Jim Vernon

The belief that crystals possess magical powers is not only among the most ancient and widespread in our species; there remains a deep, abiding, and strong connection between our own efforts at manifesting our intentions and ideas in the world and the belief that some kind of complementary spiritual power can inhabit natural crystals. This broadly held belief, however, is now derided as the foolish fantasy of the fringe by the educated caste and other partisans of secular enlightenment. Using Hegel’s scattered comments on the physics and beauty of crystals, in this paper I aim to clarify not only why humanity developed such a firm belief in their magical powers, but why the endurance of that belief in the proud weirdos of our own era is not just eminently rational, but a potential antidote to the spiritless ethos of scientific materialism.

Kris Sealey received her Ph.D. from the University of Memphis and is now Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work ranges across a variety of ????ields from existential phenom-enology to the Philosophy of Race, Caribbean philosophy, and de-colonial philosophy. In this interview, conducted over email across several months, we track Sealey’s intellectual journey, focussing on her ????irst book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, and her recent Creolizing the Nation, which received the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Along the way, we touch upon her shift from biology and mathematics to Continental philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and personal biography, the nature and promises of a creolizing ap-proach to philosophical research, and the need for philosophy to remain expansive, diverse, and inclusive. Kris Sealey a obtenu son doctorat de l’Université de Memphis et est maintenant professeure de philosophie à l’Université de Pennsylva-nia State. Son travail couvre une variété de domaines allant de la phénoménologie existentielle à la philosophie de la race, en passant par la philosophie caribéenne et la philosophie décoloniale. Dans cet entretien, mené par courrier électronique sur plusieurs mois, nous suivons le parcours intellectuel de Sealey, en nous concentrant sur son premier livre, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, et son récent Creolizing The Na-tion, qui a reçu le prix Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista de l’Association philosophique des Caraïbes. Chemin faisant, nous dis-cutons de son passage de la biologie et des mathématiques à la phi-losophie continentale, de la relation entre la philosophie et la bio-graphie personnelle, de la nature et des promesses d’une approche créolisante de la recherche philosophique, et de la nécessité pour la philosophie de rester expansive, diversi????iée, et inclusive.

Most scholars agree that the aesthetics of Hip Hop also express ethical and political values; however, because rap music has overwhelmingly served as the culture’s public face, and because rap’s most characteristic artistic practice is often understood to be sampling, or the appropriation of previously created material for freely inventive re-use, Hip Hop is often read as the aesthetic expression of a subversive attitude toward tradition, including all inherited moral or communal principles. This chapter introduces the book’s central thesis: that the hegemonic ‘postmodern’ framework in Hip Hop Studies, grounded in an anachronistic overemphasis on sampling, not only sharply contrasts with the aesthetic practices and ethical values that facilitated the development of Hip Hop; it both reflects and deepens the subversion of the culture through its appropriation by the broader fragmented, and fragmenting, neoliberal society.

Because the application of the postmodern framework to Hip Hop is usually justified through the use of sampling technology, this chapter turns to the work of Rakim—who introduced sampling to recorded rap music—in order to demonstrate the explicit continuity between the values of original culture, and the aesthetics and politics of the so-called Golden Era of sample-based rap to which his work gave birth. Upholding the fundamental proscription against biting, the diversity of sonic and lyrical perspectives expressed by these artists confutes the exoticizing and constraining image of Blackness detailed in Chap. 4. While the legal crackdown on sampling and the emergence of ‘gangsta’ rap eventually altered both the sound and content of much mainstream music associated with the culture, this chapter demonstrates the continued dominance of Hip Hop’s aesthetic and ethical values in the majority of rap music up through the 1990s and beyond.

Because the marketable products of Hip Hop have become nearly synonymous in the popular and scholarly imagination with Black expression and resistance, this chapter offers a close reading of Justin Adams Burton’s Posthuman Rap, in order to reveal the distorting and potentially dangerous consequences this erasure of the culture’s history has had on how Blackness is academically theorized in the postmodern age. Contextualizing Burton’s work in the historical reception of Hip Hop by the white gaze—within academia as well as popular culture—it argues that the purportedly ‘subversive’ account of Blackness affirmed through postmodernism’s reactionary framework imposes an exoticizing, one-dimensional, and nihilistic caricature onto the diverse, vibrant, and struggling communities within which the culture has sown its deepest roots.

This chapter traces the evolution of Hip Hop’s aesthetic practices in the early 1970s, starting with the first of the culture’s elements to emerge—wall writing—and then detailing the progressive emergence of the remaining elements: DJing, Breaking, and finally MCing. It argues that the culture’s honor-based system of ‘battles’ for artistic supremacy in these fields was grounded in a set of indigenous ethical values best exemplified by the fundamental proscription against ‘biting,’ or appropriating someone else’s rhymes, moves, style, or other creation as one’s own. Where biting reduces the products of creative labor to merely fungible signs that any isolated individual may consume or use as they please, Hip Hop, by contrast, pushed individuals to both accept and identify with a kind of civic responsibility to respect, as well as contribute to, the ongoing and progressive development of their community.

