hegel – Page 7 – objet (a)

Alexandre Kojève desire

From Introduction to the Reading of Hegel ed. Allan Bloom Trans. James H. Nichols Jr. New York: Basic Books. 1969. Based on his lectures given in 1933-1939. Published in French under the title Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel 1947.

🙂 In contemplation man is lost in the object, with her head in the clouds, and can only be brought back by Desire: from a state of passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the “negation,” the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object ..” 4

As Desire humans are transformed from animals into an “I” “radically opposed to, the non-I. The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire. 4

For a man to be truly human, for him to be essentially and really different from an animal, his human Desire must actually win out over his animal Desire. … All the Desires of an animal are in the final analysis a function of its desire to preserve its life. Human Desire, therefore, must win out over this desire for preservation. In other words, man’s humanity “comes to light” only if he risks his (animal) life for the sake of his human Desire. It is in and by this risk that the human reality is created and revealed as reality; it is in and by this risk that it “comes to light,” i.e., is shown, demonstrated, verified, and gives proofs of being essentially different from the animal, natural reality. And that is why to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of the risk of life (for an essentially nonvital end). 7

In Lacanese, animal desire is merely ‘demand’ and humans differ by seeking, Kojève adds “to desire the Desire of another … I want him to “recognize” my value as his value. I want him to “recognize” me as an autonomous value.

In other words … the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality — is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” … to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.” 7

Therefore the human being can be formed only if at least two of these Desires confront one another. Each of the two beings endowed with such a Desire is ready to go all the way in pursuit of its satisfaction; that is, is ready to risk its life —and, consequently, to put the life of the other in danger— in order to be “recognized” by the other, … accordingly, their meeting can only be a fight to the death. And it is only in and by such a fight that the human reality is begotten, formed, realized, and revealed to itself and to others. 7-8

Kojève da Slave

But the Slave, for his part, recognizes the Master in his human dignity and reality, and the Slave behaves accordingly. The Master’s “certainty” is therefore not purely subjective and “immediate,” but objectivized and “mediated” by another’s, the Slave’s, recognition. While the Slave still remains an “immediate,” natural, “bestial” being, the Master — as a result of his fight— is already human, “mediated.”

The relation between Master and Slave, therefore, is not recognition properly so-called. … this recognition is one-sided, for he (the Master rt) does not recognize in turn the Slave’s human reality and dignity. Hence, he is recognized by someone whom he does not recognize. And this is what is insufficient —and tragic— in his situation. The Master has fought and risked his life for a recognition without value for him. For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him. … The Master, therefore, was on the wrong track. After the fight that made him a Master, he is not what he wanted to be in starting that fight: a man recognized by another man. Therefore: if man can be satisfied only by recognition, the man who behaves as a Master will never be satisfied. 20

If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. history is the history of the working Slave. The Slave, in transforming the given World by his work, transcends the given and what is given by that given in himself; hence, he goes beyond himself, and also goes beyond the Master who is tied to the given which, not working, he leaves intact.

For only in an by work does man finally become aware of the significance, the value, and the necessity of his experience of fearing absolute power, incarnated form him in the Master.

The produce of work is the worker’s production. It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it. Now, this artificial product is at the same time just as “autonomous,” just as objective, just as independent of man, as is the natural thing. Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man.

Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. 25

Work, then, is what “forms-or-educates” man beyond the animal. The “formed-or-educated” man, the completed man who is satisfied by his completion, is hence necessarily not Master but Slave; or, at least, he who passed through Slavery. 25

It is by work in the Master’s service performed in terror that the Slave frees himself from the terror that enslaved him to the Master. 26

Kojève transcendence truth

The man who has not experienced the fear of death does not know that the given natural World is hostile to him, that it tends to kill him, to destroy him, and that it is essentially unsuited to satisfy him really. This man, therefore, remains fundamentally bound to the given World. At the most, he will want to “reform” it — that is, to change its details, to make particular transformations without modifying its essential characteristics. This man will act as a “skillful” reformer, or better, a conformer, but never as a true revolutionary.29

… The Master can never detach himself from the World in which he lives, and if this World perishes, he perishes with it. Only the Slave can transcend the given World (which is subjugated by the Master) and not perish. Only the Slave can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free. And the Slave achieves this only through forced and terrified work carried out in the Master’s service. To be sure, this work by itself does not free him.

