Richard Mather

Drawing on Hegel’s notion of “tarrying with the negative,” I interpret exposure and response prevention (ERP) as a practical enactment of dialectical transformation: by remaining with anxiety and contradiction rather than fleeing through ritual, the sufferer gradually reclaims agency and dissolves the illusion of an alien threat. This therapeutic process is embedded within a broader reshaping of habits — the creation of a “second nature” — through which the self becomes more flexible, rational, and integrated.

The experience of obsessive–compulsive disorder is often described in clinical terms — as a pattern of intrusive thoughts and ritualized behaviors — but such descriptions rarely capture the deeper structure of the suffering involved. Beneath the symptoms lies a form of consciousness caught in a struggle with itself, animated by a demand for certainty that cannot be satisfied and yet cannot be relinquished. Hegel’s account of the “Unhappy Self” in The Phenomenology of Spirit offers a strikingly prescient framework for understanding this inner conflict. The Unhappy Self is a consciousness that absolutizes its own principles, recoils from its finitude, and becomes ensnared in the very logic it posits as its salvation. When read alongside the phenomenology of OCD, Hegel’s analysis reveals not only the structural parallels between obsessive certainty and the dialectic of self‑division, but also the deeper philosophical stakes of the disorder: a retreat from the shared world of meaning into a self‑enclosed demand for purity, necessity, and inviolable assurance. By placing OCD within a Hegelian frame, we can illuminate the dialectical dynamics that sustain it — and gesture toward the possibility of a resolution that does not merely suppress contradiction but transforms it.

My study unfolds across several intertwined themes: Historical Frankism — Frank’s biography, his antinomian revolt against rabbinic Judaism, his conversions, his authoritarian charisma, and the traumatic dynamics of the Frankist community. I show how his movement destabilized Jewish–Christian boundaries and reshaped Polish religious imagination.“Only to wipe out all laws, all religions, did I come to Poland…” Frank and Sade — A comparative exploration of libertine transgression. While both inhabit an eighteenth‑century counter‑world of scandal and boundary‑breaking, I argue that Sade’s cruelty is nihilistic and anti‑religious, whereas Frank’s provocations remain symbolically and ritually embedded within a sacred framework. Frank and Bataille — The heart of the paper. I trace how Frank’s insistence on the primacy of matter, his valorisation of debasement, and his descent into the “lowest place” resonate with Bataille’s base materialism. Yet I highlight their divergence: Frank descends in order to rise; Bataille descends with no promise of ascent. Poland as Esau/Edom — I show how Frank reimagines Poland as the mythic site of redemption, the place where Jewish law is overturned and gnosis becomes possible. This reconfigures Jewish exile and maps Frankist theology onto Polish geography and Catholic symbolism. The Androgynous Messiah — Frank’s mythic self‑presentation as Adam and his daughter Eve as the Maiden/Messiah, drawing on Zoharic androgyny while unsettling normative religious categories. Dreams, profanation, and the undoing of binaries — I argue that Frank’s dream‑logic and profanations destabilize distinctions between holy/unholy, true/false, sacred/profane — anticipating later thinkers like Bataille, Serres, Derrida, and even Adorno’s claim that the sacred must pass through the profane to endure.

My paper explores why Jacob Frank and the Frankist movement imagined Poland, rather than Israel, as the decisive terrain of redemption. Drawing on Frank’s own teachings, I show that Poland became a mythic Edom—the land of Esau—where the final reconciliation between Judaism and Catholic Europe would unfold. As the document states, Frank taught that “If you will be worthy to come to Poland, to Esau… the living God himself will rejoice” (§72). I trace how Frank reinterpreted biblical and rabbinic traditions: Esau, long associated with Rome, becomes for Frank the spiritual ancestor of Catholic Europe, and Poland—whose name evokes “field dwellers”—becomes the “field of Edom.” In this symbolic geography, Frank casts himself as a new Jacob/Israel destined to complete the ancient drama between the brothers.

Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille articulate two of the most radical materialisms in the history of religious and philosophical thought. Their work invites us to reconsider the metaphysical hierarchies that structure Western understandings of spirit and flesh, purity and impurity, law and transgression. More importantly, it suggests that any attempt to think the sacred today must reckon with the dark, excessive, and often destabilising force of matter itself — a force that both Frank and Bataille, each in his own way, refused to domesticate. 

In the form of an extended poem I wonder aloud whether Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, split in half his 'writing self', with one part identifying with Ahab, a character who attributes to the white whale a metaphysical evil, and whose obsessive quest ends in self-defeating failure; and the other part identifying (belatedly) with Ishmael, whose open-minded and non-committal personality helps him survive Ahab's mania; and that in the end Melville sees the act of writing as a mock-heroic activity, with the writer as someone who can shed his solipsistic self and go into the world to tell his tale to as many people as possible.

The purpose of this essay is to make the case for a heterodox reading of Leibniz’s The Monadology (published 1720) through the lens of Professor John Wheeler’s hypothesis of the one-electron universe (proposed in 1940). My conjecture is this: That there exists in the knowable universe only one monad; that this monad traverses time in both directions, eventually criss-crossing the entire past and future history of the universe; and that this singular monad interacts with itself countless times, thereby filling the universe with simultaneous appearances of itself. In the course of this article I will consider the possibility that our solitary monad is synonymous with Leibniz’s God, or if the monad in question is rather a created substance that is alone with God, a notion that gains some traction thanks to Leibniz’s admiration for the solipsism of Saint Teresa of Avila. I will also consider whether the one-monad hypothesis is consistent with Leibniz’s own views on harmony, simplicity and perfection.

Anticipating Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen said we must recognize the living, breathing individual as a “Thou,” and not just as a generic example of humanity. As significant as the universal ethical ideal is for Cohen, he recognized that ethics is concerned with individuals only insofar as they are members of humanity as a whole. Ethics can’t always deal with individual moral feelings or with sin. In other words, it is religion -- rather than ethics -- that concerns itself with the sin of the individual.

Hermann Cohen made a distinction between the logic of science and the ideal of ethics, and noted that the natural world and the world of ethics are perceived very differently. This is because the order of the physical world is unchangeable (e.g, the sun sets in the west, night follows day, etc), while in the ideal world ethical rules can be accepted or rejected. It seems there should be one explanation for science, which is empirically self-evident, and another for ethics, which is something that is open to debate. Cohen reasoned there must be something that allows science and ethics to coexist and interrelate.