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Azafea. Philosophy Journal, vol. 29 (2027)

Monograph: Dialectic and Criticism in the Wake of Hegel
Coordinators: Valerio Rocco (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Berta M. Pérez (Universitat de València)

For both his followers and his detractors, Hegel's thought represents simultaneously the culmination and the collapse of philosophical modernity. This dual movement –of culmination and rupture– encodes his liminal character: Hegel is the thinker who, by bringing modernity to its maximum self-awareness, simultaneously opens the horizon of contemporary philosophy. This structural ambiguity –being both the end and the beginning of an era– explains the equally ambiguous, not to say paradoxical, nature of some of his texts, as well as the ambivalent relationship that his great heirs, from Marx to Adorno, have maintained with him.

At the height of modernity, Hegel introduced dialectic as both a philosophical approach and an ontological model that allows us to leave behind the fundamental premise of modernity: the rigid dichotomy between subject and object, or reason and world, which had just been definitively sanctioned by Kant's transcendental approach. For Hegel, dialectic is in fact the manner in which the opposites with which modern philosophy has struggled truly relate to one another, and consequently the condition under which these oppositions must be rethought. It is therefore responsible for Hegel's assertion, for the first time in the history of that philosophical era, that reason is always already in a world, or, in other words, that the spirit (or the subject) is in itself objective: ultimately, dialectic is responsible for Hegel's writing of a philosophy of the objective spirit.

This is why the contemporary critical tradition –from Marx to the Frankfurt School– finds its first condition of possibility in Hegelian dialectic. As Adorno observed, only once the dialectical approach has succeeded in reducing the distance separating reason from the real—once it has stripped reason of its abstract character and its consequent impotence—does the possibility arise of transforming reality through thought, that is, of carrying out an effective critique of the existing world. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary philosophy, which understands itself as a critique of ideology, as a denunciation –made from reason– of the irrationality of reality, recognises that it has its roots in Hegelian dialectic.

However, at first glance, the very discovery that makes criticism possible seems, in Hegel, to threaten its viability. If the subject and substance –reason and social reality– are only constituted in their reciprocal relationship, if each of them has its being in the other, it becomes necessary to recognise the necessarily “framed” nature of the subject or reason and to assume the non-existence of any “outside” from which to judge the ethical substance of the present. Dialectic thus dissolves the illusion of an impartial gaze or of a duty alien to historical reality. Hence Hegel can assert that philosophy does not have the task of "indicating how the world should be" and reject the point of view of "morality," especially in the exacerbated version that, in his time, was expressed in the romantic absolutisation of subjective reflection and conviction. It is understandable, then, that this liquidation of the critical "outside" meant that, until the end of the 20th century, the philosophical conservatism of his thought was virtually unquestionable (remember, for example, Tugendhat's verdict as late as 1986) and that even the critical tradition itself, recognising Hegel as its theoretical starting point, also proclaimed the need to turn dialectic "upside down" (Marx) or to radically change its sign, replacing its "positive" character with a "negative" determination (Adorno).

The result of all this is that, in the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy, when it was not dismissed out of hand as the expression of the most totalising modern rationalism, appeared as a two-faced figure from which the dialectical method could be saved, but in no case its resolution in a closed system, which would inevitably end up sanctioning the status quo. And it is this way of resolving the paradoxes inherent in dialectical thinking that explains why, even today, part of Hegelian-rooted critical thinking, referring to such topical issues as feminism, ecology, the postcolonial situation, and the globalised and "weary" nature of late capitalism, still confesses to using Hegelian "tools" while taking care, at the same time, to distance itself from the Hegelian point of view as such (think, for example, of Jameson, Honneth, Butler, Fanon, Buck-Morss, among others).

However, recent decades have profoundly changed this diagnosis. A broad international movement to re-read Hegel –led, from different traditions, by authors such as Pippin, McDowell, Malabou, Brandom, Hösle, Vieweg and Žižek– has helped to free dialectic from the suspicion of conservatism and recover its genuinely critical potential. All of them have strived to revive the general point of view of his thought and, in this sense, to rethink his dialectic as an ontology and not as a mere method that could be used beyond, and even against, Hegel.

It is these readings –or at least a good part of them– that have revealed that the philosophical (and not only political) conservatism attributed to Hegel for more than a century and a half depends directly on the unfounded assumption that the subject he places in a dialectical relationship with objective reality constitutes a positive principle, endowed with a specific content –specifically, that which pre-Hegelian modern philosophy has assigned to reason– which guides the dialectical movement with absolute sovereignty towards its own realisation. Such a prejudice leads to the conclusion that, even if reason, as dialectic, is determined as historical and linguistic, its positive content will constitute the “concept” of reality and that, for this very reason, once –in Hegel's time and philosophy– this is known and realised as such, there will no longer be any reason to seek to transform the world. Deconstructing this interpretation, the recent revival of Hegelian philosophy has recognised that it is only negativity –understood as a force that is always turned against itself– that constitutes its (non-)principle and that it is from this that we must decipher the redetermination of the subject and the 'rationality' of the real that Hegel, breaking with modernity, carried out (think especially of the cases of Žižek, Ruda, Dolar, McGowan, and Johnston).

