logocentric – Page 79

hallward dialectical voluntarism

Peter Hallward “The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism”
Online version here

Structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, by and large, relegated volition and intention to the domain of deluded, imaginary or humanist-ideological miscognition. Rather than explore the ways in which political determination might depend on a collective subject’s self-determination, recent philosophy and cultural theory have tended to privilege various forms of either indetermination (the interstitial, the hybrid, the ambivalent, the simulated, the undecidable, the chaotic…) or hyper-determination (‘infinite’ ethical obligation, divine transcendence, unconscious drive, traumatic repression, machinic automation…). The allegedly obsolete notion of a pueblo unido has been displaced by a more differentiated and more deferential plurality of actors – flexible identities, negotiable histories, improvised organizations, dispersed networks, ‘vital’ multitudes, polyvalent assemblages, and so on.

[Recent European theoretical contempt for any notion of ‘will’]

For Adorno, rational will is an aspect of that Enlightenment pursuit of mastery and control which has left the earth ‘radiant with triumphant calamity’. Althusser devalues the will as an aspect of ideology, in favour of the scientific analysis of historical processes that proceed without a subject. Negri and Virno associate a will of the people with authoritarian state power. After Nietzsche, Deleuze privileges transformative sequences that require the suspension, shattering or paralysis of voluntary action. After Heidegger, Derrida associates the will with selfpresence and self-coincidence, a forever futile effort to appropriate the inappropriable (the unpresentable, the equivocal, the undecidable, the differential, the deferred, the discordant, the transcendent, the other). After these and others, Agamben summarizes much recent European thinking on political will when he effectively equates it with fascism pure and simple. … Much of Foucault’s work might be read as an extended analysis, after Canguilhem, of the ways in which people are ‘de-voluntarized’ by the ‘permanent coercions’ at work in disciplinary power, coercions designed to establish ‘not the general will but automatic docility’.19 Foucault never compromised on his affirmation of ‘voluntary insubordination’ in the face of newly stifling forms of government and power, and in crucial lectures from the early 1970s he demonstrated how the development of modern psychiatric and carceral power, in the immediate wake of the French Revolution, was designed first and foremost to ‘over-power’ and break the will of people who had the folly literally to ‘take themselves for a king’;20 nevertheless, in his published work Foucault tends to see the will as complicit in forms of self-supervision, self-regulation and self-subjection. … Badiou’s powerful revival of a militant theory of the subject is more easily reconciled with a voluntarist agenda (or at least with what Badiou calls a volonté impure22), but suffers from some similar limitations. It’s no accident that, like Agamben and Žižek, when Badiou looks to the Christian tradition for a point of anticipation he turns not to Matthew (with his prescriptions of how to act in the world: spurn the rich, affirm the poor, ‘sell all thou hast’…) but to Paul (with his contempt for the weakness of human will and his valorization of the abrupt and infinite transcendence of grace). Pending a more robust philosophical defence, contemporary critical theorists tend to dismiss the notion of will as a matter of delusion or deviation.

The true innovators in the modern development of a voluntarist philosophy are Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and the general principles of such a philosophy are most easily recognized in the praxis of people like Robespierre, John Brown, Fanon, Che Guevara… It is to such people that we need to turn in order to remember or reconceive the true meaning of popular political will.

III
On this basis we might enumerate, along broadly neo- Jacobin lines, some of the characteristic features of a will of the people:
1. The will of the people commands, by definition, voluntary and autonomous action. Unlike involuntary or reflex-like responses, if it exists then will initiates action through free, rational deliberation. As Rousseau puts it, the fundamental ‘principle of any action lies in the will of a free being; there is no higher or deeper source …. Without will there is no freedom, no selfdetermination, no “moral causality”.’ Robespierre soon drew the most basic political implication when he realized that when people will or ‘want to be free they will be’. Sieyès anticipated the point, on the eve of 1789: ‘every man has an inherent right to deliberate and will for himself’, and ‘either one wills freely or one is forced to will, there cannot be any middle position’.
Outside voluntary self-legislation ‘there cannot be anything other than the empire of the strong over the weak and its odious consequences.’

An intentional freedom is not reducible to the mere faculty of free choice or liberum arbitrium.25 If we are to speak of the ‘will of the people’ we cannot restrict it (as Machiavelli and his successors do) to the passive expression of approval or consent.26 It is the process of actively willing or choosing that renders a particular course of action preferable to another. ‘Always engaged’, argues Sartre, freedom never ‘pre-exists its choice: we shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making.

‘To will’, as Badiou puts it, is ‘to force a point of impossibility, so as to make it possible.’33 The guiding strategic maxim here, adopted in situations ranging from Lenin’s Russia in 1917 to Aristide’s Haiti in 1990, was most succinctly stated by Napoleon: on s’engage puis on voit. Those sceptical of political will, by contrast, assume that apparently voluntary commitments mask a more profound ignorance or devaluation of appetite (Hobbes), causality (Spinoza), context (Montesquieu), habit (Hume), tradition (Burke), history (Tocqueville), power (Nietzsche), the unconscious (Freud), convention (Wittgenstein), writing (Derrida), desire (Deleuze), drive (Žižek)…

The actively general will distinguishes itself from the mere ‘will of all’ (which is ‘nothing but a sum of particular wills’) on account of its mediation through the collective mobilization of the people. The people who sustain the ‘will of the people’ are not defined by a particular social status or place, but by their active identification of and with the emergent general interest. Sovereignty is an attribute of such action. Conceived in these terms as a general willing, the power of the people transcends the powers of privilege or government, and entitles the people to overpower the powers that oppose or neglect them. If such powers resist, the Jacobins argue, the only solution is to ‘arm the people’, in whatever way is required to overcome this resistance.

