Category: hegel

butler Hegel life as sociality

Public lecture presented by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre of Royal Holloway, the School of Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck) and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research 4th February, 2009.

Norms constitute specific ontologies of the Subject, historically contingent ontologies, being of the subject given over to norms, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, the body is a social ontology, NORMATIVE PRODUCTION OF ONTOLOGY, HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT ONTOLOGY

Our very capacity to discern and name the being of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition.

differential allocation of precarity

Apprehension of precariousness leads to heightening of violence, insight into vulnerability increases desire to destroy them

Butler on Hegel

At begin of Lordship and Bondage: a self-consciousness sees another self-consciousness and is scandalized by this event.

Some Other appears, at first that Other appears to be me, how is it possible that this is me over there?  How can I account for this apparent distance between me over there and the “I” who regards this “me”.

If I have come outside myself then I am no longer localized and this tells me something new about who I am, my relation to space. If I am no longer localized, I am not fully or in exclusively a bounded being,  I have the capacity to appear elsewhere.

I am a kind of being here and there apparently at once.  I can as it were face myself, and this involves a certain amount of self-loss.  I am then not quite bounded in space as I apparently assumed, this unboundedness by which I am now characterized, seems bound up as it were with a redoubling of myself.  The I seems to have become 2.

The problem is that the Other whom I face, is in some sense me and is some sense not-me.  I encounter myself at a spatial distance re-doubled.  I encounter at the same time and through the same figure the limit to what I can call myself.  Both of these things happen at the same time, but this does not mean that these two encounters are reconciled. On the contrary they exist in a certain tension with one another.  This Other who appears to be me is at once me and not-me.  So what I have to live with is not just the fact that I have become 2, but that I can be found at a distance from myself and what I find at that distance is also and at once not myself.

This Other who appear as me is at once me and not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance redoubled.

—————-

Hegel has established through these steps the constitutive sociality of this self-consciousness.  The apprehension of the Other as a living being, one whose living is like my own is essential to this process of developing a social bond. There’s a shape over there, a living one and its understood as belonging to this or that living thing.

The living consciousness can only return to its absolute singularity by risking its own life, but dead that living consciousness cannot achieve the self-certainty it seeks.  So the question becomes, how best to live and how best to live with others. The defensive effort to shore up one’s singularity in the face of a duplication or substitutability is apparently overwhelming, but is only by considering

Singularity and Substitutability without a dialectical synthesis that an ethical opening to the other can take place.

Who is this I who is on the one hand substitutable and yet also singularly alive on some other hand.  If this “I” is to register its substitutability it has to survive as this singular life to do precisely that.  In other words its singularity is the precondition of its understanding of substitutability and is presupposed logically by the idea of substitution itself which involves replacing one term by another.

The Non-substitutable, is the persistent, logical and existential condition of substitutability.  As much as the “I” might be threatened by negation or threatens the other with negation, so it is clear that the life of the one is dependent on the life of the other.  This interdependency becomes a new way of conceiving of life as sociality. Sociality cannot be reduced to the existence of this identity or that identity, this group or that group, but is the open temporal trajectory of interdependency and desire, struggle, fear, murderous dispositions as well as the desire to maintain and repair social bonds.

So although I find my departure here in Hegel, I move in at least two distinct directions:

1. The ethical necessity of a non-coincidence of singularity and substitutability. I’m not interested in a dialectical synthesis of those two terms. The ethical demand to live both singularity and substitutability as an ongoing paradox is something that I affirm.

2. There can be no recognition of my life being like another’s life except through the specific social norms that allow certain populations to emerge as living beings and others to be considered as non-living, as only partially living, or as actually figuring a threat to life itself.

We cannot remain dependent on existing and already established norms of recognition, if we are to try to expand our understanding not only of who deserves to live, who lives are worth protecting but more fundamentally whose lives count as lives and whose lives are finally grievable.

The problems is not merely to include more people in the existing norms but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially? What new norms are possible and how are they wrought.

What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizablity.  What might be done in other words to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to to produce more radically democratic results.

New egalitarian norms of recognizability.

butler Hegel Žižek ek-static

Judith Butler speaking at Columbia Law School, saying some interesting, no make that really interesting stuff on the notion of “consent.”

