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. Cinema 'A synthesis of two counterpoints - the spatial counterpoint of graphic art and the temporal counterpoint of music' (Eisenstein p.52) -> Visual Counterpoint. This book is a remarkable introduction to Desmond's metaxological philosophy, prefiguring many of the ideas with which his later thought is associated. Finally, Desmond brings this metaxological understanding to bear on the metaphysical question of the ultimate origin. 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. Granting the positive power of dialectic, Desmond offers his first articulation of a further philosophical possibility-what he terms the Metaxological-a discourse of the 'between,' a discourse doing justice to desire's search for wholeness without any truncating of its radical openness to otherness.

Unlike many recent critics of Hegel, he argues that we must preserve what is genuine in dialectic. He faces the difficulties bequeathed to Continental thought by Hegelian dialectic and its tendency to subordinate difference to identity, whether appropriately or not. He systematically explores the question of dialectic and otherness by analyzing how human desire inevitably seeks immanent wholeness in a manner that opens it to irreducible otherness. Originally published at a time when the issue was not so widely discussed in the English-speaking world, William Desmond here offers a constructive and positive approach to the problem of difference and otherness. Many philosophers since Hegel have been disturbed by the thought that philosophy inevitably favors sameness over otherness or identity over difference.

Dialectic approach