hegelpd takes a summer holiday. In this period we will be sharing recent essays and reviews by our research group. 

We are pleased to share the essay Soggettività e traduzione. Dialettica traduttiva e ontologia del soggetto in Hegel by Luca Illetterati and Saša Hrnjez, published in the volume Morality, Ethics, Religion between Classical German Philosophy and Contemporary Thought. Studies in Honor of Francesca Menegoni edited by Luca Illetterati, Armando Manchisi, Michael Quante, Alessandro Esposito and Barbara Santini (Padova University Press, 2020).

Here below you can find the abstract of the text:

In this article we will shed light on Hegel’s paragraph from the Encyclopedia (§ 475) in which the subject has been defined as the activity of translating the subjective content into objectivity. What does it mean to define the subject in terms of translation? What notion of translation is at issue here? And what consequences to our understanding of the subject has such a claim about its translating into the objectivity? In order to address these questions, we will take into consideration other Hegel’s works where the activity of translating is brought to light as well, precisely in Philosophy of Right and Science of Logic. By moving through Hegel’s text, but also by commenting on some reflections of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, we will argue that subjectivity does not exists truly and effectively before its activity of translating, i.e. the subject is a self-reflexive trans-posing in the element of objectivity, thus its selfnegation as subjectivity. The subject is not the ‘original’ to be translated, but the effect of its own activity of translation as expression of its freedom. In this sense, to conceive the subjectivity in terms of translation means, actually, to locate it in the context of loss, of risk, of the unexpectable, i.e. to conceive it as the possibility of failure.

You can download the pdf of the essay from the button below.