Tag: subjectsdesire

aufhebung

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

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

reading butler’s work on Hegel’s Phenomenology

I’m trying to follow her genesis of desire in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which isn’t easy. I’m at the section in which Butler is moving towards the all important Lord and Bondsman, but before she can do that, she is outlining her understanding of the role that desire plays in the text.  Her take on desire in the P. is unique in the central role that she gives it, that is, the central role she attributes this concept playing in his overall work.

As destructive agency, self-consciousness “as desire essays to gain reality through the consumption of a living thing” 38.  But what it finds its that its consumption of living things, draws out the fact of its reliance on the very thing it seeks to destruct. An infinite number of objects must be negated in order for self-consciousness to gain the “monopoly on life that it seeks” 38

The conclusion drawn by self-consciousness that the world of objects is not consumable in its entirety has an unexpected inverse conclusion: desire requires this endless proliferation of alterity in order to stay alive as desire, as a desire that not only wants life, but is living. If the domain of living things could be consumed, desire would, paradoxically, lose its life; it would be a quiescent satiety, an end to the negative generativity that is self-consciousness. 39

“Self-consciousness thus concludes that Life and living objects cannot be fully assimilated, that desire must find some new form, that it must develop from destruction to a recognition of the insurpassibility of other living things … ” 38

butler desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Self-consciousness in general is Desire para 167

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

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