marxismNL

The OZSW Study Group – Vermittlung: Critical Hegel Studies
is organizing a Symposium and a Workshop on Hegel's notion of Vermittlung/Mediation and is happy to share the two CfPs below.

Hegel and The Logics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Mediation - December 11 2026 Utrecht University

The symposium brings together international and Netherlands-based scholars to engage with the classical Hegelian concept of mediation (Vermittlung).

While this concept exhibits a strong logico-dialectical texture, it also simultaneously  displays aesthetic relevance and political scope. At a moment when immediacy—“the  style of too-late capitalism” (Kornbluh 2024) – appears to have supplanted the need for  mediation in both art, literature, politics and the economy, fostering a proliferation of  transparent, immediate narratives governed by flows and instantaneity, this symposium turns to Hegel to restage the importance of mediation for critique and culture alike.

Countering the myth of the given, Hegel’s philosophy is committed to demonstrating that immediacy is always-already essentially mediated, and thus a fiction. As the Science of Logic explicitly states, immediacy appears rich in concreteness, yet proves to be the poorest. Likewise, the comical journey of consciousness dramatized in the Phenomenology of Spirit illustrates that immediacy is necessarily partial, abstract,
and therefore deceptive.

In a similar vein, un-mediated and hypertrophic incarnations of subjectivity that refuse  to be entangled with the objective world – such as the beautiful soul, the romantic ironist,  or the virtuous Kantian moralist – are, in Hegel’s view, inevitably doomed to defeat and  dissolution. Hegel’s concept of mediation thus reminds us that what initially appears  self-evident and self-subsisting often, upon closer scrutiny, turns out to be the result of  historical, social, aesthetic, and conceptual developments that  demand acknowledgment and critical examination.

The symposium welcomes contributions that focus on the concept of mediation in and beyond Hegel’s philosophy, across the fields of logics, aesthetics and politics (see ‘preparation and assignment’ for the Call for Papers).

Keynote speakers: Prof. María del Rosario Acosta López (University of California, Riverside) and Prof. Christoph Menke (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt).

Please, send your 250-word abstracts to hegelvermittlung@proton.me

Deadline July 31st 2026.

Mediation in Hegel’s Phenomenology: Aesthetics, Religion, History and Method December 12

This workshop is part of a two-day symposium which brings together international and  Netherlands-based scholars to engage with the classical Hegelian concept of mediation (Vermittlung). The first day will consist of an international conference. The workshop on the second day will allow graduate students to present and discuss their work on Hegel’s seminal  work Phenomenology of Spirit.

The study group Vermittlung is running reading groups with graduate students on the Phenomenology of Spirit in Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Nijmegen. The students  participating in these readings group will be invited to participate in the workshop to present their work, but we will also send out a general call for other graduate students and early career researchers to participate.

The workshop will offer participants the opportunity to present their work and discuss it with local and international experts, who will also be attending the conference on the first day. We will begin the workshop with a lecture on the theme of mediation in the Phenomenology by one of the invited international experts. The rest of the day will consist of student/participant presentations: graduate students participating for credit will be required either to present their own work or prepare a response to a paper by another student in advance. There will be space for 10-14 student participants.

The workshop will offer participants the opportunity to present their work and discuss it with local and international experts, who will also be presenting at the conference on the first day. 

Each student will present a 15 min. paper in a panel including two presentations. Each respondent will be discussing the two presentations (15 min. in total). The rest of the time will be devoted to a general Q&A.

NB. Students actively participating at the workshop, either presenting or responding, will receive 2 credits (for this a formal registration by with OZSW is required). The call for papers is open to graduate students (R/MA/PhD) and recent graduates. All students are welcome to attend.

Abstracts: Abstracts of 250 words should be sent hegelvermittlung@proton.me

Deadline: 31^st of July 2026.