Jones, Kath Renark (1996) Re-thinking desire. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis analyses the ways in which desire has been traditionally configured in terms of its relation to both being and becoming. Techniques for the domestication of desire through idealized concepts of community, the subject, the body, life and ethics, are analyzed in respect of their transcendental construction and the practices of power which they legitimate. The critical texts of Immanuel Kant are taken as the primary focus of an attempt to separate the negative values implicit in Humanism from the positive project of Enlightenment thinking. This separation, it is argued, effects a reconceptualization of the classical opposition between Man and Nature, allowing us to elaborate new definitional structures of the above themes (community, the subject, the body, life and ethics). In a postmodern era, these new formulations enable philosophical thought to accept the de-centering and dispersal of the subject without abandoning the critical project of self-experimentation, together with the political and ethical demands produced in the interactions and associations of selves in becoming. In the attempt to open up a space for thinking the desiring self of post-humanism, this writing follows a two-fold course. On the one hand, it argues against the internal organization and rationality of subject-producing ideologies. On the other, it seeks to elucidate the points of resistance in and against the power structures inherent in our societies and at work in our procedures of representation and objectification.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Alternative Title:	Rethinking desire
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Desire -- Philosophy
Official Date:	July 1996
Dates:	Date Event July 1996 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Philosophy
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Extent:	335 leaves
Language:	eng

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