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)

The publications of Taylor and Honneth have ignited a renewed interest in the Hegelian theme of recognition. But recognition has not only positive aspects, as there are also negative connotations to recognition seen as misrecognition. What might be termed negative recognition argues that there is more to recognition than simple misrecognition. This article aims to show that negative recognition reaches beyond misrecognition and non-recognition. The paper argues that there are at least four versions of negative recognition. These are misrecognition, non-recognition, (...) de-recognition, and pathological mass-recognition. The examples used to illustrate the existence of these four forms of negative recognition have been drawn from the world of work and general politics. The conclusion enhances the negative side of the ‘recognition thesis’ as recently outlined by Martineau et al. and others. (shrink)

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights (...) of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a task that Benjamin identified with the proletarian general strike, a strategy whose pure violence is supposed to secure what Benjamin described, enigmatically, as a ‘wholly transformed work’. Remarkably, however, the relationship between the suspension of law in a general strike and a total transformation of labour is never clearly defined in the ‘Critique’. This paper will develop an account of this relationship by pursuing the references to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism in Benjamin’s writings. (shrink)

This paper purports to identify the nature of Hegel’s theory of race. Especially, the author will examine whether Hegel’s theory of race in particular, his philosophy of spirit in general, provides the justification of a colonial racism or a cultural racism. While Hegel’s theory undoubtedly contained racist elements, still unanswered is whether racism is inherently at odds with the basic principles of his philosophy of spirit. To be examined critically is the suggestion that racism is fundamentally incompatible with the basic (...) principles of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, notwithstanding its undeniably racist elements. The paper aims to provide clarification in this question by showing that Hegel’s racism is not an accidental or ancillary byproduct of his speculative philosophy of spirit and world history. (shrink)