Of all the concerns that link Rousseau and Marx, few run as deep as the critique of conventional parliamentary representation. Since ‘a will cannot be represented’, so then ‘sovereignty, being nothing more than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated [and] can only be represented by itself; power can indeed be transferred but not will.’ The people can (and must) delegate ‘agents’ to execute their will, but they cannot delegate their willing as such. Marx follows Rousseau, against Hobbes, when he criticizes modern bourgeois politics as essentially representative – that is, as an expropriation of popular power by the state. The bourgeois ‘state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings’. Popular emancipation will require the interruption of such a state, and its replacement, through ‘the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class’, of a political form capable of overseeing ‘the economic emancipation of labour’. In the wake of Marx’s critique of the Commune, Lenin’s State and Revolution takes this argument to its logical conclusion.

A will, individual or collective, cannot begin in full possession of its purpose or power; it precisely wills rather than receives its clarification.60 A voluntarist prescription must anticipate effects which enable their cause. Rousseau recognizes this necessity: ‘In order for a nascent people to appreciate sound political maxims and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause …; before the creation of the laws, people would have to be what they should become by means of those same laws.’

butler hegel unhappy consciousness

Butler, Judith. “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness” Psychic Life of Power. 31-62

The ineluctability of the body in the “Unhappy Consciousness” parallels the ineluctability of “instinct” in Freud and that of the will in Nietzsche (56).

Lotsa people liked the liberation narrative of Lordship and Bondage but have neglected to look at the resolution of freedom into self-enslavement at the end of the chapter. The whole idea of the progressive history that is now in question, not to mention the status of the subject, so now “the dystopic resolution of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ has perhaps regained a timely significance (31).

The bondsman in Hegel throws off the apparently external “Lord” only to find himself in an ethical world, subjected to various norms and ideals. Or, to put it more precisely, the subject emerges as an unhappy consciousness through the reflexive application of these ethical laws (32).

A certain structuring attachment to subjection becomes the condition of moral subjectivation (33).

🙂 What JB is getting at here is the notion of the development of a subjective interiority. She like Foucault, but his limitation is a view of subject as purely a effect of power, yo bro, what about resistance?

Butler wants to underscore a Relationship Between Self-Enslavement as Bodily Subjection and Self-Imposed Ethical Norms

On the Geneology of Morals Nietzche draws relation between Self-Enslavement and the moralized “Man” of Conscience

This quote from Foucault is one of JB’s favourites:

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection [assujettissement] much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (Psychic Life 33, quoting Discipline and Punish 30-34).

How precisely are we to read this “inhabiting” of the body by the soul? Can a return to Hegel help us read it? What are the points of convergence and divergence in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault on the structure of subjection?

Hegel’s account in “The Unhappy Consciousness” prefigures a critical discourse on ethical positions that not only seek to institute the denial or sacrifice of bodily life, but that fall into instructive paradoxes when they do.

Hegel shows that if the suppression of the body requires an instrumental movement of and by the body, then the body is inadvertently preserved in and by the instrument of its suppression (33). This formulation prefigures the possibility of a convergence with Nietzschean, Foucaultian, and, as we shall see, Freudian perspectives on self-abasement, which Hegel’s text in the transition to Spirit, forecloses. … Arresting the text prior to its resolution into Spirit, this inquiry seeks to know whether a suppressed link with a Nietzchean and Freudian account of conscience is embedded in Hegel’s chapter.

Hegel and the Production of Self-Enslavement

Hegel’s insights in the “Unhappy Consciousness” on the ineluctability of the attachment of and to the body in subjection are reiterated in Foucaultian frameworks, and that the Foucaultian account of subjection, despite its significant moves beyond dialectical logic, remains unwittingly tethered to the Hegelian formulation. Furthermore, Hegel tacitly presumes that subjection is understood as a self-negating attachment and, in this way, shares an operative assumption with the Freudian notion of libidinal investment.

bondsman is instrumental body, the lord’s body “but in such a way that the lord forgets or disavows his own activity in producing the bondsman, a production which we will call a projection (35).

This disavowal involves a clever trick. It is an action by which an activity is disavowed, yet, as an action, it rhetorically concedes the very activity that is seeks to negate.” [huh]

To disavow one’s body, to render it “Other” and then to establish the “Other” as an effect of autonomy, is to produce one’s body in such a way that the activity of its production —and its essential relation to the lord— is denied. … the “Other” become complicit with this disavowal.

YOU BE MY BODY FOR ME, BUT DO NOT LET ME KNOW THAT THE BODY YOU ARE IS MY BODY.

Not only does he labor for another, who takes the yield of his labor, but he gives up his signature for the signature of the other, no longer marking ownership of his own labor in any way. This expropriation of the object does not negate the bondsman’s sense of himself as a laboring being, but it does imply that whatever he makes, he also loses. The determinate thing that the bondsman makes reflects the bondsman himself as a determinate thing. But because the object is given away, he becomes that which can be forfeited. If the object is the congealing or forming of labor, and if the labor is that of the bondsman, then the determinate and transient character of the thing will imply the determinate and transient character of the bondsman. The laboring body which now knows itself to have formed the object also knows that it is transient. The bondsman not only negates things (in the sense of transforming them through labor) and is a negating activity, but he is subject to a full and final negation in death (40-41).

self-recognition is achieved through a certain fearful transience, absolute fear:

Unhappy Consciousness [Bondsman becomes Lord over himself, lord over his own body], this form of reflexivity requires a SPLITTING of the psyche into two parts

Unhappy consciousness seeks to overcome this duality (essential, unchangeable and inessential, changeable) (47)

1. Lordship

2. Bondage internal to a single consciousness: body is still split off from consciousness, reconstituted as an interior alien, the body is sustained through its disavowal as what consciousness must continue to disavow.

