At another talk Butler gave in London early in 2009 on her book Frames of War, she started with a delineation of Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage. In this famous chapter, Butler’s re-reading of it draws attention to the fact of what she calls a ‘re-doubling’ of the initial self-consciousness. More than any other commentator on Hegel that I’ve read, Butler reading of this section draws attention to the appearance of the Other, but it is not an absolute Other, in other words, not another self-consciousness standing separate and in opposition to the initial self-consciousness. For Butler this self-consciousness notices that this other self-consciousness is not only not unlike the initial self-consciousness, it to an extent both is and is not that other self-consciousness over there. What this entails then for Butler is a situation in which a self-consciousness and Other, an Other which is both me and not-me. And it is living this paradox which constitutes the fundamental ethical relationship for her. Lordship and Bondage does not constitute a fight to the death between two self-consciousness’ for Butler. She describes as the emergence of the realization that risking death is necessary to the realization of absolute singularity of the self-consciousness subject but the rub is that death would eliminate any possibility for the self-consciousness to realize its singular will. So the question then becomes, for Butler, how to live with the Other. This Other that is over there that is both me and not-me, means that there is a dialectic of singularity and substitutability. Singularity of the one and its substitutability with the Other, the former signifying individual self-consciousness, the latter signifying its going outside itself, a self-loss of sorts in that it appears in the Other, is the Other. Singularity and substitutability is that which denotes in a nutshell the dialectic of substance as subject, of singularity and substance. The “I” may seek to buttress its singularity be destroying the Other, but as we saw, this would only end up destroying the ability of the self-consciousness to go outside itself and realize itself in the Other. So for Butler, the paradox of singularity and substitutability, of finding over there in the Other that is me and not-me cannot be as Hegel is want to do, dialectically resolved. For Butler that there is no possibility of a dialectical resolution is the definition of the ethical.