I present Hegel’s position that beauty and moral agency cannot be paired in any productive way, demonstrating this as a culminating claim of the sixth chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this, we learn that for Hegel, beauty claims an ambiguous position, always eviscerated yet never fully put to rest. This dialectical tension requires that we attend to the place of beauty as it appears in Hegel’s thoughts on morality and marks a departure from a long-standing tradition – exemplified (...) in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Immanuel Kant, the ‘Beautiful Souls’ of 18th-century German Romanticism and Elaine Scary – that matches moral goodness with beauty. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: L’Expérience intérieure de Georges Bataille formule une ontologie de l’hétérogénéité opposée à l’homogénéité du système de Hegel. Bataille définit la pensée de Hegel comme la commensurabilité d’éléments disparates au sein d’un projet unifié, et c’est à cette homogénéité dirigée par un but qu’il oppose les éléments hétérogènes du non-savoir et du sacrifice, lesquels échappent à toute commensurabilité. Cet article se livre à une évaluation critique de l’œuvre de Bataille, tant comme ontologie viable que comme critique valide de Hegel, et (...) fait valoir qu’elle échoue sur ces deux plans. L’échec de Bataille tient à son refus de saisir l’essence de la pensée hégélienne: être hétérogène, cela signifie être opposé à soi. (shrink)

This is a translation of Alexandre Koyré’s important, but overlooked essay “Hegel à Iéna.” The essay originally appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. A contribution to the philosophy of time, this essay had a profound but generally unrecognized influence on Alexander Kojève, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Derrida.

ABSTRACT English-language commentary on the role of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tends to equate the so-called “fury of destruction” (Furie des Verschwindens) with the violent dialectic of rival factions’ rush for power. Here it is argued that “Absolute Freedom and Terror” ought instead to be read in the light of a “fury of disappearance”, namely in terms of the extinction of dissenting citizens’ legal personhood. This is achieved by recourse to civil death, a criminal sentence that (...) declares the individual, who is very much alive, legally dead. While there are some actual and quite painful consequences for recipients of such a sentence, civil death is effective mainly on the philosophical and constitutional planes, where it maintains the illusion of a unanimous general will, fleetingly securing the state from failure. A focus on personhood and civil death also taps into the larger Hegelian dialectic of legalism and tradition, and into the various shapes community life takes therein, beginning with Greek Ethical Life, and ending in Absolute Freedom and Terror. (shrink)

Although the fact that Merleau-Ponty has a dialectical approach in Phenomenology of Perception has been discussed in recent Anglophone readings, there has not been an explicit clarification as to how his varying usages of the term hang together. Given his repeated references to Hegel and to dialectics, coupled with the fact that dialectics are not part of the Husserlian phenomenology or Heideggerean existentialism from which Merleau-Ponty draws so much, the question of just what he does with the idea of dialectics (...) presents itself. In this paper I argue that, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau- Ponty saw Hegel as providing a model for the conception of rationality and meaning that must underpin the existentialist response to the problems bequeathed him by Husserlian phenomenology: namely, the problems of embodiment, perception and the constitution of the world. In connection with this, I suggest an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s “existential dialectics” that focuses on his three principal uses of the term: 1) a “dialectic of objective thought,” 2) a set of existential-dialectical categories intended to capture the ontological structure of the “body-subject” as “being-in-the-world,” and 3) a dialectic at the cultural level concerning others and history. (shrink)

The master-servant and self-substance dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit presents the self as reflectively negating the particularities of its natural consciousness and transcending towards the social substance in order to inscribe its culturally refined self-conception upon the universal substance. Hegel argues that the reflective and determinate negations of the subordinated self by means of participative cultural production (Bildung) lead to the overcoming of servitude and subordination. That is, the actions of the supposedly ‘inessential’ servant-selfhood lead to freedom and disallows (...) the ossification of the social substance. This Hegelian insight is employed in this article to understand dominations in contemporary liberal democracies, and the participative cultural productions of the Dalits and their politics of resistance in the Indian subcontinent. (shrink)