Consciousness clings or ATTACHES TO ITSELF, and this clinging to consciousness is at the same time a disavowal of the body, which appears to signify the terror of death, “the absolute fear”

The unhappy consciousness requires and engages this ATTACHMENT by invoking an IMPERATIVE, an ETHICAL NORM: CLING TO ONESELF (43)

Hence the imperative to cling to oneself is motivated by this absolute fear and by the need to refuse that fear.

The section on unhappy consciousness explains the genesis of the sphere of the ethical as a defense against the absolute fear by which it is motivated. The fabrication of norms out of (and against) fear, and the reflexive imposition of those norms, subjects the unhappy consciousness in a double sense: the subject is subordinated to norms, and the norms are subjectivating, that is, they give an ethical shape to the reflexivity of this emerging subject. The subjection that takes place under the sign of the ethical is a flight from fear, and so is constituted as a kind of flight and denial, a fearful flight from fear that covers its fear first with stubbornness and then with religious self-righteousness. (43).

[…] As a dual structure, the unhappy consciousness takes itself as its own object of scorn.

The philosophical elaboration of this scorn takes the following form: consciousness is now divided into two parts, the “essential” and “unchangeable,”on the one hand, and the “inessential” and “changeable,” on the other. … it renders this contradictory self into an INessential part of itself. It thus parts with itself in order to purify itself of contradiction.

As a result the unhappy consciousness BERATES itself constantly, setting up one part of itself as a pure judge aloof from contradiction and disparaging its changeable part as inessential, although ineluctably tied to it. … ethical self-judgment in the context of the unhappy consciousness: … the unchangeable consciousness “passes judgment” on the changeable.

[…] Before the introduction of the “mediator” and the “priest,” the chapter on the unhappy consciousness appears to proceed as if it contained a trenchant critique of ethical imperatives and religious ideals, a critique which prefigures the Nietzschean analysis that emerges some sixty years later.

Significantly, it is here, in the effort to differentiate itself from its excretory functions, indeed from its excretory identity, that consciousness relies on a “mediator,” what Hegel will call “the priest.” In order to reconnect with the pure and the unchangeable, this bodily consciousness offers up its every “doing” to a priest or minister. This mediating agency relieves the abject consciousness of its responsibility for its own actions. Through the institution of counsel and advice, the priest offers the reason for the abject consciousness’s actions. Everything that the abject consciousness offers that is, all of its externalizations, including desire, work, and excrement, are to construed as offerings, as paying penance. The priest institutes bodily self-abnegation as the price of holiness, elevating the renunciatory gesture of excrement to a religious practice whereby the entire body is ritualistically purged. The sanctification of abjection takes place through rituals of fasting and moritification. Because the body cannot be fully denied, as the stoic thought, it must be ritualistically renounced (51).

At this juncture Hegel departs from what has been the pattern of explanation, in which a self-negating posture is underscored as a posture, a phenomenalization that refutes the negation it seeks to institute.

In the place of such an explanation Hegel asserts the will of another operates through the self-sacrificial actions of the penitent. In effect self-sacrifice is not refuted through the claim that self-sacrifice is itself a willful activity; rather, Hegel asserts that in self-sacrifice one enacts another’s will. … [The penitent disclaims his act as his own, avowing that another’s will, the priest’s, operates through his own, avowing that another’s will, the priest’s operates through his self-sacrifice … (52)]

One might expect that the penitent would be shown to be reveling in himself, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, that his self-punishments would culminate in a pleasurable assertion of self.

But Hegel eschews this explanation and thus breaks with the pattern of explanation in the chapter in favor of a religious solution to in Spirit (52).

Whereas in all of the earlier examples of self-negation pleasure was understood to INHERE in pain (the pleasurable aggrandizement of the stoic, the pleasurable sadism of the skeptic), pleasure is here temporally removed from pain, figured as its future compensation. For Hegel, this eschatological transformation of the pain of this world into the pleasure of the next establishes the transition from self-consciousness to reason.

Every effort to reduce itself to inaction or to nothing, to subordinate or mortify its own body, culminates inadvertently in the production of self-consciousness as a pleasure-seeking and self-aggrandizing agent. Every effort to overcome the body, pleasure, and agency proves to be nothing other than the assertion of precisely these features of the subject (53).

Post-Hegelian Subjections

Recall for Hegel ethical imperatives first emerge in a defensive response to absolute fear, and their emergence must be construed as a permutation and refusal of that fear. This absolute fear was the fear of death, hence a fear conditioned by the finite character of the body. The ethical refusal and subordination of the body might then be understood as a magical effort to preempt that existential negation. Moreover, the ideal of radical self-sufficiency is jeopardized by the body’s permeability and dependency. In this sense, excretion is not the only “animal function” that would signify “defilement” for this subject. The repeated efforts to sacrifice the body which become repeated assertions of the body are also efforts to defend it against everything that “jeopardizes ” it, where to be in “jeopardy” denotes a danger slightly less dire than death, a kind of penetrative paroxysm that implies being moved or shaken sexually “through and through.”

One could then see in the various forms of self-beratement and self-mortification typologized in “The Unhappy Consciousness” a prefiguration of neurosis and perhaps also a specific modality of homosexual panic. (54)

We might then reread the mobilizing fear that is both refused and rerouted by the ethical imperative in terms of the feared “expropriability” of the body. If the bondsman’s laboring activity could be expropriated by the lord and the essence of the bondsman’s body be held in ownership by that lord, then the body constitutes a site of contested ownership, one which through domination or the threat of death can always be owned by another. The body appears to be nothing other than a threat to the project of safety and self-sufficiency that governs the Phenomenology’s trajectory. The anal preoccupation that directly precedes the ascendance into a religious concept of an afterlife suggests that bodily permeability can only be resolved by escape into an afterlife in which no bodies exist at all.

