Robert Sinnerbrink

This article explores the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ that plays such an important role in Žižek’s theorisation of the subject. In the first part, I examine how the themes of the “pre-synthetic imagination” and “abstract negativity" are crucial to understanding Žižek’s theorisation of the Hegelian subject. In the second part, I consider how this Hegelian model of the subject is decisive for understanding Žižek’s conception of Hegelian “concrete universality,” and how the latter concept figures prominently in Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between the abstract negativity of the subject and the political question of confronting global capitalism. Žižek’s unorthodox reading of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’—the radical negativity that haunts subjectivity—is developed further in an explicitly political direction. This Hegelian theme helps explain Žižek’s recent critique of the ‘Fukuyamaian’ consensus, shared both by moral-religious conservatives and libertarian ‘postmodernists’, that global capitalism remains the ‘unsurpassable horizon of our times’. In conclusion I raise some questions about Žižek’s combining of abstract and determinate negation in his ‘romantic’ reading of the negativity of the Hegelian subject. I then critically examine the implications Žižek draws from this analysis in In Defense of Lost Causes , which presents a sustained argument to reclaim the revolutionary tradition of Leftist politics

This essay seeks to further the critical reception of Stiegler's philosophy of technology by situating his work within the legacy of critical theory and deconstruction. Drawing on what Richard Beardsworth has described as Stiegler's 'Left-Derrideanism'-his radical re-thinking of the problem of technics and related call for a "politics of memory"-I argue that Stiegler's transformation of both Heidegger and Derrida retrieves and renews the interrupted Frankfurt school tradition of culture industry critique. What we might call Stiegler's 'deconstructive materialism' reinvigorates the project of a cultural politics that would take place in the intersection between culture, technics, and politics in the more conventional sense. In this respect, Stiegler's culture industry redux points to a number of important practical cultural responses to the debilitating malaise that increasingly afflicts politics in liberal capitalist democracies. I conclude by suggesting what such a Stieglerian 'cultural politics of memory' might entail.

This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegel's account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an 'ontological' sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a 'normative' sense of recognition as embodied in rational social and political institutions. Drawing on recent work by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, I argue that Hegel's conception of rational freedom provides the key to grasping the relationship between the ontological and normative senses of recognition. Recognitive freedom provides a way of appropriating Hegel's theory of recognition for contemporary social philosophy.