Spinoza viewed the book of Ecclesiastes, in its original Hebrew and thus cleared of the interpretations imposed upon it in the guise of translation, as a powerful critique of the two most important variants of the superstition that taught human beings to regard both nature and themselves as degraded expressions of an unattainable perfection. The first was organized around the concept of miracle, the divine suspension of the actual concatenation of things, as if God were an earthly sovereign declaring a (...) state of exception. The second was the apparent opposite of this first, the idea that the concatenation of things has an origin and an end, that is, an order decreed by God. Spinoza reads Ecclesiastes through the lens of Epicurus and Lucretius, as if it were an attempt in the Hebrew idiom, an idiom in certain ways perhaps better suited for this task than either Greek or Latin, to shatter the decrees of destiny and to regard with pleasure those singular things (both human and non-human) that cannot and need not be made straight. (shrink)

Starting from a re-assessment of the relevance of the situationist analysis of riots in the 1960s to the riots in 2011, and finding their analysis largely irrelevant, this paper argues for an interpretative framework derived from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Using Hegel’s concepts of the Good, the Bad, the state and wealth, the categories of noble and ignoble or base consciousness emerge as attitudes towards social phenomena with a strong explanatory relevance to the recent riots. Drawing upon Kojeve and Hyppolite’s (...) readings of the Phenomenology, the argument is that the riotous looting of 2011 lacked all the elements of combat, challenge and struggle for recognition which would make of them a sovereign gesture and a historical episode. Instead, they embodied an abjection before the culture of the commodity which makes of them not a demand for mastery but a continuation of slavery. Given this, the view of the sub-proletarian proposed by Pasolini in the 1970s offers a descriptive analysis which perhaps also explains the current vogue for the language of the feral underclass, whilst demonstrating that such an analysis is not the sole property of Conservative Justice ministers, and can be distinguished from the latter by the connection it makes between antisocial amorality at the top of society and its repetition at the bottom. (shrink)

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

In this paper, I argue for the existence of pathologies of juridicism. I attempt to show that the Western regime of right tends to colonize our intersubjective relations, resulting in the formation of affective and habitual dispositions that actually hinder participation in social life. Speaking of pathologies of juridicism is to claim that the legal form fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, resulting in an ethically deformed, distorted or deficient form (...) of subjectivity. To support my thesis I consult a philosopher, whose work still provides a powerful analysis and critique of juridicism, namely, Hegel. Hegel provides an historic and a systematic theory of the pathologies of juridicism. His historical theory locates the origin of the abstract subjectivity of right in Roman antiquity. His systematic theory understands the negative effects of an absolutization of the legal domain as a persistent threat to social integration and an individual’s pursuit of the good life. I clarify these argumentative dimensions in two steps, beginning with Hegel’s historical analysis of right in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I then reconstruct Hegel’s critique of the subjectivity of right in the short chapter on the ‘Condition of Right’ in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, I argue that, although Hegel’s diagnosis is correct, his prescribed therapy must fail: instead of radically altering abstract right in terms of content and form, it only recommends its complementation through other ethical spheres. (shrink)

There are two dominant contradictory approaches towards understanding the nature of language: one, the epistemological approach; two, the ontological approach. The epistemological approach understands language as a mere tool and denies the close relationship between a word and the actual thing for which that word stands. The ontological approach, on the other hand, understands language as the disclosure of world experience and professes a close relationship between a word and the thing it signifies. However, this approach opposes the epistemological approach (...) towards the understanding of language. In this article, we propose that Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, depicts an interesting relationship between language and spirit which points towards the consistency between the two contradictory approaches towards the nature of language. For Hegel, language not only plays a role in spirit’s pursuit of self-knowledge which signifies the epistemological approach, but also in spirit’s existence which signifies the ontological approach. Thus, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the epistemological approach and the ontological approach towards the nature of language coexist. In this article, by turning to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and through an analysis of the relationship between language and spirit, we not only attempt to seek some resolution to the epistemology-ontology contradiction, but we also reveal the homogeneity of language and spirit, which we take as the true nature of language in Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

Two hundred years after its publication, The Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS) remains an enigmatic and challenging text, subject to a variety of interpretations. In this paper I seek to open up an additional interpretative space by emphasizing the influence of Hegel’s study of the Bible at the Tübingen Stift (1790–1793) on PhS. In a letter written to Schelling in 1795, Hegel had wondered what it might mean to »draw near to God.« It is the hypothesis of this paper that answering (...) that question was at least part of Hegel’s intent for PhS. (shrink)

Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising from (...) this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power. (shrink)

While many philosophers have found Hegel's critique of Kantian ethics to be interesting in certain respects, overall most tend to find it rather shallow and to think that Hegel either misunderstands Kant's thought or has a rather crude understanding of it. For example, in examining the last two sections of Chapter V of the Phenomenology - 'Reason as Lawgiver' and 'Reason as Testing Laws' (where we get an extended critique of the categorical imperative)- Lauer finds Hegel's treatment to be truncated (...) and inadequate.1 The only trouble, though, is that like most other readers of the Phenomenology, Lauer does not recognize that Hegel had been examining and criticizing Kantian ethics throughout a much greater part of-indeed, more than half of-Chapter V. Once we do understand this, I think we must concede that Hegel's treatment is hardly truncated and that it cannot be described as shallow or inadequate. I will try to show that Hegel demonstrates a rather sophisticated understanding of, and gives a serious and thorough critique of, Kantian practical reason. (shrink)

The article deals with the ontological configuration and political appropriation of difference in modern, capitalist societies. Against fragmented accounts of difference, it is examined the evolution from situations of wide socio-spatial diversity to the gradual instrumentalisation and selective hierarchisation of those elements of difference that can be inserted in market-based relations, whilst the majority of differences are ignored and disregarded. The instrumentalisation of difference under capitalism – the reduction of extended socio-spatial difference to the interests and priorities of the stronger (...) segments of society who emphasise their distinctive features in the attempt to exert power and control over those considered inferior and subordinate – has more than just an impact on social or interpersonal relations but constitutes an active worldmaking force that operates, primarily, via the promotion of indifference. The analysis is informed by the Hegelian framework of consciousness and reason that is based on what the German philosopher calls the laws of experience accumulated through social interaction. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can, therefore, move social theory forward to a critical interrogation of lived and contested differences. The instrumentalised metabolism of difference, following Hegelian metaphysics, is basically the result of self-estrangement and externalisation of the self, not because of self-serving interests but exactly because of its incompleteness and the need to be actualised in the other, who is also incomplete. Likewise, all particulars are moments actualised in the universal, which is also a changeable moment of itself. Thought the negation of otherness, followed by a negation of the negation, difference can be then embraced in its entirety, as it remains a central explanatory concept for social criticism. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. The article deals with the ontological configuration and political appropriation of difference in modern, capitalist societies. Against fragmented accounts of difference, it is examined the evolution from situations of wide socio-spatial diversity to the gradual instrumentalisation and selective hierarchisation of those elements of difference that can be inserted in market-based relations, whilst the majority of differences are ignored and disregarded. The instrumentalisation of difference under capitalism – the reduction of extended socio-spatial difference to (...) the interests and priorities of the stronger segments of society who emphasise their distinctive features in the attempt to exert power and control over those considered inferior and subordinate – has more than just an impact on social or interpersonal relations but constitutes an active worldmaking force that operates, primarily, via the promotion of indifference. The analysis is informed by the Hegelian framework of consciousness and reason that is based on what the German philosopher calls the laws of experience accumulated through social interaction. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can, therefore, move social theory forward to a critical interrogation of lived and contested differences. The instrumentalised metabolism of difference, following Hegelian metaphysics, is basically the result of self-estrangement and externalisation of the self, not because of self-serving interests but exactly because of its incompleteness and the need to be actualised in the other, who is also incomplete. Likewise, all particulars are moments actualised in the universal, which is also a changeable moment of itself. Thought the negation of otherness, followed by a negation of the negation, difference can be then embraced in its entirety, as it remains a central explanatory concept for social criticism. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the implications of the performative aspects of Julia Kristeva 's Powers of Horror by situating this work in the context of similar aspects of her previous work. This construction and its relationship to abjection are integral components of Kristeva 's notion of practice and as such are fundamental to her critique of Hegel and Freud.

This essay analyzes the implications of the performative aspects of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror by situating this work in the context of similar aspects of her previous work. This construction and its relationship to abjection are integral components of Kristeva's notion of practice and as such are fundamental to her critique of Hegel and Freud.