This affirmation of the absolute negation of the body contradicts all the earlier efforts to subordinate or master the body WITHIN life, efforts which culminated in the assertion of the ineluctability of the body. Whereas other religious notions turned out to be surreptitious [stealth, clandestine] ways of reasserting the body, this one appears exempt from the dialectical reversal that it resolves (54-55).

Psychoanalysis

The repression of the libido is always understood as itself a libidinally invested repression. Hence, the libido is not absolutely negated through repression, but rather becomes the instrument of its own subjection. … In other words, prohibition becomes the displaced site of satisfaction for the “instinct” or desire that is prohibited, an occasion for reliving the instinct under the rubric of the condemning law. This is, of course, the source of the form of comedy in which the bearer of the moral law turns out to be the most serious transgressor of its precepts … In this sense, then, renunciation takes place through the very desire that is renounced, which is to say, the desire is never renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation (55-56).

I do not mean to suggest that Freud’s highly problematic notion of instinct, Hegel’s inchoate body, and Nietzsche’s will are strictly equivalent. Yet I do want to suggest that these three thinkers circumscribe a kind of dialectical reversal which centers on the impossibility of a full or final reflexive suppression of what we might loosely call “the body” within the confines of life.

Within the Hegelian framework, the subject, which splits itself off from its body, requires that body in order to sustain its splitting activity; the body to be suppressed is thus marshalled in the service of that suppression. For Foucault, the body to be regulated is similarly marshalled in the service of suppression, but the body is not constituted prior to that regulation. On the contrary, the body is produced as an object of regulation, and for regulation to augment itself, the body is proliferated as an object of regulation. This proliferation both marks off Foucault’s theory from Hegel’s and constitutes the site of potential resistance to regulation. The possibility of this resistance is derived from what is unforeseeable in proliferation.. But to understaad how a regulatory regime could produce effects which are not only unforeseeable but constitute resistance, it seems that we must return to the question of stubborn attachments and, more precisely, to the place of that attachment in the subversion of the law (59-60).

… the logic of subjection in both Hegel and Freud implies that the instrument of suppression becomes the new structure and aim of desire, at least when subjection proves effective (60).

What Hegel implies in “The Unhappy Consciousness” is not merely that moral wretchedness cannot be coherently sustained, that it invariably concedes the bodily being that it seeks to deny, but that the pursuit of wretchedness, the attachment to wretchedness, is both the condition and the potential undoing of such subjection. If wretchedness, agony, and pain are sites or modes of stubbornness, ways of attaching to oneself, negatively articulated modes of reflexivity, then that is because they are given by regulatory regimes as the sites available for attachment, and a subject will attach to pain rather than not attach at all. … the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire. (61)

If desire has as its final aim the continuation of itself —and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s connatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy (62).

hegel recognition jessica benjamin

Butler, Judith. “Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin” (2000) in Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. “Self-consciousness … has come out of itself. … it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being” (Phenomenology 111). One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is suggesting that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another.

To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be “returned” to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of the reflection, regain itself as external to itself and, hence, continue to lose itself. (147)

Thus, the relationship to the Other will be, invariably, ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that its “relationality” become constitutive of who the self is.
Hegel has given us an ek-static notion of the self, one which is, of necessity, outside itself, not self-identical, differentiated from the start. It is the self over here who considers its reflection over there, but it is equally over there, reflected, and reflecting. Its ontology is precisely to be divided and spanned in irrecoverable ways. Indeed, whatever self emerges in the course of the Phenomenology of Spirit is always at a temporal remove from its former appearance;

it is transformed through its encounter with alterity, not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was. Difference casts it forth into an irreversible future.

To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel calls self-certainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself. I believe that this conception of the self emphasizes a different Hegel from the one found in Benjamin’s work. It is surely one for which the metaphor of “inclusion,” as in “the inclusive self” would not quite work. 148

[…] I would suggest that the ek-static notion of the self in Hegel resonates in some ways with this notion of the self that invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence. The “self” here is not the same as the subject, which is a conceit of autonomous self-determination. The self in Hegel is marked by a primary enthrallment with the Other, one in which that self is put at risk. The moment in “Lordship and Bondage” when the two self-consciousnesses come to recognize one another is, accordingly, in the “life and death struggle,” the moment in which they each see the shared power they have to annihilate the Other and, thereby, destroy the condition of their own self-reflection. Thus, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible, and need becomes self-conscious. What recognition does at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold destruction in check. But what it also means is that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either. And the ethical content of its relationship to the Other is to be found in this fundamental and reciprocal state of being “given over.” In Hegel, it would only be partially true to say that the self comes to “include” the Other. For the self is always other to itself, and so not a “container” or unity that might “include” Others within its scope.

On the contrary, the self is always finding itself as the Other, becoming Other to itself, and this is another way of marking the opposite of “incorporation.” It does not take the Other in; it finds itself transported outside of itself in an irreversible relation of alterity. In a sense, the self “is” this relation to alterity. 149-150

Although Benjamin sometimes refers to “postmodern” conceptions of the self that presume its “split” and “decentered” character, we do not come to know what precisely is meant by these terms. It will not do to say that there is first a self and then it engages in spllitting, since the self as I am outlining it here is beyond itself from the start, and defined by this ontological ek-stasis, this fundamental relation to the Other in which it finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself. This model is, I would suggest, one way of disputing any claim concerning the self-sufficiency of the subject or, indeed, the incorporative character of all identification. ….