This chapter argues that Hip Hop scholars must not only distinguish the more nuanced, complex, and historically informed philosophies of post-structuralism from the one-dimensional ‘reactionary postmodernism’ or ‘perverse modernism’ that dominates much of the academic humanities; they should, moreover, reject the latter framework in favor of approaches that allow for an accurate understanding of the ongoing evolution of the culture, in order to both reveal and assess the values and lessons it has long preached. It concludes, not with some ‘final’ or ‘authentic’ account of Hip Hop culture or rap music, but with a call for a more diverse—and, crucially, more culturally respectful—approach to Hip Hop Studies.

This chapter describes how Hip Hop’s fundamental proscription against biting was violated, and then effectively obscured, by the distorting appropriation of the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’; a record which not only gave birth to rap as a form of commercially recorded music, but—in the eyes of most Hip Hop pioneers—marks the first significant blow to the collective and emancipatory aesthetic culture whose unique and innovative art forms, one might say, it subversively and amorally ‘sampled.’ It argues that the subsequent scholarly use of (a narrow selection of) post-Sugarhill Gang rap to attribute postmodern values to the culture as a whole has not only erased the voices and history of the culture’s creators and organic intellectuals from the academic discipline which bears its name; it structurally removed from much scholarly discussion any rigorous consideration of, or debate concerning, the historical record of Hip Hop’s development—both before and after ‘Rapper’s Delight.’

This chapter traces the emergence of a fifth, non-aesthetic element within Hip Hop; one which was introduced precisely in order to combat the appropriation of the culture’s aesthetic practices by the rapacious forces of the neoliberal culture industry in the era when rap music was spreading Hip Hop’s aesthetic practices and name across the globe. Focusing on the teachings of the Universal Zulu Nation, it argues that the values forwarded under the heading of ‘knowledge’ stand—virtually point by point—in explicit and stark contrast with those embraced by the ‘reactionary’ strain of postmodernism that has become hegemonic in Hip Hop Studies. It also demonstrates that these values received frequent aesthetic expression in the early, post-Sugarhill Gang rap music made by the artists most directly emergent from, or connected to, the original Bronx culture.

This chapter treats two simultaneous responses to the social changes that accompanied the popularization of rap music: First, “reality rap” was born and gave voice to the newly repressive conditions faced by the marginalized youth who built and embraced Hip Hop culture; in Hegelian terms, this reflects dramatic poetry, which is written to appease a broad and fragmented, rather than specific and unified, audience. Second, organizations like the Zulu Nation and the Temple of Hip Hop emerged and added a fifth, non-aesthetic element to the culture—knowledge, in forms both religious and philosophical—to more explicitly articulate both the essence of the humanity that emancipates itself through art and the need to more directly struggle to overcome the varied forms of its denial.

This chapter demonstrates that, while the symbolic art of graffiti remains limited by its essentially indirect presentation of freedom, its immediately palpable presentation was created by Hip Hop’s DJs and breakers, whose revolutionary acts of self-governing bodily control and self-discovered feats of skill provided sensible proof of the essential freedom that grounds and guides all artistic creation. By effectively making spirit flesh through the corporeal display of self-mastery in hitherto unimagined feats of skill deployed in “battles”, fought within “cyphers” ritually formed around the performers by their devout audience, Hip Hop’s pioneers created nothing less than what Hegel identifies as a classical “religion of art” that unites aesthetic objects (DJs and dancers) and their adjudicating public (cyphers) into a consciously self-determining, ethical community.

This chapter draws some consequences for future scholarship: It identifies the structural “whiteness” of the academic “we” generally invoked in Hegel studies, and demonstrates that the rap-centric approach in Hip Hop studies has meant that the voices and views of the Hip Hop’s pioneers are often underrepresented, or even undermined, in scholarly literature. It calls for scholars in both fields to work to engage with the social movements and organic intellectuals that emerge from socially excluded groups, and argues not only for an emancipatory vision implicitly shared by Hegel’s theory of art and the artistic and ethical practices of Hip Hop culture, but for their marked and revealing distance from “postmodern” accounts of rap music that reduce art and politics to mere subversion or revolt.

