Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

Antonio Negri, Catherine Malabou, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj eiuek join with seven others, including William Desmond, Adrian Johnston, Thomas Lewis, Katrin Pahl, and Edith Wyschogrod, to apply Hegel’s thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel’s innovations against irrelevance and importantly reset the distinction of secular and sacred.These original contributions focus not only on Hegelian analysis but also on the transformative value of his thought in relation to our current turn to religion. Negri writes of Hegel’s philosophy of right; Malabou develops his motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; Caputo reaffirms the radical theology made possible by Hegel; and Bosteels critiques fashionable readings of the philosopher and argues against the reducibility of his dialectic. Taylor reclaims Hegel’s absolute as a process of infinite restlessness, and eiuek revisits the religious implications of Hegel’s concept of letting go. Mirroring Hegel’s own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways Hegel inhabits them. They invite readers to grasp a future for thought beyond representational philosophy, trivialized religiosity, and the artificial gains of liberal democratic capitalism.