If we assume that the self exists and then it splits, we assume that the ontological status of the self is self-sufficient before it undergoes its splitting (an Aristophanic myth, we might say, resurrected within the metapsychology of ego psychology). But this is not to understand the ontological primacy of relationality itself and its consequences for thinking the self in it necessary (and ethically consequential) disunity. 150

yes, it is necessary to say that the subject splits, but it does not follow from that formulation that the subject was a single whole or autonomous. For if the subject is both split and splitting, it will be necessary to know what kind of split was inaugurative, what kind is undergone as a contingent psychic event, and how those different levels of splitting relate to one another, if at all.

It is, then, one perspective on relationality derived from Hegel which claims that the self seeks and offers recognition to another, but it is another which claims that the very process of recognition reveals that the self is always already positioned outside itself. This is not a particularly “postmodern” insight, since it is derived from German idealism and earlier medieval ecstatic traditions. It simply avows that that “we” who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and cannot think of ourselves outside of the decentering effects that that relationality entails.

Moreover, when we consider that the relations by which we are defined are NOT DYADIC, but always refer to a historical legacy and futural horizon that is not contained by the Other, but which constitutes something like the Other of the Other, then it seems to follow that who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of the dyad.

I want to reiterate that displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality will also help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender. 151

what psychic price normative gender?

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

the triadic structure for thinking about desire has implications for thinking gender beyond complementarity and reducing the risk of heterosexist bias implied by the doctrine of complementarity.

I’m no great fan of the phallus … I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire. Nor do I accept the view that would posit the phallus as the primary or originary moment of desire, such that all desire either extends through identification or mimetic reflection of the paternal signifier. I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between the phallus and the penis and claim that the “paternal” is a metaphor only.

What they do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make “phallus” and “paternal” safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis/phallus and paternal/maternal that the distinctions are said to overcome.

I believe in the power of subversive resignification to an extent and applaud efforts to disseminate the phallus and to cultivate, for instance, dyke dads and the like. But it would be a mistake, I believe, to privilege either the penis or paternity as the terms to be most widely and radically resignified. Why those terms rather than some others? The “other” to these terms is, of course, the question interrogated here, and Benjamin has helped us to imagine, theoretically, a psychic landscape in which the phallus does not control the circuit of psychic effects. But are we equipped to rethink the problem of triangulation now that we understand the risks to phallic reduction (136).

The turn to the preoedipal has been, of course, to rethink desire in relation to the maternal, but such a turn engages us, unwittingly, in the resurrection of the dyad: not the phallus, but the maternal, for the two options available are “dad” and “mom.” But are there other kinds of descriptions that might complicate what happens at the level of desire and, indeed, at the level of gender and kinship? 136

[…] I do think however, that (a) triangulation might be profitably rethought beyond oedipalization or, indeed, as part of the very postoedipal displacement of the oedipal; (b) certain assumptions about the primacy of gender dimorphism limit the radicalism of Benjamin’s critique; and (c) that the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference that Benjamin maintains because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically [standing outside of oneself] involved in the Other, decentered, through its identifications which neither exludes nor includes the Other in question.

Postoedipal Triangulation

Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary? Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality. … At what psychic price does normative gender become established? 144

How is it that presuming complementarity presumes a self-referential heterosexual that is not definitionally crossed by homosexual aims? If we could not ask these questions in the past, do they not now form part of the theoretical challenge for a psychoanalysis concerned with the politics of gender and sexuality, at once feminist and queer?

houlgate difference between Kant and Hegel

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): Thinking Philosophically Without Begging the Question” in The classics of Western philosophy: a reader’s guide. Gracia, Jorge. J.E. and Gregory M. Reichberg, Bernard N. Schumacher Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Hegel maintains that the categories contain the objective structure not just of the objects of human experience (Kant’s position), but of being itself. This, of course, is a belief that Kant does not share. For Kant the categories allow us to understand as objective what we perceive, and so constitute the conditions of objective experience. They do not, however disclose the intrinsic character of things themselves. Hegel goes beyond Kant, therefore, by retaining the metaphysical idea — embaced by Spinoza and Liebniz — “that thinking grasps what things are IN-THEMSELVES”

The project of the Phenomenology is thus clear: it does not provide a logical-metaphysical account of the nature of being, but shows how the assumptions and certainties of consciousness lead by themselves to the standpoint of absolute knowing.

Note that phenomenology as Hegel conceives it, is not epistemology: it does not try to justify the claims of ordinary consciousness itself (and so is not interested in determining, for example, whether or not the colors we see are really there). Nor is phenomenology to be confused with transcendental philosophy (as practiced by Kant and Fichte): it does not aim to uncover the epistemic conditions of ordinary consciousness. Phenomenology is a new discipline that seeks to understand the perspective of consciousness on its own terms,whatever its conditions may be and whether or not its claims are justified.

Phenomenology examines not what being is absolutely, but the way being is understood by, and so appears to, consciousness. Similary phenomenology does not try to establish definitively what knowledge or mind is (and so is not philosophy of mind), but studies the way knowledge is understood by, and so appears to, consciousness.

There is, however, another, more positive nuance to Hegel’s phrase, The Phenomenology also shows how absolute knowing is gradually caused to emerge or “appear” by the certainties of consciousness itself. Hegel’s book thus examines both how knowledge appears to consciousness and how that very appearance leads logically and immanently to the appearance on the scene of absolute knowing.

houlgate master slave

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit”

Insofar as one’s identity arises and is defined only with other people, killing the others is self-defeating, for one loses precisely that source of recognition that one has come to require.

