Event Date: 10 – 12 May 2013
Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX
The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:
The Actuality of the Absolute: Hegel, Our Untimely Contemporary
Hegel is the ultimate bête noire of the last two centuries of philosophy:proponents of Lebensphilosophie, existentialists from Kierkegaard onwards, materialists, historicists, analytic philosophers and empiricists, Marxists, traditional liberals, religious moralists, deconstructionists and Deleuzians, they alldefine themselves through different modalities of rejecting Hegel. But when enemies start to speak the same language, it is a reliable sign that something is eluding them all. So what if something happens in Hegel, a break-through into a unique dimension of thought which was obliterated, rendered invisible, by the so-called post-metaphysical thought? What if the ridiculous image of Hegel as the absurd “absolute idealist” who “pretended to know everything” is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen-memory), a fantasy-formation destined to cover up a traumatic truth? The task of the symposium will be to unearth aspects of this traumatic truth.
Programme:
Friday 10th May
Welcome and Introduction to the conference – by Slavoj Zizek.
Session 1 Chair – Slavoj Zizek
Andrew Cutrofello – Hegel and his problems
Costas Douzinas – Is there a right to a revolution?
========================================
Saturday 11th May
Introduction to day 2 – by Slavoj Zizek.
Session 2 Chair – Catherine Malabou
Rebecca Comay – The Dash (I): Vicissitudes of Absolute Knowing
Frank Ruda – The Dash (II): Working Through Absolute Knowing
Discussion of the two above papers
Session 3 Chair – Slavoj Zizek
Catherine Malabou – Hegel on synthetic a priori judgments
Alenka Zupancic – Between Aufhebung and Verneinung
=========================================
Sunday 12th May
Introduction to day 2 – by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek.
Session 4 Chair – Costas Douzinas
Slavoj Zizek – The absolute recoil