But in transforming the World by this work, the Slave transforms himself, too, and thus creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. And thus in the long run, all slavish work realizes not the Master’s will, but the will —at first unconscious— of the Slave, who —finally— succeeds where the Master —necessarily— fails.

Therefore, it is indeed the originally dependent, serving, and slavish Consciousness that in the end realizes and reveals the ideal of autonomous Self-Consciousness and is thus its “truth.” 29-30

Žižek on form formalism distinction

🙂 Rothenberg on Žižek’s insistence that the truth is a thoroughly partisan process. Yet Žižek refuses relativism, so how can he argue truth is partisan but not relativistic. Rothenberg cites a lengthy passage from Žižek [which I’ve broken up below for purposes of emphasis]:

Form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion, that is, the “strange attractor” which distorts, biases, confers a specific colour on every element of the totality … [W]e should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can coexist peacefully — in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and opportunity to tell their story … The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form:

Form has nothing to do with “formalism”, with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent, particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.

(Rothenberg 161, citing guess who from Revolution at the Gates, 190, original emphasis)

Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?

Žižek says this:

To put it simply, each of these relations to the Hegelian system is always that of a “I know well, but all the same.” One knows well that Hegel affirms the fundamentally antagonistic character of actions, the decentring of the subject, etc., but all the same … this division is eventually overcome in the self-mediation of the absolute Idea that ends up suturing all wounds. The position of Absolute Knowledge, the final reconciliation, plays here the role of the Hegelian Thing: a monster both frightening and ridiculous, from which it is best to keep some distance, something that is at the same time impossible (Absolute Knowledge is of course unachievable, an unrealizable Ideal) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge must be avoided, for it threatens to mortify all the richness of life through the self-movement of the concept). In other words, any attempt to define oneself within Hegel’s sphere of influence requires a point of blocked identification – the Thing must always be sacrificed…

For us, this figure of Hegel as ‘panlogicist’, who devours and mortifies the living substance of the particular, is the Real of his critic’s, ‘Real’ in the Lacanian sense: the construction of a point which effectively does not exist (a monster with no relation to Hegel himself), but which, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to justify our negative reference to the other, that is to say, our effort at distantiation. Where does the horror felt by post-Hegelians before the monster of Absolute Knowledge come from? What does this fantasmatic construction conceal by means of its fascinating presence? The answer: a hole, a void. The best way to distinguish this hole is by reading Hegel with Lacan, that is to say, by reading Hegel in terms of the Lacanian problematic of the lack in the Other, the traumatic void against which the process of signification articulates itself. From this perspective, Absolute Knowledge appears to be the Hegelian name for that which Lacan outlined in his description of the passe, the final moment of the analytic process, the experience of lack in the Other. If, according to Lacan’s celebrated formula, Sade offers us the truth of Kant, then Lacan himself allows us to approach the elementary matrix that summarizes the entire movement of the Hegelian dialectic: Kant with Sade, Hegel with Lacan. What is implied, then, by this relationship between Hegel and Lacan?

Get the rest of this fascinating article here
This might be a slightly older version, but I don’t know.

Žižek Hegel

Žižek, Slavoj. “Article on Hegel and Interview” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. eds. Bryant, Levi., and Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re.press, 2011. 202-223. 406-415.

It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, one should apply Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion

‘everything is matter’

(which relies on its constitutive exception—in the case of Lenin who, in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism, falls into this trap, the very position of enunciation of the subject whose mind ‘reflects’ matter)

and the assertion ‘there is nothing which is not matter’

(which, with its other side, ‘not-All is matter’, opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena).

What this means is that a truly radical materialism is by definition non-reductionist: far from claiming that ‘everything is matter’, it confers upon the ‘immaterial’ phenomena a specific positive non-being.

Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. Phen of Spirit

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing—in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short,

the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self.

There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness — the only ‘greatness’ there is is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by alienating labour of renunciation is an intermediary moment to pass, so that we should just endure it and patiently wait for the reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission, suffering and renunciation are their own reward,

all that is to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Self with its ‘pathological’ desires, to purify our Self to universality.

