ABSTRACT
Here as a beginning two movements will be traced. Both occur in different Hegelian texts. The movement of the time devoted to writing marks out approximately thirty years. In this time Hegel’s ‘need’—‘need’ as the given beginning-is formulated and reformulated. The theme introduced in the first movement is reworked throughout. What comes to be presented and represented is the continual re-enactment and thus repetition of Bedürfnis, the work of ‘need’. Its presence, an effective presence, portraying and framing philosophy, is presented as given. The need is there’ (There’ is the contemporary, the actuality of the historical.) The preoccupation with the emergence of philosophy and of different philosophical systems occupies, by providing, Hegel’s beginnings. What has already been identified as the process and manner of the ‘attempt to formulate’ not only patterns the very beginning, it provides the site of interpretation. This amounts to a provision whose work precludes the possibility of its being reduced to a simple addition. This initial obviation of the parasitism between complexity and addition works, again, to open up complexity.
