Baudart, Anne

D’Hondt secret (D’Hondt’s secret) - 2015.


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“D’Hondt secret” reveals hidden yet lively traits of Hegel, a hermeneutic philosopher. Owing to a game of mirrors, loaded with paradoxes, D’Hondt’s Hegel also draws a path in life that facilitates access to thought, conceptual abstraction, and the totalizing aspirations of a work. It opens up a new channel of communication, which may not be reduced to misgiven simplification or downscaling. Hegel’s biography continuously pursues exhaustivity and completeness. Nothing is to be despised in the remarkable integral content of a masterly thought, embodied in concrete history. Unveiling it with consistency took the kind of wisdom that the Ancients fully exemplified, as well as an ability not to take oneself seriously to the point of being at risk of hiding and mutilating the faces of the considered philosopher. It was necessary to make use of humor, irony, and mockery in order to resist the pieces of criticism that always threaten to destroy novel gestures.