Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.
On Recognition: Hegel says I see you, you see me, we’re the same, you and me, looking at each other. For Hegel, the other is at first outside itself, before the subject realizes that “hey, this other is actually alot like me.” In fact this other is constitutive of the subject. Some say this makes Hegel into an imperialist, going around appropriating the other as part of the subject itself. However, others, like Butler, see in Hegel, a more ecstatic subject:
the “I” repeatedly finds itself outside itself, and that nothing can put an end to the repeated upsurge of this exteriority that is, paradoxically, my own. I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place. In fact, if we are to follow The Phenomenology of Spirit, I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was. There is, then, a constitutive loss in the process of recognition, since the “I” is transformed through the act of recognition. Not all of its past is gathered and known in the act of recognition; the act alters the organization of that past and its meaning at the same time that it transforms the present of the one who receives recognition. Recognition is an act in which the “return to self” becomes impossible for another reason as well. An encounter with an other effects a transformation of the self from which there is no return. What is recognized about a self in the course of the exchange is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying inside itself proves impossible. One is compelled and comported outside oneself; one finds that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as an author or an agent of one’s own making. In this sense, then, the Hegelian subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable. The possibility of the “I,” of speaking and knowing the “I,” resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective it conditions (27-28).