Workshop with Armin Schneider "To Begin with... Dialectics, Materialism and Mathematical Formalism in Hegel and Badiou. Or: Thinking between Philosophy and Science", 4.4.2019

On the 4^th of April, Armin Schneider (Humboldt University Berlin) held a workshop on Hegel, the beginning of his Science of Logic and its relation to Hegel’s early system drafts (in his Jena period). The workshop emerged from a CENTRAL College Project(a cooperation on PhD level between Universities of Berlin, Prague and Vienna) on Hegel and Badiou.

At first, Schneider gave an introduction into current discussions on Hegel and Post-Hegelian thought in Badiou, Ruda, Commay and Dolar. The irritating fact that Hegel’s Science of Logic – one of the main works of Hegelian dialectics – begins in a rather non-dialectical way was the background for Badiou’s critique of Hegel’s first chapter in the Logic of Being. The repetition of being in the very first syntagma of the Logic, “Being, pure being, –“, which even precedes determined negation (bestimmte Negation), causes the question if a repetitive form of thought is at work in Hegel’s speculative dialectics. However, Badiou’s insight was reevaluated in favour of Hegel by Mladen Dolar (Being and McGuffin) and Frank Ruda / Rebecca Commay (The Dash). Hegel’s beginning with the immediacy of pure being nonetheless has to be grasped as a remaining immediacy within all forms of logical mediation.

Following that, Armin Schneider presented an outline of his current work on Hegel. Dealing with the fact that the notion of repetition is often taken for one of the most important terms in Post-Hegelian philosophy (Kierkegaard, Freud, Deleuze etc.), Schneider investigated the role of repetition (Wiederholung) in the early writings of Hegel. Starting from Hegel’s system drafts in Jena, Schneider presented a new, innovative perspective on the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic.