Rebecca Comay

Doris Salcedo's artworks seem to confront the challenge that Adorno expressed so brutally: how to commemorate a traumatic event which both demands and refuses commemoration; where all available cultural forms threaten to trivialize, sentimentalize, mystify, embellish, instrumentalize, or otherwise betray the memory of the dead; and where every attempt to acknowledge injury seems only to compound it. On the one hand, it is the task of art to commemorate suffering. On the other hand, art, by its very existence—its status as a thing among things—is complicitous in this suffering. This essay reflects on the antinomies of mourning and politics in Salcedo's work.

The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is always difficult to grasp in Hegel, not least because it takes such a variety of appearances: as an inexorable process, as an unexpected leap, or as an invisible movement that seems to take place behind our backs at moments of greatest stalemate. But this particular transition is especially challenging—not simply because it is so unprepared but also because it complicates the idea of the absolute as consummation of the encyclopaedic system. Hegel clearly explains why absolute spirit requires objective spirit. Art, religion and philosophy all depend on a world of pre-existing social practices from which they must nonetheless wrest a special kind of independence. But why the reverse? Why does objective spirit need to surpass itself in forms of spirit that overreach and may even, as we will argue, undermine it? What is the insufficiency in politics that requires the supplement of cultural practices that will destabilise it? Conversely, what is the specific autonomy that absolute spirit requires for its absolution, and what are the political stakes and risks of this autonomy?

Philosopher, theologian, philologist, urban sociologist, literary critic, collector, archivist, essayist, memoirist, children's author, allegorist, media theorist, hashish connoisseur, closet surrealist, theorist of fascism, professional melancholic – it is by now habitual to begin any account of Walter Benjamin's work with an inventory of the grafts and incongruities traversing his tangled maze of writings. First known through his rather fraught association with Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (who were effectively responsible for the posthumous dissemination of his corpus); sometime ally and interlocutor of Brecht, Kracauer, Bloch, and Buber; refugee in the Paris of Bataille and company during the 1930s: Benjamin exerts today a fascination all the more striking for its untimeliness. Adopted as spiritual soulmate and precursor of almost every major trend in contemporary Continental thought – from cultural studies to deconstruction, from psychoanalysis to new historicism, from critical theory à la Frankfurt school to poststructural linguistics, from molecular politics to death‐of‐God theology, from radical geography to phantomology, from film theory to Heideggerean hermeneutics, from Foucaultian micrology to cyberpunk aesthetics – he epitomizes that unclassifiable swirl of intellectual impulses we have come to associate with the peregrinations of Weimar culture.

An argument that what is usually dismissed as the “mystical shell” of Hegel's thought—the concept of absolute knowledge—is actually its most “rational kernel.” This book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel's system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel's radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel's thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing.” Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. Reading Hegel without presupposition, without eliminating anything in advance or making any decision about what is essential and what is inessential, what is living and what is dead, they explore his presentation of the absolute to the letter. The Dash is organized around a pair of seemingly innocuous details. Hegel punctuates strangely. He ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with a dash, and he begins the Science of Logic with a dash. This distinctive punctuation reveals an ambiguity at the heart of absolute knowing. The dash combines hesitation and acceleration. Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. It both holds back and propels. It severs and connects. It demurs and insists. It interrupts and prolongs. It generates nonsequiturs and produces explanations. It leads in all directions: continuation, deviation, meaningless termination. This challenges every cliché about the Hegelian dialectic as a machine of uninterrupted teleological progress. The dialectical movement is, rather, structured by intermittency, interruption, hesitation, blockage, abruption, and random, unpredictable change—a rhythm that displays all the vicissitudes of the Freudian drive.

The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic 'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel.

This thesis explores Heidegger's attempt to move beyond the recuperative powers of the dialectic. Its title announces a certain aporia: the "beyond," of course, is precisely what Hegel claims to have transcended; and he has determined that all attempts to overcome him--refutation, opposition, supersession; reversal, inversion, bisection, dissection, periodization --only confirm the potency of the original system. Heidegger displays an acute self-consciousness concerning such aporias of "overcoming." ;This thesis inscribes the Heideggerean project within the horizon of speculative idealism. Heidegger appears to be embroiled in Hegel's earlier struggle with Reflexionsphilosophie. He seems to oscillate between two poles: between a "speculative" drive to surpassing the limit and a "reflective" hesitation or acquiescence at the barrier ; between "good infinite" and "bad infinite"; ultimately between Vernunft and Verstand. Heidegger appears "speculative" in his resistance to the bad infinite in its modern guises, the flux of das Man, the seriality of Technik, the fragmentations of a political aggregate). He appears "reflective" or "Romantic" in his appeal to a "task of thinking": interminable, provisional, forever "underway." He thus appears, at one time, both to resuscitate all Hegel's protests against Reflexionsphilosophie and to vindicate a "philosophy of finitude" which risks relapsing into just the terms Hegel had sought to surpass. Heidegger's thought is neither Spekulation nor Reflexion: it risks the appearance of both in order to negotiate a space between. The movement "'beyond' Aufhebung" is thus in fact a movement between a philosophy of Aufhebung and a philosophy of the "beyond". ;Such oscillation compels us to rethink the metaphysics of the limit; here a line is traced which may not be comprehended by a speculative logic, and which has many different aspects. This thesis explores these various aspects as they unfold throughout the Heideggerean corpus but with particular reference to Zur Seinsfrage.

This essay explores the familiar German ideology according to which a revolution in thought would, in varying proportions, precede, succeed, accommodate, and generally upstage a political revolution whose defining feature was increasingly thought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. Germany thus sets out to quarantine the political threat of revolution while siphoning off and absorbing the revolution’s intensity and energy for thinking as such. The essay holds that this structure corresponds to the psychoanalytic logic of trauma: the dissolution of the event into a missed event, and the hypertrophic investment in the trivial, the non-event, the negligible remainder.