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In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel's project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel's thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel's notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
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
About the author
Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are
The Impossible David Lynch (2007) and
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016).
Summary
Simultaneously 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.
Additional text
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.
