Hegel After Ulysses? The (Dis)Appearance of Politics in “Cyclops”

This essay challenges the dismissal of nationalist politics in readings of Ulysses by reconnecting the “Cyclops” episode to the aporias of modern political thought. Drawing on Joyce’s neglected notes to the episode, it relocates anti-colonial nationalism within the diremption and mutual implication of civil society and state, first articulated by G. W. F. Hegel and developed by Hannah Arendt. The essay rereads Hegel’s state/society diremption through Gillian Rose’s conception of “speculative thinking” and the historical openness of the “broken middle.” It argues that the episode generates a dynamic interpretative space able to register other configurations of the social and political in the nation. In a contemporary moment when legality and constitutionality are under attack in the name of the national popular, this reading suggests an alternative to frameworks that only conceive of law as violence.