About this Event
Only reserve in-person tickets if you plan on attending in-person. Otherwise, please reserve a virtual ticket.
In-person tickets on Eventbrite will close at 4:00 PM on March 31, 2026. Those that have signed up for an in-person ticket will receive an email with a QR code from [email protected] needed to enter the Columbia University campus. Each guest must have their own QR code so each guest needs to be registered. Please make sure that you use your legal first and last name when registering for the event. Please also bring a government-issued ID that matches the name on your registration to present to CU Public Safety staff. If you would like to attend in person and have not RSVP'd before 4:00 PM on March 31, 2026, please reach out to Ricardo Lombera at [email protected]. Request for access after 4:00 PM on March 31, 2026, unfortunately, cannot be guaranteed.
Seyla Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019.
Benhabib is a distinguished international scholar who is known for her research and teaching on social and political thought, particularly 20th century German thought and Hannah Arendt. Over the past two decades, she has become recognized for her contributions to migration and citizenship studies as well as her work on gender and multiculturalism.
Benhabib was the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard University, where she was a professor of government from 1993 to 2000 and chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996 to 2000.
She was the president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association from 2006 to 2007 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, she has been a research affiliate and senior scholar in many research institutions in the United States and in Europe, such as the Russell Sage Foundation (2000–2001), Berlin’s distinguished Wissenschaftskolleg (2009), NYU’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice (2012), the Transatlantic Academy in Washington D.C. (2013), and Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Humboldt University of Berlin (2018).
Benhabib has also delivered the Gauss Seminars in Criticism (Princeton, 1998), the Spinoza Lectures (Amsterdam, 200), The John Robert Seeley Lectures (Cambridge University, 2002), Tanner Lectures (University of California, Berkeley 2004), Catedra Ferrater Mora Lectures (Girona, Spain 2005), and the Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago Law School (Spring 2020). In fall 2020, she will deliver the annual human rights lecture at the London School of Economics.
Among her other professional activities, she organized the Istanbul Seminars in her native Istanbul, Turkey from 2009–2015 (with the Italian RESET Foundation, devoted to intercultural cooperation), which focused on enhancing international cooperation with intellectuals from Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Israel, and Palestine, among other countries.
She established Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory with New School for Social Research Professor Andrew Arato and served as the journal’s co-editor from 1991 to 1997. She also served on the editorial board of Citizenship Studies, Political Theory, Journal of International Political Theory, Human Rights Review, Global Constitutionalism, Blatter fur deutsche und internationale Politik, and Jus Cogens.
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Hegel 13/13 is a multi-year project that explores the historical confrontations with G.W.F. Hegel’s thought, from the nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of developing new critical perspectives and practices for today’s times.
The ambition of this multi-year project is to serve as a catalyst to produce new forms of critique and praxis to address the present political conjuncture.
New philosophies and practices have so often emerged from a sharp confrontation with past ideas, especially, and curiously, from confrontations with Hegel’s paradigm. Whether it was Marx in the nineteenth century turning the Phenomenology of Spirit on its head, or Lenin closely annotating The Science of Logic, or C.L.R. James transforming the dialectic into a tool for decolonization, or Frantz Fanon or Jean-Paul Sartre inverting the master-slave dialectic, or Judith Butler turning subjectivity into desire, so many of the major contributions to critique and praxis in the past two centuries were born from an antagonistic struggle with Hegel’s thought.
From early on with Ludwig Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians, to Alexandre Kojève in the 1930s and his influence on post-war French philosophy but also on Allan Bloom and American conservative thought, or to the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the U.S. workers’ movement composed of CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs, the contradictions in Hegel’s thought have given birth to some of the most important and impactful political ideas and practices.
It is time then, once again, to return to Hegel, not to think with him, but rather, as it has so often been more productive, to think against and beyond him. It is time for another round of agonistic confrontations with Hegel’s writings—The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Science of Logic (1812-1816), the Encyclopedia (1817), and the Principles of the Philosophy of Law (1820).
The multi-year project “Inversions of Hegel 13/13” will begin during the academic year 2025-2026 with preparatory sessions (informal conversations, small seminars, reading groups, and lectures) that will lay the groundwork for a 13/13 public seminar series on the confrontations with Hegel’s writings that have shaped world history. Throughout, the ambition will be to develop a new critical praxis for today.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Columbia University, 116th and Broadway, New York, United States
USD 0.00
