logocentric – Page 82

rothenberg empty set { }

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010.

Warning: I’m about to spoil the first 30 pages of Rothenberg’s book. They’re page turners so my apologies, but I would like to set up her discussion of ‘negation’ through her absolutely fantastic discussion of Badiou’s notion of the empty set { }

Here is one of many scintillating quotes I could draw upon from her book:

{ } The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation — like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other — they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. This “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties and relationships — as objects (33).

🙂 Now that is an awesome way of putting it. What Rothenberg is getting at is this whole idea of a determinate negation: things become objects, only through a cut, a negation that allows them to be placed in a relationship to another. If this sounds abstract, Rothenberg comes down to earth a bit later when she concretizes this concept by explicating it in conjunction with the Nom-du-Père. This is a standard Lacanian move that locates the child’s entry into language, the ‘cut’ that vaults it into the ‘defiles of the signifier’. Rothenberg is setting up her argument which consists in a very complex but fascinating and unique interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory which will allow her to argue for a totally new and innovative way in which to view the ‘social’ or ‘social field’ as she prefers to call it.

rothenberg excess

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK, Malden MA USA: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

Individuals are always working to re-assemble, re-build the social. The social as in social force is not always already there, ready to take up the explanatory slack.

“As we shall see, the impossibility of immediate (immanent) communication will be decisive for the generation and sustenance of social subjects in a social field.

It is particularly important to keep in mind that signification — the process of bestowing meaning — does not function by way of the intentions of speakers or authors but rather by way of the appropriation of the signifier by the auditor or reader. 17

🙂 I like R’s emphasis on excess. It gives me a whole different understanding of this thing called the remainder the both Laclau and Butler throw around. R. here uses it to mean the surplus in signification, what is necessary for communication to exist.

The excess necessary for signification enables associations by dissolving previous associations: without such dissolution, the link between signifier and signified would ossify and signification would be impossible (19).

Excess signifies the impossibility of immanent communion and for R. this is a good thing indeed.

rothenberg extimate

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK, Malden MA USA: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

I’ve finished the book, but now I’m chasing down Rothenberg’s intriguing use of the core theoretical concept of her treatise: extimate causality. She introduces it by way of a critique of Foucaultian immanent causality, and also a rather somewhat hasty assertion of a Marxist external causality. Where the former’s immanence ruins its ability to clearly define any causal relations or ability to resist, the Marxists, according to R. rely on a version of causality that remains external to the field of effects, without the source or cause itself being vulnerable to change or the being effected in return.

So extimate causality is premised on an excess, that is the extra that is produced This excess is developed by R. firstly in her notion of retroversion. This is the way in which events, sentences, meaning in general is only created retroactively. That we create meaning only by looking back, or that in our very actions we are incapable of controlling what meaning these actions will have on outcomes or control those very outcomes. This is excessive.

rothenberg non-self-coincidence

I am going to quote at length Rothenberg’s critique of the position of Simon Critchley. Critchley argues that as subjects we are initially called upon by an other with a demand that we cannot meet, which is traumatic. This trauma is what turns one into an ethical subject.

… if the initial state of the subject is unethical because it is self-absorbed, grasping, and autonomous, what motivates this self-centered subject to experience the demand of the other as traumatic? In fact, what motivates the unethical subject to recognize or respond to the other at all? What will pierce the self-satisfied autonomy of this possessive selfhood so that it will feel the other’s presence as infinitely demanding? And what will guarantee that the experience of an infinite demand will call forth a sense of insufficiency, a traumatic sense of insufficiency, on the part of the subject? Or, put another way, why doesn’t the subject who encounters the other simply walk away, or try to annihilate the other, or help the other in some limited way and go home to an untroubled sleep?

