Knowledge Without Comprehension? On Spirit after Hegel in the Age of AI

The conference confronts a pressing question of our time: Can there be knowledge without comprehension—and what becomes of Hegel’s concept of Geist in an era defined by algorithmic operations, statistical inference, and synthetic cognition?

The point of departure is Hegel’s conception of Spirit as the self-developing totality of mediation, in which knowing is never simply the accumulation of information, but the unfolding of self-related comprehension. Yet today, we witness a proliferation of epistemic structures—artificial intelligences, language models, neural nets—that generate outputs irreducible to conscious understanding. These systems “know” in a sense that bypasses human reflection, operating through a logic that resists the very categories of intentionality and meaning on which Hegel’s dialectic relies.

What happens, then, to Spirit when cognition no longer entails comprehension? Does AI signal a new stage of reason—or the end of the very subject Hegel placed at the core of his system? Drawing on psychoanalysis (Lacan, the Ljubljana School) and post-Hegelian dialectics (Marx, Adorno, Deleuze, the Frankfurt School), the conference explores whether AI reveals an unthought dimension of Geist: the unconscious of the concept, the drive of negativity beyond reflection, the logic of the inhuman within Spirit itself.

At the same time, the event serves as an indirect homage to Slavoj Žižek—both as a thinker of Hegel’s speculative legacy and as a diagnostician of our paradoxical historical moment. In revisiting the question of Spirit under digital conditions, we aim to honor Žižek’s persistent engagement with the dialectical entanglements of consciousness, ideology, and technicity.

A Marxist perspective is explicitly welcome: AI not only transforms knowledge but intensifies class divisions and reconfigures labor, value, and subjectivity. Can HegelianGeist still name a site of resistance— or has it become the operating system of a post-political technocapitalism?

Invited speakers may interrogate the unconscious as a thinking machine, reflect on the limits of rational comprehension, explore the ontology of machinic intelligence, or speculate on a rehabilitation—or radical transformation—of Hegelian categories. Is AI a dialectical continuation of Geist, or its monstrous parody? And can the subject still be thought within systems that outpace its ability to comprehend?

Speakers:

Andrew Cutrofello, Mladen Dolar, Daniel Feige,  Rahel Jaeggi, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Dirk Quadflieg, Michael Reder, Frank Ruda, Russell Sbriglia,  Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Dominik Finkelde.

With kind support from Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.