IMPORTANT NOTE
Due to COVID the course starts online via video-conference.
Ever since the advent of postmodernity, signaling the end of the “grand narratives,” the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel has been deemed outdated. After 1990, however, para-Hegelian narratives about an alleged “end of history” surprisingly persisted, while analytic, postcolonial or poststructuralist theory traditions critically rediscovered a non-Hegelian Hegel. Rather than narrating the afterlives of post- and anti-Hegelian scholarship, this seminar revisits central passages of Hegel’s original writings, among them his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812/32). In dialectical fashion, the goal is a discussion of Hegel-against-Hegel, demonstrating his belated contemporaneity with more recent constellations in Western and non-Western philosophies. This partial and deliberately partisan reading of Hegel introduces his oeuvre as a site of negativity, contradiction, struggle, alienation, restless movement and performative writing. Grasping modernity’s “social ontology of abstraction” (Jamila Mascat), Hegel gave rise – before Marx – to a theory of abstraction in the age of its technological reproducibility.
Although this course is announced in English, the language can still be decided (German or English), depending on the language preference of the participants.
A certificate (Schein) is possible with credit in Media Philosophy by writing a seminar paper (Hausarbeit).
Dr. Sami Khatib
khatib.sami (at) gmail.com
Friday, bi-weekly, 2pm – 5pm / online
First class: 23 April 2020.
Consulation hours: Friday, 1pm