Stop the Owl of Minerva! - Zizek's favourite books on Hegel

By Rowan Wilson / 12 June 2012

So that we can all be doing background reading before this Friday's overnight reading, we asked Slavoj Zizek which books influenced the writing of his Less Than Nothing. Here's the list (in no order):

Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution  - Rebecca Comay

The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic  - Catherine Malabou

In the Spirit of Hegel - Robert C. Solomon

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath - Robert Pippin

Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit - Fredric Jameson

L' envers de la dialectique: Hegel à la lumière de Nietzsche - Gerard Lebrun

Do you know of any good reviews of these books?

And what's missing from the list? Please let us know below.

4 comments

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It's interesting to see that Zizek's changed his Pippin pick (from Hegel's Idealism) and his Lebrun pick (from La patience du Concept). Also, he's recently mentioned his Longeneusse as formative, although this didn't make the cut. I find it a bit puzzling to see this particular Jameson, as it is by no means a major contribution to the scholarship (to put it charitably) and Valences of the Dialectic is much more impressive (albeit it sometimes seems to be written and organized as if it were a Zizek book). Also curious is the absence of any Hegel specific scholars (aside from Comay)... not a Houlgate, not a Harris, not a Winfield, Inwood, or a Maker. Not a Hyppolite, Kojeve, Koyre, et. al. Or any German texts at all! But then favourites are favourites and who knows the reasons for these omissions.

Fans of Zizek would likely take a lot from Carlson's Commentary on Hegel's Science of Logic, which uses Lacan's borromean knot schema to articulate the form of the Greater Logic. If I can give a few further personal recommendations (excluding Zizek's own work and those mentioned above), they would be the following: Houlegate - Opening of Hegel's Logic; Beiser - Hegel; Hyppolite - Logic and Existence; Badiou - the Rational Kernal of Hegel's Dialectic; Franks - All or Nothing; Lenin - Philosophical Notebooks, Vol. 38.

R K / 12 June 2012 0 people think so
see the long interview with Comay --
 http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/view/3612
F M / 14 June 2012 0 people think so
Slightly surprised not to see Alexandre Kojeve's book Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Basic Books, 1969), but perhaps only because it has been cited as a formative text by others.

As a relative stranger to Hegel, I would also offer Terry Pinkard's Hegel: A biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000), although I cannot vouch for its contribution to scholarship concerning Hegel.
Sam Kinsley / 19 June 2012 0 people think so

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