Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers: Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge,\u00a0 2004.<\/p>\n
Between 1933 and 1939 the philosopher Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve conducted a weekly seminar on the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770\u2013 1831). Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s influential seminar was attended by almost all the major figures of France\u2019s immediate post-war intellectual life \u2013 Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Bataille to name just a few \u2013 including Lacan himself. Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s interpretation of Hegel was to have a profound influence on this whole generation of thinkers and dominated French philosophy until the mid-1960s, when Hegelianism was finally displaced by Structuralism and Post-structuralism.<\/p>\n
Koj\u00e8ve was particularly interested in Hegel\u2019s account of the emergence of self-consciousness as an account of the transition from nature to culture, or to put it another way, as the transition from animal existence to human existence. According to Hegel, self-hood emerges through a process of developing self-consciousness through the activity of self-reflection. For the human subject to emerge it must not simply be conscious of its own distinctiveness but must be recognized as a human subject by another. Hegel sketched out this process as the dialectic of \u2018Lordship and Bondage\u2019<\/strong>, more commonly known as the \u2018Master\/Slave\u2019 dialectic. In this account two subjects \u2013 a \u2018Master\u2019 and a \u2018Slave\u2019 \u2013 are apparently locked in a reciprocal relationship of recognition. In order for the Master to be a subject he must be recognized by the Slave as such; in turn, the Slave knows he is a Slave because he is recognized by the Master as one. The Master is thus free to pursue his life in the firm knowledge that his identity is affirmed by the recognition of the Slave. The paradox of the dialectic, however, is that a positive always turns into a negative. Because the Master is dependent upon the Slave for the recognition of his identity he can never be truly \u2018free\u2019, whereas the Slave is not dependent on the Master in the same way because he has another source of self-affirmation, his work. If the Slave\u2019s identity is affirmed through his work as a Slave, it is not the Master who is free but the Slave.\u00a0 23<\/p>\n Koj\u00e8ve read this dialectic as essentially a struggle of desire and recognition<\/strong>. The Master and the Slave are locked in a mutual struggle for recognition: neither can exist without the recognition of the other, but at the same time the other also requires his\/her own recognition. It is then for Koj\u00e8ve a struggle to the death, but the death of one will also be the death of the other. The Master and the Slave are locked within a struggle whereby one cannot do without the other but at the same time each is the other\u2019s worst enemy.<\/span> It is this dialectic, according to Lacan, that permeates the imaginary<\/span>.<\/p>\n Moreover, this dialectic introduces into the psychological account of mirroring outlined above the element of aggressivity,<\/span> that is to say, it posits the relationship between self and other as fundamentally conflictual. It was Hegel\u2019s great insight, contends Lacan, to reveal how \u2018each human being is in the being of the other\u2019<\/span> (Lacan 1988b [1978]: 72).<\/p>\n We are caught in a reciprocal and irreducible dialectic of alienation. There are, however, two moments of alienation for Lacan, first, through the mirror phase and the formation of the ego, and, second, through language and the constitution of the subject. 24<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers: Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge,\u00a0 2004. Between 1933 and 1939 the philosopher Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve conducted a weekly seminar on the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770\u2013 1831). Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s influential seminar was attended by almost all the major figures of France\u2019s immediate post-war intellectual life \u2013 Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Bataille … Continue reading “recognition and desire”<\/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":[111,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7084","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=7084"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7089,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7084\/revisions\/7089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}