The conference confronts a pressing question: What becomes of Hegel’s concept of Geist in an era of AI and synthetic cognition, where knowledge exists without human comprehension? For Hegel, Spirit is the self-developing totality of mediation and conscious understanding. Today’s epistemic structures—like language models and neural nets—bypass this reflection, operating on a logic that resists intentionality. This raises the question: Does AI signal a new stage of reason, or the end of the Hegelian subject? Does it reveal an inhuman dimension within Spirit itself?
Serving as an indirect homage to Slavoj Žižek, the event explores these questions through psychoanalysis and post-Hegelian dialectics. A Marxist perspective is explicitly welcome to examine whether AI functions as the operating system of post-political technocapitalism, intensifying class divisions and reconfiguring labor. Ultimately, the conference asks: Is AI a dialectical continuation of Geist, or its parody? And can the subject still be thought within systems that outpace its understanding?
Speakers: Andrew Cutrofello (Chicago), Luca Di Blasi (Bern), Mladen Dolar (Ljubljana), Daniel Feige (Stuttgart), Dominik Finkelde (München), Rahel Jaeggi (Berlin), Adrian Johnston (Albuquerque), Thomas Khurana (Potsdam), Christoph Menke (Frankfurt/M.), Dirk Quadflieg (Leipzig), Michael Reder (München), Frank Ruda (Dundee), Russell Sbriglia (South Orange), Slavoj Žižek (London), Alenka Zupančič (Ljubljana).
To register, please email: hegelonai@gmail.com
(HfPh-Students are exempt from registration.)
For more information, please visit: https://hegelonai.wordpress.com/
