The Refracted discourse of modernity

Present and periphery in Paulo Arantes

Abstract

In this article, we aim discuss Paulo Arantes’s reading on Hegel’s Dialectics, against the background of the german capitalist modernization, according to his book Ressentimento da dialética [“Ressentiment of dialectics”]. To this end we will stem from some considerations of Habermas on the “philosophical discourse of modernity” and his critiques to Hegel, against which we will face Arantes’s notion of “intellectual experience”.  We will try to show how the author resorts to the problems of Germany’s peripheral insertion to comprehend the historical reception of the French Revolution in the german intelligentsia. Thus Hegel will be approached as the one who matches a “negative dialectics” and a “Concept’s superior Dialectics”.  Thereby we will discuss some aspects of Roberto Schwarz’s critical contribution so that Arantes may think the ideas production in peripheral capitalism by the notion of “unequal and combined development” and its consequences to Hegel’s witness of the modernization time.