Lacan attempts to bring the psychoanalytic insights of Sigmund Freud into the philosophy of German Idealism, specifically that of Kant and Hegel. Unlike Freud, Lacan was schooled in the history of philosophy, and this allowed him to trace the implications of introducing the unconscious into the theory of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel. Throughout his career, Lacan insists on the subject as what sticks out from its social context thanks to the existence of the unconscious. The unconscious marks the subject’s failure to fit within its social world, and Lacan makes this failure to fit the basis for his philosophy. Although Lacan sees himself as a psychoanalyst rather than a philosopher, we must recognize the significance of his philosophical contribution.

Boulez’s prolific writings, of which Stocktakings, Orientations and Music Lessons are representative in English (originally in French, 1966, 1981 and 2005, respectively), show his preoccupation with the dialectical and the deductive, his passion for creativity in all its forms and his focus on the craft of ‘écriture’ (‘writing’ in the sense of composing). He detested archaism, hence his notorious critique of Schoenberg’s dodecaphony, and rejected the concept of schools of composition or interpretation. In the mid 1960s, he turned to ‘formalism’ in all his activities, aiming at the comprehensibility of transitory truths, including music – analytically in his commentaries covering a century and a half of musical works by others. The dialectic between system and idea infuses all his writings. Challenging though it is to embrace such a large collection of outputs, Boulez’s unity of thought and purpose is evident throughout.

The courage to be by Paul Tillich is explored with a special emphasis on its dialectical ontology and the account of neurotic character and existential courage informed by it. Then, in turn, two more contemporary and more specifically clinical and secular approaches: dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) of Linehan and radically open dialectical behavior therapy (RO-DBT) of Lynch are analyzed in terms of the dialectical framework they employ to explain both the issues pertinent to personality psychopathology and the remedies required to alleviate them. As soon as the dialectical character of these approaches is elucidated, the ideas of radical acceptance (Linehan) and radical openness (Lynch) are brought to the fore and compared in light of different spiritual perspectives lying behind them: Zen Buddhism and contemplative Christianity for the former and Malâmati Sufism for the latter. Finally, some concluding remarks are made to emphasize the parallel conceptual structures existing in Tillich, Linehan, and Lynch and to make clinical, including nosological, sense of non-trivial differences between DBT and RO-DBT.

This chapter charts a chronology of British literary realism in relation to nineteenth-century capitalism. It considers formal innovations in Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, situating those techniques in conjunction with processes such as enclosure, financialization, urbanization, and imperialism. Throughout, it argues for the dialectical faculties of novel forms (counterbalancing interior and exterior, individual and society, event and context, exceptional and exemplary, concrete and abstract, cartography and utopia) to mediate capitalist contradiction, transformation, and totality.

We introduce the subjects beginning with the early works of Hegel, followed by a description of the emphases provided by Levins and Lewontin in their volume. Then we elaborate on the particularities that become involved in the application to the issues of food and agriculture more generally, and specifically to agroecology. We end the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of agroecology as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a platform for political action.

This essay offers a speculative account of a third wave of Beckett criticism, emerging at the turn of the current century, one which is dedicated to the articulation of a Beckettian literary politics.

The first two waves of Beckett criticism, the essay suggests, despite their manifest differences, shared a sense that Beckett was in some fundamental sense an apolitical writer. The first wave sees his work as invested in a universal condition, which is resistant to any form of political particularity. The second tended to see his writing as a deconstructive endeavour, one which reveals not an essential human condition, but the groundless of all forms of being.

Both of these waves of criticism, the essay argues, tend to overlook a central dynamic in Beckett’s writing, in which a rejection of forms of reference coincides with a longing, however residual, for forms of political community. The urge towards solitude in Beckett is countered by an equally strong urge towards company, towards shared life. To begin to articulate a Beckettian politics, as part of a third wave of Beckett criticism, it is necessary to develop a critical language that can account at once for Beckett’s negativity – his refusal of political commitments – and for his persistent attachment to the word that he seems to disavow.

In the introduction, I argue that Yeats’s revivalism, far from being prior to or separate from his modernism, is in fact a principal component of it. This claim is based on new research on revivalism as a movement and a way of thinking about Ireland, its past, and its future. My theoretical point of view is determined by three intertwined concepts: recognition, temporality, and the world of the work of art. The concepts of recognition and misrecognition, as I use them, derive from Hegel’s philosophy and are fundamental to his dialectical method. I explore at length Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological concept of worldmaking, according to which the aesthetic object consists of a represented and an expressed world. The dialectical relation of these two worlds in the work of art led to the creation of new time signatures, new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. These innovations, which I argue are characteristic of Yeats’s revivalism and his modernism, sanction, through artistic means, the creation of new histories and stories for understanding Ireland’s past. They also sanction the creation of new worlds – possible and impossible – in art and other cultural forms. Yeats’s work, propelled by a lifelong commitment to revivalism, introduces into modernism a constellation of new worlds.

