An erudite post-Hegelian exploration of the metaphysics of human desire and its relevance to philosophical issues of difference and otherness.


Many philosophers since Hegel have been disturbed by the thought that philosophy inevitably favours sameness over otherness or identity over difference. William Desmond here offers a constructive and positive approach to the problem of difference and otherness. He systematically explores the question of dialectic and otherness by analysing how human desire inevitably seeks immanent wholeness in a manner that opens it to irreducible otherness. In a wide-ranging yet unified discussion, Desmond tackles such issues as the nature of the self, the ambiguous restlessness and inherent power of being revealed by human desire, desire’s relation to transcendence, its openness to otherness in agapeic good will and in relation to the sublime as an aesthetic infinitude.

Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness is a remarkable introduction to Desmond’s metaxological philosophy. This second edition contains a substantial new preface and an afterword to each chapter in which Desmond reflects on the material from the standpoint of his current thinking.