This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: ‘One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous’. It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become ‘universal citizens’ by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality — in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. …

Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the ‘truth’ of the engaged positions emerges through it, i.e., how the warring parties are ‘reconciled’ through their mutual destruction. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honour, victory, defence, etc., but the emergence of absolute negativity (death) as the absolute Master which reminds us of the false stability of our organized finite lives.

War serves to elevate individuals to their ‘truth’ by making them obliterate their particular self-interests and identify with the State’s universality. The true enemy is not the enemy we are fighting but our own finitude

— recall Hegel’s acerbic remark on how it is easy to preach the vanity of our finite terrestrial existence, but much more difficult to accept this lesson when it is enforced by a wild enemy soldier who breaks into our home and starts to cut members of our family with a sabre ….

In philosophical terms, Hegel’s point is here the primacy of ‘self-contradiction’ over external obstacle (or enemy).

We are not finite and self-inconsistent because our activity is always thwarted by external obstacles; we are thwarted by external obstacles because we are finite and inconsistent.

In other words, what the subject engaged in a struggle perceives as the enemy, the external obstacle he has to overcome, is the materialization of the subject’s immanent inconsistency: the fighting subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges on his opposing the enemy, so that his (eventual) victory over the enemy is his own defeat, disintegration.

As Hegel likes to put it, fighting the external enemy, one (unknowingly) fights one’s own essence.

So, far from celebrating engaged fighting, Hegel’s point is rather that every struggling position, every taking-sides, has to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being).

This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility (of what is an inherent constituent of your position) as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which prevents your full realization) — the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly the Fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form of ideology, one is even tempted to say: ideology as such, kat’ exochen. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, this foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishist objectivization, a standin, for the ‘inconsistency’ of the social order, for the immanent antagonism (‘class struggle’) which generates the dynamic of the social system’s instability (208).

We can measure here clearly the distance that separates Hegel from Nietzsche: the innocence of exuberant heroism that Nietzsche wants to resuscitate, the passion of risk, of fully engaging in a struggle, of victory or defeat, they are all gone—the ‘truth’ of the struggle only emerges in and through defeat.

This is why the standard Marxist denunciation of the falsity of the Hegelian reconciliation (already made by Schelling) misses the point. According to this critique, the Hegelian reconciliation is false, it occurs only in the Idea, while real antagonisms persist — in the ‘concrete’ experience of the ‘real life’ of individuals who cling to their particular identity, state power remains an external compulsion.

Therein resides the crux of the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political thought: Hegel presents the modern constitutional monarchy as a rational State in which antagonisms are reconciled, as an organic Whole in which every constituent (can) find(s) its proper place, but he thereby obfuscates the class antagonism which continues in modern societies, generating the working class as the ‘non-reason of the existing Reason’, as the part of modern society which has no proper part in it, as its ‘part of no-part’ (Rancière). …

In other words, instead of rejecting the Hegelian false reconciliation, one should reject as illusory the very notion of dialectical reconciliation, i.e., one should renounce the demand for a ‘true’ reconciliation. Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formulas of reconciliation from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should ‘recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present’, or, to put it in Marx’s terms, in reconciliation, one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner ‘truth’ of this miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel only proposes its new interpretation, thus in a way misses the point—it knocks on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, one does not have to change reality, but the way we perceive it and relate to it.

butler lacan performativity

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming.” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

Footnote 26: On Lacan’s divergence from structuralism, see also Zupancic, Ethics, 29–30. While Butler tends to give undue prominence to the influence of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology on Lacan (she repeats this in her latest work: see Undoing Gender, 45), her emphasis on the imaginary in Antigone’s Claim appears to stem from her Althusserian reading of Lacan in The Psychic Life of Power. There, too, she refers to “the unspeakable, the unsignifiable” of the symbolic order in Lacan (94), but, rather than naming this limit as the real, she, as in Antigone’s Claim, moves on to consider the imaginary. Identifying the Althusserian interpellation with Lacan’s subject formation (95), she locates the only possibility for resistance in the psychoanalytic subject’s imaginary misrecognition of the name with which the law hails her. With an imprecision that also characterizes her synthesis of the earlier and later Lacan, she writes: “For the Lacanian, then, the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive—that is, symbolic—constitution of identity” (96–97; emphasis added). In this Althusserian reading of Lacan, “[t]he imaginary thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes” (98; see also 89). Here again, as in Subjects of Desire, Butler moves from the dead end she finds in Lacan to Foucault as a more productive theorist of resistance: “where Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginary, Foucault recasts the symbolic as relations of power and understands resistance as an effect of power” (98–99). Shepherdson complicates this reading of Lacan’s and Foucault’s differences in “History and the Real.”

