“a methodological issue … to forestall one of the most notorious and inveterate stereotypes of Hegel discussion, namely the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. It is certain that there are plenty of triads in Hegel, beginning with the Trinity (or ending with it?). It is also certain that he himself is complicitous in the propagation of this formula, and at least partly responsible for its vulgarization. It is certainly a useful teaching device as well as a convenient expository framework: and is thereby called upon to play its role in that transformation of Hegel s thought into a systematic philosophy—into Hegelianism, if you will—on which we will have occasion to insist over and over again in the present essay. For even if the tripartite rhythm happens to do justice to this or that local Hegelian insight, it still reifies that insight in advance and translates its language into purely systemic terms. (Indeed, for contemporary philosophy it is precisely this sequence which is identifiable as being teleological, so that today—or perhaps from Freud on—we tend to reverse this order and to affirm that it is the antithesis which produces the thesis in the first place, in order to generate the ideological illusion of the synthesis as such” (Jameson 2010: 18)
” the standard tripartite language, whose final term, “synthesis,” presupposes a resolution in this movement which is not at all consistent with Hegel’s thinking; positing a kind of success or progress in externalization and internalization which scarcely does justice to Hegel’s deeper appreciation of failure and contradiction and turns the historical movement of the dialectic into a banal and uplifting saga of inevitable progress” (Jameson 2010: 20)
Jameson. The Hegel Variations. 2010.
Trinketization 