Supervisor: Professor Catherine Malabou 

Institutional email:  K1274193@kingston.ac.uk

This project will investigate the reception of Hegel by the female philosophers Gillian Rose, Judith Butler, Rebecca Comay and Catherine Malabou, and their respective attempts at re-animating the speculative potential of Hegel’s thought. Hegel’s legacy, these thinkers argue, challenges trends in modern European philosophy, as well as the critiques of these trends, e.g. critical theory, poststructuralism and deconstruction. Hegelian speculation, according to these thinkers, reveals the inherent fragmentation or disjointedness of central, independent philosophical categories, for instance those of universal and particular or of law and ethics. A speculative approach examines such disjunctions but also analyses the tacit identity of supposed opposites, with the aim of producing linguistic and social and political meaning by working through the contradictions and tensions of concepts. Rose, Butler, Malabou and Comay propose that this is the radical kernel of Hegel’s thought. It is, they argue, in the plasticity of speculation that the potential for philosophical transformation, i.e. for thinking anew philosophical concepts and categories, resides. I intend to argue that this is a new, still unexplored dimension of Hegel scholarship that also has a feminine or feminist dimension to it. The proposed research will evaluate the philosophical interventions of these four thinkers and in doing so aims to investigate the structuring role of gender for philosophical authorship as well as the possibly emancipatory potential of a speculative approach