page 19: The political thrust of Butler’s theory is, then, to reevaluate abjected bodies, to shape a symbolic future that would render them culturally recognized and intelligible. I think we can find a description of this Hegelian mechanism in Deleuze’s work: that of the realization of the possible. For Deleuze, who follows here Henri Bergson,

the realization of the possible refers to a materialization of as-yet nonexistent forms of life. Even if these forms do not, in Butler’s terms, “matter,” they are nevertheless prefigured as possible substitutes to, or deviations from, current forms of reality. Possibilities, then, are like a gallery of alternatives from which future reality is selected. Some possibilities are never realized, and here politics comes into existence, in the struggle over making certain possibilities available or refusing the legitimate reality of others.

For Butler, the process that grants this reality is that of recognition. Given her examples of the fag and the dyke as unrecognized, illegitimate bodies, her futurity opens as the horizon of the possible realization of alternatives that have been excluded from and by the heterosexual matrix.

page 19: But to identify the specificity and limits of Butler’s notion of becoming, we should note that, taking his cue from Bergson, Deleuze contrasts this realization of the possible (which I suggest characterizes the politics of performativity) to what he calls the actualization of the virtual. In seeing the future as so many possibilities, we imagine an emergence in which the possible, as “a phantom awaiting its hour” (Bergson, 101), is fleshed out in the process of its realization, its cominginto-being. An already existing form or ideal is given materiality; for Butler, for example, abject but nevertheless existing bodies begin to matter through the legitimizing processes of recognition. Clearly, the importance of politics that seeks to enable the full realization of lives and bodies is not to be dismissed. But quite another thing is to allow the monopolization of our understanding of futurity by this process of realization qua recognition. For Bergson, the error in thinking becoming as the realization of possibilities is that this process can imagine the future only in terms of that which has already come to be. Realization operates through a temporal loop where we retroactively posit in the past the possibilities that “will have been” realized: “the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted” (100). The possible is realized as a form that, despite its insubstantiality, has been made conceptually available. It is molded according to that which is in existence. Because it is an already imaginable form, we are dealing with “preformism: the real is already preformed in the possible insofar as the real resembles the possible” (Grosz, Nick of Time, 187). According to the model of realization, where out of a plethora of possibilities some pass into existence while others are eliminated, the real resembles and is a limited version of the possible. Consequently, “[r]ealization is a process in which creativity and production have no place” (187); in it, we lose the play of “unforeseeable novelty” that, according to Bergson, only the unfolding of duration allows (Bergson, 91, 93). In thinking “possibles which would precede their own realization,” “the future is outlined in advance” (103).

Unlike the possible, what Deleuze calls the virtual is not a preformed alternative that may be realized, that may come into existence (for example, via the kind of political work that Butler advocates). Rather, it is an undifferentiated realm of potentiality that in no way predicts the actual forms of existence that it produces. As Todd May writes, the virtual can be seen “as the reservoir of difference out of which the speciWc differences that are phenomenologically accessible to us are actualized” (71). Possible futures emerge through the processes of “resemblance and limitation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97): resemblance because that which emerges is a materialization of an already existing possibility; limitation because only a certain number of the possible futures vying for existence can be realized. As opposed to the possible, “the virtual never resembles the real that it actualizes” (Grosz, “Thinking,” 27). It does not have a form, yet as an ontological realm— for Bergson, the realm of nonpsychological, nonindividual memory— it is entirely real. Its actualization takes place through “the rules . . . of difference or divergence and of creation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97). [20]

