Judith Butler speaking at Columbia Law School, saying some interesting, no make that really interesting stuff on the notion of “consent.”
Commenting on Žižek in this 2000 text, Butler accuses him of presenting us with an overly formalistic brand of Hegelianism. She draws upon the way in which Žižek’s occupation with the Kant-Hegel combo is telling and productive in some respects, but that ultimately Žižek’s analyses, while brilliant, are often ahistorical, presented in an overly structuralist-formalist fashion that makes thinking a political aritculation somewhat difficult. Here is a quote from the Verso book Contingency, Universality, Hegemony (2000).
Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed philosopher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery. Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising several times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate. We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (20).
commenting on Zizek:
One difference that is doubtless apparent is that my approach to Hegel draws upon a certain set of literary and rhetorical presumptions about how meaning is generated in his text. I therefore oppose the effort to construe Hegel in formal terms or, indeed, to render him compatible with a Kantian formalism, which is something Žižek has done on occasion. Any effort to reduce Hegel’s own text to a formal schematism will become subject to the very same critique that Hegel has offered of all such formalisms, and subject to the same founderings (25).