“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

“This is . . . an enormously ambitious project, both for the mastery of diverse traditions and perspectives it requires, and for the philosophical acuity and imagination it presupposes. . . . Davis’s work has an original and important contribution to make . . . to the intellectual situation of our time.”—Jerrold Seigel, author of The Idea of the Self

• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Engagement
• 1. 
• Hegel: The Contemporary of the Future
• A Farewell to Epistemology: Reflection on Hegel's Concept of Consciousness
• The Critique of Rationalism and Empiricism
• The Structure of Consciousness
• The Life of Reflection
• Self-Consciousness: The Spirit That Cuts Back into Life
• Desire—and the Object
• Desire—and the Other
• Subjective Growth: Master-Slave and the Struggle for Recognition
• To Freedom Condemned: Stoicism and Skepticism
• Self-Consciousness as Unhappy Consciousness
• Toward a Dialectic of Situated Subjectivity
• 2. 
• Existentialism: The Once and Future Philosophy
• The Experience of the Existential Subject
• Identifying Existence
• Who am I … What Shall I Do? Understanding the Question
• Toward Anxiety: The Other and the Value of Fear
• Toward Anxiety: Love as Existential Experience
• Anxiety: In and for Itself
• The Mother of Beauty
• Dialectical Ontology of the Existential Subject
• Two Misunderstood Concepts
• The Existential A Priori
• Existential Categories as Principles of Drama
• Drama: The Law/Lure of the Concrete
• Situated Subjectivity: The Ethos of Inwardness
• Subject in Its Immediacy: Sketch for an Existential Psychology
• Possibility, Project, Situation, World
• 3. 
• Subject in a Marxism without Guarantees
• The Dialectic of Subject within Marxism
• Taking Stock
• Ideology and the Dissolution of the Rational Self
• The Concept of Ideology: A Dialectical History
• Capitalizing on Inwardness: A Nondialectical Comedy
• The Belly of the Beast
• A Last “Dialectic of Enlightenment ”
• Everyday Life under Capitalism: The Workings of an Antidialectic
• Anti-Bildung: Retrieving the Contradictions of “objective Spirit”
• 4. 
• The Drama of the Psychoanalytic Subject
• On Catching Up with Oneself
• Point of Entry: The Problem of Beginnings
• Beginning in Medias Res: Trauma as Inaugural Experience
• The Core Theory of Psychoanalysis as a Structure of Theses
• Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts Dramatistically Reinterpreted
• The Drama of Defense and Anxiety
• The Drama of Emotions
• The Drama of Psychic Structuring: Reinterpreting the Structural Theory
• Subject and “The Large Glass”
• 5. 
• Methodology Is Ontology: Dialectic and Its Counterfeits
• Dialectic as Discourse
• Preliminary Definitions
• The Primacy of the Whole
• The Characteristic Procedures of Dialectical Discourse
• Dialectic as Process
• From Abstract Understanding to Aufhebung: Conceptualizing Dialectical Opposition
• The Dialectical Process as a Totality: Concrete vs. Abstract Dialectics
• Dialectic as System: Its Content and Ground
• The Nature and Content of Comprehensive Categories
• The Unconditioned First Principle: The Logic of Its Internal Structure
• Notes
• Index

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