Deleuze understands actualization as the potential process of radical emergence, of becoming—to borrow Bergson’s term, of creative evolution. Realization, on the other hand, is a double process of unveiling and culling: preexisting forms and models enter existence while others are eliminated (for example, in the political struggle for recognition). According to Bergson and Deleuze, the process of realization does not allow us to think duration, the dimension of becoming that undergirds their metaphysical systems. Only with the virtual can we intuit duration; reversely, it is only durée that enables the unforeseeability of the virtual’s actualization. “Duration,” as Deleuze writes, “is the virtual” (“Bergson’s Conception,” 55). Deleuze turns to Bergson as a source for articulating time as an irreducible dimension of being. For him, Bergsonian metaphysics theorizes devenir in a way that is incompatible with the Werden of Hegelian dialectics, its “false movement” (Difference, 8). Butler, too, clearly acknowledges that, as a theory of becoming, of invention and change, performativity requires and depends on time as an active dimension.

Only in duration can inaccurate repetitions introduce newness into the world.Consequently, performativity does not allow us to think forms of existence that radically diverge from what is currently available to us—forms that, unlike the gender nonconformist beings with which Butler replaces the Lacanian real, are strictly inconceivable from our present perspective. [22]

Grosz writes:

the aim of all radical politics is the production of a future that actively transforms the dynamics of the present, and this may involve precisely an unpredictable leap into virtuality. . . . This leap into the virtual is always a leap into the unexpected, which cannot be directly planned for or anticipated, though it is clear that it can be prepared for. (Nick of Time, 186)

Grosz finds in the virtual an openness that may be useful for thinking about radical change: “perhaps the openendedness of the concept of the virtual may prove central in reinvigorating a politics embracing the future by refusing to tie it to the realization of possibilities . . . and linking it to the unpredictable, uncertain actualization of virtualities” (190). Butler’s argument about the undirectedness and divergence of performatively realized futures seems to echo this call for the unforeseeability of becoming. Yet I have suggested that her Hegelianism cannot tolerate such openness but always, despite her goal of resignifying dialectics, returns to a notion of becoming that makes accessible the possible, not the virtual. For Bergson, a constant interlocutor in Deleuze’s thinking of becoming, duration as radical becoming cannot be thought through the possible:

If this logic [of retrospection] we are accustomed to pushes the reality that springs forth in the present back into the past in the form of a possible, it is precisely because it will not admit that anything does spring up, that something is created and that time is efWcacious. It sees in a new form or quality only a rearrangement of the old—nothing absolutely new.

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought. Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

foucault critique of Hegel

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. 1987. 182-183

Indeed, for Foucault, domination is not a single stage in an historical narrative whose ultimate destination is decidedly beyond domination. …

For Foucault, domination is not, as it is for Hegel, an impossible or self-contradictory enterprise. On the contrary, the prohibitive or regulative law must find ways to implement itself, and the various strategies of that law’s self-implementation become the occasions for new historical configurations of force. Regulative or prohibitive laws, what Foucault will come to call “juridical” laws, are curiously generative. They create the phenomena they are meant to control: they delimit some range of phenomena as subordinate and thereby give potential identity and mobility to what they intend to subdue. They create inadvertent consequences, unintended results, a proliferation of repercussions precisely because there is no prior dialectical prefiguration of what form historical experience must take.

Without the assumption of prior ontological harmony, conflict can be seen to produce effects that exceed the bounds of dialectical unity and result in a multiplication of consequences.

From this perspective, conflict does not result in the restoration of metaphysical order, but becomes the condition for a complication and proliferation of historical experience, a creation of new historical forms.

This “non-place” of emergence, this conflictual moment to which produces historical innovation, must by understood as a nondialectical version of difference, not unlike the “difference” which, for Derrida, permanently ruptures the relation between sign and signified. For both Derrida and Foucault, the Hegelian theme of relational opposition is radically challenged through a formulation of difference as a primary and irrefutable linguistic/historical constant.

The inversion of Hegel’s prioritization of identity over difference is achieved through the postulation of certain kinds of “difference” as historically invariant and insuperable. In effect, the difference whereof Foucault and Derrida speak are differences that cannot be aufgehoben into more inclusive identities.