That is, the Levinasian story as Critchley tells it seems to require that the subject already be ethical in order to respond in the way that would leadit to ethicality. In this account, the dividual subject is nothing other than an ethical subject from the start, a person who for some unexplainedreason, responds to the presence of others as requiring more of the subject than the subject can give. Nothing in the story accounts for the transformation of the unethical subject, because the change-agent (trauma) can only be generated if the subject is already responsive to the other. And once we start with an ethical subject, the whole circuitous route to ethicality through trauma is superfluous. 197-198

… Critchley never explains what would motivate the subject to attempt to relate to a radical other with whom there can be no relation. It just seems to him to be obvious that any subject would react to such an encounter with a sense of responsibility, so he never inquires into the means by which that responsiveness is achieved. Still something has to make the subject desire a relation with the other, rather than, for example, a rejection or obliteration …his model doesn’t explicate the production of the ethical subject … (200).

rothenberg molly anne

Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book Excessive Subjects is the book Žižek always wanted to write but can’t, either because he is unable to grasp what he continually was circling around, which Rothenberg saw and rectified in her book, or Žižek can’t bring himself to criticize Butler in the devastating manner with which Rothenberg accomplishes this task. The chapter on Butler is a devastating critique of what Rothenberg views as Butler’s totally mistaken, misunderstanding and gross misuse of psychoanalytic theory. Rothenberg’s pseudo-Lacanian approach in this book argues that what is key in subject formation is the notion of ‘excess’ or the ‘addition of negation’. Things start to really happen around page 30 when Rothenberg adeptly interprets Badiou using the analogy of a dimly lit garage. You have to read this part a couple of times it’s fascinating, but once the distinction between being and objects is understood, then you are only a hop, skip, jump away from understanding Rothenberg’s general thesis. I have just read the chapter on Butler, and I feel that although Rothenberg makes some good points, she nevertheless limits her treatment of Butler to one work, Excitable Speech (which is my least favourite work btw). In this work, Butler is still agonizingly trying to articulate a conception of agency that is, I feel, better laid out in The Psychic Life of Power. Rothenberg’s two critical points being centred on a criticism of Butler’s interpretation of Austin’s speech act theory and what is quickly becoming the achilles heel of Butler’s theory of agency, her interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. Rothenberg’s criticism of Butler’s take on Lacan is unrelenting. The rumblings began a few years ago regarding Butler’s uptake of the term “foreclosure” and it hits a crescendo pitch in Rothenberg’s chapter. However Butler could really take issue with Rothernberg’s curt dismissal of Butler regarding that latter’s take on Foucault. I believe Butler is a more complex Foucaultian, and as she argues in The Psychic Life of Power her understanding and use of Foucault is complex and attentive to the shortcomings of his theory of agency. I am eager to get into the chapter on Laclau.

Note: the binding job on this book by Polity Press is horrible. This book is falling apart after only 2 days of very polite and gentle handling. Buyer beware!

rothenberg on the symbolic

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Polity Press, 2010.

Only the encounter with significative excess produces the subject as a social subject, serving as the means for freeing the child from the closed world of dyadic meanings and ushering him into the world of circulating (not completely stable) meanings available for appropriation and re-signification.

The Symbolic is not a systematic set of proscriptions, rules, practices, or any other substantively specifiable content shared alike by everyone else in the social field: it is not a system of stable meanings, even though it may seem that way at times and even though one might fervently wish or imagine it to be so. Rather, the Symbolic is a psychic register, the register of significative excess and appropriability.

In this register, in the mind of the individual, resides a collocation of meanings that have significance for that person, meanings which are always to some extent fantasmatically shared with others. These meanings come from the world of bodily experience, parental behaviours and dicta, extended familial practices and beliefs, the school environment, and the larger social world. Of course, people sometimes overlap in their habitation of these worlds: siblings, schoolmates, neighbors, party members, fellow religionists, countrymen, and conlinguists may share signifiers and contexts. Yet the significance invested in even the most closely overlapping elements may be radically different from person to person — and from time to time for the same person. Even children raised in the same house have different experiences and attach different meanings to the same events, parental actions, family narratives, and emotional states taking place in their home environments (88).

rothenberg molly excessive subjects

I am reading a book that is interfering with my work on Butler, however it doesn’t seem too tangential. It’s by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Excessive Subjects. It’s a re-thinking of social theory from the perspective of a retelling of the Žižekian tale only this time exposing the critical Lacanian insights in more detail, and talking way slower than Žižek. Plus Rothenberg includes some nice chapters on Butler and Laclau, so I’m dying to read the rest of the book.

butler new preface to paperback edition of subjects of desire (1987) August 1998

In a sense all my work remains within the oribit of a certain set of Hegelian questions:

What is the relation between desire and recognition and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?

