recognition

honneth

Honneth, Alex. “From desire to recogntion: Hegel’s account of human sociality” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Eds. Moyar, Dean and Michael Quante, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2008. 76-90. Print.

A subject can arrive at “consciousness” of its own “self” only if it enters into a relationship of “recognition” with another subject. 76

It is unclear why the disappointment over the independence of the object should lead to an encounter with the other and to recogntion (84).
… this subject strives, through the need-driven consumption of its environment, to acquire the individual certainty that the reality it faces is on the whole a product of its own mental activity. In the course of this striving, however, it is confronted with the fact that, as Hegel put it, the world retains its “independence” since its existence is not dependent on the survival of its individual elements.

fichte schelling

Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Fichte says that Kant’s theory presupposes a wider inter-subjective human community

According to Fichte, the self cannot give itself the consciousness of freedom; rather the consciousness of freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Schelling qualifies the latent solipsism of transcendental idealism when maintains that the ground of free self-determination must lie partly “within” the subject and partly “outside” of the subject. Schelling’s point in affirming that the ground of freedom is divided is that freedom is social and intersubjective. Hence the ground of freedom cannot be identified with subjectivity alone; the grounds of freedom must be both “in” the subject and yet transcend the subject. Freedom and consciousness of freedom must obviously be the subject’s own doing, yet the subject is incapable of making itself and its freedom into an object and so it cannot be autonomously self-conscious in the crucial sense. Something irreducibly other is required to make the subject available to itself and to arouse the subject to freedom and responsibility.

For this reason self-consciousness and freedom require reciprocal interaction between self and other. Neither self nor other is, by itself, sufficient; consequently, the ground of freedom must be twofold, and yet correlative.

Yet the correlation of the internal and external grounds of freedom, or self and other, is not simply a positive empirical one. Schelling shares Fichte’s tendency to conceive the other in terms of negation. The other is not-I, and I am not-other. Both the other and the self mutually condition each other, but such conditioning is negative. There is no direct presence of the other to the self, or vice versa. The important concept of a doubled ground of freedom makes central the issue of coordinating and ordering the dual grounds of freedom: each self, in its independence, depends on an other that it is not. In spite of its claims to freedom and independence, each seeks security and legitimation from an other whose recognition is contingent and not guaranteed.

Since the parochial self, as self-repulsive negativity, is hidden from itself, it depends on the other for its own critical self-consciousness. that is why self-knowledge for Hegel take the form of Self-recognition in other. The road to interiority passes through the other. The self is for itself only by being for an other, and the self is for an other only by being for itself. The ‘for itself’ formulates not the beginning but the result and telos of the process of recognition.

The natural “solipsism” of desire is a condition that must be transformed and sublimated if the self is to become capable of enduring relationships with others. Hegel’s account of the process of recognition is at the same time an account of the sublimation of desire. In this process desire is fundamentally a desire for the other.

The point to be underscored here is that the other, or the confrontation with the other, both shatters the natural solipsism of the self, and “pulls” it out of its natural solipsism. The analysis of recognition therefore is also and at the same time a story of self-overcoming, through which a enlarged ethical-social mentality or Geist, is attained. (50)

Hegel conceives the individual self in its desires not as a simple, stable, quiescent self-identity but as a complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity. This self-repulsing negativity means that the self is not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself. The immediate self does not yet know what it is. What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it.

It can become explicit to itself, that is, discover what it is, only through the mediation of an other. Self-consciousness requires an other to confirm and transform its own self-understanding. The self’s presence to itself is mediated by an other that is likewise a self-repulsing negative identity. But this does not mean tha the relation to the other is inherently or essentially negative.

Rather only the other is capable of satisfying the desire for recognition, which is at the same time a desire for an other. “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” … Believing at first that it has no need of the other, the self makes the discovery that it needs and depends on the very other that it originally deemed “unessential.”

