Ebook: Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre

This inquiry develops a theory of desire as a tacit effort to overcome ontological difference through a philosophical reconstruction of the treatment of desire in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and selected works of Jean-Paul Sartre, paying some attention to the writings of Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite. The central concern is to establish an ontology of desire which accounts for the interrelationship of choice, imagination, temporality, and personal and cultural history in the experience of desire. Hegel's discussion of the ontological significance of desire provides the framework by which Kojève and Hyppolite analyze desire with respect to its relation to temporality and historical life generally. Hyppolite and Sartre accept and extend Hegel's contention that desire must be understood in terms of the problem of negation, and this implies that desire plays a constitutive role in all conscious activity. Although Sartre's view of desire presupposes a critical reformulation of Hegelian ontology, it nevertheless extends the doctrine of negation with clear consequences for concretizing and furthering the phenomenological understanding of desire. Sartre's reformulation of desire as negation involves a view of desire as choice (manifesting the lack which is freedom) and as a mode of apprehending the world (the 'nihilating' or discriminatory function of consciousness). Sartre's later biographical studies on Genet and Flaubert provide culturally and personally concrete analyses of this view of desire. Moreover, they reveal that the Hegelian project to achieve ontological unity of substance and subject is an imaginary one, one which, accordingly, can only be achieved in imaginary works. In these biographical studies Sartre also returns to an Hegelian formulation of desire, recasting the relationship between desire and recognition in terms of early childhood experiences and the task of literary writing.