{"id":5117,"date":"2010-02-26T18:31:57","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T22:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5117"},"modified":"2010-02-26T21:13:05","modified_gmt":"2010-02-27T01:13:05","slug":"desire-and-recognition-in-butler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/02\/26\/desire-and-recognition-in-butler\/","title":{"rendered":"desire and recognition 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am going to re-read these 40 torturous pages in Subjects of Desire<\/em><\/p>\n

Butler defines Hegelian Desire thus on page 6:<\/p>\n

… 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

… 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/p>\n

[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<\/em> of consciousness, the necessity that it become other to itself in order to know itself<\/strong>.\u00a0 As desire, consciousness is outside itself, and as outside itself, consciousness is self-consciousness<\/em>. 7
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, the meaning of this “outside” is yet to be clarified, and becomes a crucial ambiguity in the section “Lordship and Bondage.”\u00a0 … The Hegelian subject cannot know itself instantaneously or immediately, but requires mediation to understand its own structure (7).<\/p>\n

… the Hegelian subject expands in the course of its adventure through alterity<\/em>; it internalizes the world that it desires, and expands to encompass, to be, what it initially confronts as other to itself.\u00a0 The final satisfaction of desire is the discovery of substance as subject<\/strong><\/em><\/span>, the experience of the world as everywhere confirming that subject’s sense of immanent metaphysical place (8-9).<\/p>\n

Hyppolite suggests that desire is “the power of the negative in human life” … Conceived as lack, a being-without, desire initially signifies negativity<\/strong>; 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.\u00a0 Human desire articulates the subject’s relationship to that which is not<\/em> itself, that which is different, strange, novel, awaited, absent, lost.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Thus, human desire is a way of thematizing the problem of negativity; it is the negative principle of human life,<\/strong> its ontological status as a lack in pursuit of being <\/strong>— Plato’s vision in the <\/strong>Symposium<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42 Butler adds this:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 In effect, we read our negativity in the objects and others we desire<\/strong>; 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<\/strong>, and engage us with the promise of plenitude or the threat of reaffirming our nothingness.\u00a0 Whatever the emotional permutation of desire, we are, in virtue of desire, posing the question of final destination.\u00a0 And for Hegel, in posing the question, we presume the possibility of an answer, a satisfaction, an ultimate arrival (9-10).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “desire and recognition 1”<\/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":[78,111,100,15],"tags":[129,132],"class_list":["post-5117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-desire","category-hegel","category-subjectivity","tag-recognition","tag-subjectsdesire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5117","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=5117"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12591,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5117\/revisions\/12591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}