PhD student, Mat Keel, presenting paper at the 2022 UK Royal Geographic Society annual conference

Mat Keel presents paper, "Three Ways of Looking at the Sphinx: De Castro, Hegel, Povinelli" at the 2022 UK Royal Geographic Society conference. This paper enacts repeated returns to the mythic figure of the Sphinx, as grounded in Hegel’s treatment of the Egyptian mystery schools and the lesser sophistication he affords to pre-logocentric stages in his history and philosophy of religion. The sphinx is situated here as a fulcrum of the emergence of the human, the objectification of the animal, and the triumph of Occidental logos. This fulcrum is approached through variable speculations on the question of animality and the human, drawing on Viveiros De Castro, Elizabeth Povinelli’s and Hegel’s exegesis on the symbolic role of animality in Lectures on Religion.