As immediate, each self operates with the presumption of being absolute. According to Hegel, desire signifies a condition of natural egoism in which the self’s satisfaction is the end to which everything else is regarded as merely instrumental and subordinate. Natural egoism is immediate, parochial, and abstract; it excludes the other, difference, and relation. For this reason, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, that is, a plunge into a relation that “others” or alters the self. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness is confronted by an other self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double [equivocal] significance: first it has lost itself, because it finds itself as an other being. Second, it has thereby canceled [aufgehoben] the other, because it does not look upon the other as essential, but rather sees only itself in other.

The presence of the other precipitates a crisis in abstract parochial self-identity. The “shock” or upsurge of the other is immediate and underivable. The encounter with an other calls into question the immediate natural solipsism or naive self-identity. the encounter with the other reveals that naive or parochial self-identity is exclusive. The self achieves its identity by excluding the other. the other constitutes a shock to this naive parochial identity, which works an immediate change. The self now finds itself as other, or as “othered.” The presence of the other signifies a loss of the original naive certitude, and this may be experienced as a loss of self.

The starting point of the process of recognition is the apparent loss of self before the other, or conversely, an apparent loss of the other owing to the inability to see anything but oneself in the other. The second phase is the attempt to cancel the self-othering, which can take two forms: elimination and/or domination of the other, or finding some accommodation with the other. The former involves eliminating the other, or compelling the other to recognize. Either form of violence is self-subverting in Hegel’s view. Hegel believes that the concept of recognition must take the second path. This means that the self may “return” to itself out of its “othered” state, but it can do so only if it abandons mastery and domination. the recognition that is needed cannot be coerced or controlled.

Mutual-reciprocal recognition is possible only if coercion is renounced. The authentic “cancellation” of other-being means that the other is not eliminated but allowed to go free and affirmed. But if the other is allowed to go free, this means that is affirmed, not simply in its identity, but also in its difference. Without the release and allowing of the other to be as other, in its difference, the ‘We’ would be merely an abstract, parochial identity. The release and affirmation of the other is constitutive of the determinately universal identity of the ‘We’. The ‘We’ is not a return to abstract, parochial self-identity of the original self-certain I. It is a determinate universal that reflects both the common identity and individual differences. Releasement of the other is the condition for the other’s release of the self and the self’s “return to itself” from “being-other,” both of which constitute the We qua determinate universal.

The self’s return to itself out of self-othering is not simply a restoration of the original parochial and abstract self-identity. It is not a simple satisfaction of desire, a filling of the lack by consumption of the object. Rather the original absolute self-identity of desire is decentered and relativeized by relation to other, while being enlarged and legitimated by the other’s recognition. This return to self in freedom is intersubjectively mediated. The condition under which the self can pass through the other and the other’s freedom and return to itself affirmatively is that coercion and mastery must be given up.

mutual recognition 1/2

Houlgate article is here

By placing struggle at the heart of social interaction (even though he believes it can be overcome), Kojève in my view paves the way (perhaps along with Nietzsche) for Sartre’s bleak claim that “the essence of the relations between consciousnesses is . . . conflict.” It is on the basis of this claim that Sartre then accuses Hegel of “optimism” for believing that genuinely mutual recognition is possible. Hegel is praised for his “brilliant intuition” that I “depend on the Other in my being”; but he is castigated for thinking “that an objective agreement can be realized between consciousnesses – by authority of the Other’s recognition of me and of my recognition of the Other.”

Sartre’s emphasis in Being and Nothingness on the inevitability of social conflict is notoriously uncompromising, but he is not alone in challenging what Jay Bernstein calls Hegel’s “worrying ‘reconciliations’.”

Many post-Hegelians balk at Hegel’s suggestion that mutual recognition is a real possibility in modern society (or perhaps even already achieved), and prefer to follow Kant in regarding recognition and respect as at most moral ideals in an essentially imperfect world.

Some have even argued that the very idea of successful mutual recognition is unsustainable. Recently, for example, Alexander García Düttmann has claimed that “recognition is always embedded in a destabilizing tension . . . [and] is always an improper, dissimilar, one-sided recognition.” Indeed, if one follows Hegel, Düttmann maintains, “recognition can become what is meant by its concept only in a struggle for life and death.” As we have seen, Kojève would not endorse such a definitive judgment. There is little doubt, however, that he opens the door to such judgments by claiming that the life and death struggle arises directly from the very nature of social interaction between self-consciousnesses.

