In the first section of this essay, I offer a brief overview of Hegel’s dozen or so mentions of dance in his Lectures on Aesthetics, focusing on the tension between Hegel’s denigration of dance as an “imperfect art” and his characterization of dance as a potential threat to the other arts. In the second section, I turn to an insightful essay from Hans-Christian Lucas on Hegel’s “Anthropology,” focusing on his argument that the Anthropology’s crucial final sections threaten to undermine Hegel’s (...) entire philosophy. And in the final section, I offer my own reading of the Anthropology, connecting the threads of my previous two sections. More specifically, I attempt to show that Hegel has in effect quarantined dance in what he terms “the dark regions” of madness in “The Feeling Soul.” Overall, I suggest that this quarantining is ultimately as problematic for Hegel as it has been for dance. Because without dance, complete with its associations with people disempowered in their embodiment, this crucial transitional section in the Anthropology remains burdened with a corporeal remainder that problematizes the entire system. Put simply, Hegel must – by his own logic – learn to dance gracefully with those he would rather shun. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers are right to criticize Hegel’s prejudices against women. In many of his works, Hegel reduces women to their physiology as means of explaining why they occupy a subordinate role in nature and in society. Such treatment seems arbitrary at best, for the gendering of roles disrupts Hegel’s dialectical approach to spirit without any meaningful gain. Despite this defect in Hegel’s work, what is positive in Hegelian social and political philosophy remains intact. In this paper I argue that the (...) sexist claims that Hegel makes about women are irrelevant to his theory of the family in the Philosophy of Right. Therein, Hegel outlines three components that are necessary for the completion of the family: marriage, property and assets, and the raising of children. Hegel also includes a description of the different roles occupied by family members and divides these roles along gender lines. Given the three components that are essential to the family, I argue that there is no necessary basis for familial roles to be divided by gender. (shrink)

Rethinks the existing definitions of aesthetics and ethics and the relations between them.

Various levels of feminist criticism of Hegel's account of woman and family, both contentious and sophisticated, are examined. While finding much that is telling and valid in them, the author finds much that is uncomprehended and much that stands to be learned about the issues in question were the texts allowed to speak for themselves.

Examines Hegel’s insights regarding the complexity and significance of embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel’s anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel’s view, to be human means in part to produce one’s own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and (...) which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel’s account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness. “This book offers a lucid explanation of very difficult Hegelian concepts in clear language, along with a passionate, searing, provocative, and intelligent foray into questions of race and gender.” — Lydia Moland, Colby College. (shrink)

This thesis defines the philosophical concept of speculation and assessesits emergence in Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy, in the attempted construction of a post-Enlightenment “scientific” philosophy and alongside early work in anthropology and gynaecology. It argues that in the historical elaboration of the problem of speculation “race” and “sex” emerge as concerns for this newly defined scientific philosophy. Moreover, a concept of performativity is introduced in the attempt to think the ontological implications or “effects” of speculative thought. This thesis proposes (...) that Hegel is the originator of such a concept of performativity, introduced as the conclusion to the Science of Logic. Here, performativity is defined as activity of form or determinate being in contrast to the empty notion of being pure being with which the Logic begins. Speculation, the Logic proposes, is not only a methodological necessity giving rise to an essentially epistemological problem, as Kant had defined it, but is also to be thought as ontological Thätigkeit proper. Rewriting speculation as an ontological concept of form, Hegel uses, among others, social and political examples to illustrate the nature of speculative thought. The surprising appearance of the state and the sexual relation in the Logic, alongside the concepts of violence, resistance, power and freedom, demonstrates that speculative reason necessarily encounters political categories and suggests that these might be exemplary of its nature. While it remains unclear, in Hegel, precisely how the unfolding of conceptual form leads to political categories, both Irigaray and Butler offer answers to this question. In doing so, they separately outline ways of thinking the ontological dimension of speculative thought: Irigaray by modifying speculation as speculation – an attempt to visualise speculation and to render its social dimensions visible; and Butler by formulating the concept of gender performativity. This thesis offers its own answer, too, by situating the emergence of speculation and performativity as philosophical concepts in the context of the history of modern gynaecology and the speculum. It reads these concepts alongside those of sexual difference, Geschlecht and gender, arguing that only in this way can speculation and performativity be thought. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos indagar acerca del lugar y significado que asume la categoría de autonomía estética en lo que Hegel denomina “consideración liberal de lo bello”. A tales fines, analizamos los aspectos de su teoría de la religión del arte, cuyo modelo puede encontrarse en la organización ético-política de la polis griega, así como también los presupuestos filosóficos de su célebre teorema acerca del carácter pasado del arte “en su determinación suprema”. La hipótesis que nos guía en esta (...) lectura sostiene que la estética hegeliana se encuentra tensionada por un movimiento doble que impide ubicar al arte en un lugar fijo: al mismo tiempo en que sostiene la necesidad de una categoría de libertad para la determinación conceptual de lo bello, ella es motivo de una constante complejización por una perspectiva que la excede. Esa perspectiva filosófico-histórica se fundamenta en una categoría del sujeto moral que justifica la interpretación del arte como medio de tránsito hacia figuras más avanzadas del espíritu. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary and contemporary response to Irigaray’s work.

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between (...) modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression. (shrink)

This article presents conceptual bridges that exist between the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel and a feminist ethics of care. To do so, it engages with Slavoj Žižek’s contemporary reading of Hegel in concert with existing feminist interpretations of Hegel’s thought. The goal of doing so is to demonstrate how both Žižek and a selection of critical feminist thinkers interpret Hegel’s perspective on the nature of subjectivity, intersubjective relations and the relationship between the subject and the world it inhabits, in a (...) way that can further our thinking on the feminist ethics of care as a relational and contextualist ethics that foregrounds vulnerability as a condition of existence. These readings of Hegel highlight the radical contingency of human subjectivity, as well as the relationship between human subjectivity and the external world, in a way that is compatible with the feminist ethics of care’s emphasis on the particularity, fluidity, and interdependency of human relationships. I argue that this confrontation between care ethics and mainstream philosophy is valuable because it offers mutual contributions to both care ethics as a moral and political theory and the philosophy of Hegel and Žižek. (shrink)

Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify the crisis precipitated by contact with otherness that threatens their claims to autonomy, authority, homogeneity, and universality. Specifically it situates the polemical exchange of representations of women among Friedrich Schlegel, G W (...) F Hegel, and Karl Gutzkow as exemplary German male bourgeois efforts to rectify the crises to subject formation generated, in part, by the emergence of gender-coded bifurcated bourgeois society and signaled by the Kantian and French Revolutions. The public dissemination of apotropaic representations screened the dependence upon proximate others by, and determined the positions among, exchange participants as well as maintained structures of domination. (shrink)

_Investigates the role of family in Hegel’s phenomenology._.

Argues that love plays an essential—if often implicit—role in Hegel's mature theory of moral subjectivity and political community.