Despite what its title might suggest, Death and Desire is a meditation on life. Using the texts of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze, the author argues that philosophy has been dominated by a form of thought that focuses exclusively on death. The importance of Death and Desire lies in its refusal of the morbidity of much contemporary philosophy. Its uniqueness lies in placing Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze in conversation. Its usefulness lies in the clarity with which it articulates and compares these very diverse thinkers.

This book places Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze in conversation with one another, which results in a new (joyful) way of thinking about death.

This thought-provoking study explores the philosophical resources provided by Hegel and Heidegger to grasp the nature of the “I” and combines those resources in a theoretical analysis of “I-hood” in its connection with nature and history, experience and myth. The “I” has a fleeting, almost elusive character in the philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger. Yet, both philosophers strive to make sense of what it means to be an “I”. Their respective theories, though seemingly divergent, offer remarkable insights into the nature of the “I” and its relationship to the world. Through meticulous examination, this book explores the parallel journeys of Hegel and Heidegger, tracing their respective paths towards a comprehensive conception of identity beyond the subject/object dichotomy. Moreover, this study goes beyond being an exploration of Hegel’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of the self by actively employing their insights to chart a path towards a novel understanding of “I-hood”. Hegel, Heidegger, and the Quest for the “I” will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Hegel, Heidegger, history of European philosophy, and contemporary theories of subjectivity and personal identity. Offering a fresh perspective on the work of these two seminal thinkers, the book contributes to the ongoing dialogue on the nature of the self and its place in the world.

The book is the first detailed and full exegesis of the role of death in Heidegger’s philosophy and provides a decisive answer to the question of being. It is well-known that Heidegger asked the “question of being”. It is equally commonplace to assume that Heidegger failed to provide a proper answer to the question. In this provocative new study Niederhauser argues that Heidegger gives a distinct response to the question of being and that the phenomenon of death is key to finding and understanding it. The book offers challenging interpretations of crucial moments of Heidegger’s philosophy such as aletheia, the history of being, time, technology, the fourfold, mortality, the meaning of existence, the event, and language. Niederhauser makes the case that any reading of Heidegger that ignores death cannot fully understand those concepts. The book argues that death is central to Heidegger’s “thinking path” from the early 1920s until his late post-war philosophy. The book thus attempts to show that there is a unity of the early and late Heidegger often ignored by other commentators. Niederhauser argues that death is the fulcrum of Heidegger’s ontology and the turning point of the history of being. Death resurfaces at the most crucial moments of the “thinking path” – from beginning to end. The book is of interest to those invested in current debates on the ethics of dying and the transhumanist project of digital human immortality. The text also shows that for Heidegger philosophy means first and foremost to learn how to die. This volume speaks to continental and analytical philosophers and students alike as it draws on a number of diverse Heidegger interpretations and appreciates intercultural differences in reading Heidegger.

Both Hegel's philosophy and psychoanalytic theory have profoundly influenced contemporary thought, but they are traditionally seen to work in separate rather than intersecting universes. This book offers a new interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and brings it into conversation the work of two of the best-known contemporary psychoanalysts, Christopher Bollas and André Green. Hegel and Psychoanalysis centers a consideration of the Phenomenology on the figure of the Unhappy Consciousness and the concept of Force, two areas that are often overlooked by studies which focus on the master/slave dialectic. This book offers reasons for why now, more than ever, we need to recognize how concepts of intersubjectivity, Force, the Third, and binding are essential to an understanding of our modern world. Such concepts can allow for an interrogation of what can be seen as the profoundly false and constructed senses of community and friendship created by social networking sites, and further an idea of a "global community," which thrives at the expense of authentic intersubjective relations.

While the governance of human existence is organised ever-increasingly around life and its potential to proliferate beyond all limits, much critical reflection on the phenomenon is underpinned by considerations about the very negation of life, death. The challenge is to construct an alternative understanding of human existence that is truer to the complexity of the present, biopolitical moment. Palladino responds to the challenge by drawing upon philosophical, historical and sociological modes of inquiry to examine key developments in the history of biomedical understanding of ageing and death. He combines this genealogy with close reflection upon its implications for a critical and effective reading of Foucault's and Deleuze's foundational work on the relationship between life, death and embodied existence. Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death proposes that the central task of contemporary critical thought is to find ways of coordinating different ways of thinking about molecules, populations and the mortality of the human organism without transforming the notion of life itself into the new transcendent truth that would take the place once occupied by God and Man.

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.

An original philosophical exploration of the limits of Hegel’s thought. In the preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic, Hegel speaks of an instinctive and unconscious logic whose forms and determinations “always remain imperceptible and incapable of becoming objective even as they emerge in language.” In spite of Hegel’s ambitions to provide a philosophical system that might transcend messy human nature, Félix Duque argues that human nature remains stubbornly present in precisely this way. In this book, he responds to the “remnants” of Hegel’s work not to explicate his philosophy, but instead to explore the limits of his thought. He begins with the tension between singularity and universality, both as a metaphysical issue in terms of substance and subject and as a theological issue in terms of ideas about the human and divine nature of Jesus. Duque argues that the questions these issues bring out require a search for some antecedent authority, for which he turns to Hegel’s theory of “second nature” and the idea of nature as reflected in the nation-state. He considers Hegel’s evaluation of the French Revolution in the context of political and civil life, and, in a religious context, how Hegel saw considerations of authority and guilt sublimated and purified in the development of Christianity. “This is the work of an important philosopher, with a lifetime of ideas and research to draw on. It is a great book on Hegel and a great book of philosophy in its own right.” — Jay Lampert, author of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History “As a contribution to the field, this book does the admirable work of bringing to the fore the interrelated problems of religion and death as fundamentally philosophical problems. The author is refreshingly well versed in theological debates surrounding the Eucharist and their philosophical import for Hegel. There is much insight here for scholars, especially of the analytic, anti-metaphysical school of Hegel studies. They may not walk away convinced that Hegel’s metaphysics is mediated by religion, but they will certainly see the plausibility of such a reading. For other Hegel scholars, the book is a treasure trove of insightful ways of framing Hegel’s project.” — Brent Adkins, author of Death and Desire: In Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze

This new book by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito addresses the profound crisis of contemporary politics and examines some of the philosophical approaches that have been used to try to understand and go beyond this crisis. Two approaches have been particularly influential – one indebted to the thought of Martin Heidegger, the other indebted to Gilles Deleuze. While opposed in their political thrust and orientation, both approaches remain trapped within the political ontology that has framed our conceptual language for some time. In order to move beyond this political ontology, Esposito turns to a third approach that he characterizes as ‘instituting thought’. Indebted to the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this third approach recognizes that the road to reconstructing a productive relation between ontology and politics, one that is both realistic and innovative, lies in instituting praxis. Building on this insight, Esposito conceptualizes social being as neither univocal nor plurivocal but as cross-cut by the dual semantics of political conflict. This new book by one of the most original European philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, social and political theory and the humanities generally.

In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.