Beginning with Hegel, we will consider the master-slave dialectic and the conflictual account of relations with other people that it describes. We will then consider the Nietzschean adaptation of this position in his account of slave morality and ressentiment, before tracing the heritage of these two ideas (one ontological, the other 'moral') through their twentieth century developments in psychoanalysis (Lacan), existentialism (Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty), and in the (post)phenomenological work of Levinas, Deleuze, and Derrida. Themes to be considered include love, desire, hatred, friendship, shame, Bad Faith, authenticity, sadism, masochism, as well as solipsism (how can we know that other people exist?) and ontology. Ultimately we will seek to establish whether or not Sartre was right to describe love as a 'ruse', and relations with other people as 'hell'.

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Readings