In contrast to Kojève, Hegel argues that what is made necessary by the interaction between self-consciousnesses is mutual recognition rather than conflict.

This does not mean that social and historical existence will in fact always be characterized by respect and love for one’s fellow human beings; Hegel is not that naïve. It means that logically, when all that it entails has been rendered fully explicit,

genuine social interaction turns out to require mutual recognition. Hegel does not deny that social conflict constantly arises. His claim, however, is that it arises not because we are social beings as such, but because we fail to understand properly what social interaction demands.

For Hegel, self-consciousness must be desire; but we achieve a fully objective sense of ourselves only by relating to something irreducibly independent in which we find our own identity reflected. Such a thing can only be another self-consciousness that recognizes us. Logically, therefore, concrete self-consciousness must be social and intersubjective. But why should the fact that I require recognition from another mean that our relation must be one of mutual recognition? Hegel’s answer is to be found in §§178–84 of the Phenomenology.

Genuine self-consciousness, Hegel writes, is faced by another self-consciousness by which it finds itself recognized. It has thus “come out of itself”: it is not just enclosed within its own interiority, but sees its identity located, as it were, “over there.” In such a relation, self-consciousness certainly gains a sense of self through being recognized. Yet at the same time, Hegel maintains, it feels that it has “lost itself,” precisely because it finds its own identity over there in the eyes of the other.

Equally, however, self-consciousness lacks any real sense that the other is genuinely other than it, since it sees in the other nothing but its own self. Insofar as self-consciousness does no more than find itself recognized by another, therefore, its consciousness of both itself and the other actually remains deficient.

To remedy this situation, Hegel argues, self-consciousness must “proceed to supersede (aufheben) the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being.” Self-consciousness does so by withdrawing itself from the other, locating its true identity within itself (as it were, “over here”), and thereby overcoming its previous sense of being what it is only in and through the other. In making this move, however, self-consciousness loses what has been shown to be a crucial ingredient of any concrete sense of self, and thus, as Hegel puts it, “proceeds to supersede its own self”: for by insisting that its own identity resides wholly within itself, it abandons the idea that its identity is to be found reflected in another and so is something objective. Yet all is not lost: for, as Hegel immediately points out, this withdrawal of self-consciousness out of the other into itself is in fact ambiguous. In withdrawing into itself, consciousness does indeed recover the certainty that it is what it is in itself. In Hegel’s own words, “it receives back its own self . . . [and] again becomes equal to itself.” At the same time, however, self-consciousness restores the other self-consciousness to its own proper otherness.

It no longer sees the other merely as a mirror reflecting it, but “equally gives the other self-consciousness back again to itself . . . and thus lets the other again go free (entläßt also das Andere wieder frei).” That is to say, self-consciousness recognizes the other as another free and independent self-consciousness.

The action of self-consciousness is ambiguous for this reason: by withdrawing out of the other wholly into itself, self-consciousness lets the other go free, and thereby unwittingly affords itself for the first time the opportunity to be recognized by, and to find itself in, another that it knows to be genuinely other than it.

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.

houlgate desire and recognition

Houlgate article is here

Desire fails to secure pure self-certainty because it always has to seek out new objects that are other than consciousness. In negating such objects, desire does find satisfaction and enjoys itself; but it ceases to be certain of itself as soon as it encounters the otherness and independence of things once again.

A more secure self-consciousness would be achieved, however, if consciousness were able to preserve its certainty of itself in its very awareness of the independence of things. How might it do this?

Hegel’s answer is clear: by turning its attention specifically toward things that in their very independence negate themselves and thereby allow consciousness to be certain only of itself. Simply eliminating all consciousness of other things is not an option for self-consciousness. Hegel has shown that self-consciousness first arises in our consciousness of other things, and that such consciousness of otherness remains an integral part of the consciousness that is explicitly concerned with itself. That is why self-consciousness must be desire. If consciousness is not to be restricted to being perennially renewed desire, therefore, the only logical alternative is for it to relate to something independent that negates itself for the sake of self-consciousness: “on account of the independence of the object, . . . it can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation within itself.”

