Hegel 13/13 — Bruno Bosteels on Hegel and Adorno
Scholar Bruno Bosteels explores how Adorno's critical theory transformed Hegelian dialectics in this installment of Columbia's Hegel 13/13 lecture series.
Why we picked this
The Hegel-Adorno relationship is one of the most productive tensions in 20th-century thought — Bosteels brings both the rigor and the political stakes that make this series worth following session by session.
Theodore Adorno spent his career in a productive argument with Hegel: drawing on the dialectical method while refusing its reconciliatory logic, insisting that the negative must be allowed to remain negative rather than sublated into a higher synthesis. His Negative Dialectics is among the most demanding works in twentieth-century philosophy, and understanding it requires understanding precisely what Adorno is pushing against in Hegel’s system. Bruno Bosteels, a scholar whose work spans Latin American cultural theory, communist philosophy, and the contemporary left, brings a distinctive perspective to this encounter between the two thinkers.
Bosteels’s session in Columbia’s Hegel 13/13 series takes on the question of what happens when a philosopher inherits a tradition by transforming it — how Adorno’s Frankfurt School context, his experience of fascism and exile, and his commitments to aesthetic theory all shape the way he reads and revises Hegel. The 13/13 format, which allows for extended engagement and cross-session dialogue, is well suited to a relationship between two philosophers that resists easy summary.
For attendees who have been following the series, this session lands at a useful point in the arc: late enough that the core Hegelian vocabulary is established, and positioned to illuminate how that vocabulary travels into explicitly political and aesthetic terrain. For newcomers, Bosteels’s clarity as a teacher makes this a viable entry point into a conversation that rewards sustained attention.