… I am as much concerned with the way in which Antigone is consistently misread by Hegel as with his provocative way of understanding her criminal act as an eruption of an alternate legality within the sphere of public law. Whether Antigone functions as a subject for Hegel remains a compelling question for me, and raises the question of the political limit of the subject, that is, both the limitations imposed upon subjecthood (who qualifies as one), and the limits of the subject as the point of departure for politics. Hegel remains important here for his subject does not stay in its place displaying a critical mobility that may well be useful for further appropriations of Hegel to come. The emergent subject of Hegel’s phenomenology is an ek-static one, a subject who constantly finds itself outside itself, and whose periodic expropriations do not lead to a return to a former self. Indeed, the self who comes outside of itself, for whom ek-statis is a condition of existence, is one for whom no return to self is possible, for whom there is no final recovery from self-loss. The notion of “difference” is similarly misunderstood, I would suggest, when it is understood as contained within or by the subject: the Hegelian subject’s encounter with difference is not resolved into identity. Rather, the moment of its “resolutions” is finally indistinguishable from the moment of its dispersion; the thinking of this cross-vectored temporality ushers in the Hegelian understanding of infinity and offers a notion of the subject that cannot remain bounded in the face of the world. Misrecognition does not arrive as a distinctively Lacanian corrective to the Hegelian subject, for it is precisely by misrecognition that the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers its self-loss. Indeed, this is a self constitutively at risk of self-loss. This subject neither has nor suffers its desire, but is the very action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject. Thus, it is neither precisely a new theory of the subject nor a definitive displacement of the subject that Hegel provides but rather a definition in displacement, for which there is no final restoration. August 1998

malabou catherine review hegel and plasticity

Catherine Malabou and the Currency of Hegelianism

Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000) by Lisabeth During

Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of over-read and “too familiar “te xts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself.

Arguing against Heidegger, Kojeve, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

It is a brave person who will take G W. F Hegel on his own terms in this day and age. It is, after all, 50 years at least after Martin Heidegger’s gloomy warnings about the “end of metaphysics.”‘ And at least 30 years since Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault first insisted that philosophy would have to choose between “difference” and “dialectic, “if it were to escape the banality of a teleological justification of history.2 In the United States, anyone who still sees vitality in Hegel may find themselves uncomfortably close to the right-wing apologetics of a Francis Fukuyama. For what are we to make of Hegel’s supposed announcement of the “end of history”? It is too easy to hear in it the accents of resignation or premature reconciliation, even if Hegel himself would be the last to be reconciled to the global victory of market-driven “democracy” in the aftermath of 1989. Committed to the foresight of the dialectic, for which history is an externalization of the quietly uninterrupted life of the Idea, can there be anything genuinely “new” for Hegel, any event for which the concept is not already prepared, any history that doesn’t happen, as it were, twice? And if there is no space for the new, is there in fact any space for the present? Georges Bataille fantasized about the immense “weariness” of the Hegelian standpoint.4 Heidegger dismissed it more bluntly: Hegel’s present moment is lost in eternity; it is not temporal at all; indeed all his “times” are

Lisabeth During homogenous, empty (Heidegger 1984,391-98). Because Hegel could not conceive the present except as a vanishing “point,” it was impossible for him to believe that anything really could happen “in time.” Everything is repetition, recycling: the motions that feel like revolution, overturning, reversal, are not new. They have always already been traced. Calling things to mind, if that is one way of describing knowledge, is, then, only recalling. Catherine Malabou accepts the intransigence of these questions. Is it too late for Hegel? Is any reading of Hegel, no matter how interesting, simply an exercise in nostalgia? Her recent book, The Future of Hegel: Plasticite,Temporalite, Dialectique (1996), makes a claim about Hegel’s place in history that risks disturbing a powerful precursor. Alexandre Kojeve, who was almost single-handedly responsible for French Hegelianism, believes as Malabou does in the “actualite(t he timeliness) of the Hegelian dialectic. Yet while Kojeve’s potent mix of Marxist and Heideggerean ideas made it possible to read Hegel with a modernist conscience, his influential interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit as an announcement of the “end of history” foreclosed any future trans-formations of the Hegelian machinery (Kojeve 1968). To approach the fulfilled spirit of Hegel, Kojeve famously decreed, is to step into the shoes of the sage, the one who ceases to act, the one for whom change is arrested.5 Bataille will add that to be “sovereign” in the limited sense of Hegelian mastery is to be dead to suffering, perhaps also immune to ecstasy and shock (Bataille 1990). Although we are told that the dialectic is a logic of unceasing alteration, which Hegel baptized “negativity,” surely only a being who has transcended finitude would be able to see that dialectical logic in history. For those enmeshed in the coils of history, the events of politics, even individual life, seem without meaning, only random and indifferent. Politically as well as philosophically, then, it is a dangerous thing to do, to situate yourself too intimately within the dialectical movements and concepts of the Hegelian system, to know them from the inside out. It is better to be protected by a selective “borrowing” th at sifts the wheat from the chaff, that exports only the more acceptable bits from Hegel. The Hegel which late modernity can claim for itself might include the portrait of desire or the un-happy consciousness. We might find a place among our prejudices for the communitarian intuitions and the distrust of liberalism, for the cult of Antigone and her tragic anomaly, for the critique of immediacy, or maybe the abuse directed at Immanuel Kant and his “formalism.” Doesn’t Hegel need a scrupulous purification — even licensing as dramatic a cleansing as that provided by John McDowell in his widely read Mind and World (1994) — before the modern reader can confront his ideas, and, in particular, his language, without wincing? Malabou thinks otherwise. To her the dialectic is a process of “plasticity,” a movement where formation and dissolution, novelty and anticipation, are in continual interplay-in the “time” of the world as in the “time” of individual life. Hegelian thought has futurity because it has plasticity. As she interprets it, the Hegelian future is not a characterless void-a space of unfilled time-but a horizon which will preserve even though it abrogates and takes away. If “plasticity” is one of the meanings of futurity in Hegel, it is also one of the best translations of Hegel’s difficult idea that the “concept” needs “self-determination” and “self-differentiation.”Even the notorious “Aufhebung” (French “reléve“) is, on Malabou’s reading, another alibi for the future. Against Hegel, Bataille and Theodor Adorno have accused the system of a symptomatic fear of loss, a speculative hunger to absorb all. There are many recognizable traits in their portrait of a philosophical economy too committed to its reserves, too closed to the anomalous and the singular.6 But the virtue of Malabou’s attractive Hegel is that, without glossing over any of the most intractable concepts in the Hegelian repertory, she can save Hegel from such a fate. “Plastic”-borrowed from the lexicon of sculpture, the “plastic” art par excellence-implies mobility, molding, forming and flexibility-“a speculative souplesse which is neither passion nor passivity.” It is a generous trait, not a petty or self-protective one. But it also suggests a certain dynamite that shares its name (the plastic bomb). She wonders if her reading of Hegel, driven by a belief that the Hegelian “future” is both open and imaginable, will strike others as “explosive.” In her account of her intention to produce a deconstructive reading, a Hegel subjected to the very metamorphoses his dialectical writing puts into motion, Malabou describes how she chose the notion of plasticity in the belief it might act as the “defective cornerstone” causing the self-reliant systematic artifice to tremble. But in fact neither plasticity nor deconstruction prove to unsettle the Hegelian text in the way Jacques Derrida had taught her to expect. Is it that Hegel-that thinker of breaks and repairs-is simply too resilient, too open himself to the way an argument moves not just from bottom to top, but from side to center, and corer to comer? Malabou prefers to give Hegel the credit. One may also wonder if it is the deconstructive scenario which is less rewarding than she would have liked to believe. Derrida’s Hegel —in Glas (1986), in “Le puits et la pyramide” (1982b), in the essay on “Ousia and gramme” (1982a) which she analyses in her book-is a tricky and fertile thinker, not a prophet of ontological closure or historical triumphalism. But Derrida’s axioms of reading, as Malabou summarizes them in her introduction to her own work, are less interesting as a program than the insights for which they are meant to account. Malabou betrays a moment of self-doubt when reflecting on the results of her own inquiry: has she finished up on the side of a philosophy of cure, of reparation and reconciliation, rather than unending rupture and untidy edges? Can she rest content with the product of her own scrupulous and inventive reading? Is her reading neither “explosive,” as she calls it, nor “transgressive,” as some students of Derrida would expect? 192