Despite a profound concern for the epistemological, ontological and ethical conditions for being-at-home-in-the-world, G.W.F. Hegel published very little on a particularly serious threat to being-at-home: mental illness and disorder. The chief exception is found in Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). In this work, Hegel briefly provides an ontology of madness (Verrücktheit), wherein madness consists in the inward collapsing of subjectivity and objectivity into the individual's unconscious and primordial feeling soul. While there has been an increasing number of studies (...) on Hegel's conception of madness, I propose that there is another overlooked way to understand madness in Hegel's system: as social pathology. I argue in this article that Hegel offers a compelling social account of madness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which arises at the elevated, self-reflective and community level of spirit. This sociality of madness, as I call it, occurs when spirit is unable to reconcile two contradictory yet equally essential aspects of its reality, resulting in spirit's structural homelessness. I argue that by examining this overlooked sociality of madness, we may read Hegel's political-philosophical project in a new light: on the one hand, the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) presented in the Philosophy of Right (1821) becomes understood as a political therapeutic. On the other hand, if the ethical life fails to live up to the demand of being an adequate spiritual therapeutic, then the traditional reading of the Philosophy of Right as a reconciliatory hermeneutic becomes problematized, opening up new avenues for the proliferation of social pathology. (shrink)

A well-known term in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, the “beautiful soul” (die schöne Seele) has resurfaced in recent years. Deleuze refers to the beautiful soul’s “religiosity” and argues that aggressive “selection” is necessary as its antidote. However, in volatile contexts of social destabilization, such selection risks recoiling into reactionary violence. After first developing in more detail the beautiful soul’s background as a discursive figure, I argue that understanding Deleuze’s selection within a context of spiritual experience is necessary to mitigate this (...) worry. Exploration of this experience is pursued through juxtaposition of Deleuze’s thought with Nishida Kitarō’s investigation of the ontological structure of religious consciousness. The comparative resonances I develop suggest an ontological objectivity to the problems and structuring of the logos of religious consciousness and show how a more explicitly spiritual rendering of “selection,” developed through the Deleuze/Nishida encounter, intervenes into the broader beautiful soul problematic. (shrink)

If, as Hegel claims, all philosophy is idealism, then defining his philosophy in these terms makes his idealism a metaphilosophy. This most obvious fact about his definition is the most overlooked. It is the key to a definitive, comprehensive and clear-cut interpretation of Hegel’s idealism. If Hegel defines all philosophy as idealism and thus his own idealism as a metaphilosophy, then his own idealism must be both the same as the old philosophies in this respect and also different in the (...) sense that it embodies self-conscious awareness. Hegel divides philosophy into pre-reflective, pre-speculative, unconscious idealism and his own reflective, speculative, thus self-conscious, absolute idealism. Missing this obvious fact is the Achilles’ heel of Stern’s non-mentalistic interpretation in the only other in-depth study of this topic, the object of this article’s critique. If Hegel’s idealism is a metaphilosophy, then it is a radical mentalistic ontology of mind and its thoughts. (shrink)

I maintain that Hegel’s reading of the Antigone underestimates the power of the negativity to which Antigone’s action is dedicated. I argue that the negativity of death and the sacred cannot, contrary to Hegel, to be sublated and thus incorporated into the progression of Spirit. Bataille’s treatment of the sacred better characterizes the unworldly force and the otherness with which Antigone and Creon are confronted when their actions bring the divine and the human into conflict. Antigone’s obedience to what she (...) understands to be her divine obligation is a devotion to a negativity which exceeds and subverts all dialectical comprehension. Although her action brings the divine and the human political sphere into a moment of identity, allowing for the sublation of the ethical world, Antigone’s action is a transgression in Bataille’s sense of the term, and it points toward the limits of reason. The Antigone narrative thus exceeds Hegel’s use of it and is ultimately more consistent with Bataille’s understanding of the sacred. (shrink)

RésuméCet article concerne le conflit entre le domaine du divin et celui de l'humain dans la lecture hégélienne de l'Antigone de Sophocle. Je soutiens que la lecture de l'Antigone par Hegel sous-estime la négativité du sacré et que, contrairement à ce que pense Hegel, l'action d'Antigone ne peut pas être dépassée, parce que son telos n'est pas l'unité, mais plutôt le rétablissement de ce que Bataille appellerait la continuité, ou l'indifférencié. Le sens du récit de l'Antigone excède ainsi l'usage qu'en (...) fait Hegel et s'accorde davantage avec la compréhension du sacré proposée par Bataille. (shrink)

