Hegel & the Infinite

by Zizek, Slavoj; Crockett, Clayton; Davis, Creston

• ISBN13: 9780231143356
• ISBN10: 0231143354
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-19
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Antonio Negri, Catherine Malabou, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj }i~ek join with seven others, including William Desmond, Adrian Johnston, Thomas Lewis, Katrin Pahl, and Edith Wyschogrod, 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 not only on Hegelian analysis but also on the transformative value of his thought in relation to our current "turn to religion." Negri writes of Hegel's philosophy of right; Malabou develops his motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; 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 }i~ek revisits the religious implications of Hegel's concept of letting go. Mirroring Hegel's own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways Hegel inhabits them. They invite readers to grasp a future for thought beyond representational philosophy, trivialized religiosity, and the artificial gains of liberal democratic capitalism.

Author Biography

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and at the European Graduate School, Switzerland. His many books include Democracy in what State?, Living in the End Times, and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Radical Theory: Religion and Politics After Liberalism. Creston Davis is assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Rollins College. He is a coauthor (with John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek) of Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology.

Table of Contents

Preface: Hegel's Century	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: Risking Hegel: A New Reading for the Twenty-first Century	p. 1
Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition? Rousseau and the Unthought of Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit	p. 19
Rereading Hegel: The Philosopher of Right	p. 31
The Perversity of the Absolute, the Perverse Core of Hegel, and the Possibility of Radical Theology	p. 47
Hegel in America	p. 67
Infinite Restlessness	p. 91
Between Finitude and Infinity: On Hegel's Sublationary Infinitism	p. 115
The Way of Despair	p. 141
The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized	p. 159
Disrupting Reason: Art and Madness in Hegel and Van Gogh	p. 181
Finite Representation, Spontaneous Thought, and the Politics of an Open-Ended Consummation	p. 199
Hegel and Shitting: The Idea's Constipation	p. 221
List of Contributors	p. 233
Index of Names	p. 235
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.