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 After being dismissed out of hand as an outdated and pernicious model of conceptual imperialism and a naïvely Eurocentric historical teleology, there is now a robust renewal of interest in Hegel and the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)