To contribute to the organizational turn in research on participatory democracy, this paper examines the effects of organizational hierarchy on individual thinking. Power corrupts, but neither political scientists nor psychologists can really tell us how. To identify mechanisms by which it does so, the paper introduces recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology, here to suspicious political theorists. The study of cognition shows that we actively make meaning, and that we do so with a discernable neurological apparatus. The paper (...) presents hierarchy as a social construct that 'fits' this apparatus in such a way as to assist the capture of meaning by the interests of power. This process of capture takes place beneath individual awareness. For this reason, the concern here amounts to ideology critique: specifically, using cognitive psychology to reveal the ideological propagation of hierarchy. The fact that hierarchy has hidden cognitive costs has important implications for the prospects of a more participatory democracy. Any democratization of organizational life is seen to turn on the capacity of participants to selectively use and manage hierarchy and to minimize its cognitive costs. This entails, among other things, a recovery of our own thinking from the knowledge processing requirements of power saturated hierarchic organizations. In its examination of the personal effects of power, the paper seeks to reveal psychological mechanisms by which power corrupts, and by which, inadvertently, we come to serve the interests of power in the very way we think. (shrink)

While Hegel's discussion of the ‘speculative sentence’ occurs in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit, commentators rarely link it to the larger program of this text. Instead, this discussion has typically been received as a guide to the Science of Logic's presentation, as an independent theory of judgment, or as a reflection on the constraints and capacities of language generally. In this paper I argue that the speculative sentence can and should be linked to the Phenomenology itself. Specifically, I (...) show that Hegel's discussion both mirrors and supplements the ‘Introduction's’ explication of immanent phenomenological method. Establishing this parallel in turn allows us to identify a class of sentences throughout the Phenomenology as properly speculative and methodologically substantive. At the same time, this interpretation helps clarify several characteristics that Hegel ascribes to the speculative sentence, but which have gone unaddressed by commentators. (shrink)

In the following essay I shall propose a reading of Lordship and Bondage that follows what Robert Pippin termed a ‘practical turn’ (Pippin 2011: 28). I shall further argue that this turn ought to be qualified as Hegel's first philosophy. Starting with a reading that evinces the connection between the practical achievement of Self-Consciousness and the notion of Spirit as exhibiting a concentric relation, Spirit will be revealed to have its centre in the practical achievement of Self-Consciousness. I will then (...) offer a commentary on the notion of a complex desideratum as a way of attaining the concept of desire at work in the Phenomenology. The commentary will show that Hegel frames the satisfaction of this desire as a distinctive problem that will in turn necessitate a proper practical solution. This leads us to the implicit critique of contractualism, that may—in the terms of Hegel's argument—function as an impediment to the proper philosophical understanding of reciprocity. To conclude I shall propose a reading within the intrasubjective family of readings. We will find that the critique of both contractualism and the apprehension of the complex desideratum offers us the rationale for interpreting the peculiar absence of fear in Hegel's allegory of life-and-death struggle. I shall offer a detailed reading of the Lord and Bondsman trope and interpret these two figures as two aspects of one self-conscious individual in the process of apprehending their practical nature, thus making explicit a tripartite structure of practical self-consciousness. This will be suggested as the solution to the initial orectic problem and the beginning of an argument towards the practical attainment of Spirit. (shrink)

: The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master-slave dialectic and a Kojève–influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, (...) and that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant-garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today. (shrink)

The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master-slave dialectic and a Kojève-influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, and (...) that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant-garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today. (shrink)

The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master-slave dialectic and a Kojève-influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, and (...) that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant-garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today. (shrink)

The purpose of the present work is to analyze Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness in light of the psychoanalytic conceptualization of the relation Subject-Other. The analysis will investigate unhappiness on two counts: its relation to Hegelian dialectic and the possibility of its coming to an end. Examining Hegelian unhappiness through the prism of psychoanalytic thought will allow us to formulate a crucial distinction between the philosophical (Hegelian) and psychoanalytic (Freudian, Lacanian) approaches to unhappiness as they relate to the arch-concepts of knowledge, possibility, (...) negation, and end.The first part of this work will be dedicated to the investigation of these arch-concepts through two main and opposing .. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)