Chapter 2 addresses Aristotle’s use of artefacts as counterexamples or central elements in counter-arguments against Plato and the Academy. The common opinion, within the Academy, that there cannot exist Ideas of artefacts is used by Aristotle to highlight the internal incoherence of the Platonic theory (Met. A 9, 990b8–15; Met. B 4, 999b15–20; Met. K 2, 1060b23–8). Moreover, the case of artefacts offers evidence that Ideas are either inert thus superflous (Met. A 9, 991b1–7; GC 2.9, 335b18–24), or even in contradiction with the coming-to-be of individual substances (Met. Z 8, 1033b19–24). The chapter shows that in these passages Aristotle is using artefacts dialectically against Plato’s separation of Ideas and concludes with a reflection on the notions of separation and substantiality.

Studies of agency are crucial if we are to grapple with pressing societal and environmental problems. Relevant conceptual and methodological solutions are needed to make alternative futures possible. This chapter outlines a broad position from which the subsequent contributions to this edited volume depart: one that recognises the urgency of agency and the value of cultural-historical perspectives in breaking away from problematic notions that frame agency as a matter of individuals pitted against the social, or in which individual actions lose their social contingency. Elaborating agency as a matter of struggle where individual and social are in dialectic relations, the chapter focusses on motives, mediation and motion. Within a broader and still-evolving cultural-historical framework, these motifs offer a distinctive way to deal with the challenges of conceptualising and facilitating agency, one which brings alternative futures into the realm of the possible by linking agency with learning and development.

This section consists of four selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian that serve as an introduction to the classical understanding of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? Is it an art or a mode of knowledge? What is its value? What are its elements or parts?

The conclusion tackles the dialectics of state–society relations in the Arab worlds in the longue duree. Neo-imperialism in Yemen, mercenaries, and the Sudanese and Algerian revolutions are discussed in light of the earlier history, a possible return of latent citizenship. The legacies of the three facets of representation are at play in the 2019 revolutions of Sudan and Algeria, with recent military coups undermining democratic channels of participation.

This chapter examines the criteria exposed by Stephen Jay Gould’s original paper on just-so stories to sustain such a charge. I show that Gould’s concerns were neither directed to narrative explanations nor were they ineluctably linked to their narrative quality. Then I analyse how advocates of narrative science have met the challenge. I identify two basic defensive approaches: the vindication of explanatory narratives in cases where the historical, contingent and causally complex nature of the phenomena demand a narrative approach and an unveiling strategy showing how there’s a narrative behind each law-like generalization or nomological explanatory formula. The chapter’s concentration on the argumentative moves of the discussants helps clarify their positions. Moreover, the argumentative quality of their object of study (scientific reason-giving practices) is also emphasized. I claim that the dialectical requirement of openness to collective survey and discussion is what may prevent just-so charges for any kind of explanatory model.

Margaret Cavendish was a natural philosopher and feminist who between 1653 and 1671 wrote some twenty-six works, including fourteen scientific books about atoms, matter and motion, butterflies, fleas, magnifying glasses, distant worlds, and infinity. Her vitalist–materialist view held that human beings are matter in motion who think. She argued that her age had produced many feminine writers, rulers, actors, and preachers and was perhaps a feminine reign. Cavendish was a pioneer, both as a feminist and a natural philosopher. While standing up for the rights and intellectual abilities of women, she attempted to address the most fundamental ontological and epistemological questions of philosophy. She also anticipated and articulated ideas associated with future philosophers, such as Spinoza’s pantheism, Leibniz’s vitalism, Hegel’s dialectics, and Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism. In synthesizing ideas into her own system of a vitalistic dialectical form of materialism, she paved the way both for the “new science” and the “new philosophy” that emerged during the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution.

The chapter engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language used in the media reporting of the most recent prime ministerial elections in Israel, in 2019. It draws on the tradition of Cultural-Historical and Activity Theory to highlight the impact of the wider historical context of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the media reporting of events in the region. It is a comparative study of the BBC’s and Al Jazeera’s reporting of the elections, examining a period from August 2019 (the pre-election period) through to October 2019 (the immediate post-election period). The data collected consists of six and nine online reports by the BBC and Al Jazeera, respectively. An overriding aim is an examination of the impact and the role of the history of the region in reporting on significant events. The work aims to contribute to other studies on the Israel–Palestine conflict which have argued that media is a contested space, and the news is not a neutral product.

The brechtian tragic is inconceivable without the brechtian comic. Virtually no brecht play lacks a strong comic dimension, covering the whole range of the genre (parody, commedia, slapstick, clown etc.). Brechtian tragi-comedies call for special attention in this context, and this chapter contains detailed analyses of the resistible rise of arturo ui as well as the fragmentary, aristophanes-inspired pluto revue.

H. Patrick Glenn, Professor of Law and former Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, passed away in 2014. For the past decades, he had been a central figure of legal scholarship, especially in the global discourse on comparative law. This chapter is the introduction to a collection that intends to honour Professor Glenn’s intellectual legacy by engaging critically with his ideas, especially focusing on his visions of a ‘cosmopolitan state’ and of law conceptualized as ‘tradition’. To this end, the collection brings together an international group of leading scholars in comparative law, legal philosophy, legal sociology, and legal history. This introductory chapter situates Glenn’s work within the context of his trajectory as a scholar of comparative law and reflects critically, in particular, on Glenn’s concept of ‘tradition’.