Slavoj Žižek proposes to offer a renewed version of dialectical materialism and so a critical theory of late modern capitalism. The path through German Idealism is the path he has chosen and it is important to know if his version is leading us correctly. The article suggests a different way of understanding the problem of "negativity" in that tradition. This forces the question of whether there is much left in contemporary society that provides any sort of material basis for Hegel's aspirations about the potentially transformative and educative potentials of modern civil society. No one can be anything but profoundly pessimistic about this possibility, but the search for such possible "traces of reason" seems to be more genuinely Hegelian.
Slavoj Žižek; G. W. F. Hegel; German idealism; Late capitalist modernity