Category: butler

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 … The dissolution of Hegel’s harmonious ontology, the scheme whereby negation is continuously superseded by a more encompassing version of being, allows for the formulation of desire as an expression of freedom. 69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.

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

… Hegel here characterizes the negativity of desire as the final, fully realized form of self-consciousness. To understand this correctly, we must not assume that negation is nothingness; on the contrary, as a differentiating relation that mediates the terms that initially counter each other, negation, understood in the sense of Aufhebung, cancels, preserves, and transcends the apparent differences it interrelates. As the final realization of self-consciousness, negation is a principle of absolute mediation, an infinitely capable subject that is its interrelations with all apparently different phenomena. 41

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

Desire has been deemed philosophically dangerous precisely because of its propensity to blur clear vision and foster philosophical myopia, encouraging one to see only what one wants, and not what is. (3)

– moral subject must evince a moral intentionality, desire must be good, they must desire the good, ‘passionately wants what is right’ (4),

– if philosophy did not ‘evince a moral intentionality … philosophy would be left defenceless against the onset of nihilism and metaphysical dislocation.

… for desire, according to Hegel, is the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become  self-sufficient subject for whom all things apparently different finally emerge as immanent features of the subject itself (6).

Enter Hegel’s 20th century French commentators, “desire increasingly becomes a principle of the ontological displacement of the human subject, and in its latest stages, in the work of Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, desire comes to signify the impossibility of the coherent subject itself.” (6)

Twentieth-century French reflections on Hegel have, then, consistently looked to the notion of desire to discover possibilities for revising Hegel’s version of the autonomous human subject and the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations that conditions that subject (6).

How is it that desire, once conceived as the human instance of dialectical reason, becomes that which endangers dialectics, fractures the metaphysically integrated self, and disrupts the internal harmony of the subject and its ontological intimacy with the world? (7)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Self-consciousness in general is Desire para 167

– consciousness must become other to itself in order to know itself, “The Hegelian subject cannot know itself instantaneously or immediately, but requires mediation to understand its own structure.

Insofar as desire is this principle of consciousness’ reflexivity, desire can be said to be satisfied when a relation to something external to consciousness is discovered to be constitutive of the subject itself … the Hegelian subject expands in the course of its adventure through alterity; it internalizes the world that it desires, and expands to encompass, to be, what it initially confronts as other to itself.  The final satisfaction of desire is the discovery of substance as subject, the experience of the world as everywhere confirming that subject’s sense of immanent metaphysical place (8-9).