Walking in Place: Time and Totality in Hegel's Modernity

What philosophy questions is both the idea of the present as being contained within itself, and the idea that a future merely follows in the passing of time. The claim made in this thesis is that to be self-contained necessitates the effacement of difference, which is not only a form of domination, but precludes the possibility of a future by reducing existence to parameters that already govern the present. Via a reading of G.W.F Hegel, it is argued that the future’s possibility depends upon the recovery of difference from the past, a past that is discontinuous with the present.