Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition

Presents three generations of German, French, and Anglo-American thinking on the Hegelian narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation in life, labor, and language.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.>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.