Hegel 13/13 with Homi Bhabha

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In-person tickets on Eventbrite will close at 4:00 PM on April 28, 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 April 28, 2026, please reach out to Ricardo Lombera at [email protected]. Request for access after 4:00 PM on April 28, 2026, unfortunately, cannot be guaranteed.

Homi is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Harvard University. He was founding director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Humanities Center. He is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. Homi is also leading a research project on the Global Humanities supported by the Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations. He is a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, advisor on the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (CMAP) project at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and Curator in Residence of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 2012, Homi was awarded the Government of India’s Padma Bhushan Presidential Award in the field of literature and education. He holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, the Free University Berlin, and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Early in 2020, Homi was elected as Fellow of the British Academy.

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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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