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. 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 indifiference
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 Kojeve, Jean Hyppolite,
Jean-Paul Sarte, Georg Lukas, Jurgen 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 lcass, race, and gender issues are drawn into a historical romance that is being
rewritten in contemporary cultural politics.
Table of Contents
Part I. Lordship and Bondage
1. Lordship and Bondage
2. Critique of Hegel
Part II. Desire and Recognition
3. Desire and Work in the Master and Slave
4. Self-Consciousness and Life: The Independence of Self-Consciousness
5. The Existence of Others
Part III. Alienation and Recognition
6. Hegel's Economics During the Jena Period
7. Labor and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Mind
8. Hegel's Dialectic of Self-Consciousness
Part IV. Dialectics of Desire and Recognition
9. Of Human Bondage: Labor and Freedom in the Phenomenology
10. Labor, Alienation, and Social Classes in Hegel's Realphilosophie
11. Master and Slave: The Bonds of Love
12. Hegel and Lacan: The Dialectic of Desire
13. The Concept of Recognition in Hegel's Jena Manuscripts
14. Notes on Hegel's "Lordship and Bondage"
15. The Struggle for Recognition: Hegel's Dispute with Hobbes in the Jena Writings
16. Self-Sufficient Man: Dominion and Bondage
17. The Metaphor in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind
