To the question does Giegerich contain everything needed to read Giegerich as image and the corollary is it necessary to read Hegel to fully understand Giegerich I would like to take a step back and discuss two thoughts on the image in Giegerich's What is Soul? and modernity's relation to the arbitrary, the necessary, and freedom. In What is Soul? Giegerich characterizes the image as "sublated sensibility" full of "speculative content" suggesting an ascetic transcendence of the body, giving form to a body of work. The "speculative content" of the image as "sublated sensibility" gives the image an appearance of divinity or of being on a transcendental plane, sublating both naive realist and critical realist ontology and enacting a speculatively real world. Thus, for me, it is not the case that the question posits the dilemma of taking position on whether Giergerich contains everything necessary to read Giegerich or not, but whether Giegerich has successfully enacted the "invention" and "articulation" of a world unto itself. Further, the performance of world building, with virtuosity, seduces the reader or the analysand into participating in the the built world - much like a surrealist painting where speculative content overflows, one feels absorbed or immersed (depending on extraversion/introversion type) but also thinks this immersion, lives it. It becomes the "world" one inhabits, the psychology one practices, and then and only then can Giegerich be said to contain all that is needed to understand Giegerich as image/text/dream. But then what becomes of Hegel? Another dream, of a previous night? One distantly recollected, and returned to with distilled psychological consciousness? Taking a step back again, what becomes of necessity and the dream of modernity's freedom being being chained to necessity? In Leibniz's Theodicy the question is raised if one is free if one does not act arbitrarily, and therefore, it would seem that only the King, chosen by God, could exercise freedom as absolute rule. However, if the image is "sublated sensibility" full of "speculative content" known through the direct apperception of the transcendent function and disclosing a speculatively real ontological "world" then one is only free if one acts freely, and therefore reading Hegel to read Giegerich as a image does not become unnecessary but more than necessity, becomes freedom. Freedom in the mundane sense of "knowing where one is coming from" and resolving-absolving any antinomies in the recollection of the movement of Soul that is articulated in Giegerich and being socially adapted.