Any effort to posit an identity, whether the identity of the linguistic signified or the identity of some historical epoch, is necessarily undermined by the difference that conditions any such positing. Indeed, where identity is posited, difference is not aufgehoben, but concealed. In fact, it appears safe to conclude that for both Derrida and Foucault, Aufhebung is nothing other than a strategy of concealment, not the incorporation of difference into identity, but the denial of difference for the sake of positing a fictive identity. We shall see that for Lacan the role of difference functions similarly. For both Derrida and Foucault, difference displaces the metaphysical impulse from its totalizing goal. The Derridean moment of linguistic misfire where the conceit of referentiality debunks itself, undermines the Hegelian effort to establish sign and signified as internally related features of a unified reality.

Similarly, the Foucaultian moment of conflict seems capable of producing only ever greater complexity in its wake, proliferating opposition beyond its binary configurations into multiple and diffuse forms, thus undermining the possibility of an Hegelian synthesis of binary opposites.

It is clear that both Derrida and Foucault theorize from within the tradition of a dialectic deprived of the power of synthesis.

On the other hand, it becomes necessary to distinguish between kinds of difference, some of which are dialectical and always reinstate identity subsequent to any appearance of ontological difference and others of which are nondialectical and resist assimilation into any kind of synthetic unity. To find the latter sort of difference is to change the very meaning of the “labor of the negative,” for this “labor” consist of building relations where there seemed to be none, in the “magic power that converts the negative into being.” Nondialectical difference would convert the negative only and always into further negativity or reveal difference itself, not as the negative, but as a qualitative permutation of Being; in effect, nondialectical difference, despite its various forms, is the labor of the negative which has lost its “magic,” a labor that does not construct a higher-order being but either deconstructs the illusions of a restorative ontological immanence and posits nondialectical difference as irreducible, or rejects the primacy of difference of any kind and offers a theory of primary metaphysical plenitude which eludes Hegelian categories and entails a defense of affirmation on nondialectical grounds. (184)

Kant Hegel pure thought

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.

Hegel’s Relation to Kant

It was, after all, Kant who first argued, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787), that categories allow us to conceive as an object that which we perceive through he senses and that such categories are therefore the necessary conditions of objective experience.

Kants merits particular praise from Hegel, however, for noting the special role categories play in lending objectivity to our perceptions. Categories for Kant (as later for Hegel) are what permit us to say of what we see, hear and touch, not just that it is a collection of sensations (colors, sounds, and tactile impressions) but that it is a real object with identifiable properties and of measurable size standing in causal relations with other similar objects.

Categories thus constitute the conditions of the possibility of experience because “only by means of them can any object of experience be thought at all.”

Kant’s other great insight, in Hegel’s view, is that the fundamental general categories, through which what we preceive “become[s] an object for me,” are a priori concepts generated “spontaneously” and independently by pure thought.

In other words, Kant saw (as Hegel himself puts it), that “the thought-determinations have their source in the I (Ich)” and in the I alone.

Categories, such as “reality,” “quantity,” “substance,” and “cause” are thus not abstracted from what is given to the senses in the manner of empirical concepts: we do not first encounter a variety of colors and sounds, gradually notice that they all have in common the quality of being “real,” and then formulate the general concept of “reality” as we formulate (or at least might be said to formulate) the empirical concept “red” by comparing and contrasting the various shades of red that we see. Rather, the category of “reality” is produced spontaneously and independently by thought and then employed to understand as real the red that is given to us.

In the area of theoretical philosophy, however, one of the Kantian ideas that most impressed Hegel is clearly this claim that “the original identity of the ‘I’ within thinking (the transcendental unity of self-consciousness) [constitutes] the determinate ground of the concepts of the understanding.” Hegel will take up this idea and make it the cornerstone (albeit in an amended form) of his whole philosophy.

One important difference between Kant and Hegel is that Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy argues —contra Kant— that the categories are not all produced at the same time by thought or employed together in every period of history. Kant understands the categories discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason to be the universal conditions of the possibility of objective experience for any rational being endowed with a discursive, finite intellect. For Hegel, by contrast, human thought generates the basic categories over a period of time, so they are not all to be found —or at least not all given the same prominence— in every epoch of history or in every culture. Consequently, although Hegel believes that all the catgories discussed in the Logic will be familiar to the inhabitants of our post-reformation Western world, they would not necessarily all be familiar to ancient Egyptians or Greeks. Yet Hegel agrees with Kant that the source of the categories is always and only the spontaneous activity of pure thought itself. Thought certainly produces its categories in response to changing situations, but the categories with which it responds are wholly its own and a priori.