If either self-consciousness is to attain recognition, therefore, one of them must back down. This is not to say that in every such struggle one party will in fact back down, but that the logic of the situation requires that one capitulate. The one that does so shows thereby that it is not absolutely free after all. It is actually attached to life and afraid of death, and accepts that its identity is (at least in part) determined and limited by what is given to and other than it. This consciousness thus acknowledges that its identity depends on its own body and the realm of natural things around it, and in consciousness of this dependence it becomes the servant, bondsman, or slave of the other. The other self-consciousness, having succeeded in proving itself to be absolutely free and fearless, is recognized by the slave as his (or her) lord and master. The life and death struggle thus leads logically — if not always in fact — to the relation of master and slave (21).

This relation — Hegel’s famous account of which profoundly influenced Marx — is not intrinsic to social life. It is not to be encountered, for example, where there is genuine mutual recognition. It is the result of a struggle for recognition by two (or more) primitive self-consciousnesses, one of which — the slave– finally accepts what Tom Rockmore rightly calls the “deep truth” that “life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” and thereby lets the other enjoy the feeling of unencumbered freedom.

Desire in the Master and Slave

Desire, we recall, negates and consumes things; but it also runs up against the independence of things, and so fails to “have done with the thing altogether” and thereby to achieve complete satisfaction. By interposing the slave between himself and things, the master succeeds in separating these two sides of desire from one another. He leaves the slave to deal with the independence and resistant “thereness” of the thing, and reserves for himself “the pure enjoyment of it.” With the help of the slave, the master thus frees himself from the frustrations of desire and revels in the pure joy of consuming.

The problem faced by the master is twofold. On the one hand, though he receives recognition from the slave, the master does not recognize the slave in turn, and so cannot find true value in the slave’s recognition of him. The outcome, Hegel writes, “is a recognition this is one-sided and unequal.” On the other hand, the very relation that embodies for the master his absolute freedom — his dominance over the slave — also reminds him that in his freedom he is actually dependent on another.[…]

There is a further sense, however, in which “the truth of the independent consciousness” — the master — is to be found by looking to the slave: for in the slave we begin to see what the freedom and indepence to which the master lays exclusive claim are in truth. …

How, then does the slave prove to be free? First of all, through his labour: for even though he is forced to work by the master, his labor is nonetheless his own activity. Furthermore, unlike the master’s unchecked desire, which consumes the object and leaves nothing behind to mark its activity, labor enables the slave to give enduring objective expression to his freedom. The slave may not find himself recognized by the other self-consciousness, but he does find his freedom embodied in the object of his labour.

Equally important to the slave’s freedom is his fear of death. In the original life and death struggle, both self-consciousnesses seek recognition for themselves as “purely negative being” — being that is “self-identical” yet not tied to being anything in particular. …

Fear is sometimes understood by commentators merely to be that which forces the slave to labor in the service of the master in the first place. Hegel’s point, however, is more subtle. It is that fear alters the slave’s understanding of the meaning of labor itself.

The slave has to labor because he is subservient to the master. Through his labor, however, the slave discovers that he has the freedom to transform things himself and, indeed, to transform them according to his own will and intention. In working on things, he thus acquires what Hegel calls “a mind of his own”. The slave’s freedom, however, is the freedom to transform the particular things that he encounters: to turn this piece of wood into a chair or these ingredients into bread. Accordingly, the slave develops particular skills, depending on what he is required to work on. The freedom that he exhibits in his labor is thus still a limited freedom: it consists in the particular ability to give new shape to these particular objects, and bears witness to the fact that the slave’s consciousness is still mired in the world of given particularities (or, as Hegel puts it, that “determinate being still in principle attaches to it”).

mutual recognition

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Eds. Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman, 2003. 8-29. Print.

On what makes self-consciousness social

page 16: For Kojeve, what drives self-consciousness to become social is its desire to assimilate (as well as be desired by) another’s desire; for Hegel, by contrast, what renders self-consciousness social is its acceptance of the other as an independent source of recognition for itself.

page 17According to Kojève, the direct consequence of desire’s entrance into social relations is struggle and conflict. Each desire, Kojève insists, “wants to negate, to assimilate, to make its own, to subjugate, the other Desire as Desire.” Furthermore, each seeks to have its exclusive right to satisfaction recognized by all desires. This “fight” or struggle in turn leads to the creation of masters and slaves. Human social and historical existence is thus distinguished principally by fighting, slavery and work. For Kojève’s Hegel there is a point at which historical development stops: namely, when a community of mutual recognition is produced that puts an end to struggle and domination. … Nevertheless, what has prevailed throughout history prior to this point is nothing but struggle and domination, because these are generated by the very desire that gives rise to social interaction in the first place.

Achieving self-consciousness as we have seen, requires that I relate to myself in relating to that which is other than me. This means that I must relate to another self-consciousness that recognizes me alone. Self-consciousness must, therefore, be social and intersubjective. We now know that by itself recognition accorded to me by the other is not sufficient to enable me to be concretely self-conscious. To attain that end I must be recognized by another that I recognize in turn as a free and independent other. Genuine self-consciousness thus requires not just recognition of my identity by the other, but mutual recognition by each of us of the other. Self-consciousness must be a “double movement of the two self-consciousnesses” working freely together. In such a movement, Hegel writes, “each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only, would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.”

