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We warmly invite you to the book launch of R. A. Aumiller’s Hegel, Marx, and the Laughing Matter of Spirit (Northwestern University Press, 2025)

Co-hosted by The Center for Contemporary European Philosophy at Radboud University and Vermittlung – Research Group for Critical Hegel Studies

Speakers: Dr. R. A. Aumiller and Dr. Ype de Boer

Location: Radboud University, Room E 3.01

Date: Monday 14 September, 15:30–17:00

Book Description: What happens when those denied political subjectivity play out their negative role in a historical drama that casts them as the damned? Hegel, Marx, and the Laughing Matter of Spirit locates the eruption of revolutionary laughter in the cracks of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, where exiled philosophers, Partisan fighters, and artists framed their political resistance as a historical comedy. Hegelian comedy animates the Young Hegelian critique of Prussian censorship, Walter Benjamin’s antifascist staging of dialectical disruption, and the Yugoslav Partisan attempt to create a new world in the rubble of fascist occupation. Revolution erupts from a historical stage that can no longer look upon its own contradictions with a straight face. Drawing on the defiant spirit of comedy, this Hegelian feminist manifesto refuses political despair, overturning the perception that history tragically repeats itself. Adopting “Nothing changes” as a mantra, Aumiller transforms a concession of defeat into a rallying cry for resistance.

R. A. Aumiller (Rae) is an assistant professor in the department of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University. They received their PhD in Philosophy from Villanova University (2016), specializing in European philosophy. Their publications include Hegel, Marx, and the Laughing Matter of Spirit (Northwestern UP, 2025) and A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism (De Gruyter, 2020). Aumiller was the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Grant to conduct research in Slovenia and fellowships at the Maimonides Center for Advanced Studies in Jewish Scepticism in Hamburg and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. They previously taught at Columbia University and the University of Hamburg.

Ype de Boer is lecturer in metaphysics and philosophical anthropology at Radboud University Nijmegen and extraordinary professor in philosophy at North-West University in South-Africa. He has published on the fiction of Murakami, on eroticism, happiness and on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. His most recent English monograph is Agamben’s Ethics of the Happy Life. Beyond Nihilism and Morality (2024).