Hegel & Hamlet

University of Copenhagen
May 17, 15.15-16.45 – South Campus, room 24.0.11

Lecture by Professor Dr. Anselm Haverkamp, New York University 

Hegel knew Shakespeare by heart. He developed his philosophy of history and his philosophy of right, as well as his lectures on aesthetics, with Shakespeare on his mind. The combination of Hegel and Shakespeare works in both directions: It helps to know Shakespeare, if one wants to understand Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but it is also illuminating to read Hegel in order to understand the philosophical interest in Shakespeare after Herder and Goethe. Hamlet – the play and the notorious figure – is the most exemplary case, where Hegel’s philosophy needs Shakespeare, and Shakespeare needs (readers like) Hegel, in order to unfold its implicit (latent) philosophical content. 

Anselm Haverkamp is Emeritus Professor of English at New York University and University Professor of Philosophy at LMU Munich. He has published books in English, German and French on aesthetic theory, rhetoric and metaphorology, Shakespeare and Hölderlin, Keats and Joyce, most recently a collection of theoretical essays, Productive Digression: Theorizing Practice (Berlin/ Boston: de Gruyter, April 2017). At
present he teaches as Kade Visiting Professor at UCSB a Graduate Seminar on “Shakespeare and Hegel.”

CEMES research group: “Thinking the European Republic of Letters”

Info: christian.benne@hum.ku.dk

 Everyone welcome – no registration