Hegel without Lacan: on Todd McGowan’s Emancipation after Hegel

Abstract

If Todd McGowan’s new book on Hegel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. McGowan is the giant of Vermont, the Bernie Sanders of the academy, the Larry David of Lacanian theory. In my review I make the following argument: desire is algorithmic, and realized in clickbait (clickbait names Hegel’s dialectics). McGowan’s book finds in Hegel a philosopher for the “after theory” era, a philosopher who forbids us from remaining satisfied with particularisms of the left or the right, a philosopher whose theory of contradiction is both universalist and grounded in the singular, a Hegel for whom love and duty are the slamdance of emancipation.