Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France

301 Pages·2012·10.14 MB·English

by  Butler, Judith;Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

T
his classic work by one b
u
of the most important
t
philosophers and crit- l j u d i t h b u t l e r
ics of our time charts e
r
the genesis and trajec-
tory of the desiring subject from Hegel’s
formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to
its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite,
Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. highly critical emphasis on the
Judith Butler plots the French reception metaphysical issues of identity, ratio-
of Hegel and the successive challenges nality, and historical closure have so
waged against his metaphysics and view obscured Hegel’s original idealism,
of the subject, all while revealing ambi- especially his theory of reflection, that
guities within his position. The result is the rejection of Hegel brings with it,
a sophisticated reconsideration of the with a kind of dialectical necessity, the
post-Hegelian tradition that has pre- return of the pre-Hegelian, even the s
dominated in modern French thought, pre-Kantian, a kind of naive hope for
u
and her study remains a provocative and ‘immediacy’ and, paradoxically, a
timely intervention in contemporary commitment to a realism that the idealist b
debates over the unconscious, the pow- tradition was to have finished off.”
j
ers of subjection, and the subject. —The Philosophical Review e
c
“Butler’s book. . . is an outstanding
one, and deserves to be read by anyone JUdITh BUTLER is the Maxine Eliot t
interested in the question of the Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and
s
survival(s) of Hegel in contemporary Comparative Literature at the University of Cali-

French philosophy.” fornia at Berkeley, and Visiting Professor in the o
—Annals of Scholarship Humanities at Columbia University. Her books f
include Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of
“[Butler] writes clearly and without jar-
Zionism; The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere; Gender d
gon. . . . The impact of Butler’s work is
immense.” Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; and e
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death.
—The French Review s
PhILIPPE SABOT is lecturer in philosophy at i t
“Subjects of Desire gives evidence of long re- the Charles de Gaulle University–Lille 3 in of
r s u b j e c t s
flection on important texts and issues
Lille, France.
in the Continental tradition. There is e
a sure-footedness of judgment here Cover Image: Clyfford Still,957-D No. 1. 1957.
that historians ought to envy.” Oil on canvas, support: 113 x 159” (287.02 x
403.86 cm). ©Clyfford Still Museum
—The Journal of Modern History
Cover Design: Shaina Andrews
“What [Butler’s] account suggests is that
the most damaging aspect of contem- c
o
porary French Hegel reception is that its
l
u
m Hegelian Reflections in twentietH-centuRy fRance
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK b
cup.columbia.edu ia with a new foreword by philippe sabot reprint edition
printed in the u.s.a.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through a special grant,
has assisted the Press in publishing this volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Butler, Judith P.
Subjects of desire.
Bibliography: p. 253
Includes index.
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770– 1831—
Infl uence. 2. Desire (Philosophy) 3. Philosophy,
French— 20th century. I. Title.
B2948.B86 1987 128' .3 86-3 3458
ISBN 978- 0- 231- 06451- 4 (pbk.)
Columbia University Press
New York Guildford, Surrey
Copyright © 1987 Columbia University Press
Preface to the Paperback Edition copyright © 1999
Judith P. Butler
Foreword copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Ken Venezio
Contents
Foreword by Philippe Sabot vii
Preface to the Paperback Edition xiii
Preface xxv
Abbreviations xxix
Introduction 1
1. Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit 17
The Ontology of Desire 24
Bodily Paradoxes: Lordship and Bondage 43
2. Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel 61
Kojève: Desire and Historical Agency 63
Hyppolite: Desire, Transience, and the Absolute 79
From Hegel to Sartre 92
3. Sartre: The Imaginary Pursuit of Being 101
Image, Emotion, and Desire 101
The Strategies of Pre- refl ective Choice: Existential Desire
in Being and Nothingness 121
[v]

