Review by Choice Review
This reading of Hegel's Phenomenology presents a densely worded analysis of sense certainty, the dialectical structure of self and other, and absolute knowing. It attempts to situate what Miklowitz (California Polytechnic State Univ.) calls the metafictions of Hegelian metaphysical pretensions into the Nietzschean death spiral of those ideas philosophy bequeathed to our culture as religious surrogates. Miklowitz links metafictions to metaphysics and the inherently tropological rhetoric of Hegel via Nietzsche into the atrophic philosopher-chow of postmodernist literary criticism. This kind of reading can hammer the very metafictions it uses as hammer. Interpreting Hegel via Nietzsche through Roy Lichtensteinian lenses that convert aesthetically embellished ontological categories into cartooning (a methodology which alone seems able to elicit a Myth of Er in philosophische Er-scheinung), we may observe in the author the author-as-self-critic. In his preface, Miklowitz describes the attempted "metonymy of linking being with history" in a meetly meted prose which messalinically mimics a metrazolic mirage magnifying our culture's metolic mode of chemo-mechanical maturation paradigms of onto-focus. Those able to meaningfully parse the previous sentences will find Miklowitz's summary and discussion to be of some interest. Level: professionals working in the field. M. C. E. Peterson; University of Wisconsin Colleges
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
