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Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic
This groundbreaking work synthesizes concepts from thirteen crucial philosophers and psychologists, relating how the ancient problem of opposites has been opening to an integration which not only conserves differentiation but enacts it, especially through the integration of myth into the dialectic.
Weaving a fascinating narrative that ‘thinks with’ the complex encounters of theorists from Baruch Spinoza, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James to Alfred North Whitehead, C. G. Jung, Gilles Deleuze, and Isabelle Stengers, this book uniquely performs the convergence of continental philosophy, pragmatism, depth psychology, and constructivist ‘postmodern’ theory as a complement to the trajectory culminating in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.
This is an important book for professionals and academics working across the humanities and social sciences, particularly for continental theorists and depth psychologists interested in the construction of a novel epoch after the modern.
Weaving a fascinating narrative that ‘thinks with’ the complex encounters of theorists from Baruch Spinoza, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James to Alfred North Whitehead, C. G. Jung, Gilles Deleuze, and Isabelle Stengers, this book uniquely performs the convergence of continental philosophy, pragmatism, depth psychology, and constructivist ‘postmodern’ theory as a complement to the trajectory culminating in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.
This is an important book for professionals and academics working across the humanities and social sciences, particularly for continental theorists and depth psychologists interested in the construction of a novel epoch after the modern.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
360 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 30, 2022
8 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Grant Maxwell
32 books6 followersGrant Maxwell is the author of "How Does It Feel?: Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Philosophy of Rock and Roll" and "The Walk", a children's book illustrated by his mother-in-law, Susan Edwards. Maxwell has served as a professor of English at Baruch College in New York, he holds a PhD from the City University of New York's Graduate Center, and he's an editor at Archai: the Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. He's also a musician, and he lives in East Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and son.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 31, 2024
Absolute psycho material. High theory of the most ascendant level. If you hate theory, stay the fuck away! I thought I hated theory!! I thought I was over this shit, but this book crawled its way into my brain and skullfucked me like the little Deleuzian lapbitch I am.
You wanna learn about the entanglement of organic- and divine-machines? We've got that. Polytheistic potencies that elevate historical beings to transcendent actuality? We've got that too. Biological excess as a creative drive towards self-overcoming and self-consciousness? Fucking take it!
This is the dialectic ingested and regurgitated as integration, the ouroboric fusion of materialism and idealism, of mechanics and teleology into a system of incompleteness whose oppositions rupture into incoherence then complementarity as further systems are integrated into its fold. Multiplicity, not towards fragmentation and relativism, but emergent complexities. Negation, contradiction, and error as vital processes of positive becoming.
No Gothbois allowed 💀 Immanently divine Femmes only ✨
You wanna learn about the entanglement of organic- and divine-machines? We've got that. Polytheistic potencies that elevate historical beings to transcendent actuality? We've got that too. Biological excess as a creative drive towards self-overcoming and self-consciousness? Fucking take it!
This is the dialectic ingested and regurgitated as integration, the ouroboric fusion of materialism and idealism, of mechanics and teleology into a system of incompleteness whose oppositions rupture into incoherence then complementarity as further systems are integrated into its fold. Multiplicity, not towards fragmentation and relativism, but emergent complexities. Negation, contradiction, and error as vital processes of positive becoming.
No Gothbois allowed 💀 Immanently divine Femmes only ✨
May 31, 2023
Grant's ability to score a balance between both a natural flow of wordsmithing and succinct presentation regarding the contours of different complex ideas and theories that range anywhere from Heraclitus to Hillman, is something to behold, the upshot being a trenchant transformation: a crucial katabasis plunging down into polycentric depths of psyche and soul-making, troubling the orthodox of scientism, Western philosophy and armchair psychoanalysis.
His book, Integration and Difference, isn't just the usual info dump, nor is it a clunky thesis-beating in dusty PhD fashion, as most philosophy books; rather, it takes seriously the aesthetic mode, putting forth a production that is an incisive and riveting survey of both depth psychology and process philosophy, forming them in dialectical, processual fashion.
There are flourishes in this book that will forge something new and strange and potent within, tarrying with the inner other in a way that doesn't offer cheap solutions to mental health as much as maintain the tension -- and not just make room for a cliched growth but also allow for the deep, unwieldy intervals of madness to have a say, dispelling pathology as something to fix with pills and couches and biblically-sized diagnostic manuals, discerning it, rather, as something to flow with, something to learn from, only to resurface into a multivalent milieu of strange soulful heterodox. In a word, this book will simply alter you.
His book, Integration and Difference, isn't just the usual info dump, nor is it a clunky thesis-beating in dusty PhD fashion, as most philosophy books; rather, it takes seriously the aesthetic mode, putting forth a production that is an incisive and riveting survey of both depth psychology and process philosophy, forming them in dialectical, processual fashion.
There are flourishes in this book that will forge something new and strange and potent within, tarrying with the inner other in a way that doesn't offer cheap solutions to mental health as much as maintain the tension -- and not just make room for a cliched growth but also allow for the deep, unwieldy intervals of madness to have a say, dispelling pathology as something to fix with pills and couches and biblically-sized diagnostic manuals, discerning it, rather, as something to flow with, something to learn from, only to resurface into a multivalent milieu of strange soulful heterodox. In a word, this book will simply alter you.
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November 12, 2025painfully academic and extremely difficult to parse but exactly the subject matter I'm interested in
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews