Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentary

· State University of New York Press
Ebook
331
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

This book presents three generations of German, French, and Anglo-American thinking on the Hegelian narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation in life, labor, and language—a narrative that has been subject to extensive commentary in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. The texts focus on a central topos in Western thought, the story of self-consciousness awakened in nature and in history. John O'Neill argues that current postmodern rejections of the Hegelian-Marxist narrative demand an understanding of the texts included here. Without Hegel and Marx in our toolbox, he argues, we will flounder in a world marked by the split between postmodern indifference and premodern passion.

The book makes a strong selection from the history of Hegelian-Marxist debate, hermeneutical and critical theory, and Freudian/Lacanian and feminist commentary on the dialectic of desire and recognition, on the levels of social psychology and political economy. Included are articles by Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sarte, Georg Lukács, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Howard Adelman, Shlomo Avineri, Jessica Benjamin, Edward S. Casey and J. Melvin Woody, Henry S. Harris, George Armstrong Kelly, Ludwig Siep, Judith N. Shklar, and Henry Sussman. The texts and commentaries show how the Hegelian-Maxist narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation is a contested story, one in which class, race, and gender issues are drawn into a historical romance that is being rewritten in contemporary cultural politics.

About the author

John O'Neill is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of a number of books, including For Marx Against Althusser and The Poverty of Postmodernism.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.