Hegel and the Shadow of Materialist Geographies

Authors

  • Lucas Pohl Department of Human Geography Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

Keywords:

Hegel, Materialism, Slavoj Žižek, Henri Lefebvre, Materialist Geographies, Idealism

Abstract

There seems to be a wide agreement in critical geographic thought that Hegel is dead, as to end up with Hegel’s idealism serves to be the starting point for the materialist project of critical geographies. This paper aims to call this starting point into question by confronting Henri Lefebvre with Slavoj Žižek. While Lefebvre, one of the pioneers of materialist geographic thought, intensively worked on a metaphilosophical critique to open Hegel’s testament, Žižek’s Hegel supposed to pave the way for a new philosophical materialism. This paper seeks to claim that such a materialist Hegel not only survives the critical encounter of Lefebvre’s metaphilosophy, but also encourages us to inquire about the possibilities and consequences of a geographical turn to Hegel. What if there is a Hegel out there that geography has not even detected?

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Published

2019-05-24

How to Cite

Pohl, L. (2019). Hegel and the Shadow of Materialist Geographies. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(2), 285–307. Retrieved from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1716