hegel

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.

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).

on Hegel

Fichte

Given the fact that an individual shares the external world with other free subjects, this is possible only if individuality is recognized by those other beings as setting limits to their own free agency. This mutual recognition [Anerkennung] is an important influence on Hegel’s move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity.

Mutual recognition, or … subjectivity requires intersubjectivity. Furthermore, rights cannot be deduced from ethical individualism but require intersubjectivity. In a sense, Fichte is criticizing all previous philosophies, particularly those dealing with rights, for not first demonstrating the need for intersubjectivity, or the impossibility of thinking of the individual as isolated, which he sees as the same thing. For Fichte, intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for the very existence of individuality and self-awareness. The idea of natural rights outside of a community is a fiction:

There is no condition in which original rights exist; and no original rights of human beings. The human being has actual rights only in community with others, just as—according to the higher principles noted above—the human being can be thought of only in community with others. An original right, therefore, is a mere fiction, but one that must necessarily be created for the sake of a science of right.

Thus, it is impossible to think of rights without thinking of an individual in relation to other individuals. Hegel’s attempt to reconcile individual liberty with community follows Fichte’s lead. Nor, for Fichte, can we think of free beings as existing together unless their rights mutually limit each other (39).

butler hegel

Norms govern recognizability: There’s a million quotes I can find to underscore this argument. What I need to outline with regards to this is

– The geneology of the emergence of Butler’s turn to normativity, which I’ll find as the Foucault Effect no doubt

– The more difficult part is the exegesis of this quote:

“Does recognition, as Hegel argues, consist in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the other is structured in the same way I am? And do I recognize that the other also makes, or can make, this recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps another encounter with alterity here that is irreducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity?” (27)

🙂 Is Butler saying in effect that introducing difference into Hegelian dialectic of recognition forces now not any reconciliation with sameness

– norms and language, decentre the subject, as Hegel mentions as the system of customs Sittlichkeit and in this way Žižek and JB are not that far apart. As both in their respective way resist pegging down Hegel as this authoritarian philosopher of logocentric identity.

There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability. (30)

Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero is a post-Hegelian in her approach to ethics and the other.

– “there is an other not fully known or knowable to me”

– “exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me”

Butler agrees and disagrees. She definitely likes the part about exposure and vulnerability, but she offsets Cavarero’s emphasis on singularity, which can slide into an individualist ethics. Butler instead emphasizes ‘substitutability’ of the account. This is because …

“discourse is not life its time is not yours (36)

indifferent structures, a sociability that exceeds me, which gets to the fact that for Butler any emphasis on singularity effaces the extent to which this originality resembles too strictly a frame of referencing that doesn’t correspond to the deconstructionist framework. That is for Butler, the account is impossible because the exposure and vulnerability undoes the subject, the other’s opaqueness is my opaqueness and this is the substitutable condition of subjectivity, and to that extent it is substitutable.

The account I give of myself exceeds narration, it can not be narrated. It can’t be a story, there is no stable subject, it doesn’t unfold in a linear way.

If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable. The narrative authority of the “I” must give way to the perspective and temporality of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story. (37)

Žižek hegel lacan

How Hegelian is Lacan?

Žižek proposes that we trace this through the 3 stages of theorization of the Symbolic in Lacan’s thought.

1) Symbolic as intersubjective dimension, focusing on speech as place of signification, and symptoms, traumas are blank spaces, analysand cannot properly gain ‘full speech’ and the goal of “analysis is to produce the recognition of desire through ‘full speech’, to integrate desire within the universe of signification.”
2) Schema L : the structuralist Symbolic through and through, the subject is at the mercy of the “Symbolic machine.”

foreclosure (Verwerfung),

repression (Verdrängung),

denial (Verneinung)

displacement (Enstellung)

3) Definitely NOT a synthesis of first 2 stages.

a barred Other () incomplete, not-all, an Other articulated against a void, an Other which carries within it an extimate, non-symbolizable kernel.

subject of the signifier ():

It is only by working from the barred Other () that one can understand the subject of the signifier (): if the Other is not fractured, if it is a complete array, the only possible relationship of the subject to the structure is that of total alienation, of a subjection without remainder; but the lack in the Other means that there is a remainder, a non-integratable residuum in the Other, objet a, and the subject is able to avoid total alienation only insofar as it posits itself as the correlative of this remainder: <> a. In this sense, one is able to conceive of a subject that is distinct from the ego, the place of Imaginary misrecognition: a subject that is not lost in the ‘process without subject’ of the structural combination.

