. She threads the claim through Schelling's philosophy of mythology, where peoples are constituted by mythic representations they neither generate nor steer; through Hölderlin's aphorism on the phantoms mortals fabricate when nothing "true and real" remains for cognition; and through Hegel's remark that philosophy begins only when "moral life becomes dissolved" and spirit flees into a kingdom of thought. This thesis forms the book's intellectual spine, and it earns the title: unrest is not a mood attributed to the period but a structural feature of thinking as these writers understood it.

The strongest essays #

Comay and Ruda's "On Gaps" is the collection's best chapter and shows what the volume's method looks like when it has real philosophical stakes. Their question is concrete: why, at the end of the Encyclopedia, does objective spirit, the state that has already accomplished the reconciliation of substance and subject, need the supplement of art, religion, and philosophy at all? Rather than answering for Hegel, they build a typology of the gaps that open every time he moves from politics to culture, from the 1797 System-Programme's demand that "we must even go beyond the State" through Jena to Berlin: fictitious cuts, impasses, unexplained swerves, silent shifts. Their sharpest observation is historical: Hegel says almost nothing about the museum and the university, the two modern institutions of absolute spirit being built around him in Berlin (in the very university where he lectured, as he lectured). Their conclusion, that culture intervenes in the objective order "not by constructing or adding something new, but rather by a subtraction, undoing, or deconstructing of what is already 'done,'" gives the volume its most quotable formula and its clearest political claim.

Nuzzo's opening essay pairs Hegel's logic of standstill with Gramsci's interregnum to argue that in moments of historical collapse the task of philosophy is not to prescribe remedies but to dwell in contradiction until real advancement becomes possible; several later essays borrow this genuinely useful idea. Richter's chapter on Bloch's "darkness of the lived moment" proceeds patiently and cumulatively, showing the motif structurally at work across Bloch's philosophy, narrative prose, and letters, and reading its non-transparency not as deficiency but as the condition of hope. And Rajan's essay on "archival textuality" proposes the volume's most transferable method: reading German Idealism as "an archive of dynamically intersecting texts" in which thinking happens between texts and thinkers, so that Schelling's diseased Naturphilosophie can be read into Hegel's Aesthetics and development itself refigured as involution, delay, and Bloch's non-synchronicity.

Where the wager goes unpaid #

The book's problem lies in the distance between its framing and its practice. The introduction promises a volume responsive to "times of historical crisis that none could have foreseen, including those of today." But today never actually arrives. No essay engages a specific contemporary crisis, political formation, or event; the present figures as an atmosphere, invoked through Nancy, Žižek, and Zupančič in the opening pages and then left at the door while the essays get on with what they really do, namely expert internal reading of idealist texts and their literary afterlives. Nothing shames expert internal reading. But a reader who picks up a book in a series called Philosophy and Critical Theory, primed by talk of social fragmentation and ongoing struggle, will notice that the second half of the volume moves toward Rilke's Duino Elegies, Hölderlin's ode "Vulkan," and Novalis's algebraic marginalia on Fichte, terrain where "crisis" means a strain within concepts of identity or imagination, not anything happening to anyone. The Frankfurt School inheritance of German Idealism, the obvious bridge to critical theory proper, goes almost entirely missing apart from Bloch; this lacuna is startling. Adorno, whose negative dialectics is arguably the twentieth century's major sustained thinking of unrest, barely figures.

A monotony of valuation also runs through the book unconfronted. Across eight essays, gaps, undoing, unsettlement, precarity, darkness, and dissolution are uniformly good; system, fixity, closure, and the familiar are uniformly suspect. Hegel's warning that "what is familiar and well known as such is not really known" becomes a license for finding the same virtue everywhere: Comay and Ruda's absolute undoes, Horn's night undoes, Mieszkowski's imagination unrules, Krell's Schelling unsettles. Each demonstration persuades locally, yet their aggregate raises the question the volume does not ask: if unrest is always the honorific and settlement always the error, has "unrest" not become exactly the kind of fixed thought Hegel wanted set into fluid motion? A single essay defending what systems, institutions, or even the state accomplish (a position Hegel himself held for most of his career) would have made the collection's dialectics less frictionless.

Finally, a word on access. This collection is high-deconstructive scholarship, dense with untranslated German, allusive in argument, assuming fluency in the Phenomenology, the Freedom essay, and their twentieth-century French reception. The essays by Mendicino and Horn in particular ask a great deal. Doctoral students in critical theory can work through the volume profitably; anyone hoping for an introduction to why German Idealism matters now should start elsewhere and come back.

Verdict #

Judged as what it actually is, a specialist collection on the textual and conceptual instabilities of German Idealism, this volume is a strong book, better integrated than most conference volumes, with an introduction that does real argumentative work and at least three essays (Comay and Ruda, Nuzzo, Rajan) that scholars will cite for years. Judged by its own opening wager, that these readings help us think the unrest of the present, it delivers much less: the present is a frame, not an object, and the book's politics remains a politics of reading. The best essays show that the gap between text and world can itself be made thematic and productive. The volume as a whole mostly leaves that gap where it found it, which is, perhaps, a very Hegelian irony: the transition announced with the greatest fanfare is the one indicated with the most breathtaking brevity.