{"id":5039,"date":"2010-02-22T11:05:21","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T15:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5039"},"modified":"2010-04-14T13:20:37","modified_gmt":"2010-04-14T17:20:37","slug":"butler-hegel-unhappy-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/02\/22\/butler-hegel-unhappy-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"butler hegel unhappy consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness” Psychic Life of Power<\/em>. <\/em>31-62<\/p>\n

The ineluctability of the body in the “Unhappy Consciousness” parallels the ineluctability of “instinct” in Freud and that of the will in Nietzsche <\/strong>(56).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

The bondsman in Hegel throws off the apparently external “Lord” only to find himself in an ethical world, subjected to various norms and ideals.\u00a0 Or, to put it more precisely, the subject emerges as an unhappy consciousness through the reflexive application of these ethical laws <\/strong>(32).<\/span><\/p>\n

A certain structuring attachment to<\/em> subjection becomes the condition of moral subjectivation (33).
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\ud83d\ude42 What JB is getting at here is the notion of the development of a subjective interiority<\/em>.\u00a0 She like Foucault, but his limitation is a view of subject as purely a effect of power, yo bro, what about resistance?<\/p>\n

Butler wants to underscore a Relationship Between Self-Enslavement as Bodily Subjection and Self-Imposed Ethical Norms <\/em><\/p>\n

On the Geneology of Morals<\/em> Nietzche draws relation between Self-Enslavement and the moralized “Man” of Conscience<\/p>\n

This quote from Foucault is one of JB’s favourites:<\/p>\n

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection [assujettissement<\/em>] 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”<\/span> (Psychic Life 33, quoting Discipline and Punish 30-34).<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How precisely are we\u00a0 to read this “inhabiting” of the body by the soul?\u00a0 Can a return to Hegel help us read it?\u00a0 What are the points of convergence and divergence in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault on the structure of subjection?<\/p>\n

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

Hegel shows that if the suppression of the body requires an instrumental movement of and by the body, then the<\/strong> body is inadvertently preserved<\/em> in and by the instrument of its suppression<\/strong> (33).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Hegel and the Production of Self-Enslavement<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Hegel’s insights in the “Unhappy Consciousness” on the ineluctability of the attachment of and to the body in subjection<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 Furthermore, Hegel tacitly presumes that subjection is understood as a self-negating attachment<\/em><\/strong> and, in this way, shares an operative assumption with the Freudian notion of libidinal investment.<\/p>\n

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

This disavowal involves a clever trick.\u00a0 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]<\/p>\n

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 \u2014and its essential relation to the lord\u2014 is denied.\u00a0 … the “Other” become complicit with this disavowal.<\/p>\n

YOU BE MY BODY FOR ME, BUT DO NOT LET ME KNOW THAT THE BODY YOU ARE IS MY BODY.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The laboring body which now knows itself to have formed the object also knows that it is transient. <\/em>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<\/strong> (40-41).<\/p>\n

self-recognition is achieved through a certain fearful transience, absolute fear:<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Unhappy consciousness seeks to overcome this duality (essential, unchangeable and inessential, changeable)\u00a0 (47)<\/p>\n

1. Lordship<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Consciousness clings or ATTACHES TO ITSELF<\/strong>, 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”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The unhappy consciousness requires and engages this ATTACHMENT<\/strong> by\u00a0 invoking an IMPERATIVE, an ETHICAL NORM: CLING TO ONESELF<\/strong><\/span><\/em> (43)<\/p>\n

Hence the imperative to cling to oneself is motivated by this absolute fear and by the need to refuse that fear.<\/p>\n

The section on unhappy consciousness explains the genesis of the sphere of the ethical<\/strong> 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<\/strong>, and the norms are subjectivating<\/strong>, that is, they give an ethical shape to the reflexivity of this emerging subject<\/strong>.\u00a0 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).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[…] As a dual structure, the unhappy consciousness takes itself as its own object of scorn.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 It thus parts with itself in order to purify itself of contradiction.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 … ethical self-judgment in the context of the unhappy consciousness: … the unchangeable consciousness “passes judgment” on the changeable.<\/p>\n

[…] 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<\/strong>, a critique which prefigures the Nietzschean analysis that emerges some sixty years later.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.” <\/strong>In order to reconnect with the\u00a0pure and the unchangeable<\/span>, this bodily consciousness offers up its every “doing” to a priest or minister.\u00a0 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<\/strong>, are to construed as offerings<\/em>, as paying penance.\u00a0 The priest institutes bodily self-abnegation as the price of holiness, elevating the renunciatory gesture of excrement to a religious practice<\/strong> whereby the entire body is ritualistically purged.\u00a0 The sanctification of abjection takes place through rituals of fasting and moritification.\u00a0 Because the body cannot be fully denied, as the stoic thought, it must be ritualistically renounced (51).<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the place of such an explanation Hegel asserts the will of another operates through the self-sacrificial actions of the penitent.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 … [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)]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Whereas in all of the earlier examples of self-negation pleasure was understood to INHERE<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Every effort to reduce itself to inaction or to nothing, to subordinate or mortify its own body, culminates inadvertently in the production<\/em> of self-consciousness as a pleasure-seeking and self-aggrandizing agent<\/strong>.\u00a0 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).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Post-Hegelian Subjections<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recall for Hegel ethical imperatives <\/strong>first emerge in a defensive response to absolute fear, and their emergence must be construed as a permutation and refusal of that fear.\u00a0 This absolute fear was the fear of death<\/strong>, hence a fear conditioned by the finite character of the body.\u00a0 The ethical refusal and subordination of the body might then be understood as a magical effort to preempt that existential negation.\u00a0 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<\/strong>.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

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) <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/strong>.\u00a0 The body appears to be nothing other than a threat to the project of safety and self-sufficiency that governs the Phenomenology’s <\/em>trajectory.\u00a0 The anal preoccupation<\/span><\/strong><\/em> 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This affirmation of the absolute negation of the body contradicts all the earlier efforts<\/strong> to subordinate or master the body WITHIN<\/strong> life, efforts which culminated in the assertion of the ineluctability of the body<\/strong>. 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).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Psychoanalysis<\/strong><\/p>\n

The repression of the libido is always understood as itself a libidinally invested repression.\u00a0 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.<\/strong> 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 … <\/strong>In this sense, then, renunciation takes place through<\/em> the very desire that is renounced, which is to say, the desire is never<\/em> renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation<\/strong> (55-56).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/span> 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<\/em> an object of regulation, and for regulation to augment itself, the body is proliferated<\/em> as an object of regulation.\u00a0 This proliferation both marks off Foucault’s theory from Hegel’s and constitutes the site of potential resistance to regulation.<\/strong> The possibility of this resistance is derived from what is unforeseeable<\/em> in proliferation..\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

… 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<\/strong> (60).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 … 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)<\/p>\n

If desire has as its final aim the continuation of itself \u2014and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s connatus<\/em>\u2014 then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy (62).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “butler hegel unhappy consciousness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,111,32,100,15],"tags":[134],"class_list":["post-5039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-desire","category-foucault","category-hegel","category-subjectivity","tag-psychiclife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5039"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5041,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions\/5041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}