The Community of the Self

The essay examines the hermeneutical criticism of Hegelian recognition, showing that this is based on the thesis of a reductive vision of the meaning of the negative in the Hegelian dialectic. According to hermeneutical thinking, despite his criticism of the abstract universal and his understanding of negation as relationship, Hegel doesn’t get definitely rid of the merely ‘logical’ sense of negation in terms of exclusion or elimination. Thus he conceives recognition as a definitive overcoming of diversity, and therefore of otherness. However, reconsidering the radical Hegelian recognition of reciprocity, the essay attempts to reverse this critical thesis showing how the very hermeneutical defence of diversity may be considered as the most concealed resistance to the extension of the meaning of the negative