There’s going to be a big conference on Hegel at Birkbeck in May, entitled “The Actuality of the Absolute: Hegel, Our Untimely Contemporary”. The event’s description asks an interesting question:

What if the ridiculous image of Hegel as the absurd “absolute idealist” who “pretended to know everything” is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen-memory), a fantasy-formation destined to cover up a traumatic truth? The task of the symposium will be to unearth aspects of this traumatic truth.

It’d be interesting to attend this one. I’m sure Slavoj Žižek’s presentation will be fantastic. His tome Less than Nothing is still sitting on my bookshelf, but I’m working towards it.