Contents

Foreword by Philippe Sabot

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

1.  Desire, Rhetoric, and
Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

The Ontology of Desire

Bodily Paradoxes: Lordship and Bondage

2.  Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel

Kojève: Desire and Historical Agency

Hyppolite: Desire, Transience, and the Absolute

From Hegel to Sartre

3.  Sartre: The Imaginary Pursuit of Being

Image, Emotion, and Desire

The Strategies of Pre-reflective Choice: Existential Desire in Being and Nothingness

Trouble and Longing: The Circle of Sexual Desire in Being and Nothingness

Desire and Recognition in Saint Genet and The Family Idiot

4.  The Life and Death Struggles of Desire: Hegel and Contemporary French Theory

A Questionable Patrilineage: (Post-)Hegelian Themes in Derrida and Foucault

Lacan: The Opacity of Desire

Deleuze: From Slave Morality to Productive Desire

Foucault: Dialectics Unmoored

Final Reflections on the “Overcoming” of Hegel

 

Notes

Bibliography

Index