The Intractability of Dialectics
Description
The dialectic has stubbornly refused to grow old. After being dismissed out of hand as an outdated and pernicious model of conceptual imperialism and a naïvely Eurocentric historical teleology, there is now a robust renewal of interest in Hegel and the affordances of dialectical thinking in many corners. Certainly, many older criticisms of Hegelianism now demand more careful scrutiny or have themselves been rendered seemingly obsolete. And yet, while we share the sense that there remains much that is alive and necessary in this mode of thought, we are (perhaps stubbornly or perversely ourselves) intrigued by the possibility of its inadequacy. How, with neither the forgetfulness characteristic of its repression nor the agon of negation incurred by its attempted overcoming, might we ever leave dialectics behind—recalling that within its own matrix the dialectic was only ever supposed to refer to a specific and self-abolishing phase of thought?
We are interested in moments in which the dialectic sputters out, encounters something indigestible, or gives way to a dynamic irrecuperable within its economy. Our critical impulse here is especially animated by lines of thinking developed within contemporary black studies, where the most profound criticisms of Hegelianism and its afterlives in phenomenology and critical theory have come from a deep ambivalence with respect to dialectical difference and its attendant incapacities rather than its outright rejection. We take it as a given that there are forms of relation and/or non-relation that demand to be thought differently, but how do we think these without hypostatizing conceptuality? If, as has been the old and new contention, there are phenomena which render the dialectic unworkable—as manifested in the dynamics of racialization, antiblackness, gender, and postcoloniality, not to mention the history of capitalism itself—how do we describe this unworkability without recourse to the work of negativity? What is the role of literary and other aesthetic objects in dramatizing these breakdowns, false starts, and further possibilities? In light of the exegetical rigor of recent Hegel scholarship, where do his older and newer critics still have a point?
For this panel, we invite papers with any topic or method germane to some subset of these thematic questions. These can include, but are by no means limited to:
- critical reactivation of lines of engagement with Hegel in the 19th or 20th centuries, in any of the various national and linguistic traditions which took him up—such as the German (e.g., Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche), Anglophone (James, Peirce, Du Bois, Whitehead), or Francophone (Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Fanon, Deleuze, Glissant)
- critical theory in its various phases (Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, Rose)
- contemporary work in black studies re-evaluating the inheritance of German Idealism (da Silva, Moten, Terada, Okiji)
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Linette Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She has edited special issues on the topics of black resistance, crisis, and philosophy for the journals, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism and Oxford Literary Review. Her first monograph is forthcoming with Stanford University Press for the series, Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics.
Speaker Bio
I am a 5th year PhD Candidate in the Philosophy department at Emory University. My work meets at the intersection of 19th&20th century French Philosophy, Black Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis. I am writing a dissertation on the question of poiesis in African Philosophy.
Speaker Bio
Joel Auerbach is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, with an MA from McGill University and a BA from Vassar College. He works on 19th and early 20th century American literature, philosophy, and religion, particularly the relations between Du Bois, the Harlem Renaissance, and the philosophies and theologies of William James, C. S. Peirce, and A. N. Whitehead. He is an editor for the journal Qui Parle.
Speaker Bio
Thel Maude-Griffin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in critical theory. Her research uses autistic experience as an analytic for thinking about the problem of expression posed by the fact of cognitive difference and its racial overdetermination within black studies, German Idealist thought, and romanticism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Maksim Vak received his PhD in philosophy from New School University. He has published articles on problems of morality, the ontology of death, and Nietzsche’s dialectics. He currently teaches different topics in philosophy at City University of New York. He specializes in continental philosophy. His current interests are the revaluation of the ontology of death in the history of philosophy and the sublation of dialectic in humor.
Speaker Bio
Jim Hansen is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of English. He's the author of Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett. He’s currently working on a book-length study of Adorno and Benjamin. He's contributed articles to numerous journals and collections and served as Co-Editor of a special issue of Contemporary Literature called “Contemporary Literature and the State.”
Speaker Bio
André Flicker is a lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in 2025 with a dissertation on the philosophical and aesthetic undercurrents of Unsinn performed in the works of Dada artists. His work has been published in The Germanic Review and Philosophy Today.
Speaker Bio
Julia is a Ph.D. candidate in German at New York University. Her interests range across black study, Critical Theory, histories of anticolonialism, and transnational German studies. Her dissertation examines modes of anticolonial critique that engage dialectic as a movement without presupposition or principle. The project focuses on anticolonial thought in Southwest Africa, the Caribbean, and Germany.