Hegel’s Science of Logic is one of the strangest and most difficult texts in the history of philosophical or theoretical writing, and as little read and studied as it is central to his entire work (and not only his: both Marx and Lenin studied it intensively). The Institute for Critical Theory invited three scholars who had something new to say about Hegel to present their views in a one-day exchange.
Presentations
Fredric Jameson, “Hegel and Marxist Literary Criticism”
Mladen Dolar, “Being and MacGuffin”
Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, “The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowledge”
link to
Conference Summary
Presenter Biographies
Mladen Dolar, born in 1951 in Maribor, former Yugoslavia, is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism and philosophy of music. He has lectured extensively at the universities in USA and across Europe, he is the author of over hundred papers in scholarly journals and collective volumes. Apart from a dozen books in Slovene his book publications include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into six languages) and Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into a number of languages). Two new English books are forthcoming with Duke UP and Verso. He is one of the founding members of what has become known as ‘the Ljubljana Lacanian School’.
Rebecca Comay teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Comparative Literature at University of Toronto. She works at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, and has published extensively on post-Kantian German philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art. She is the author of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford UP), and is currently working on theories and practices of iconoclasm, as well as ongoing work on Hegel and Freud.
Fredric Jameson, from Duke University, is Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous books, most notably, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, MLA Lowell Award winner), The Cultural Turn (1998), Archaeologies of the Future (2005), The Hegel Variations (2010), The Antinomies of Realism (2013, recipient of the Truman Capote Award), and The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015).
Frank Ruda holds a research position at department of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, GerFrank Ruda holds a research position at department of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His publications include Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Continuum 2011), For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern UP 2015) and Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Nebraska UP 2016).
