Hegel and the Infinite

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and at the European Graduate School, Switzerland. His many books include Democracy in What State?, Living in the End Times, and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism and Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. Creston Davis is assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Rollins College. He is a coauthor (with John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek) of Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology; a coeditor (with John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek) of Theology and the Political: The New Debate; and the editor of Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank's The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

A very strong collection of essays that goes beyond the critical poles that have tended to divide Hegel's readers in recent years. Rather than assuming we already know Hegel, these essays approach the philosopher as an infinitely complex and shifting set of ideas and texts that must be constantly reread, insofar as those texts continue to unfold new meanings through ongoing transformations in the history of philosophy and material culture, before and after Hegel. -- Kenneth Reinhard, University of California, Los Angeles These are exciting times for the student of Hegel. In place of a previously regnant understanding of the great philosopher, depicting him as an absolute idealist unable to comprehend difference, a staid liberal who walked away from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, we have a 'new' Hegel. This superb collection gives us the lineaments of this latter Hegel, who grappled unsparingly with difference and whose systematicity allowed breaks and interruptions. -- Kenneth Surin, Duke University

• 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 Zizek List of Contributors Index