Gregor Moder
University of Ljubljana, Aufhebung Association
Gregor Moder is Senior Research Associate in Philosophy Department, University of Ljubljana. He won a 3-year research grant for a project on the theatricality of power, and he visited Princeton in 2020 as a Fulbright scholar to pursue this question in the writings of Foucault, Hegel, and Shakespeare. His recent works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern UP, 2017) and an edited volume on the Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He co-founded Aufhebung—International Hegelian Association and served as its first president (2014–2020).
Speaking at the conference
Saturday, 23 September, 3pm, Kosovel Hall
Caesar’s Wounds: The Absolute Master
Hegel remarks, in various contexts throughout his body of work, that death is the absolute master. However, the exact meaning of this phrase, of the coupling of death and master, varies to a certain degree. Death and human coping with death often imply an ethical life and a political structure for Hegel – so much so even that one is tempted to consider it as an elementary social phenomenon. This paper thus responds to the question of the master by way of a detour: by tracing the notion of death in political, historical, and conceptual processes in Hegel’s philosophy.