Mutual recognition, for Hegel, requires the uncoerced cooperation of the two (or more) self-consciousnesses involved. Indeed, not only must the two self-consciousnesses freely recognize one another; in fact, they must both recognize that their mutual recognition and cooperation is needed for either to be concretely and objectively self-conscious. In Hegel’s own words, they must “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”

Genuine self-consciousness involves much more than mere desire (though it must also incorporate desire). Whereas desire “seizes upon and negates the object,” genuine self-consciousness requires recognition from the other, which in turn entails “allowing the other to be what it is” and “letting the other go free.” Self-consciousness would like to know only itself in the other and be the sole object of the other’s recognition. Such self-certainty can be achieved, however, only “through membership or partnership with Other.” For one person to have a concrete and objective understanding of himself, he must join together with somebody else.

as beings who are by necessity conscious of what is other than ourselves, we can achieve certainty of ourselves only when we are recognized by another whom we recognize as free in turn. This conception of mutual recognition, I contend, lies at the heart of Hegel’s whole social and political philosophy. (20)

Žižek subjectivity

houlgate on kojève

Houlgate, S. G. W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Houlgate opines on page 13:

In my view, however, Kojève seriously distorts Hegel’s account of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology by conflating the idea that desire is the activity of negation with the further idea that the subject of desire is essentially “empty.” According to Kojève, the desiring subject is “an emptiness (vide) greedy for content; an emptiness that wants to be filled by what is full”; that is to say, “desire is absence of being” that seeks to fill itself “with a natural, biological content.” To my mind, this distinctively Kojèvian conception of desire finds no place in Hegel’s account. Desire does, indeed, negate the object. Yet it does so not to fill a void in the subject, but rather to confirm and enhance the subject’s sense of self: desire, Hegel writes, is simply the movement of consciousness whereby its “identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for it.” Pace Kojève, the desiring self in the Phenomenology does not lack a sense of its own being. If anything, it is rather too full of itself, for it regards everything around it as there for it alone. In so doing, desire considers the other to be nothing but an opportunity for desire itself to negate it. Desire is thus for Hegel “certain of the nothingness of this other,” but it is by no means clear that desire takes itself to be sheer “absence” or “emptiness.”

houlgate phenomenology desire

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman eds. The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print.

According to Hegel, I cannot fully understand who I am, if I remain alone by myself with only the objects of nature to attend to. I gain a proper consciousness of myself only when my self-understanding is recognized and confirmed by others.

The Phenomenology describes … the development of consciousness from its most primitive or naive form which Hegel names “sensuous certainty” to its most mature form: self-knowing spirit or “absolute knowing.”

Sensuous certainty: form of consciousness that takes itself to be aware of the simple immediate presence of things, eschewing all mediating categories and is certain in its own mind that what it has before it is nothing but this, here, now in all its simplicity.

Perception: the more developed standpoint of perception is logically implicit in that of sense certainty, and those wedded to immediate sensuous certainty should acknowledge that the objects they relate to are more complex than they first think. Hegel argues that perception grasps its object as a complex unity of many “nows” and many “heres,” but that it cannot decide whether the true nature of the object lies more in its unity or in its multiplicity. Perception ends up distinguishing between the manifold character and the inner unity of the object. As soon as it regards its object as having an inner unity, however, it ceases to be mere perception and becomes understanding.

Understanding: then learns that inner unity of the thing actually consists in lawfulness, reason, and life. When this happens, Hegel claims, understanding proves to be not just consciousness of objects, but also self-consciousness — because it finds in its objects the very qualities that constitute its own nature.

Prior to its mutation into self-consciousness, understanding already incorporates an element of self-understanding: it knows that it is precisely the understanding, rather than mere perception of objects.

Yet only when it encounters in the objects themselves nothing but qualities belonging to itself does it come to be self-consciousness in the full sense, that is, consciousness of itself above all else.

Hegel points out that understanding always takes itself to be conscious of what is other than it and does not realize that it is self-conscious. It is we phenomenologists, not understanding itself, who recognize that understanding is in fact conscious of itself. In Hegel’s own words, “it is only for us that this truth exists, not yet for consciousness.” Nevertheless, in understanding something else to be rational and law-like, understanding is, indeed, “communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself” … Hegel’s next task is to examine what is involved in being explicitly self-conscious, or “what consciousness knows in knowing itself.”

We become explicitly self-conscious when we make our selves and our own identity the explicit and all consuming object of our concern, when we become wholly and overtly absorbed by ourselves.

1. consciousness comes to be wholly absorbed by itself while remaining conscious of what is other than it. When consciousness wakes up to the fact that it is primarily conscious of and concerned with itself, the objects of perception and understanding do not suddenly disappear from view. ON the contrary, they remain before us as the external objects in relation to which we are principally conscious of ourselves. For Hegel, self-consciousness is thus not exclusively consciousness of oneself; it is a relation to something other than me in which I relate to myself above all.

This is not to deny that, like Descartes in the Mediations, I can “shut my eyes, stop my ears, withdraw all my senses” and “converse with myself” in total separation from things. What can be reached through Cartesian doubt, however, is no more than abstract self-consciousness, because such doubt abstracts from the conditions under which alone concrete, all-embracing self-consciousness is possible: namely, consciousness of an external world in relation to which we find ourselves. … Hegel acknowledges that such abstract self-consciousness is possible and is an important moment of true, concrete self-consciousness. He claims, however, that true self-consciousness itself does not merely abstract from but (to borrow Kant’s term) “accompanies” our consciousness of objects.

From Hegel’s point of view Descartes overlooks the moment of other-relatedness that is essential to true consciousness of oneself. Yet there is nevertheless something to be learned from Descartes about true self-consciousness: for in remaining conscious of real, external objects, self-consciousness must also seek to negate those objects. Consciousness finds itself in what is other than it; but the very otherness of the objects I encounter inevitably prevents me from relating wholly to myself. In order to achieve unalloyed self-consciousness, therefore, I must regard the object before me as something that is not essentailly other than or independent of me after all, but there merely for me. I continue to consider the object to be real, and (unlike Descartes) do not declare it to be a figment of my imagination: but I deem it to offer no resistance to me and to yield to my ability to negate or consume it for my own satisfaction and self-enjoyment. Insofar as self-consciousness relates to itself through negating objects around it, it is, in Hegel’s word, desire (Begierde). Self-consciousness necessarily takes the form of desire, therefore, because Descartes is half-right: consciousness does enhance its sense of itself by negating the objects around it, but it directs its activity of negation at a realm of objects whose reality is not in doubt and that, consequently, forever remains to be negated.

