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

AUDIO HERE

Costas Douzinas – Is there a right to a revolution?

AUDIO HERE

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Saturday 11th May

Introduction to day 2 – by Slavoj Zizek.

Session 2 Chair – Catherine Malabou

Rebecca Comay – The Dash (I): Vicissitudes of Absolute Knowing

AUDIO HERE

Frank Ruda – The Dash (II): Working Through Absolute Knowing

AUDIO HERE

Discussion of the two above papers

Session 3 Chair – Slavoj Zizek

Catherine Malabou – Hegel on synthetic a priori judgments

AUDIO HERE

Alenka Zupancic – Between Aufhebung and Verneinung

AUDIO HERE

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Sunday 12th May

Introduction to day 2 – by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek.

Session 4 Chair – Costas Douzinas

Slavoj Zizek – The absolute recoil

AUDIO HERE