QUOTE: At first sight, it might appear that the Lacanian reference to Hegel is fundamentally limited to the first stage, with its themes of symbolization as historicization, integration within the symbolic universe, etc. Throughout this period, the Lacanian reading of the Hegelian text is ‘mediated’ by Kojeve and Hyppolite, and the predominant themes are those of struggle and the final reconciliation in the medium of intersubjective recognition, which is speech. In effect, the achievement of symbolic realization, the abolition of the symptom, the integration of every traumatic kernel into the symbolic universe, this final and ideal moment when the subject is finally liberated from Imaginary opacity, when the blanks of its history are filled in by ‘full speech’ when the tension between ‘subject’ and ‘substance’ are finally resolved by this speech in which the subject is able to assume his desire, etc. – is it not possible to recognize this state of plenitude as a psychoanalytic version of Hegelian ‘Absolute Knowledge’: a non-barred Other, without symptom, without lack, without traumatic kernel?

In the third stage, in which Lacan places the accent on the Real as the impossible/non-symbolizable kernel, ‘death drive’ becomes the name for that which, following Sade, takes the form of the ‘second death’: symbolic death, the annihilation of the signifying network, of the text in which the subject is inscribed, through which reality is historicized – the name of that which, in psychotic experience, appears as the ‘end of the world’, the twilight, the collapse of the symbolic universe. To put it another way, ‘death drive’ designates the ahistorical possibility implied, exposed by the process of symbolization/historicization: the possibility of its radical effacement.

The Freudian concept which best designates this act of annihilation is das Ungeschehenmachen, ‘in which one action is cancelled out by a second, so that it is as though neither action had taken place’,or more simply, retroactive cancellation. And it is more than coincidence that one finds the same term in Hegel, who defines das Ungeschchenmachen as the supreme power of Spirit.*

This power of ‘unmaking’ the past is conceivable only on the symbolic level: in immediate life, in its circuit, the past is only the past and as such is incontestable; but once one is situated at the level of history qua text, the network of symbolic traces, one is able to wind back what has already occurred, or erase the past. One is thus able to conceive of Ungeschehenmachen, the highest manifestation of negativity, as the Hegelian version of ‘death drive’: it is not an accidental or marginal element in the Hegelian edifice, but rather designates the crucial moment of the dialectical process, the so-called moment of the ‘negation of negation’, the inversion of the ‘antithesis’ into the ‘synthesis’: the ‘reconciliation’ proper to synthesis is not a surpassing or suspension (whether it be ‘dialectical’) of scission on some higher plane, but a retroactive reversal which means that there never was any scission to begin with – ‘synthesis’ retroactively annuls this scission. This is how the enigmatic but crucial passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia must be understood:

The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists therefore in sublating the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished.**

One does not accomplish the end by attaining it, but by proving that one has already attained it, even when the way to its realization is hidden from view. While advancing, one was not yet there, but all of a sudden, one has been there all along – ‘too soon’ changes suddenly into ‘too late’ without detecting the exact moment of their transformation. The whole affair thus has the structure of the missed encounter: along the way, the truth, which we have not yet attained, pushes us forward like a phantom, promising that it awaits us at the end of the road; but all of a sudden we perceive that we were always already in the truth. The paradoxical surplus which slips away, which reveals itself as ‘impossible’ in this missed encounter of the ‘opportune moment’, is of course objet a: the pure semblance which pushes us toward the truth, right up to the moment when it suddenly appears behind us and that we have already arrived ahead of it, a chimerical being that does not have its ‘proper time’, only ever persisting in the interval between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’.

This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques – Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.

* G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 402.