From this point, we can understand that the fact that dialectic denies any “beyond” from which to judge reality externally, far from resulting in the exclusion of all forms of criticism, rather determines philosophy itself as an exercise that is always critical, which, in purely describing reality, causes it to measure itself against itself and expose the contradictions that –given that its ultimate foundation is nothing more than its own negativity– necessarily run through it (remember in this regard the works of Duque, Zupancic, Moss, and Illetterati, among others). These re-readings, in short, do not merely recognise the seed of a critical philosophy in Hegelian dialectic, but discover it as a work that is already radically critical in itself.

However, such criticism is not only devoid of criteria alien to the reality under examination, used as mean of comparison that would in fact give voice to the subjective interests or convictions of those who exercise it, but is also freed from the assumption –still persistent in the classical form of the critique of ideology– that reality itself must be, at least in essence, consistent and coherent. And that, therefore, it must be possible, sooner or later, to trace it back to its (positive) principle and thus access its truth. It is therefore not surprising that this critique, which is directly anchored in Hegel, claims to be in a better position than Marxist or Adornian thought to respond to the objections raised to the critical tradition in general from post-foundational thought, which –starting with Heidegger and arriving, via Nancy, Laclau or Lefort, to Marchart– interprets the political from an original nothingness and conceives philosophy as pure deconstruction.

The debate that thus opens up between dialectical criticism and deconstruction revolves fundamentally around the question of determining which conception of the negative can adequately respond to the crisis of the present or to the present as crisis, as a time that calls for criticism because it wants to be left behind.

Suggested thematic lines:

The philosophical relevance of Hegelian dialectic today.
Critical review of the historiographical reception of Hegel.
Negativity, contradiction and totality in Hegel and in his contemporary reinterpretations.
Dialectic and critique: from Marx to Critical Theory and its recent developments.
Hegel and the post-foundational tradition: between dialectic and deconstruction.
Recognition, freedom and normativity: Hegelian legacies in contemporary practical philosophy.
Nature, life and spirit: dialectic in current ecological debates.
Feminism, postcolonialism and critical reinterpretations of the Hegelian subject.
Ontology of negativity and critique of modern reason.

All manuscripts received must comply with Azafea’s publication standards (https://revistas.usal.es/dos/index.php/0213-3563/about/submissions) and will be evaluated by the double-blind system. Submissions are accepted in Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese.

The deadline for article submissions is 15 November 2026.

Valerio Rocco & Berta M. Pérez

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Azafea. Revista de Filosofía, vol. 30 (2028)

Monograph: Jacques Derrida and the Phenomenological Tradition

Coordinators: Maurizio Ferraris (Università degli Studi di Torino) and Jimmy Hernández Marcelo (Universidad de Salamanca)

The relationship between Jacques Derrida and phenomenology constitutes one of the most fertile and widely debated issues in contemporary philosophy. For decades, the dominant interpretation held that deconstruction emerged as a break with Husserlian phenomenology and, more broadly, with the metaphysics of presence. From this perspective, Derrida's work was understood as exposing the limits of the phenomenological project while opening a radically new philosophical horizon.

Research conducted over the past decades has profoundly transformed this picture. The publication of manuscripts, seminars, and early writings, together with renewed interest in the genesis of Derrida's thought, has revealed the extent to which phenomenology constitutes the very ground upon which deconstruction develops. The study of Derrida's writings on Husserl between 1954 and 1967, along with the reconsideration of many of his later texts, has shown that some of the central problems of his philosophy—genesis, temporality, historicity, alterity, ideality, writing, and the constitution of meaning—emerge through a direct engagement with transcendental phenomenology.

This shift in perspective has led to a reassessment of both Derrida's philosophy and the history of French phenomenology itself. Rather than being described simply as a "post-phenomenological" thinker, Derrida increasingly appears as one of the most significant interlocutors within the tradition inaugurated by Husserl. Deconstruction can thus be understood not merely as a critique of phenomenology, but also as a radicalization of some of its fundamental tensions: between genesis and structure, presence and absence, ideality and historicity, constitution and alterity.

Moreover, Derrida's place within French phenomenology invites a reconsideration of the debates that shaped the reception of Husserl in France. His thought occupies a complex space of dialogue with figures such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Cavaillès, Suzanne Bachelard, Tran Duc Thao, and Paul Ricoeur, while engaging closely with some of the major philosophical questions of the twentieth century: the critique of metaphysics, theory of literature, philosophy of language, philosophy of history, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.

At a time when international scholarship increasingly emphasizes the continuity between phenomenology and deconstruction, it seems particularly important to foster renewed reflection on the philosophical significance of this dialogue. This special issue seeks to contribute to that endeavor by bringing together studies that explore, from both historical and systematic perspectives, the complex relationship between Derrida and phenomenology, as well as the enduring relevance of the questions arising from this encounter.