Description
Book SynopsisSimultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, this book presents a radical Hegel for the twenty-first century. Todd McGowan contends that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction.
Trade ReviewThis is the book we were waiting for after long years of being bombarded by Hegel as a closet liberal whose last word is recognition. With Todd McGowan, the revolutionary Hegel is back—however, it is not the old Marxist Hegel but the Hegel AFTER Marx, the Hegel who makes us aware that revolution is an open and risked process which necessarily entails catastrophic failures. Hegel’s problem—how to save the legacy of the French revolution after its breakdown—is our problem today: how to save the project of radical emancipation after the catastrophe of Stalinism. In a truly democratic country,
Emancipation After Hegel would be reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed for free to all students. Read this book… or ignore it at your own risk! -- Slavoj Žižek, author of
Less Than Nothing and
Absolute RecoilTodd McGowan's
Emancipation After Hegel could not come at a more appropriate time: the time when we truly need to carefully (re)think and reestablish the idea of emancipation. The book does this in a brilliant and compelling way, taking contradiction—as understood by Hegel—as the key to the understanding of emancipation and its relationship to freedom. -- Alenka Zupančič, author of
What Is Sex?In
Emancipation After Hegel, Todd McGowan forges an unprecedented type of left Hegelianism. From Marx and Engels onward, leftist defenders of Hegel either downplay or repudiate Hegel's accounts of Christianity and the state. McGowan's distinctive achievement is to prove that Hegelian freedom would not exist without both the Christian legacy and the modern state. McGowan opens up new horizons precisely by venturing where traditional left Hegelianisms have feared to go. -- Adrian Johnston, author of
A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical MaterialismThe ten chapters canvass a wide range of topics—logic, reason, history, love, freedom, politics, experience, universality. In each case, McGowan shows with devastating clarity how the received view of Hegel has been founded on serious misreadings, then unfolds a fresh interpretation as deeply insightful as it is far-reaching. The result is an absolute
tour de force. In McGowan's book, Hegel rises from the dead and assumes the status of an indispensable resource for the next chapter of Western intellectual history. -- Richard Boothby, author of
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After LacanSparklingly articulate. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *
If Todd McGowan’s book on Hegel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. McGowan is the giant of Vermont, the Bernie Sanders of the academy, the Larry David of Lacanian theory. * Continental Thought and Theory *
This book is particularly helpful for someone trying to better understand Slavoj Žižek’s thought. Žižek resonates with McGowan’s emphasis on the necessity of embracing contradiction for understanding anything. * European Legacy *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Divided He Falls
1. The Path to Contradiction: Redefining Emancipation
2. Hegel After Freud
3. What Hegel Means When He Says
Vernunft4. The Insubstantiality of Substance: Restoring Hegel’s Lost Limbs
5. Love and Logic
6. How to Avoid Experience
7. Learning to Love the End of History: Freedom Through Logic
8. Resisting Resistance, Or Freedom Is a Positive Thing
9. Absolute or Bust
10. Emancipation Without Solutions
Conclusion: Replanting Hegel’s Tree
Notes
Index