This chapter introduces the book’s central thesis: that Hip Hop’s early history unfolds in a manner remarkably similar to the evolution of artistic creation in general in Hegel’s Aesthetics. It explicates art’s “highest vocation” as the most fundamental mechanism by which a people initially and collectively raises itself from a state of radical alienation into the self-determining, higher spheres of actualized freedom, in the absence of other determinate state structures upon which to draw. Challenges from the infamous thesis that art “remains a thing of the past” are answered through Hegel’s account of the unjust social conditions that may force art to return, and Vernon argues that Hip Hop’s emergence as broad-based and varied aesthetic culture can be understood as just such a resurgence.

This chapter details the unique socio-economic conditions in the South Bronx, just prior to the birth of Hip Hop. The sudden roll-back of the political changes won by the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles induced a form of state abandonment so severe that the region effectively became an isolated, stateless territory, signalling a return to the “state of nature” from which Hegel claims art, as a cultural force, necessarily emerges. Produced by adolescents who never knew the protections of a modern civil society, Hip Hop culture reflects less anger at the state which stifled or neglected them than the compelled, but heroic, resurgence of the most immediate means through which humanity transforms itself and its world into reflections of its free, creative essence.

This chapter examines the first of Hip Hop’s aesthetic “elements” to emerge—graffiti writing—as exemplary of Hegel’s account of the foundational, symbolic stage of an artistic culture’s development, which reflects a community’s groping search for adequate forms of sensation through which to express themselves as free within a situation that radically suppresses clear consciousness of their essence. As “taggers” anonymously spread their adopted, cryptographic names throughout the city, they—in Hegelian terms—enacted a near-total, “architectural” transformation of the cramping barriers of their external sphere into a veritable temple for the celebration of humanity’s universal spirit. In process, graffiti constructed a unified ethical culture grounded in artistic practice, which ultimately fragmented when it attracted the interest of the outside world.

This chapter demonstrates that, as the culture moved from the streets of the Bronx to clubs throughout New York, it was deprived of its community base, unifying ethics and symbiosis between its aesthetic elements, artists and audience. This move reflects the shift from Hegel’s classical Ideal to modern romanticism and was facilitated by the development of Hip Hop’s final aesthetic element—MCing. Tracing this spoken poetry from its emergence as a rhythmic accessory to block parties (reflecting epic poetry’s capture of communal existence in celebratory language), through to its eventual dominance as the rhyming expression of the idiosyncratic imagination of individual poets (reflecting the lyrical celebration of infinitely free and contingent subjectivity) simultaneously charts the break between Hip Hop culture and subsequent “rap music”.

Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity offers critical appraisals of two of the dominant figures of the Continental tradition of philosophy, Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel. Jim Vernon and Antonio Calcagno bring together established and emerging authors in Continental philosophy to discuss the relationship between the thinkers, creating a multifarious collection of essays by Hegelians, Badiouans, and those sympathetic to both. The text privileges neither thinker, nor any particular topic shared between them; rather, this book lays a broad and sound foundation for future scholarship on arguably two of the greatest thinkers of infinity, universality, subjectivity, and the enduring value of philosophy in the modern Western canon. Assuredly overdue, this volume will attract Hegel and Badiou scholars, as well as those interested in post-structuralism, political philosophy, cultural studies, ontology, philosophy of mathematics, and psychoanalysis.

Kris Sealey received her Ph.D. from the University of Memphis and is now Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work ranges across a variety of ????ields from existential phenom-enology to the Philosophy of Race, Caribbean philosophy, and de-colonial philosophy. In this interview, conducted over email across several months, we track Sealey’s intellectual journey, focussing on her ????irst book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, and her recent Creolizing the Nation, which received the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Along the way, we touch upon her shift from biology and mathematics to Continental philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and personal biography, the nature and promises of a creolizing ap-proach to philosophical research, and the need for philosophy to remain expansive, diverse, and inclusive. Kris Sealey a obtenu son doctorat de l’Université de Memphis et est maintenant professeure de philosophie à l’Université de Pennsylva-nia State. Son travail couvre une variété de domaines allant de la phénoménologie existentielle à la philosophie de la race, en passant par la philosophie caribéenne et la philosophie décoloniale. Dans cet entretien, mené par courrier électronique sur plusieurs mois, nous suivons le parcours intellectuel de Sealey, en nous concentrant sur son premier livre, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, et son récent Creolizing The Na-tion, qui a reçu le prix Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista de l’Association philosophique des Caraïbes. Chemin faisant, nous dis-cutons de son passage de la biologie et des mathématiques à la phi-losophie continentale, de la relation entre la philosophie et la bio-graphie personnelle, de la nature et des promesses d’une approche créolisante de la recherche philosophique, et de la nécessité pour la philosophie de rester expansive, diversi????iée, et inclusive.

This thesis is an investigation of the theory of language presented by Hegel. Specifically, I argue that Hegel's system contains an implicit linguistics in the form a dialectic between a universal, logical grammar and a particular material lexicon. Hegel argues that a particular lexicon is set of community specific expressions that are utilized and experienced by consciousness in its everyday experience, while its grammar is a universal abstraction covered over in our habitual everydayness. The lexicon, as experienced by a conscious subject, falls under the investigation of Geist, while grammar, as a universal abstraction from it demanded by and achieved through a subject's scientifically grasping the lexicon, is a matter of logic. Thus, the dialectical relation of logic and Geist in Hegel's system forms the basis for scientifically deducing linguistic relations, and it is this dialectic that I pursue in my dissertation

The Black Panther Party was founded to bridge the radical theorizing that swept college campuses in the mid-1960s and the lumpen proletariat abandoned by the so-called ‘Great Society’. However, shortly thereafter, Newton began to harshly criticize the academic Left in general for their drive to find ‘a set of actions and a set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute.’ This article reconstructs Newton’s critique of progressive movements grounded primarily in academic debates, as well as his conception of vanguard political theory. Newton’s grasp of revolution as a gradual, open, and above all dialectical process, not only provides a corrective to many dominant academic accounts of the nature of progressive change but, more importantly, it also grounds an emancipatory philosophy that can direct collective struggle, precisely because it remains grounded in the imperfect and internally conflicted lives of those whose freedom is to be won through it.

Drawing on the culture’s history before and after the birth of rap music, this book argues that the values attributed to Hip Hop by ‘postmodern’ scholars stand in stark contrast with those that not only implicitly guided its aesthetic elements, but are explicitly voiced by Hip Hop’s pioneers and rap music’s most consequential artists. It argues that the structural evacuation of the voices of its founders and organic intellectuals in the postmodern theorization of Hip Hop has foreclosed the culture’s ethical values and political goals from scholarly view, undermining its unity and progress. Through a historically informed critique of the hegemonic theoretical framework in Hip Hop Studies, and a re-centering of the culture’s fundamental proscription against ‘biting,' this book articulates and defends the aesthetic and ethical values of Hip Hop against their concealment and subversion by an academic discourse that merely ‘samples’ the culture for its own reactionary ends.

This book develops the general theory of language implicitly contained in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel. It offers novel readings of Hegel's central works in order to explain his views on some long neglected topics and as such demonstrates that his accounts of representation, the concept and the speculative sentence can be used to create sophisticated theories of language acquisition, universal grammar and linguistic practice. Hegel's defence of a scientific philosophy that is necessary and universal seems to eliminate the need for a philosophical linguistics. Since thought is demonstrably objective in itself, questions about the language through which it is expressed appear to be external to philosophy. This has caused many commentators to neglect the real problems that the historical and cultural associations of language pose for the adequate expression of universal thought. Others, exploiting this apparent inadequacy, have argued that the lack of rigorous linguistic analysis in Hegel's philosophy is its greatest, and perhaps fatal, flaw. Although the very idea of a Hegelian linguistics is controversial, this book argues that there are resources within the texts of Hegel for developing a general theory of language as the reciprocal grounding of a universal grammatical form and a particular lexical content. Moreover, it uses this theory to resolve the apparent tension between the necessity of Hegelian philosophy and the contingency of its linguistic expression. In the light of Hegel's critical relation to contemporary debates in Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, coupled with the central role that philosophy of language plays in both streams, this important new study offers the first comprehensive, integrated and fully developed analysis of Hegel's theory of language.

In this paper, I reconstruct the conception of political will implicitly developed by the ‘philosophical theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton. Counterintuitively, I argue that his ‘dialectical’ account of political will is best understood through categories derived from G.W.F. Hegel. Briefly, both Hegel and Newton identify abstract negation and situational concretion as equally essential to actualizing the free will, and thus advocate the channeling of revolutionary enthusiasm into reformist modes of institutional transformation. I conclude by arguing that it is precisely this collective, but contested, unity of revolutionary and reformist tendencies that the Black Panther Party itself embodies.

This book argues that Hip Hop’s early history in the South Bronx charts a course remarkably similar to the conceptual history of artistic creation presented in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. It contends that the resonances between Hegel’s account of the trajectory of art in general, and the historical shifts in the particular culture of Hip Hop, are both numerous and substantial enough to make us re-think not only the nature and import of Hegel’s philosophy of art, but the origin, essence and lesson of Hip Hop. As a result, the book articulates and defends a unique reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics, as well as providing a philosophical explanation of the Hip Hop community’s transition from total social abandonment to some limited form of social inclusion, via the specific mediation of an artistic culture grounded in novel forms of sensible expression. Thus, the fundamental thesis of this book is that Hegel and Hip Hop are mutually illuminating, and when considered in tandem each helps to clarify and reinforce the validity and power of the other.