Force, Drive, Desire

“Rudolf Bernet’s Force, Drive, Desire is a highly welcome contribution to contemporary philosophy. Bernet offers an impressive, multifaceted account of the fundamental forces that move human beings, individually and collectively. This is crucial not just to phenomenology and psychoanalysis but also to political philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics.” —Sara Heinämaa, author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference
 

“Clear and erudite, challenging and exciting, this work is a literal tour de force. The aim of Rudolf Bernet’s Force, Drive, Desire is nothing less than a renewal of both philosophy and psychoanalysis by way of a powerful reconstruction of the concepts of drive and desire as fundamental to each.” —James Dodd, author of Phenomenology, Architecture, and the Built World
 

“This unique book is sure to be a classic. Bernet’s masterful study unearths remarkably deep connections between psychoanalytic concepts of drive and desire, and philosophical problems of force, movement, agency, negativity and passivity, offering extraordinary insights into what drives us in our relations to each other and nature.” —David Morris, author of Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology

“Bernet's book makes for essential reading on the topic of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis; many of the chapters are sure to become standard points of reference . . . This book does more than just shed new light on a much-debated question; it opens up a new area of research. Bernet has a truly impressive mastery of the texts of classical metaphysics which he expertly weaves into an alternative tradition. The book sometimes takes a circuitous route to approach its goal, but like drives themselves, this detour produces an abundant surplus not always connected to its object that nevertheless generates a pleasure all of its own.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Bernet brings psychoanalysis and philosophy into the kind of productive dialogue that has not been accomplished since Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy. . . . Bernet's reconstruction of drives and desire will have far-reaching implications for rethinking the future of both psychoanalysis and metaphysics as central to how to conduct a philosophy sensitive to human agency and existence itself. Essential." —M. Uebel, University of Texas, CHOICE