The purpose of the Logic is not just to describe and analyze how we understand categories in everyday life but to determine how they are supposed to be understood, how they are to be understood in truth.

Hegel thus will not describe the way concepts operate in concrete speech situations or given language games (in the manner of J.L. Austin or Wittgenstein), nor will he examine the way concepts operate in given texts (in the manner of Derrida). Such descriptions may well reveal that we do not actually understand and employ concepts as we imagine we do. But as descriptions of the way concepts happen to be used in given verbal or textual practices, they would not be able to establish how concepts should be understood (13).

How then is Hegel to proceed in his task? The way forward is indicated by Kant. If, as Kant argues, the categories have their source in and are generated by pure thought alone, then pure thought alone must determine how those categories are properly to be conceived (just as it must explain our ordinary understanding of the categories, which may or may not overlap with the proper understanding). The way to determine the proper understanding of the categories is thus to consider how pure thought itself requires categories to be conceived. This is what Hegel will endeavor to do in the Logic: that text will seek to determine which categories are necessitated by, and so are inherent in, thought, as well as the form that these categories must take. In this way, it will set up a standard —the proper understanding of the categories— in relation to which we can determine to what extent our ordinary understanding is rational and appropriate.

Hegel’s Logic will thus not only clarify the categories of thought for thought but also offer a thorough critique of our ordinary conception of them to the extent that the conception falls short of what the Logic reveals them to be (14).

mutual recognition 2/2

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.

To begin with, self-consciousness did not “see the other as an essential being,” because in the other it saw only itself. Yet it did not enjoy an unalloyed sense of self either, since it found itself “over there” in another (that it did not properly recognize). Now, by contrast, self-consciousness has a clear sense of its own identity and recognizes that the other is something wholly other than and independent of itself. Consequently, it can at last fulfill the condition required for concrete self-consciousness: for it can find itself recognized by and reflected in another that is known to be truly other.

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 recogntion, 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.”

As Williams points out, genuine self-consciousness involves much more than mere desire (though it must also incorporate desire). Whereas desire “seiz[es] upon and negat[es] 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.

thought and being

Houlgate, Stephen. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Layfayette Indiana: Purdue University Press. 2006.

Hegel will not argue that consciousness is simply wrong to think of the world as made up of perceivable things or self-conscious agents or forms of social and historical organization. He will argue that the experience of consciousness shows the world not merely to be determined in these ways. When consciousness realizes this, it ceases to be mere consciousness of a world over against it and becomes the thought of the universal, categorial structure immanent in that world and in thought (148).

Hegel’s analysis continues until consciousness discovers that its understanding of its object does not actually correspond to the stated definition of an object of consciousness at all. An object of consciousness is stated to be something known by, but standing over against, consciousness. Consciousness eventually discovers, however, that it actually understands its object to have one and the same categorial structure as itself and so not simply to stand over against consciousness after all. At that point, consciousness realizes that it is no longer mere consciousness but has become speculative thought, or absolute knowing (150).

This experience is not an historical experience that every individual necessarily makes in his or her own life but the experience that is logically entailed by the structure of ordinary consciousness itself. It is the experience through which ordinary consciousness is taken by its own internal logic from its most primitive shape of sense-certainty through perception, understanding, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion to philosophy or absolute knowing, albeit an experience that concrete historical individuals all too often fail to comprehend (150).

Understanding (Verstand) discovers that the inner character of things is not just force but force governed by law —the same lawfulness that governs understanding itself. Understanding thus finds a dimension of itself in the things it encounters and so becomes self-consciousness (151).

Self-consciousness then discovers that the objects to which it relates are not just law-governed objects in nature but other living, self-conscious beings —self-conscious beings who confirm our own consciousness of ourselves by recognizing us but whose recognition of us we in turn have to recognize. In this way, self-consciousness acquires a sense that an individual’s identity does not belong to that individual alone but is constituted by his or her social interaction with others (151).

The aim of the Phenomenology is to teach ordinary consciousness —and philosophers wedded to the convictions of ordinary consciousness— that being is not simply something objective to which we stand in relation but exhibits one and the same logical form as thought itself and thus can be understood a priori from within thought (146-7).