William Desmond

Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: an Essay on Origins William Desmond

Brief Description: Many philosophers since Hegel have been disturbed by the thought that philosophy inevitably favors sameness over otherness or identity over difference. Originally published at a time when the issue was not so widely discussed in the English-speaking world, William Desmond here offers a constructive and positive approach to the problem of difference and otherness. He systematically explores the question of dialectic and otherness by analyzing how human desire inevitably seeks immanent wholeness in a manner that opens it to irreducible otherness. He faces the difficulties bequeathed to Continental thought by Hegelian dialectic and its tendency to subordinate difference to identity, whether appropriately or not. Unlike many recent critics of Hegel, he argues that we must preserve what is genuine in dialectic. Granting the positive power of dialectic, Desmond offers his first articulation of a further philosophical possibility--what he terms the Metaxological--a discourse of the "between," a discourse doing justice to desire's search for wholeness without any truncating of its radical openness to otherness. In a wide-ranging yet unified discussion, Desmond tackles such issues as the nature of the self, the ambiguous restlessness and inherent power of being revealed by human desire, desire's relation to transcendence, its openness to otherness in agapeic good will and in relation to the sublime as an aesthetic infinitude. Finally, Desmond brings this metaxological understanding to bear on the metaphysical question of the ultimate origin. This book is a remarkable introduction to Desmond's metaxological philosophy, prefiguring many of the ideas with which his later thought is associated. This second edition contains a substantial new preface and an afterword to each chapter in whicTable of Contents: Preface to the First Edition -- Preface to the Second Edition -- Introduction -- Dialectic and Otherness: The Historical Problem -- The Problem of Otherness: Four Fundamental Possibilities -- Desire and Origins -- Part 1. Intentional Infinitude -- 1. Desire, Lack, and the Absorbing God -- Finite Desire and Lack -- Particular Possessions and the Infinitude of Desire -- The Difficulty of Discourse and Desire -- Infinite Lack and the Absorbing God -- Afterword -- 2. Desire and Original Selfness -- The Issue in Historical Context -- The Being of Self and the Difficulty of Discursive Access -- The Original Self as Fact -- The Original Self as Ideal -- The Original Self as Concrete Ideality -- The Original Self and the Empirical Ego -- The Original Self and the Transcendental Ego: Being and the I Think -- Afterword -- 3. Desire's Infinitude and Wholeness -- Univocal and Equivocal Desire: Wholeness Shortcircuited -- Intentional Infinitude and Wholeness -- Between Incompleteness and Absolute Closure: Art and the Dialectical Tension of Wholeness -- The Open Circle of Desire -- Afterword -- Part 2. Actual Finitude -- 4. Desire, Transcendence, and Static Eternity -- Transcendence, Time, and the Problem of Dualism -- Desire and Equivocal Becoming -- Static Eternity and Its Defects -- Becoming as Process of Positive Othering -- The Self as Free Becoming -- The Positive Pluralization of Identity and Difference -- Afterword -- 5. Desire, Knowing, and Otherness -- Immediacy, Self-mediation, and Intermediation -- Hegel, Identity, and Self-Mediation -- The Dialectical and the Metaxological Relations -- Afterword -- 6. Desire, Concreteness, and Being -- Desire and the Identification of Otherness -- Univocal Particularity and Equivocal Predication -- Dialectical Comprehension and Form -- The Metaxological Affirmation of Being -- The Fourfold Sense of Being and Traditional Philosophical Views -- Afterword -- 7. Desire, Otherness, and Infinitude -- Desire, Infinitude, and the Between -- Three Forms of Infinitude -- The Sublime and Aesthetic Infinitude -- Agapeic Otherness -- Afterword -- Part 3. Actual Infinitude -- 8. Desire and the Absolute Original -- The Absolute Original and the Metaxological View -- The Absolute Original and the Givenness of Being -- The Absolute Original, the Regulative Ideal, and the Ens Realissimum -- The Absolute Original as Whole and Infinite -- The Absolute Original as Beginning and End -- The Absolute Original, Heights and Depths -- The Absolute Original and the Absorbing God -- The Absolute Original, Man, and the World -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index.

Contributor Bio:  Desmond, William William Desmond completed his doctorate at Yale?and he then?taught at Yale before moving to Maynooth in?2007. His book The Greek Praise of Poverty: Origins of Ancient Cynicism (Notre Dame University Press) won the National University of Ireland Centennial Prize in 2008.