It is the fidelity of Malabou’s Hegel which leaves the most lasting impression from her work: a Hegel as supple and ambitious as the reader he asks for. Malabou, a scholarly reader of the history of philosophy, puts her reputation on the line by identifying her very contemporary perspective with Hegel’s. She makes a case that should strike many as persuasive, claiming that Hegel’s thought is “relevant,” timely, its designs on us unfinished and still to be under-stood. For her, Hegel is not an interesting “maitre” worth a passionate but irritated conversation (as he is for Irigaray7), nor a source of philosophical guidelines who can be absorbed and then moved beyond (as he is for Judith Butler 8), but someone who must be followed “to the very limits” (jusqu’au bout), to the extremities of his unexpected thought, in order that the risk and challenge of his ideas be recognized and aspired to. If such a result is not enough to align Catherine Malabou to any particular “school” of French philosophical thought, it is more than enough to make her graceful and generous writing a novelty in the present landscape of Hegel scholarship. Her commitment to a “plastic” reading follows not only Hegel’s own instructions, but the suggestion of another influential French philosopher from the generation and circle of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy anticipates her in emphasizing the contribution of the reader as a “repetition” which restores the “plasticity” of the author’s exposition. (His La Remarque speculative [1973] introduces this understanding of the term.) Plastic reading, which Hegel identifies with the ideal philosophical attitude, releases the force and inexhaustibility of the “content” from its contingent and rigid form: it is as much an act of receptivity as a formative process. Refashioned and recuperated by the plastic individual, the life of philosophy (which is what Hegel, we must remember, meant by the “concept”) is freed from any moribund or “congealed” thought structure, whether that be the artificial “fixity of the proposition,” as Hegel maintained, or our more self-conscious yet no less provisional habits of mind. Plasticity, Nancy and Malabou agree, is the true product of the notorious Hegelian Aufhebung. Seen in this way, the Aufhebung marks the difference between a dependent, self-enclosed thought and a thought of transformation, of “futurity.”If speculative thought is plastic rather than recollective, transcendental, or merely “critical,” it is because it is a movement that dissolves and restores, fractures and reweaves, in the same way that plasticity allows the organ to regain its resilience or the work of art to make and remake the possibilities of its material. It is this notion of plasticity-not so much a notion as a sign of generous reading-which tells us less about the secret and trouble-some “meaning” of Hegel’s philosophy-something neither I nor Malabou assume to be the desired goal-and more about what it would be like to carry out a Hegelian “reading” of philosophy. Here we can understand why Malabou thinks it is so important to defend the “future” of Hegel and to resist his relegation to the museum of dead onto-theological monuments. Her work intends to do something more than add another piece to the body of Hegel scholar-ship. It has no interest in the condescending way in which the present believes it can “update” or appropriate for its own ends a past form of thought. The Future of Hegel belongs not to the commemoration of Hegel but to the pro-longed effects of Hegel’s thought as it continues to address us. Inspired by her teacher and collaborator Derrida, Malabou sees a way to transform and pre-serve (auffieben) the sort of reading which Hegel’s writing teaches us how to want, and whose sophistication and clarity has rarely been recognized as effectively as here.

NOTES

1.The notes that became Heidegger’s essay” Uberwindungder Metaphysik” come from the years1936-1946; Being and Time( 1927) proclaimed the end of the “history of ontology” in order to pose in a radical and renewed fashion “the question of being.” See Heidegger(1985) and (1996).

2. See, on this, Descombes (1980).

3. See Fukuyama (1982).

4. Bataille speaks of Hegel’s immense fatigue in Bataille (1987). See also Derrida (1978), and on the inescapability of weariness, Blanchot (1993).

5. This conclusion is implicit in almost every passage of Kojeve’s lectures, but see especially Kojeve (1981, 95-99, 167-68). 6. For Adorno o n Hegel see Adoro (1993); for Batailles see Bataille (1987;1990).

7. See Irigaray (1987).

8. See Butler (1987; 1997).

REFERENCES

Adorno,Theodor W. 1993. Hegel: Three studies. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bataille,G eorges.1987. Inner experience.Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: SUNY Press. .1990. Hegel,death and sacrifice. Yale French Studies 78:9 -28.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1993.The infinite conversation. Trans. Susan H anson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century Fra nce. New York: Columbia University Press.