What kinds of objects perform such an independent negation of themselves? One possible candidate is the living object, or organism. In his account of understanding, Hegel argued that the objects of understanding include not just those that are law-governed but also those that are alive. Living beings thus belong among the objects that desire seeks to consume. Furthermore, as Hegel construes it, life is the explicit process of self-negation: death does not just descend on living organisms from the outside, but is immanent in life from the start, because “the simple substance of Life is the splitting up of itself into shapes and at the same time the dissolution of these existent differences.”14

So, do living things afford us the opportunity of being conscious only of ourselves in being conscious of that which is independent of us? Almost, but not quite. The problem is that living things do not preserve their independence when they negate themselves: when they die, they simply cease to be. As Hegel puts it, “the differentiated, merely living, shape does indeed also supersede its independence in the process of Life, but it ceases with its distinctive difference to be what it is.” (The same is true of inorganic objects: insofar as they “negate themselves,” they do so only by ceasing to be what they are.)

The logic of self-consciousness demands, however, that we achieve self-certainty in relating to objects that retain their independence from us. We can satisfy this demand only by relating to an object that negates itself but that is “equally independent in this negativity of itself.” Such an object, Hegel maintains, cannot merely be a living thing (or an inorganic object), but must be another consciousness or self-consciousness. Consequently, “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”

At this point Hegel appears no longer to be just a critic of Descartes, but to draw a positive lesson from the latter’s meditations (though Hegel does not mention him by name). We do not learn from Descartes what it is to be concretely self-conscious; only phenomenology can teach us that. Nevertheless, in his cogito argument Descartes proves that consciousness retains an abstract awareness of its own independent identity and existence even when it calls into question and abstracts from every particular aspect of itself. The logic of self-consciousness demands that we achieve concrete self-certainty in relating to another thing that negates itself for our sake and that retains its independent identity in so doing. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “only consciousness is able to . . . cancel itself in such a fashion that it does not cease to exist.” This fact, I would suggest, we learn from Descartes (as well, of course, as from Fichte).

It is important not to lose sight of the point at issue here. Descartes himself fails to see that concrete self-consciousness is to be gained in a relation to what is irreducibly other than consciousness. Yet he helps us to see that that very other cannot just take the form of an inanimate or animate thing, but must also take the form of another self-consciousness, for he shows that self-consciousness alone is able to negate every aspect of itself and preserve itself in so doing. Of course, to be genuinely and concretely self-conscious, that other self-consciousness must in turn be related to what is other than it, and so must itself be desire and relate to another self-consciousness. The specific point that Hegel is making here, however, is that the other, to which any concrete self-consciousness relates, must at least be capable of abstract self-consciousness: for only in this way can it thoroughly negate itself and at the same time retain its identity.

The desire to be certain of ourselves in our very relation to others is fulfilled not by consuming things, but by interacting with another self-consciousness – one that is not only capable of abstract self-awareness, but also takes the form of desire and relates to a self-consciousness other than itself. Self-consciousness is thus necessarily social or “spiritual”: it is “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.” In this social relation, Hegel remarks, I find my own identity out there in an objective form: “just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’.” This is because I find my identity recognized by something other than and independent of me. This moment of recognition is built into the act of independent self-negation performed by the other self-consciousness: for by negating itself the other declares itself to be nothing in and for itself – it “posits its otherness . . . as a nothingness” – and so makes way for me. The other thus allows me to relate wholly to myself in relating to another, because all I see in the other is his or her recognition of my identity.

If we are to enjoy full self-consciousness, the hermit’s existence cannot be an option for us, for we can become properly self-conscious only in the society of others who recognize us. Of course, we could try to turn our backs on self-consciousness. Hegel would point out, however, that self-consciousness is logically entailed by consciousness itself. Insofar as we are conscious at all, we must therefore seek to become fully self-conscious. The hermit, it seems, lives at odds with the logic inherent in consciousness itself.

