Hegel 13/13 | Bruno Bosteels on Hegel and Adorno

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Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory. He is the author of (Palinodia), (La Fabrique, translated into German as with Laika), (Duke, translated into Spanish as with Prometeo Libros), (Verso, translated into German with Laika as , into Korean with a new preface by Galmuri as 공산주의의 현실성 : 현실성의 존재론과 실행의 정치, into Serbian with Univerzitet Singidunum as , and into Spanish with Prometeo Libros as , forthcoming in Japanese with Koshisha), (Verso, Spanish translation as with Akal), (Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia), (Ariel Pennisi), (Akal-Mexico, 2021; second edition Akal-Spain, 2022; forthcoming in English as The Mexican Commune with Duke University Press); and (Prometeo Libros, 2024). Between 2005 and 2011 he served as general editor of Diacritics: Review of Contemporary Thought. He is currently preparing two new books, the first a sustained polemical engagement with contemporary post-Heideggerian thought, titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso); and the second, a collection of recent and previously unpublished essays under the title The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press). With Joshua Clover he co-edits the book series "Studies in Literature and Revolution" for Palgrave Macmillan; and with George Ciccariello-Maher the book series "Radical Américas" for Duke University Press. He is also the translator from French to English and/or editor of over half a dozen books by Alain Badiou, among them (Continuum/Bloomsbury), (Verso), (Verso), (Verso), (Verso), (Verso), (Duke), and (Stanford). He recently translated the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner's (Brill) and is finishing the translation of Alain Badiou's Nietzsche (Columbia University Press).

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Hegel 13/13 is a multi-year project that explores the historical confrontations with G.W.F. Hegel’s thought, from the nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of developing new critical perspectives and practices for today’s times.

The ambition of this multi-year project is to serve as a catalyst to produce new forms of critique and praxis to address the present political conjuncture.

New philosophies and practices have so often emerged from a sharp confrontation with past ideas, especially, and curiously, from confrontations with Hegel’s paradigm. Whether it was Marx in the nineteenth century turning the Phenomenology of Spirit on its head, or Lenin closely annotating The Science of Logic, or C.L.R. James transforming the dialectic into a tool for decolonization, or Frantz Fanon or Jean-Paul Sartre inverting the master-slave dialectic, or Judith Butler turning subjectivity into desire, so many of the major contributions to critique and praxis in the past two centuries were born from an antagonistic struggle with Hegel’s thought.

From early on with Ludwig Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians, to Alexandre Kojève in the 1930s and his influence on post-war French philosophy but also on Allan Bloom and American conservative thought, or to the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the U.S. workers’ movement composed of CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs, the contradictions in Hegel’s thought have given birth to some of the most important and impactful political ideas and practices.

It is time then, once again, to return to Hegel, not to think with him, but rather, as it has so often been more productive, to think against and beyond him. It is time for another round of agonistic confrontations with Hegel’s writings—The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Science of Logic (1812-1816), the Encyclopedia (1817), and the Principles of the Philosophy of Law (1820).

The multi-year project “Inversions of Hegel 13/13” will begin during the academic year 2025-2026 with preparatory sessions (informal conversations, small seminars, reading groups, and lectures) that will lay the groundwork for a 13/13 public seminar series on the confrontations with Hegel’s writings that have shaped world history. Throughout, the ambition will be to develop a new critical praxis for today.

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