Commenting on Žižek in this 2000 text, Butler accuses him of presenting us with an overly formalistic brand of Hegelianism. She draws upon the way in which Žižek’s occupation with the Kant-Hegel combo is telling and productive in some respects, but that ultimately Žižek’s analyses, while brilliant, are often ahistorical, presented in an overly structuralist-formalist fashion that makes thinking a political aritculation somewhat difficult.  Here is a quote from the Verso book Contingency, Universality, Hegemony (2000).

Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed  philosopher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery.  Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories.  And just as Hegel insists on revising several times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate.  We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (20).

commenting on Zizek:

One difference that is doubtless apparent is that my approach to Hegel draws upon a certain set of literary and rhetorical presumptions about how meaning is generated in his text. I therefore oppose the effort to construe Hegel in formal terms or, indeed, to render him compatible with a Kantian formalism, which is something Žižek has done on occasion. Any effort to reduce Hegel’s own text to a formal schematism will become subject to the very same critique that Hegel has offered of all such formalisms, and subject to the same founderings (25).

May 25

🙂 logic and phenomenology, structure of thought = structure of being, structure of thought = structure of reality, structure of capital.  And the role of the phenomenology in this thesis is ….

The quandary conditioning the struggle of life and death is that of having to choose between ecstatic and self-determining existence (49).

Self-consciousness’ predicament, that of having to choose between ecstatic and self-determining existence, is seen to be the predicament of the Other as well.  This similarity between the two self-consciousnesses ultimately proves to be the basis of their harmonious interdependence … Recognition, once achieved, affirms the ambiguity of self-consciousness as both ecstatic and self-determining.

self-estrangement implicit in the experience of desire … As an intentional movement desire tends to eclipse the self that is its origin.

Desire must arrange for its satisfaction within the context of life, for death is the end of desire … Desire is coextensive with life, with the realm of otherness, and with Others.

Domination and and enslavement are thus defenses against life WITHIN the context of life; they emerge in the nostalgia over the failed effort to die. 54

The lord and bondsman turn against life in different ways, but both resist the synthesis of corporeality and freedom, a synthesis that alone is constitutive of human life; the lord lives in dread of his body, while the bondsman lives in dread of freedom.

desire and recognition 2

Hegel’s anthropocentric reorientation of Spinoza’s monism results in a reformulation of Spinoza’s notion of self-actualization.  The journeying subject of the Phenomenology also seeks its own actualization, but finds that this does not happen without the paradoxical assistance of negativity.

The human subject does not exhibit greater potency through an unobstructed expression of selfhood, but requires obstruction, as it were, in order to gain reflection of itself in its environment, recognition of itself by Others.

Hence, actualization only occurs to the extent that the subject confronts what is different from itself, and therein discovers a more enhanced version of itself.  The negative thus becomes essential to self-actualization, and the human subject must suffer its own loss of identity again and again in order to realize its fullest sense of self.

But once again, can this full self be found, and does Hegel’s introduction of essential negativity effectively preclude the possibility of achieving full selfhood consonant with completed metaphysical knowledge?  Can the living human subject reconstitute every external relation as internal, and simultaneously achieve adequacy to itself and its world?

Is the ideal of substance recast as subject merely that, a regulative ideal which one longs for and suffers under but never appropriates existentially?  If this is the case, has Hegel then created the notion of a subject as perpetual striving?

Although Hegel is often categorizd as the philosopher of totality, of systematic completeness and self-sufficient autonomy, it is not clear that the metaphysical totality he defends is a finite system.  Indeed, the abiding paradox of Hegel’s metaphysics seems to consist in the openness of this ostensibly all-inclusive system (13).

desire and recognition 1

I am going to re-read these 40 torturous pages in Subjects of Desire

Butler defines Hegelian Desire thus on page 6:

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

… desire increasingly becomes a principle of the ontological displacement of the human subject, and in its latest stages, in the work of Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, desire comes to signify the impossibility of the coherent subject itself (6).

