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In Force, Drive, Desire, Rudolf Bernet develops a philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis focusing on human drives. Rather than simply drawing up a list of Freud’s borrowings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or Lacan’s from Hegel and Sartre, Bernet orchestrates a dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis that goes far beyond what these eminent psychoanalysts knew about philosophy. By relating the writings of Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts to those of Aristotle, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, more tacitly, Bergson and Deleuze, Bernet brings to light how psychoanalysis both prolongs and breaks with the history of Western metaphysics and philosophy of nature.

Rereading the long history of metaphysics (or at least a few of its key moments) in light of psychoanalytic inquiries into the nature and function of drive and desire also allows for a rewriting of the history of philosophy. Specifically, it allows Bernet to bring to light a different history of metaphysics, one centered less on Aristotelian substance (ousia) and more on the concept of dunamis—a power or potentiality for a realization toward which it strives with all its might. Relating human drives to metaphysical forces also bears fruit for a renewed philosophy of life and subjectivity.

Infinite Phenomenology builds on John Russon’s earlier book, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, to offer a second reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here again, Russon writes in a lucid, engaging style and, through careful attention to the text and a subtle attunement to the existential questions that haunt human life, he demonstrates how powerfully Hegel’s philosophy can speak to the basic questions of philosophy. In addition to original studies of all the major sections of the Phenomenology, Russon discusses complementary texts by Hegel, namely, the Philosophy of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and the Science of Logic. He concludes with an appendix that discusses the reception and appropriation of Hegel’s Phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. As with Russon’s earlier work, Infinite Phenomenology will remain essential reading for those looking to engage Hegel’s essential, yet difficult, text.

A closely annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes on literary language

Investigations into the Literary Use of Language presents an annotated translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes from one of the two courses that he gave during his inaugural year teaching at the Collège de France. In his notes from the concurrent course, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Merleau-Ponty contends that our embodied perceptual engagement with the sensible world already involves the same spontaneity that underlies cultural expression. Approaching it from the other side, he revisits here the analysis of language that he had undertaken in the unfinished manuscript The Prose of the World.

Focusing on the work of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) and Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), Merleau-Ponty explores how the spontaneity of literary language sheds light on the relation between lived experience and language more broadly, and how cultural expression remains grounded in embodied perceptual experience in a way that is homologous yet irreducible to it. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty shows how Stendhal had already overcome Valéry’s skepticism concerning literary sincerity by effectively incorporating what the latter called the linguistic “implex”—in effect, language as institution—and thus achieving a “total style” of improvisational spontaneity in which the “conquering function” characteristic of the literary use of language gives shape to an immanent model of political engagement.