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Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentary, edited by John O'Neill. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1996. Paper, $19.95. Pp. x, 331.
John O'Neill's most recent work is an introduction to and a collection of 17 essays, all of which have been published previously, and most of which are required reading for those who fancy themselves well-informed and thoughtful participants in the contemporary discussion of Hegel and Marx. These texts are not only concerned -- directly or indirectly- with Hegel's dialectical construal of desire and recognition, found in the Phaenomenologie des Geistes (the bit on "Lordship and Bondage"); they are also themselves a prime example of historical dialectic at work. From Marx to Kojeve, from Hyppolite and Sartre to Shklar and Lacan, from Lukacs and Habermas to Gadamer and Siep (as well as Avineri, Harris, and Kelly), O'Neill has culled the very best of the secondary literature dealing with intra- and intersubjectivity. For the neophyte, this collection will serve as a substantial and reliable introduction to the post-Hegelian aftermath; for the gerontophyte, it is equally valuable as a sustained litmus test - though certainly not the experimentum crucis- for the "optimist" inherent in the historical narratives told by Hegel on the one hand and Marx on the other.
Though Hegel is often no easier to vindicate than he is to understand, O'Neill's book succeeds, at least to some degree, at both tasks. The "dialectic of desire and recognition" refers to a series of moments or stages of...