Hegel and Spinoza

Whether under the name of lack, nothingness, non-being, void, splitting, torsion, or clinamen, the problem of negativity is central to contemporary philosophy. The hypothesis of this workshop is that many of the current debates revolving around this key issue—from Lacanians and Deleuzians, Althusserians and Heideggerians, philosophers of contradiction and antagonism and thinkers of affirmation and multiplicity—consist in a productive repetition of one of the crucial controversies of 19th century thought, summed up by the names ‘Hegel and Spinoza’.

Gregor Moder will present his paper “Hegel and Spinoza. Negativity in Contemporary Theory”, followed by a response by Pascale Gillot, and time for discussion.Gregor Moder researches “The Structure of the Void” and teaches “Philosophy of Art” at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is also a research fellow in the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, The Netherlands. His book on Hegel and Spinoza will appear in German translation with Turia+Kant in 2012.

Pascale Gillot, a former ICI Fellow, is a researcher in Philosophy at the Institut d’Histoire de la Pensée Classique, ENS de Lyon. After a PhD Dissertation dedicated to the issue of parallelism in Spinoza’s philosophy, her work has focused on a confrontation between early-modern and contemporary models of mind and subjectivity. She is the author of Althusser et la psychanalyse (PUF, 2009).