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

[desire] is established early on in the text as a permanent principle of self-consciousness. Hegel claims that “self-consciousness in general is Desire” (Para 167), by which he means that desire signifies the reflexivity of consciousness, the necessity that it become other to itself in order to know itself.  As desire, consciousness is outside itself, and as outside itself, consciousness is self-consciousness. 7

Clearly, the meaning of this “outside” is yet to be clarified, and becomes a crucial ambiguity in the section “Lordship and Bondage.”  … The Hegelian subject cannot know itself instantaneously or immediately, but requires mediation to understand its own structure (7).

… the Hegelian subject expands in the course of its adventure through alterity; it internalizes the world that it desires, and expands to encompass, to be, what it initially confronts as other to itself.  The final satisfaction of desire is the discovery of substance as subject, the experience of the world as everywhere confirming that subject’s sense of immanent metaphysical place (8-9).

Hyppolite suggests that desire is “the power of the negative in human life” … Conceived as lack, a being-without, desire initially signifies negativity; as the pursuit of substance, desire thus implicitly raises the question of whether human negativity, that which constitutes its ontological difference, can be resolved into an encompassing network of being.  Human desire articulates the subject’s relationship to that which is not itself, that which is different, strange, novel, awaited, absent, lost.  And the satisfaction of desire is the transformation of difference into identity: the discovery of the strange and novel as familiar, the arrival of the awaited, the reemergence of what has been absent or lost.  Thus, human desire is a way of thematizing the problem of negativity; it is the negative principle of human life, its ontological status as a lack in pursuit of being — Plato’s vision in the Symposium.

🙂 Butler adds this:

But desire is also the mode in which consciousness makes its own negativity into an explicit object of reflection, something to be labored upon and worked through.  In effect, we read our negativity in the objects and others we desire; as desirable, detestable, solicitous, or rejecting, these emotional facts of the world mirror our ontological insufficiency in Hegelian terms; they show us the negativity that we are, and engage us with the promise of plenitude or the threat of reaffirming our nothingness.  Whatever the emotional permutation of desire, we are, in virtue of desire, posing the question of final destination.  And for Hegel, in posing the question, we presume the possibility of an answer, a satisfaction, an ultimate arrival (9-10).

recognition

The struggle for recognition arises, then, not from a primary competitive attitude toward the other, but from the experience of desire for and by another.  Specific desires for property, goods or positions of social dominance must be, according to Hegel’s framework, seen as derivative expressions of the desire for a community based on love.  Desire is, thus, not originally an effort of acquisition or domination, but emerges in such forms only when a community based on the principles of reciprocal recognition has not yet been developed.  note 18 page 242

butler self-loss

Here is JB commenting on the fact of recognition in Lordship and Bondage is really about self-loss.

Here is the JB quoting from Hegel’s Phenomenology:

Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a two-fold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. (para 178)

desire

The gradual yet insistent effort of Hegel’s journeying subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit never relinquishes this project to relate itself to externality in order to rediscover itself as more inclusive being.  The insurpassability of externality implies the permancence of desire. In this sense, insofar as Hegel’s subject never achieves a static union with externality, it is hopelessly beyond its own grasp, although it retains as its highest aim the thorough comprehension of itself. This thoroughgoing self-determination is the ideal of integrity toward which self-consciousness strives, and this striving is denoted by desire (44).

After all, desire revealed an implicit intentional aim, namely, to disclose and enact a common ontological structure with the world. Hence, despite the alleged object of desire … “the consumption of this brute being which poses as other to me,” desire has at base a metaphysical project which, while requiring determinate objects, transcends them as well, i.e., to effect a unity with the realm of externality which both preserves that realm and renders it into a reflection of self-consciousness.  (44)

Because desire is the principle of self-consciousness’ reflexivity or inner difference, and because it has as its highest aim the assimilation of all external relations into relations of inner difference, desire forms the experiential basis for the project of the Phenomenology at large … the gradual sophistication of desire —expanding inclusiveness of its intentional aims —is the principle of progress in the Phenomenology (45).

hallward dialectical voluntarism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

butler hegel unhappy consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hegel and the Production of Self-Enslavement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Lordship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Hegelian Subjections

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

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

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

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

Psychoanalysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

hegel recognition jessica benjamin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

houlgate difference between Kant and Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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