Re-articulating Genealogy: Hegel on Kinship, Race and Reproduction

Abstract

In the decades around 1800, genealogical imaginaries, or the social, political, economic and cultural meanings of descent and kinship, underwent far-reaching change. Hegel was deeply concerned with these transformations in various respects and in different parts of his philosophy. By engaging with the issues of kinship and family, with the disputes over racial diversity as well as with the scientific debates about life, reproduction and the meaning of sexual difference, Hegel contributed to a philosophical re-articulation of genealogical relations, or to the shaping of a new vocabulary through which the political, social, cultural and epistemic transformations of the period were rendered intelligible in distinctive ways. Although Hegel did not draw explicit connections between his reflections on kinship, race and reproduction, my aim is to explore the semantic interrelations among his reflections on these issues.

Hegel and Egypt's African Element

“… 15 In an important essay Susanne Lettow shows the clear difference between the Kantian conception of race and Hegel's. Her account might need to be modified, albeit only in one of its details, given that she draws heavily on a sentence in the Zusätze attached to paragraph 393 of The Philosophy of Spirit where Hegel seems to dismiss the salience of Abstammung in the assessment of human beings (Hegel 1845: 65; Lettow 2021: 264). That particular sentence is not found in the surviving record of Hegel's lectures from which Ludwig Boumann, the first editor of Hegel's Encyclopaedia drew the surrounding sentences (see Hegel 2011c: 956).…”