** G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusädtze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, p. 286.

butler immanence nietzsche foucault 3-25

After reading Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book and her critique of Foucault and Butler, I’m intrigued by this problematic of immanentism. It happens when relations take place entirely within, that is, without any causal agent developing from the outside, without being effected by an ‘outside.’

… a subject produced by morality must find his or her relation to morality. One cannot will away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation and for the task of giving an account of oneself. Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

Molly Anne Rothenberg says if the subject is produced by a morality, in what sense can it develop a relation to that morality, how can it distance itself such that it can be properly reflective of its relationship with a morality? This is the problem of immanence and why Rothenberg moves to a version of extimate causality, with its emphasis on the non-coincident subject, but unlike Foucaultian immanentism, there is a space, an opening, in the subject’s ‘non-coincidence’ that allows it recognize it’s own relationship and defensive posturing with relationship to his/her own excess and yet instead of playing a game of ‘hot potato’ instead, absorb the excess via a identification with the sinthome. Thus becoming in Rothenberg’s words (I think), a sinthomic subject. That is, a subject that takes on the place of where jouissance formerly was, now the subject [Here I am] emerges.

Nietzsche

On page 10, Butler begins w/ Nietzsche because he offers an account of how we become reflective in the first place: “we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries have been inflicted.” In the interests of meting out a just punishment that the lawyer for the claimant asks the defendant, give an account of yourself, what were your actions? “And so, in fearful response, I offer myself as an “I” and try to reconstruct my deeds … For Nietzsche accountability follows only upon an accusation or, minimally, an allegation, one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality can be established. And we become reflective upon ourselves, accordingly as a consequence of fear and terror. Indeed we become morally accountable as a consequence of fear and terror (11).

N. did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from an other —”Was it you?”— do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings (11).

In The Psychic Life of Power, I perhaps too quickly accepted this punitive scene of inauguration for the subject. According to that view, the institution of punishment ties me to my deed, and when I am punished for having done this or that deed, I emerge as a subject of conscience and, hence, a subject who reflects upon herself in some way. This view of subject formation depends upon an account of a subject who internalizes the law or, minimally, the causal tethering of the subject to the deed for which the institution of punishment seeks compensation (15).

Foucault

For N. the elaboration of a morality… is the sublimated … effect of this primary aggression turned against oneself, the idealized consequence of a turn against one’s own destructiveness and, for Nietzsche, one’s own life impulses … Foucault turns …. to codes of morality, understood as codes of conduct —and not primarily to codes of punishment —to consider how subjects are constituted in relation to such codes, which do not always rely on the violence of prohibition and its internalizing effects. … For Foucault, reflexivity emerges in the act of taking up a relation to moral codes, but it does not rely on an account of internalization or of psychic life more generally, certainly not a reduction of morality to bad conscience (16).

In the early 1980s Foucault’s interest shifts to a consideration of how, “certain historically established prescriptive codes compelled a certain kind of subject formation. Whereas in his earlier work, he treats the subject as an “effect” of discourse, in his later writings he nuances and refines his position as follows: The subject forms itsellf in relation to a set of codes, prescriptions, or norms … This work on the self … takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject. … setting the limits to what will be considered to be an intelligible formatio nof the subject within a given historical scheme of things.

There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique then exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms. (Quoting Foucault) “Critique would insure the desubjugation of the subject in the course of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (17)

The Immanence Thing, Listen Up:

A practice of self-stylization in relation to norms … (means) neither conforming to the prescriptions entailed by a given code nor of internalizing a primary prohibition or interdiction (Hey Oedipal!)

However, the “I” engendered by morality is not conceived as a self-berating psychic agency. From the outset, what relation the self will take to itself, how it will craft itself in response to an injunction, how it will form itself, and what labor it will perform upon itself is a challenge, if not an open question (18).

the subject’s self-crafting … always takes place in relation to an imposed set of norms. the norm does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity; one invariably struggles with conditions of one’s own life that one could not have chosen. If there is an operation of agency or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free. It’s struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way. This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle —an agency— is also make possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of unfreedom (19).

