Reading Hegel was completed three years after Reading Marx which was the first book that was written by Slavoj Žižek, Frenk Ruda, and Agon Hamza. This is not a coincidence because authors state that our contemporary situation requires a return from Marx to Hegel. Reading Hegel consists of three chapters and each of them was written by one of the authors while “Introduction” was co-authored. Therefore, this book consists of three attempts to read Hegel as our contemporary. Slavoj Žižek defends Hegel’s openness to the future by claiming that his philosophy prohibits any project of how our future should look like. Frank Ruda examines Hegelian concept of nature and claims that precisely this concept forces the avoidance of all types of naturalisation. Agon Hamza examines the problem of Hegel’s materialism and develops a Hegelian critique of Marx. Participants in this discussion will attempt to bring forward various aspects of Reading Hegel and situate it within the field of global political theory and contemporary politics.

This and further discussions of this kind will be conducted in collaboration between the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade and The European Graduate School, Switzerland.

Participants:

Slavoj Žižek is a Visiting Professor at New York University, a Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Department of Philosophy, and a Professor at The European Graduate School/EGS. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages.

Frank Ruda is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee and a Professor at The European Graduate School/EGS. He wrote Gegen-Freiheit. Für einen komischen Fatalismus (Konstanz University Press, 2018), Indifferenz und Wiederholung. Freiheit in der Moderne (Konstanz University Press, 2018), The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (with Rebecca Comay, MIT Press, 2018), and Reading Marx (with Agon Hamza and Slavoj Žižek, Polity Press, 2018).

Agon Hamza is an Assistant Professor of political philosophy at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, in Skopje, North Macedonia. Together with Frank Ruda, he is the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the international journal of political thought and philosophy Crisis and Critique. Besides his two books with Slavoj Žižek and Frank Ruda, he also wrote Althusser and Pasolini: Philosophy, Marxism, and Film (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. 2016/2018) and Althusser and Theology: Religion, Politics and Philosophy (Leiden, Brill, 2016).

Christopher Fynsk is President of The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His work is closely involved with that of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon and Salvatore Puglia. His works are Heidegger, Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986), Language and Relation: that there is language (Stanford, 1996), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minnesota, 2004), Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (Fordham, 2013).

The event will be photographed and recorded due to publishing on social networks, the website and other information channels for the purpose of promoting the event and activities of the Institute.