Note that desire arises at this point in the Phenomenology not (or, rather, not just) because we are organic, embodied beings, but because of the very nature of self-consciousness itself. Concrete self-consciousness is not immediate self-awareness, but self-awareness mediated by and inseparable from the awareness of what is other. Self-consciousness is interested in itself above all, and yet, as a complex form of consciousness, it is necessarily related to external things.

If it is to attain an undiluted consciousness of itself, it must thus negate and destroy the other things in encounters. As this activity of negating what is other than itself, self-consciousness is desire. In Hegel’s own words, the origin of desire is thus the fact that “self-consciousness is … essentially the return from otherness.”

Note that what we desire, in Hegel’s view, is not the object as such, but rather, as Jean Hyppolite puts it, “the unity of the I with itself.” If Hegel is right, in seeking to enjoy the object, we are in fact seeking to enjoy ourselves.

Sittlichkeit

Sittlichkeit pronunciation

Sittlichkeit is intimate and cozy, but unconscious and uncritical. It is a simple, almost instinctive obedience to established law and custom. In this sort of moral community people live unreflectively by tradition and not by their own lights. But here always comes a time when the tradition s are questioned; this is an age of enlightenment or Aufklärung, as a result of which Sittlichkeit gives way to Moralität. The latter is an individualistic morality that has its source in individual conscience. In Hege’s veiw, Socrates … is responsible for having opened the Athenians up to the dangers f subjective or reflective morality.

In the Hegelian view, the Greek world was animated by a collective “we” that personified a spontaneous harmony of ideas and feelings. Those who were part of this collectivity were at home in the world because their personal feelings and inclinations were in complete concord with the social order. They did not suffer from the alienation, isolation, and estrangement so characteristic of men in modern society. The Greeks created a world in which order and liberty existed side by side in perfect harmony. Hegel envied them this harmony, but by the same token, he thought that they were morally infantile. Their freedom and harmony was the product of thoughtless conformity to conventional morality. It was Socrates who broke the spell of this happy coincidence of freedom and order. Socrates represented a new sensibility that was richer, deeper ..

Drury, Shadia. Alexandre Kojève: the roots of postmodern politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

kant 1724 – 1804

West, David. An Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 1996.

Analytic truth: straightforward definitions, can be found to be either true or false simply in virtue of the meanings of the terms they contain or, in other words, by analysis. “A bachelor is an unmarried male” is, simply true by definition. In Kantian terms, the concept of the predicate (‘… is an unmarred male’) is included in the concept of the subject (‘A bachelor’). Analytic truths, which depend simply on the meanings of the terms we use and tell us nothing about the real world, are plausible examples of a priori knowledge. We don’t find out that they are true by observation or experience.

The truth of synthetic peopositions, on the other hand, cannot be decided in this way. That “No woman has ever been President of the USA” is a truth that can be known only synthetically. In this case the concept of the predicate is clearly not included in the concept of the subject (being male is not part of the definition of President). factually informative based on actual evidence or experience, and therefore are a posteriori truths

Kant’s philosophy imples that we can have substantive or non-trivial knowledge of the structure of experience independently of all experience. TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

A moral action must be motivated purely by the intention to do what is right, not by any particular interest or desire of the individual. The ‘synthetic a priori principles of orality must be derived, therefore, fromteh abstract notion of a rational will or agent, from which all distinguishing inidivudal features have been expunged. The inidivudla acts freely andmorally when he or she acts purely in obedience to a universal moral law that is the product of reason alone.

Accordingly, Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’ invites agents to ‘universalize’ the maxim of their actions: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’

introduction summary

When the question of practical philosophy, that is, bringing philosophy in a practical relationship with living, then it has always delved into the question of desire. Why? Butler adds, to live a philosophical life, is to ask the question, is the human individual capable of living a philosophical, hence moral life? Does ‘ought’ imply ‘can’. And if desire were just seen to be an irrational component with no inherent competency, then the moral project would founder. But, on the contrary, moral philosophy has

On Spinoza

Hegel is sceptical of the notion of metaphysical closure, Butler adds that Hegel charges Spinoza with erecting a metaphysical system that “excludes the negativity of self-consciousness, that aspect of human life that precludes its final assimilation into Being …” (10) And it is in Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s over-theistic mono-mania, that is Spinoza’s excluding of “consciousness’s own negativity” that we find hegel’s original contribution to the formulation of desire

A very nice summary of the Phenomenology

Spinoza’s metaphysics takes the point of view of the completed system as its starting point, but Hegel’s Phenomenology poses the question of how this system is known, and how the knower comes to know himeself as part of this system. In other words, Hegel wants to know how the movement of human knowledge, the negativity of self-consciousness, comes to be understood as necessary for the constitution of the system itself and further, how the necessity of human negativity confirms the impossiblity of that system’s completion and closure (12).

For Butler, no doubt heavily influenced by the French reading of Hegel, the negativity of self-consciousness is desire. Desire is the negative dialectic. Of which she poses the question to Hegel as to whether he is “guilty of silencing the power of the negative?” (14).

The deceptive pursuit of the Absolute is not a vain “running around in circles,” but a progressive cycle which reveals every deception as permitting some grander act of synthesis, an insight into yet more regions of interrelated reality (22).

Desire

Nothing just appears ex nihilo for Hegel, “‘Appearance’ is but one explicit or actual moment in the development of a phenomenon. In the Phenomenology, a given phenomenon appears in the context of a given configuration of the world. In the case of desire, we must ask, what kind of world makes desire possilbe? What must the world be like for desire to exist?” (24).