Does the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself? (19)

I will argue otherwise by showing how a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility.

[…] primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary opacity in our understanding of ourselves. An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told (21).

With the help of Foucault’s self-criticism, it may be possible to show that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the limits of our schemes of intelligibility, the site where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can be assumed. where one is, as it were, at the limits of what one knows yet still under the demand to offer and receive acknowledgment: to someone else who is there to be addressed and whose address is there to be received. (21-22).

Recognition

Thus if I question the regime of truth, I question, too, the regime through which being, and my own ontological status, is allocated. Critique is not merely of a given social practice or a certain horizon of intelligibility within which practices and institutions appear, it also implies that I come into question for myself. Self-questioning becomes an ethical consequence of critique for Foucault, as he makes clear in “What is Critique?” It also turns out that self-questioning of this sort involves putting oneself at risk, imperiling the very possibility of being recognized by others, since to question the norms of recognition that govern what I might be, to ask what they leave out, what they might be compelled to accommodate, is, in relation to the present regime, to risk unrecognizability as a subject or at least to become an occasion for posing the questions of who one is (or can be) and whether or not one is recognizable.

These questions imply at least two kinds of inquiry for an ethical philosophy.

First, what are the these norms, to which my very being is given over, which have the power to install me or, indeed, to disinstall me as a recognizable subject?
Second, where and who is this other, and can the notion of the other comprise the frame of reference and normative horizon that hold and confer my potential for becoming a recognizable subject? (23)

If we conclude that Foucault’s failure to think the other is decisive, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity (as Levinas would have it), but also on the social dimension of normativity that governs the scene of recognition. The social dimension of normativity precedes and conditions any dyadic exchange, even though it seems that we make contact with that sphere of normativity precisely in the context of such proximate exchanges. (23-4)

The norms by which I recognize another or, indeed myself are not mine alone. They function to the extent that they are social, exceeding every dyadic exchange that they condition. Their sociality, however, can be understood neither as a structuralist totality nor as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental invariability. Some would doubtless argue that norms must already be in place for recognition to become possible, and there is surely truth in such a claim. It is also true that certain practices of recognition or, indeed, certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the institution of new norms, putting into question the giveness of the prevailing normative horizon. The normative horizon within which I see the other or, indeed, within which the other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a a critical opening.

It will not do, then, to collapse the notion of the other into the sociality of norms and claim that the other is implicitly present in the norms by which recognition is conferred. Sometimes the very unrecognizability of the other brings about a crisis in the norms that govern recognition. If and when, in an effort to confer or to receive a recognition that fails again and again, I call into question the normative horizon within which recogntion takes place, this questioning is part of the desire for recognition, a desire that can find no satisfaction, and whose unsatisfiability establishes a critical point of departure for the interrogation of available norms (24).

In asking the ethical question “How ought I to treat another?” I am immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separateness and exteriority. So, though I might think of the ethical relation as dyadic or, indeed, as presocial, I am caught up not only in the sphere of normativity but in the problematic of power when I pose the ethical question in its directness and simplicity: “How ought I to treat you?” If the “I” and the “you” must first come into being, and if a normative frame is necessary for this emergence and encounter, then norms work not only to direct my conduct but to condition the possible emergence of an encounter between myself and the other (25).

butler move from hegel

We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is conditioned and mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character and that exceed the perspective of those involved in the exchange (28)

Post-Hegelians like Adriana Cavarero ask “who are you” and thus try to suggest that Hegel’s dialectic of recognition gets it wrong when it envelopes the other within the “I.” Although as Butler points out, Hegel reveals the shortcomings of the Master and Slave dyad of recognition, requiring a further incorporation under the sphere of ethics or sittlich.., Butler is drawing parallels between Hegel’s ethical sphere and structure of normativity that underscores the ability for one to recognize an other.

Whereas The Phenomenology of Spirit moves from the scenario of the dyad toward a social theory of recognition, for Caverero it is necessary to ground the social in the dyadic encounter. She writes: “The “you” comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they.

Susceptibility to others that is unwilled, unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others (87-88).