Emilia Angelova

The Necessity of Freedom in Hegel's Turn Between Logic and History explores Hegel’s claim that freedom is not just an abstract ideal but a necessary foundation for philosophy itself. This collection of essays examines how Hegel’s system connects logic, history, and rationality, shaping the meaning of historical development through the actualization of conceptual necessity. Hegel’s philosophical position is unique in the tradition of German idealism in its insistence that freedom is a necessity that permeates and grounds philosophy as a system. The contributions in this collection, as a result, work in the intersections between the philosophy of right, logic, phenomenology, history, and aesthetics to demonstrate this realization. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume investigates key dimensions of Hegel’s thought: Stephen Houlgate, Michael Quante, and Angelica Nuzzo on the philosophy of right; Iain Macdonald and Nahum Brown on the science of logic; Alberto Siani, Jennifer Bates, and Jim Vernon on the phenomenology of spirit; Jeffrey Reid and Timothy Brownlee on the philosophy of history and aesthetics; and John McCumber, Ian Balfour, and Rebecca Comay on Hegel and the French Revolution. Through close textual analysis, this volume illuminates how Hegel’s dialectic rejects atomistic individualism, instead emphasizing the subject’s role in actualizing political rationality. This collection offers fresh insights into Hegel’s enduring relevance in philosophy, history, and political thought.

In his late lectures of 1975-76, Levinas returns to Heidegger, writing that—behind the phenomenon of death in the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time—it is “death” that “crouches like a question with no givens” (GDT, 38). Levinas grants Heidegger that death is an ending as well as being an end, in the verbal and nominal senses. More, he admits that Heidegger has explored the transitivity of the existential verb “to be,” in this consists his “unforgettable” contribution (GDT, 122).Yet, for Levinas, to the extent that “coming-to-the-end” and “comingat- the-end” mark a signifying thought still tied to logic, Heidegger remains preoccupied with the nominal sense of being, with an “epic of being.” That is, Heidegger posits that the beingness of being and a certain reductive, that is, metaphysical comprehension of it, is at the origin of “all meaning” (GDT, 123). Levinas, who remains never too interested in the later Heidegger, makes no room for departure from the early thesis. He is reluctant to see a change even as, after the mid-1930s, Heidegger shifts from the problematic of being-toward-death, recognizes that the epoch of philosophy itself has reached its end, completed and fulfilled in the dominance of European science, and embarks upon the opportunity to think differently, an opportunity for “thought to rediscover a possible thinking of being” (GDT, 126). As Levinas puts it, what the later Heidegger “calls the thinking of being” remains tied to a certain comprehension of being as having the transcendence of an entity, in the sense that “being is or does its business of being” (GDT, 124). In other words, Heidegger does not move beyond being and fails to think the other of being “as irreducible to the Same,” which would imply a new notion of meaning and a certain ethical relationship, within which one may start out in this search. For his part, Levinas insists not on contrasting or opposing (opposer) being to its beyond, but on “separating” the Other from

In his recent book Organs Without Bodies (2004), Slavoj Žižek raises an objection to Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the body without organs as desiring machine. Žižek accepts the concept, but argues that the right way to think about it is rather its inversion, organs without bodies. Žižek argues that a change in the conceptualization of causation and desire, from the concept of quasi-cause in the early Deleuze of The Logic of Sense (1969) to the late work of Deleuze and Guattari on the body without organs in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1974), is responsible for a certain rigidity and reification that reduces desire to production as product, rather than leaving it open, as process. The vector on which the body without organs rides, and which gives it its direction—the direction in which the actual virtualizes—in fact involves organs without bodies, which, as Žižek shows, invokes the Lacanian Real. This essay takes its clue from Žižek’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari, but rather than directly engaging with Žižek, its focus extends beyond his particular critique and moves on its own to explore some of the related problems of ontology and ethics in Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Lacan. It is not possible here to address in full the underlying connection of ontology and ethics that is at stake in this discussion. The focus is restricted to the problematic shift in Deleuze’s notion of the body without organs. The shift concerns whether the body without organs must include a relation to quasi-cause, which is the case in the early Deleuze of The Logic of Sense; or, whether it can be treated independently of quasi-cause, which is the case in the Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. I outline the sharp turn of Anti-Oedipus—the breaking away from the connection between body without organs and quasi-cause—in order to set up the ethical question emerging out of this shift: Is the shift in Deleuze and Guattari economizing on the otherness of this body? Is Anti-Oedipus, in proposing a reductionist ethics of pure production, in need of a further critique? At the end of this discussion, I point out some affinities that Deleuze and Guattari miss between the Lacanian Real and the structuring of the Kantian transcendental field in ways that make it homologous with the real. I contend that, with the Logic of Sense, Deleuze moves away from classical theories of the Kantian transcendental field, of identity, of external representation, and cause/effect, away from the biologism, or even the socio-biologism in Freud/ Lacan he moves into intensities. But there is nothing to suggest that the Logic of Sense suffers from phenomenological or essentialist tendendies—at least not in the main concepts of interest to us, the body without organs and quasi-cause.

