Todd McGowan, "Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution" (Columbia UP, 2019)
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What is the main focus of Todd McGowan’s book *Emancipation After Hegel*?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Intellectual History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Bill Schaefer, the host of the channel for today's session. Today we'll be talking to Todd McGowan about his new book Emancipation After Hegel Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. which argues that an encounter with intractable contradiction lies at the heart of Hegel's philosophy, and that a proper understanding of his dialectical method could transform our understanding of the possibilities of contemporary politics. It is therefore a work that seeks to demonstrate the urgent relevance of intellectual history to problems of the present. Todd McAlen, welcome to the show.
Hi Bill. Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you for coming. Oh okay. So Todd, I wonder if you could begin this interview by telling us a bit about your background and how it led you to writing this book.
The fur actually the first time I read Hegel was in graduate school. So I just had I I had a sense I don't know where the sense came from, that Hegel was important and so I asked my dissertation director if I could do an independent study reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and that sort of took me off on the on the path to to Hegel. And then I I guess from that p not that early, but pretty early on I had the idea that I wanted to write a book on Hegel and I'd say over the last maybe ten years I've been slowly accumulating little pieces of it, like chapters or or just little sections. And then I about maybe three, four years ago, I decided to put it all together and then that's how the book came about.
Okay. So my first question is about the difference between contradiction and difference. Because at a time when the celeb celebration of difference has become mandatory in leftist theorizing, your book tries to show that the logic of contradiction uh emerging from Hegel's dialectic provides a much better basis for a leftist politics than an ontology of difference. And of course, as I'm sure we all know, the the joyful valorization of difference in theory is almost always accompanied by a a total rejection of Hegel's totalizing tendencies. So I wonder if you can give us an initial impression of the difference between difference and contradiction as you understand it. and the stakes of that distinction for contemporary theory.
Sure. So I I I guess I associate difference mostly with Deleuze, but also as you're saying, it's with it goes far beyond that. It goes it's comes from Derry Dah and it also is sort of infiltrated just almost every aspect of contemporary theory. And my idea is that Difference is always a I even think it's almost always an ideological move away from contradiction so that it so contradiction makes
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main focus of Todd McGowan’s book *Emancipation After Hegel*?
0:00–9:45
2
How did McGowan’s academic background lead him to write about Hegel’s dialectic?
9:45–15:36
3
Why does McGowan argue that contradiction, not difference, is the key to left‑ist politics?
15:36–29:09
4
What reasons does McGowan give for rejecting the thesis‑antithesis‑synthesis schema?
29:09–51:25
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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