Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud

A PROFOUND, CHALLENGING, WIDE-RANGING BOOK, BACK IN PRINT FOR A NEW GENERATION

“If the book we are reading
does not wake us up,
as with a fist hammering on our skull,
why then do we read it?”
— Kafka (from the epigraph)

“Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it.”
♦ Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
“Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency, content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical contingency and processsual immediacy) into dynamic, rupturing explorations of categories which provoke the reader’s analytic process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with stress, the heady rush of analysis, and the challenges of hard work.”
♦ Leighton Brooks McCutcheon, Journal of Mind and Behavior
“Praiseworthy because it grapples with the fundamental assumptions of these competing traditions, and does so with clarity and conviction.”
♦ David M. Thompson, Philosophy and Literature
For more information regarding publicity and reviews, contact University of Wisconsin Press publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734; email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu. To purchase, visit University of Wisconsin Press or Amazon.com.
Read excerpts: “Hegel: The Contemporary of the Future” and “The Drama of the Psychoanalytic Subject”
Additional Information:
Purchase details:
424 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-12014-6
Paper $24.95 s
visit: University of Wisconsin Press or Amazon.com
Excerpts:
Chapter 1: “Hegel: The Contemporary of the Future”
Chapter 4: “The Drama of the Psychoanalytic Subject”
Table of Contents:
| Acknowledgments | xiii | |
| Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Engagement | 3 | |
| 1. | Hegel: The Contemporary of the Future | 8 |
| A Farewell to Epistemology: Reflection on Hegel's Concept of Consciousness 8 | ||
| Self-Consciousness: The Spirit That Cuts Back into Life 25 | ||
| 2. | Existentialism: The Once and Future Philosophy | 107 |
| The Experience of the Existential Subject 107 | ||
| Dialectical Ontology of the Existential Subject 137 | ||
| 3. | Subject in a Marxism without Guarantees | 173 |
| The Dialectic of Subject within Marxism 173 | ||
| Capitalizing on Inwardness: A Nondialectical Comedy 211 | ||
| 4. | The Drama of the Psychoanalytic Subject | 232 |
| On Catching Up with Oneself 232 | ||
| Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts Dramatistically Reinterpreted 266 | ||
| 5. | Methodology Is Ontology: Dialectic and Its Counterfeits | 314 |
| Dialectic as Discourse 314 | ||
| Dialectic as Process 326 | ||
| Dialectic as System: Its Content and Ground 349 | ||
| Notes | 367 | |
| Index | 403 | |