In his recent work, Leonard Lawlor draws attention to the problem of “violence,” which is the “problem that provides the most food for thought.” This emphasis on the problem of violence and its connections to metaphysics understood as philosophy has been remarkably consistent over his career, and thinking through responses to “violence” has sustained Lawlor’s continued effort to think about what he calls “violent” relations between event and repeatability and ground these upon a critical phenomenology. This contribution to the discussion of Lawlor’s work focuses on his most recent book, From Violence to Speaking Out (2016), so as to suggest three important directions for this project and for philosophy’s response to violence. I first briefly trace the theme of violence in From Violence to Speaking Out, contextualizing it against the rest of his work, so as to draw out what he means by violence and its provocation to philosophy, with special attention to the way that the violence in question is figured as disrupting the transcendental and confronting philosophy with what Lawlor calls the “ultratranscendental.” Second, I link it to the theme of time by tracing Lawlor’s point about violence in relation to the breaking up of the transcendental subject from Kant into Heidegger. Third, I link these points to the negative movement of the dissolution of modes of repeatability. This dissolution is captured in a kind of “speaking‐out” that Lawlor detects in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, involving an excess over and above expression, which Deleuze calls “hyperbologic.”

_Revisits Julia Kristeva's magnum opus on the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication to open up new paths of interdisciplinary inquiry._ In her 1974 _Revolution in Poetic Language_, Julia Kristeva resisted the abstract use of language, with its aim of totalization and finality, in all its colonizing and alienating forms. A major thinker and critic, Kristeva reappropriated Hegel's concepts of desire and negativity, in conjunction with the thought of Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, and Lacan, to revolt against modernity's culture of nihilism and the West's inability to deal with loss. This collection celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of _Revolution in Poetic Language_ by revisiting Kristeva's oeuvre and establishing exciting new directions in Kristeva studies. Engaging with queer and transgender studies, disability studies, decolonial studies, and more, renowned and rising scholars plot continuities in-and push the boundaries of-Kristeva's thinking about loss, revolution, and revolt. The volume also includes two essays by Kristeva, translated into English for the first time here-"The Impossibility of Loss" (1988) and "Of What Use Are Poets in Times of Distress?" (2016).

Heidegger shifts between two contrasting interpretations of Descartes. While discussion around the time of the project of fundamental ontology emphasizes rather the unavoidable ambiguity of Descartes’ views, the later texts (the courses on Nietzsche, What is a Thing? , The Age of the World Picture , the final seminars) more clearly express a critique of the extreme subjectivism of the Cartesian system and Cartesian method. Reception dates since the early lecture course 1921–2 in Freiburg 1 and the Prolegomena from summer 1925 in Marburg, into the best known engagements from Being and Time (esp. sections 6, 10, 18b–21, 43) and in 1927, Basic Problems of Phenomenology (esp. sections 11, 12, 13a, 15a).

Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (KrV)1 in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik2 is well known for its destruction of the categories and destruction of the faculties. Reason, as Heidegger argues, is receptive of its regulative ideas. That is, reason is receptive of its own spontaneity, and this moment is a selfaffection– reason’s receptivity to its own spontaneity is reducible neither to a phenomenon nor a noumenon. This goes against a two-world view of noumena (that would put noumena in a metaphysically different world), in which reason as generating a regulative idea of freedom would be doubled by a reason as a free spontaneity in a metaphysically different world. The self-affection of reason is understood in terms of what Heidegger calls “time as pure self-affection”. The subject, therefore, is understood as the temporal backdrop of a synthesis that is itself an openness to time in reason’s open relation with Being. In such a synthesis, time’s taking on the character of self-hood is affected by the very time that it is synthesizing, and there is no subject given in advance of this affection. Time as self-hood and time synthesized as a permanent object are strictly correlative.

Reading Kant’s Geography, edited by Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, State University of New York Press, 2011, 382 pp., pb. $34.95, hb. $90.00, ISBN-13: 9781438436050. This review of an edited collection, Reading Kant’s Geography, discusses a series of critical essays on Kant’s physical geography, a topic to which he devoted many years of intellectual energy. The volume is the first of its kind for it appears in anticipation of the first ever publication into English of Kant’s own lectures on physical geography, which lectures he held for over forty years, alternating with lectures on anthropology. This volume together with the publication of the lectures thus constitute an important event in the English language reception of Kant.

Hegel is a founding philosopher of political modernity. His accounts of history, and as well political institutions of bourgeois culture and society, are critical models and strategies for engaging what he calls negation. Negation does not simply belong to the “not” of judgement, but derives more substantively from the negativity of the desire of the Other, which has meaning. Negativity as the origin of negation originates with the negative instance of the subject, who expels part of itself in order that it may come to be as being for itself and for the other. Hegel thus institutes the twofold ground of negation as precondition of logical thought. Drawing on Rebecca Comay’s Hegel and the French Revolution I show how negation and the self-justification of freedom necessarily intertwine across the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit . I begin with a study of the “form” of freedom in Stephen Houlgate and Kevin Thompson. Hegel’s Reason entails the universalism of history, which is in turn inseparable from the universalism of its ethics. That is, Hegel treats political modernity as rooted in systematic foundations that are inherently incomplete. The normativity of social bonds, an apt conception of a more radical sociality, is understood as inherently incomplete.

To-be being-with, that is, to be co-constitutive of the world of spirit and as well of the world of the social: this is how Jean-Luc Nancy reformulates Hegel’s question of Being’s identity with thought. Nancy’s preoccupation with the Thought-event of being offers a transformative reading of Hegel, one which calls for a move beyond the political tradition of Being’s identity with representational thought. Hegel contributes to a renewal of the idea of thinking that moves beyond representation by introducing a movement into thought as driven by a force that is not simply the negativity of Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” It is received orthodoxy that Hegel understood representation as representing thought as dialectical movement. Yet as Nancy argues, Hegel grasps that under the force of development of a necessary transcendental illusion thought no longer can remain at the level of representation, and the principle that drives it is rather ontic-ontological. I will introduce a three-point approach to reconstructing the shift to an ontology of Being-with, but first, I will sketch this perspective more generally.

I attempt to explain why the principle of uncertainty of sense, or meaning, matters to thinking the political, and where it originates, where and how it comes to appear. My focus is Nancy’s Hegel, the structural and phenomenological openness of the principle of negation, the thought of this openness as “problematics of textuality,” and the implications for “sense.” I show how this openness is radicalized through Nancy’s early work on Kant’s idea of the “experience of freedom.” Nancy engages the negativity of spirit, and what “loss” would mean under negativity’s condition. This complicates the modern heritage and what is meant by freedom, monarchy, the nation-state, violence and the subject.

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics controversially claims that the A deduction is superior to the B deduction because the imagination, as the“common root” of understanding and sensibility, opens the first Critique to metaphysical ground. Drawing on Dieter Henrich, this paper reinterprets Heidegger’sreading by moving beyond the Analytic and taking the Dialectic into account. This suggests a continuity between the A and B deductions, namely that the imagination, as more than an ontic faculty, remains a basic power that keeps open a metaphysics of being in Kant—a metaphysics whose site is a radicalized unity of transcendental apperception. Revisiting Heidegger in this way shows how Kant is both linked to and differentiated from German Idealism’s debate about the imagination, a position suggested in both Heidegger and recent scholarly discussion.