—., 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories of subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978.From restricted to general economy:A Hegelianism without reserves. In Writing and difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1982a. Ousia and gramme. In Margins of philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1982b. The pit and the pyramid. In Margins of philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1986. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modem French philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1982. The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.

Hegel, G. W. F 1977. The phenomenologyof spirit. Trans. A . V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Sein und Zeit. Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer. 1985. Vortrdge und Aufsatze. Pfullingen: Neske .1996. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Irigaray, Luce. 1987. L’universel c mme mediation. In Sexes et parentes. Paris: Editions de Minuit. . 1993. The universal as mediation. In Sexes and genealogies. Trans.Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alexandre Kojeve. 1968. Introduction a la lectured e Hegel: Lecons sur la Phenomenologie de l’Esprit professes de 1933 a 1939 a I’Ecole des Hautes Etudes reunites et publiees par Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. 1980. Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenologyof spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. 1996. L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticite, temporalite, dialectique. Paris: Vrin. Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. 1999. La contre-allee. Paris: La Quinzaine Litteraire-Louis Vuitton.

McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1973. La Remarque speculative. Paris: Galilee.

butler lordship and bondage

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.

We have seen that desire is a polyvalent structure, a movement to establish an identity coextensive with the world. Hegel’s discussion of labor begins to show us how the world of substance becomes recast as the world of the subject. Desire as a transformation of the natural world is simultaneously the transformation of its own natural self into an embodied freedom. And yet, these transformations cannot occur outside of an historically constituted intersubjectivity which mediates the relation to nature and to the self. True subjectivities come to flourish only in communities that provide for reciprocal recognition, for we do not come to ourselves through work alone, but through the acknowledging look of the Other who confirms us (58).

butler on kojeve anthropocentrism

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.

Work that exemplifies human being as transcending the natural and which occasions the recognition of the Other is termed historical action. As the efficacious transformation of biological or natural givens, historical action is the mode through which the world of substance is recast as the world of the subject.

Confronting the natural world, the historical agent takes it up, marks it with the signature of consciousness and sets it forth in the social world to be seen. This process is evident in the creation of a material work, in the linguistic expression of a reality, in the opening up of dialogue with other human beings: historical action is possible within the spheres of interaction and production alike. 68

kojève

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.

Desire is thus a kind of negation that is not resolved into a more inclusive conception of being; desire indicates an ontological difference between consciousness and its world, which, for Kojève, cannot be overcome.

Kojève’s formulation of desire as a permanent activity of negation permits a modern conception of desire freed from the implicit teleological claims of Hegel’s view in the Phenomenology. Kojève views desire as a … negative or negating intentionality without a preestablished teleological structure. … The dissolution of Hegel’s harmonious ontology, the scheme whereby negation is continuously superseded by a more encompassing version of being, allows for the formulation of desire as an expression of freedom. 69

Below is taken from Scott R. Stroud

Another important consideration that should lend credibility to Kojève’s externalist, social reading, although not to his ultimate materialist conclusions, is the issue of power in the master/slave dialectic. The important developments for the slave come in and through her reaction to the wielding of power by the master. Initially, however, one must recognize that the struggle was initiated over a desire for unilateral recognition by the other; in other words, each agent wanted power over the other to the extent that they could achieve unreciprocated recognition. This leads to the staking of lives qua transcending being, and to the life or death struggle for recognition. Kojève is accurate in his assessment of conflict relating to power; in this case, the power relates to external objects that a subject would like to exercise control over.

The other source of power in the struggle comes from the master, once the roles have been assigned. One agent becomes a slave because he yields to his natural instincts and desires; the master is able to risk his life long enough for the other’s desire to give way. In this regard, he earns the title of master because he was able to transcend his natural desires, such as those of self-preservation. The slave feels this external power exercised by the master and is forced to work and labor on the world to sate the master’s desires. Again, the externality of Hegel’s point is clear, in that the two self-consciousnesses are in a struggle that involves the status of both wills; the master’s will is that which ends up being sated with the unwilled action of the slave because of the massive power difference. The master is able to force the slave to serve him through the fear of death. It is through this experience, however, that the slave gains a realization of her being in the world; she realizes that she is a being-for-self and that the master’s power only goes so far. Indeed, in the later sections on stoicism and skepticism, the slave begins to exercise this putative freedom through mental activity.