Hegel
February 8th, 2010on Hegel
February 7th, 2010Fichte
Given the fact that an individual shares the external world with other free subjects, this is possible only if individuality is recognized by those other beings as setting limits to their own free agency. This mutual recognition [Anerkennung] is an important influence on Hegel’s move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity.
Mutual recognition, or … subjectivity requires intersubjectivity. Furthermore, rights cannot be deduced from ethical individualism but require intersubjectivity. In a sense, Fichte is criticizing all previous philosophies, particularly those dealing with rights, for not first demonstrating the need for intersubjectivity, or the impossibility of thinking of the individual as isolated, which he sees as the same thing. For Fichte, intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for the very existence of individuality and self-awareness. The idea of natural rights outside of a community is a fiction:
There is no condition in which original rights exist; and no original rights of human beings. The human being has actual rights only in community with others, just as—according to the higher principles noted above—the human being can be thought of only in community with others. An original right, therefore, is a mere fiction, but one that must necessarily be created for the sake of a science of right.
Thus, it is impossible to think of rights without thinking of an individual in relation to other individuals. Hegel’s attempt to reconcile individual liberty with community follows Fichte’s lead. Nor, for Fichte, can we think of free beings as existing together unless their rights mutually limit each other (39).
bulter hegel
February 5th, 2010Norms govern recognizability: There’s a million quotes I can find to underscore this argument. What I need to outline with regards to this is
- The geneology of the emergence of Butler’s turn to normativity, which I’ll find as the Foucault Effect no doubt
- The more difficult part is th exegesis of this quote:
“Does recognition, as Hegel argues, consist in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the other is structured in the same way I am? And do I recognize that the other also makes, or can make, this recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps another encounter with alterity here that is irreducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity?” (27)
- Is Butler saying in effect that introducing difference into Hegelian dialectic of recognition forces now not any reconciliation, but wait, this wasn’t reconciled in Hegel either. But Butler’s point is …
- norms and language, decentre the subject, as Hegel mentions as the system of customs Sittlichkeit and in this way Žižek and JB are not that far apart. As both in their respective way resist pegging down Hegel as this authoritarian philosoher of logocentric identity.
There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability. (30)
Adriana Cavarero
Cavarero is resolutely anti-Hegelian in her approach to ethics and the other.
- “there is an other not fully known or knowable to me”
- “exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me”
Butler agress and disagrees. She definitely likes the part about exposure and vulnerability, but she offsets Cavarero’s emphasis on singularity, which can slide into an individualist ethics. Butler instead emphasizes ’substitutability’ of the account. This is because …
“discourse is not life its time is not yours (36)
indifferent structures, a sociability that exceeds me, which gets to the fact that for Butler any emphasis on singularity effaces the extent to which this originality resembles too strictly a frame of referencing that doesn’t correspond to the deconstructionist framework. That is for Butler, the account is impossible because the exposure and vulnerability undoes the subject, the other’s opaqueness is my opaqueness and this is the substitutable condition of subjectivity, and to that extent it is substitutable.
The account I give of myself exceeds narratiion, it can not be narrated. It can’t be a story, there is no stable subject, it doesn’t unfold in a linear way.
If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then i might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable. The narrative authority of the “I” must give way to the perspective and temporalilty of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story. (37)