Hegel’s own account shows not how desire seeks to become pure desire, freed from determination by independent objects, but how self-certainty is attained by a consciousness that considers independent otherness to be irreducible. Unlike Kojèvian desire, Hegelian desire learns that we are always conscious of what is other than and independent of us, and that we can never fulfill the desire to be purely free. For Hegel, if I am to be conscious of myself alone, I can thus do so only in relation to what is and remains independent of me. But how is this possible? Only if the other, in its very independence, negates itself and puts itself at my disposal. This in turn is possible only when another self-consciousness thinks of itself as nothing, recognizes me alone, and thereby enables me to find nothing but myself reflected in it. Gadamer puts the point perfectly: “if self-consciousness is to become true self-consciousness, then it must . . . find another self-consciousness that is willing to be ‘for it’.”

To recapitulate: for Kojève, what drives self-consciousness to become social is its desire to assimilate (as well as be desired by) another’s desire; for Hegel, by contrast, what renders self-consciousness social is its acceptance of the other as an independent source of recognition for itself. This significant difference between Kojève and Hegel leads them to very different views of what is implicit in and made necessary by social life.

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.

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).

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

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

mutual recognition

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Eds. Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman, 2003. 8-29. Print.

On what makes self-consciousness social

page 16: For Kojeve, what drives self-consciousness to become social is its desire to assimilate (as well as be desired by) another’s desire; for Hegel, by contrast, what renders self-consciousness social is its acceptance of the other as an independent source of recognition for itself.

page 17According to Kojève, the direct consequence of desire’s entrance into social relations is struggle and conflict. Each desire, Kojève insists, “wants to negate, to assimilate, to make its own, to subjugate, the other Desire as Desire.” Furthermore, each seeks to have its exclusive right to satisfaction recognized by all desires. This “fight” or struggle in turn leads to the creation of masters and slaves. Human social and historical existence is thus distinguished principally by fighting, slavery and work. For Kojève’s Hegel there is a point at which historical development stops: namely, when a community of mutual recognition is produced that puts an end to struggle and domination. … Nevertheless, what has prevailed throughout history prior to this point is nothing but struggle and domination, because these are generated by the very desire that gives rise to social interaction in the first place.

Achieving self-consciousness as we have seen, requires that I relate to myself in relating to that which is other than me. This means that I must relate to another self-consciousness that recognizes me alone. Self-consciousness must, therefore, be social and intersubjective. We now know that by itself recognition accorded to me by the other is not sufficient to enable me to be concretely self-conscious. To attain that end I must be recognized by another that I recognize in turn as a free and independent other. Genuine self-consciousness thus requires not just recognition of my identity by the other, but mutual recognition by each of us of the other. Self-consciousness must be a “double movement of the two self-consciousnesses” working freely together. In such a movement, Hegel writes, “each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only, would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.”

Mutual recognition, for Hegel, requires the uncoerced cooperation of the two (or more) self-consciousnesses involved. Indeed, not only must the two self-consciousnesses freely recognize one another; in fact, they must both recognize that their mutual recognition and cooperation is needed for either to be concretely and objectively self-conscious. In Hegel’s own words, they must “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”

Genuine self-consciousness involves much more than mere desire (though it must also incorporate desire). Whereas desire “seizes upon and negates the object,” genuine self-consciousness requires recognition from the other, which in turn entails “allowing the other to be what it is” and “letting the other go free.” Self-consciousness would like to know only itself in the other and be the sole object of the other’s recognition. Such self-certainty can be achieved, however, only “through membership or partnership with Other.” For one person to have a concrete and objective understanding of himself, he must join together with somebody else.

as beings who are by necessity conscious of what is other than ourselves, we can achieve certainty of ourselves only when we are recognized by another whom we recognize as free in turn. This conception of mutual recognition, I contend, lies at the heart of Hegel’s whole social and political philosophy. (20)

Žižek subjectivity

butler hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adriana Cavarero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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