Circulation Bound: Hegel and Heidegger on the State

Publication: Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community, SUNY Press, 1996.

Modernity means freedom, we say, and circulation let loose: commodities, technology, choices, the autonomous individual. In contrast to our free exchange, we imagine old traditional societies as a regulated exchange along a network of posts defined by fixed roles. In a totally modern world, all identities are available for use and consumption, exchange and substitution in a depthless circulation of beings made indifferently available. In such a world our individual freedom can be trivialized by the circulation that we thought guaranteed it. In this essay, I examine how Hegel and Heidegger envision the role of the State in binding up the unlimited flows of modernity.

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