Hegel and the Infinite

Catherine Malabou, Antonio Negri, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj Zizek join seven others—including William Desmond, Katrin Pahl, Adrian Johnston, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas A. Lewis—to apply Hegel's thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel's innovations against irrelevance and, importantly, reset the distinction of secular and sacred.

These original contributions focus on Hegelian analysis and the transformative value of the philosopher's thought in relation to our current "turn to religion." Malabou develops Hegel's motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; Negri writes of Hegel's philosophy of right; Caputo reaffirms the radical theology made possible by Hegel; and Bosteels critiques fashionable readings of the philosopher and argues against the reducibility of his dialectic. Taylor reclaims Hegel's absolute as a process of infinite restlessness, and Zizek revisits the religious implications of Hegel's concept of letting go. Mirroring the philosopher's own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways in which Hegel inhabits them.

Preface: Hegel's Century
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Risking Hegel: A New Reading for the Twenty-First Century, by Clayton Crockett and Creston Davis
1. Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition? Rousseau and the Unthought of Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, by Catherine Malabou
2. Rereading Hegel: The Philosopher of Right, by Antonio Negri
3. The Perversity of the Absolute, the Perverse Core of Hegel, and the Possibility of Radical Theology, by John D. Caputo
4. Hegel in America, by Bruno Bosteels
5. Infinite Restlessness, by Mark C. Taylor
6. Between Finitude and Infinity: On Hegel's Sublationary Infinitism, by William Desmond
7. The Way of Despair, by Katrin Pahl
8. The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized, by Adrian Johnston
9. Disrupting Reason: Art and Madness in Hegel and Van Gogh, by Edith Wyschogrod
10. Finite Representation, Spontaneous Thought, and the Politics of an Open-Ended Consummation, by Thomas Lewis
11. Hegel and Shitting: The Idea's Constipation, by Slavoj Žižek
List of Contributors
Index