Launch of Hegel 13/13

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.

Welcome to Hegel 13/13!

Here is a short introduction to Hegel 13/13:

Host or Publisher The Center for Contemporary Critical Thought