Foreword
Finished with Hegel?
Philippe Sabot
Subjects of Desire is the work that emerged from Judith Butler’s disserta-
tion thesis, completed in the mid-1 980s, on the reception of Hegel in
twentieth- century French thought. This work compels attention on sev-
eral accounts. To begin with, it allows us to take stock of the importance
of the Hegelian reference in Butler’s subsequent work, in par tic u lar
through her critical elaboration of the theme of recognition and its con-
temporary reformulations (such as in Axel Honneth’s recent work1). In
Subjects of Desire, however, the dialogue with Hegelian thought has dif-
ferent stakes. It consists both in reconstituting the conditions of elabo-
rating a Hegelian paradigm of desire, as that paradigm emerges in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, and in tracking a series of re-a ppropriations of
this trope of desire through a particularly rich sequence of French phi-
losophy, beginning with Alexandre Kojève’s seminar at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes in the 1930s and stretching at least until the fi rst volume
of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the mid- 1970s. Within this frame-
work of thematic and historical analysis, Butler sets about distinguishing
different contemporary reformulations of the question of desire each of
which leads to an interrogation of the totalizing impetus often attributed
to the Hegelian subject. Thus, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre take up,
each in his own way, the problem of knowing whether desire can be
satisfi ed— and under what conditions this potential satisfaction fulfi lls
the desiring subject at the same time that it reveals the ontological lack
[vii]
Foreword
by which that subject is constituted. For their part, in a manner osten-
sibly more critical, Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault each undertakes to de-
pose a certain metaphysics of identity, of the subject, or of presence, taken
to support the Hegelian doctrine of desire, by putting into play instead a
nondialectical thought of différe/ance.
This vast inquiry into the avatars of French Hegelianism (from its re-
nais sance to its dissolution) has the virtue of allowing us to reconstitute
the relationship that contemporary French philosophy has been able to
maintain with Hegel. But Butler does not restrict herself to this. She pro-
poses equally to interrogate the inherent ambiguity in what she calls
French “post-H egelianism,” comprising various attempts since the 1960s
to “escape from Hegel.” This ambiguity derives particularly from the fact
that criticisms of Hegel within the French tradition often rest on a mis-
apprehension about Hegelianism: They impute to the Hegelian subject
an ontological autonomy and self- suffi ciency, whereas the very fact of
being a “subject of desire”— thus a subject who is subject to desire, and
to a desire for recognition—p uts into play a negativity and a dialectic of
intersubjectivity that renders eminently problematic the supposed pleni-
tude of this subject. The reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit Butler
proposes at the beginning of the book is very instructive in this regard.
She shows, indeed, that the “science of the experience of consciousness”
is not an undertaking in constitution or foundation making but rather
opens onto a self- dissolution of the point of view of consciousness when
that consciousness fi nds itself confronted with the demands of absolute
knowledge— in other words, precisely with that regime of truth that ex-
ceeds any objective constitution by consciousness. All along the course of
this deceptive trajectory that leads from consciousness to Spirit, the
Hegelian subject thus appears affl icted by a negativity that undermines
its identity and that condemns it to a kind of permanent ec- stasis—without
any fi nal return of the self to itself. Desire, which has an animating function
in the Bildung or cultivation of consciousness, testifi es to this precarity
of the ego (unsatisfi ed and incomplete) at the same time that it constitutes
the matrix of a possible identifi cation and satisfaction that emerges from
the specular play of recognition: Desire is the desire to be recognized by
another desire, by the desire of another who limits the subject’s claim on
autonomy or who, at least, stands for the requirement that the subject
[viii]
Foreword
become alienated from itself in order to be recognized. It is between
these two poles of desire and recognition, out of the play of negativity
and alienation, that the subject fi nds its problematic elaboration. This sub-
ject is thus not a defi nitive and preconstituted given, but represents rather
the ideal or fi ctive precipitate of a pro cess of assimilation and appro-
priation of the totality of differences in the refl exive immanence of the
self.
To put the accent thus on the trajectory of the Hegelian subject in its
pursuit of satisfaction, of recognition, and of absolute knowledge, but on
the basis of an ontological rupture with the world and with itself in the
ordeals of desire, is to provide the means of meas ur ing the profound and
enduring infl uence of Hegel on the French philosophical landscape since
the 1930s. In fact, Butler shows how Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre effect
an anthropological and existential revision of Hegelianism. For these
thinkers the task is to know whether negativity can be overcome through
History or whether it instead forms the fabric of a human existence
founded on becoming and dissatisfaction, doomed to be nothing other
than a “useless passion” (Sartre)—c raving, lacking the Absolute. The
Kojevian fi ction of the death of man at the end of History and the Sar-
trean dramatization of an ontological dualism (in itself/for itself) that
opens only onto satisfactions that are either imaginary (man as God) or
in the imaginary (literature) clearly mark the double orientation of this
fi rst French reception of Hegel. In a sense, both expose the historical col-
lapse of a metaphysical model of the subject as assured of itself and of its
own identity in its immanent relation to the Absolute. Hyppolite elabo-
rates the story of this collapse in his commentary on the Phenomenology
of Spirit, which underscores the tragic structure of conscious experience.
In the tradition of Jean Wahl, he imagines a Kierkegaardian Hegel!
At the same time, a temptation persists here to overcome this failure in
an attempt to restore the subject’s lost unity with itself and with the
world, even if in the imaginary or posthistorical domain. And according
to Butler, it is precisely to this fi ctive re- elaboration and dialectical resto-
ration of a subject lacking substance, lacking the absolute, that the
overtly antidialectical posture of the following philosophical generation
responds. For that generation, Hegelian Aufhebung must be interpreted
either as a strategy of dissimulation or as the denial of difference by a
[ix]