A Hesitation Of Things

This dissertation, A Hesitation of Things was initially motivated by a temporal, Deleuzian, and Bergsonian enquiry, which appears to trouble notions of ontology and knowledge. It takes up the concept of Hesitation and, tracing a path through meditations on ‘Method’, ‘Writing’, ‘Hesitation’, ‘History’ and ‘Faith’, while applying a method of creative, self-reflexive writing and ‘radical empiricism’, produces a critique of ‘things’ as worldly and objective phenomena.

The self-reflexivity of the writing leads to a recurring and prolonged dialogue with method, form and process - particularly in the early, ‘hesitant’ chapters - while also discussing effects of digital computing on the production of philosophy and History.

The dissertation utilises visual reference throughout, implicating a history of painting and visual culture. The canon is mostly modern while the dissertation regularly questions modernity. Nietzsche is perhaps the dissertation’s main protagonist, complemented by Nietzschean thinkers including Derrida and Deleuze.

Literary figures, such as Kafka, Proust and Kazuo Ishiguro play significant parts while W.G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin are referred to as historians valued for the quality and style of their writing as much as for their scholarship. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s Hamlet recurs and, through Shakespeare the dissertation attempts to resolve the strands of its argument.