Todd McGowan

Todd McGowan (born October 9, 1967) is an American film scholar, philosopher, and professor of English at the University of Vermont where he teaches film and cultural theory. He works on Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, and the intersection of these lines of thought with the cinema. McGowan is the author of more than 15 books, editor of Film Theory in Practice series from Bloomsbury and co-editor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. McGowan's work has been described as a "Politics of Death Drive". McGowan cohosts the podcast Why Theory with Ryan Engley.

Work

Hegelianism In Emancipation After Hegel (2019), Todd McGowan presents ‘a new radical Hegel’, dispensing with the infamous formula of the dialectic as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’, McGowan maintains that contradiction is not the opposition of an antithesis to a thesis, but occurs when a position follows its own internal logic and exposes its inner division. According to McGowan, Freud's psychoanalytic theory ‘provides a theoretical supplement for Hegel’. By conceptualizing the unconscious, Freud sees subjectivity through a contradiction that it cannot eliminate.