Tag: history
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‘Against Progress’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is not a conventional monograph so much as a deliberately fissured surface that refuses to heal: a collection of analytic incursions that turn the received object—“progress”—into a problem that will not stop returning as symptom, screen, and compulsion. The wager is that only a description that never quite stabilizes can meet…
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The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings
Sarah Kofman’s The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings is a disciplined reconstruction and a deliberately disconcerting defamiliarization of Freud’s scattered and chronologically asymmetrical reflections on “femininity.” It proceeds by accepting Freud’s declared interest in observation, method, and conceptual economy while patiently exposing the inner duplicities of those same appeals whenever they function as…
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Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic…
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Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder | 天上大乱
Comrades of the interval—neither before nor after, but in the thickening middle—what follows keeps faith with a specifically 2021 mood: an in-between composition framed by emergency, written when vaccination queues braided with border queues, when lockdown routines folded into supply-chain algorithms, and when a pathogen taught political economy at scale. The temporal setting matters. Numbers,…
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Hegel and the State
Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegel and the State (1920; first English translation 2024) is far more than an erudite study of Hegel’s political thought; it is a monumental philosophical biography, a tragic historical meditation, and an intellectual reckoning with the failure of German idealism’s promise when confronted with the realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics. Written…
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Hegel and the Philosophy of Right
Dudley Knowles’ Hegel and the Philosophy of Right is one of the most sustained and philosophically rigorous engagements with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a work that itself remains among the most complex statements of modern political philosophy. The Philosophy of Right is notorious both for its forbidding prose and for the controversies it has generated:…
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The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750-1800
Robert S. Leventhal’s The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750–1800 is a genealogy of interpretive reason at the precise historical moment when “reading” ceases to be a private virtuosity and becomes a structured practice, an institutional technology, and a self-questioning mode of historical knowledge. Published by Walter de Gruyter in…
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Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History
To describe Frederick M. Barnard’s Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History is to chart a work that treats Johann Gottfried Herder not merely as a source of quotable slogans about Volk, language, and culture, but as an architect of a supple vision in which the formative powers of a people’s speech, memory, and art are…
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Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology
Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology presents Herder’s lifelong wager that history becomes intelligible only when narrated as the becoming of humanity—not a thin abstraction but a living principle that binds language, climate, custom, belief, and art into a single, ever-unfinished text. The editors, Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, organize thirty-eight selections…
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Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches
Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches, edited by John K. Noyes, is a landmark publication that makes accessible for the first time in English Johann Gottfried Herder’s Versuch über das Sein (Essay on Being), a youthful but philosophically decisive text from 1763–64. Long overshadowed by the commanding figure of Kant, Herder has…
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Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as one of the twentieth century’s rare philosophical milestones, a work that both revived and reoriented an entire French understanding of Hegel’s magnum opus. Born in the ferment of pre‑World War II Paris, these lectures—delivered by Alexandre Kojève between 1933 and 1939…
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The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right
In The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right, Paul Gottfried analyses the ideological evolution of the American conservative movement in the post-World War II era, examining an often unacknowledged debt to Hegelian philosophy within the conservative thought of key intellectual figures. Gottfried’s exploration seeks to uncover how thinkers like Will Herberg,…
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Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel
Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel by William Maker is an unrelenting philosophical treatise that boldly seeks to dismantle the inherited caricatures of Hegel as a metaphysical absolutist and dogmatic systematizer by rereading him through the prism of contemporary antifoundationalist critique. In a rigorous and sustained engagement with both the tradition of German Idealism and the…
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Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social
Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social by Sevgi Doğan is a philosophically rigorous, politically charged, and historically grounded study that embarks on a systematic reconstruction of one of modernity’s most vexing and fundamental questions: the nature and role of the individual within the social totality. Rooted in the dialectical…
Simon Gros 