In his speech at the University of Dakar in July 2007, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Africa as the continent that has not yet fully entered history. This article takes this obvious reference to Hegel as its starting point and examines the current significance of ‘Hegel’s Africa’. Through a close reading of The Philosophy of History and The Phenomenology of Spirit, it shows that Hegel’s remarks on Africa are by no means incidental. They constitute rem(a)inders of a modernity (...) that is based on the construction of Africa as its own limit. The return of Hegel’s Africa, the article concludes, can thus not be restricted to a problem of the new European right. It is part of an understanding of modernity that remains haunted by the specters of racism. (shrink)

Ausgangspunkt des Artikels sind Simone de Beauvoirs und Frantz Fanons Interpretation eines Schlüsseltextes moderner Anerkennungstheorien, Hegels Herr-und-Knecht-Passage. Beide Aneignungsversuche geraten allerdings in eine Krise, die, so wird gezeigt, das konstitutive Verhältnis von Subjektivierung und Darstellung betrifft. Mit Bezug auf die Theorien von Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak und Judith Butler wird infolgedessen dargelegt, dass der Zugang zum Bereich der Repräsentation als Vorbedingung von Anerkennung gedacht und derart in eine Anerkennungstheorie miteinbezogen werden muss.

The state of nature is a fundamental concept of modern political philosophy. As such, it is particularly associated with Thomas Hobbes’ and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work. As the following article shows, the state of nature is not simply an auxiliary construction [Hilfskonstruktion] for a theory that aims to clarify the relation between the political order and its origins and normative principles. It is also a figure of thought that introduces colonial images into political philosophy. The following reading of Hobbes and Rousseau, (...) which also draws on image analysis, traces how their conceptions of the state of nature are constitutively linked to imaginations of the savage that emanate from contemporary colonial discourses. Moreover, by comparing the writings of Hobbes and Rousseau it becomes apparent that the colonial difference increasingly takes on a systematic relevance. This development further contains significant similarities with the changing use of gender differences in political philosophy. (shrink)