Hegel 13/13 with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak engages with Hegel's philosophy in Columbia's landmark lecture series exploring contemporary relevance of dialectical thought.
Why we picked this
Spivak reading Hegel through the lens of colonial power is one of the most provocative intellectual exercises happening anywhere right now — and Columbia opens these sessions to the public for free.
Columbia’s “13/13” lecture series pairs a single philosopher with thirteen leading thinkers across a full academic year, each bringing their own intellectual framework to the same body of work. This year’s subject is Hegel, and the sessions are free and open to anyone who shows up. The format is unusual in the best sense: not a survey course, not a panel discussion, but a sustained close reading from a dozen distinct vantage points.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is among the most influential theorists of the last half century. Her landmark essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” forced a reckoning with how Western philosophical traditions — Hegel very much included — construct and erase the voices of colonized peoples. Hegel’s philosophy of history, with its teleological march toward Geist and its open dismissal of Africa and Asia as outside of history, provides exactly the terrain where Spivak’s critique operates at its sharpest.
This session matters because it refuses the comfort of reading Hegel in isolation from the world his thought helped justify. Whether you arrive as a philosophy student, a theorist, or simply someone who wants to hear a major intellectual work at full power, this is the kind of free public lecture that, a decade from now, you will be glad you attended.