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The conception of the whole as a system, that is, as a totality determined by one principle or idea, has dominated the philosophical tradition from Kant and Hegel to Marxism - and, as Louis Althusser's critique of Hegelianism shows, not without implicit social, political, and ideological consequences. The possibility of breaking with the idealist tradition in all of these respects rests on the articulation of an alternative conception of the whole. Althusser advances the notion of the social whole as a complex unity that is constituted through its own effects - what he calls "overdetermination." Such overdetermination of the whole displaces the conception of the whole as totality (Hegel) in favor of Spinoza's notion of modal unity - the whole as singularity.
A different take on knowledge, history, and totalization is presented in Jamila Mascat's essay 'Hegel and the Ad-venture of the Totality', which aims at exploring the controversial notion of the Hegelian totality. Countering Louis Althusser's critique of Hegel's 'expressive totality', where every part is thought to expresses the whole, it proposes to consider such a speculative figure as a temporalizing instance situated at the entanglement of Knowing and History. Firstly, it illustrates the paradoxical inclination of Hegel's totality to being both complete and a never-ending task. Secondly, it analyses the accomplishment of totality at the peak of the Science of Logic, focusing on the temporal circularity of the Concept ('Begriff'). Thirdly, drawing on the readings of Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite, the essay illustrates the peculiar relation between becoming and eternity that is located at the heart of Hegel's conception of time. Finally, it approaches the last section of the "Phenomenology of Spirit" devoted to Absolute Knowing in order to highlight the twofold movement of seizure ('Begreifen') and release ('Entlassen') that characterizes the activity of the Spirit and that is constitutive of the contingent ad-venture of the totality as a philosophical achievement. In other words, it is by embracing contingency as its limit that Absolute Knowing reaffirms the status of its absoluteness precisely because of its capacity to sacrifice itself and let it go. Critically engaging with Catherine Malabou's reading of plasticity in Hegel, Mascat highlights that Absolute Knowing is a process of totalization that entails cuts and interruptions. The essay shows that the Hegelian totality may be interpreted and actualized as a theoretical construct densely charged with temporal and historical implications: on the one hand, totality expresses a timely standpoint for thought - the standpoint of Hegel's age, which is, as claimed by the philosopher at the end of his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy", 'for the time being completed', as well as the standpoint of the present time to be speculatively accomplished; on the other hand, Hegel's idea of a speculative totalization sets for the philosophies yet to come the never-ending task of constituting and re-constituting wholes.