Hegel 13/13 with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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In-person tickets on Eventbrite will close at 4:00 PM on February 24, 2026. Those that have signed up for an in-person ticket will receive an email with a QR code from [email protected] needed to enter the Columbia University campus. Each guest must have their own QR code so each guest needs to be registered. Please make sure that you use your legal first and last name when registering for the event. Please also bring a government-issued ID that matches the name on your registration to present to CU Public Safety staff. If you would like to attend in person and have not RSVP'd before 4:00 PM on February 24, 2026, please reach out to Ricardo Lombera at [email protected]. Requests for access after 4:00 PM on February 24, 2026, unfortunately, cannot be guaranteed.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her fields of study span from the 19th- and 20th-century literature; politics of culture; feminism; Marx and Derrida; to globalization. Her most recent publications include the 2016 fortieth-anniversary edition of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Readings (2014), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012).

Spivak has written numerous books and articles, including In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987; Routledge Classic 2002), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993; 2d ed forthcoming), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge classic 2003), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed. forthcoming), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003) and Other Asias (2005). She has translated and introduced several texts by Mahasweta Devi and Ramproshad Sen. Her book Du Bois and the General Strike is forthcoming.

Spivak has been an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986.

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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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