Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

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Catherine Malabou, Antonio Negri, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj Zizek join seven others—including William Desmond, Katrin Pahl, Adrian Johnston, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas A. Lewis—to apply Hegel's thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel's innovations against irrelevance and, importantly, reset the distinction of secular and sacred. These original contributions focus on Hegelian analysis and the transformative value of the philosopher's thought in relation to our current "turn to religion." Malabou develops Hegel's motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; Negri writes of Hegel's philosophy of right; Caputo reaffirms the radical theology made possible by Hegel; and Bosteels critiques fashionable readings of the philosopher and argues against the reducibility of his dialectic. Taylor reclaims Hegel's absolute as a process of infinite restlessness, and Zizek revisits the religious implications of Hegel's concept of letting go. Mirroring the philosopher's own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways in which Hegel inhabits them. "A very strong collection of essays that goes beyond the critical poles that have tended to divide Hegel's readers in recent years. Rather than assuming we already know Hegel, these essays approach the philosopher as an infinitely complex and shifting set of ideas and texts that must be constantly reread, insofar as those texts continue to unfold new meanings through ongoing transformations in the history of philosophy and material culture, before and after Hegel." --Kenneth Reinhard, University of California, Los Angeles "These are exciting times for the student of Hegel. In place of a previously regnant understanding of the great philosopher, depicting him as an absolute idealist unable to comprehend difference, a staid liberal who walked away from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, we have a 'new' Hegel. This superb collection gives us the lineaments of this latter Hegel, who grappled unsparingly with difference and whose systematicity allowed breaks and interruptions." --Kenneth Surin, Duke University Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Cover Series Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Preface: Hegel’s Century Acknowledgments Introduction: Risking Hegel: A New Reading for the Twenty-first Century 1. Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition? Rousseau and the Unthought of Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit 2. Rereading Hegel: The Philosopher of Right 3. The Perversity of the Absolute, the Perverse Core of Hegel, and the Possibility of Radical Theology 4. Hegel in America 5. Infinite Restlessness 6. Between Finitude and Infinity: On Hegel’s Sublationary Infinitism 7. The Way of Despair 8. The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized 9. Disrupting Reason: Art and Madness in Hegel and Van Gogh 10. Finite Representation, Spontaneous Thought, and the Politics of an Open-Ended Consummation 11. Hegel and Shitting: The Idea’s Constipation List of Contributors Index of Names