Subjects of Desire is the work that emerged from Judith Butler’s dissertation thesis, completed in the mid-1980s, on the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century French thought. This work compels attention on several accounts. To begin with, it allows us to take stock of the importance of the Hegelian reference in Butler’s subsequent work, in particular through her critical elaboration of the theme of recognition and its contemporary reformulations (such as in Axel Honneth’s recent work1). In Subjects of Desire, however, the dialogue with Hegelian thought has different stakes. It consists both in reconstituting the conditions of elaborating a Hegelian paradigm of desire, as that paradigm emerges in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in tracking a series of re-appropriations of this trope of desire through a particularly rich sequence of French philosophy, beginning with Alexandre Kojève’s seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in the 1930s and stretching at least until the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the mid-1970s. Within this framework of thematic and historical analysis, Butler sets about distinguishing different contemporary reformulations of the question of desire each of which leads to an interrogation of the totalizing impetus often attributed to the Hegelian subject. Thus, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre take up, each in his own way, the problem of knowing whether desire can be satisfied—and under what conditions this potential satisfaction fulfills the desiring subject at the same time that it reveals the ontological lack by which that subject is constituted. For their part, in a manner ostensibly more critical, Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault each undertakes to depose a certain metaphysics of identity, of the subject, or of presence, taken to support the Hegelian doctrine of desire, by putting into play instead a nondialectical thought of différelance.
This vast inquiry into the avatars of French Hegelianism (from its renaissance to its dissolution) has the virtue of allowing us to reconstitute the relationship that contemporary French philosophy has been able to maintain with Hegel. But Butler does not restrict herself to this. She proposes equally to interrogate the inherent ambiguity in what she calls French “post-Hegelianism,” comprising various attempts since the 1960s to “escape from Hegel.” This ambiguity derives particularly from the fact that criticisms of Hegel within the French tradition often rest on a misapprehension about Hegelianism: They impute to the Hegelian subject an ontological autonomy and self-sufficiency, whereas the very fact of being a “subject of desire”—thus a subject who is subject to desire, and to a desire for recognition—puts into play a negativity and a dialectic of intersubjectivity that renders eminently problematic the supposed plenitude of this subject. The reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit Butler proposes at the beginning of the book is very instructive in this regard. She shows, indeed, that the “science of the experience of consciousness” is not an undertaking in constitution or foundation making but rather opens onto a self-dissolution of the point of view of consciousness when that consciousness finds itself confronted with the demands of absolute knowledge—in other words, precisely with that regime of truth that exceeds any objective constitution by consciousness. All along the course of this deceptive trajectory that leads from consciousness to Spirit, the Hegelian subject thus appears afflicted by a negativity that undermines its identity and that condemns it to a kind of permanent ec-stasis—without any final return of the self to itself. Desire, which has an animating function in the Bildung or cultivation of consciousness, testifies to this precarity of the ego (unsatisfied and incomplete) at the same time that it constitutes the matrix of a possible identification and satisfaction that emerges from the specular play of recognition: Desire is the desire to be recognized by another desire, by the desire of another who limits the subject’s claim on autonomy or who, at least, stands for the requirement that the subject become alienated from itself in order to be recognized. It is between these two poles of desire and recognition, out of the play of negativity and alienation, that the subject finds its problematic elaboration. This subject is thus not a definitive and preconstituted given, but represents rather the ideal or fictive precipitate of a process of assimilation and appropriation of the totality of differences in the reflexive immanence of the self.
To put the accent thus on the trajectory of the Hegelian subject in its pursuit of satisfaction, of recognition, and of absolute knowledge, but on the basis of an ontological rupture with the world and with itself in the ordeals of desire, is to provide the means of measuring the profound and enduring influence of Hegel on the French philosophical landscape since the 1930s. In fact, Butler shows how Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre effect an anthropological and existential revision of Hegelianism. For these thinkers the task is to know whether negativity can be overcome through History or whether it instead forms the fabric of a human existence founded on becoming and dissatisfaction, doomed to be nothing other than a “useless passion” (Sartre)—craving, lacking the Absolute. The Kojevian fiction of the death of man at the end of History and the Sartrean dramatization of an ontological dualism (in itself/for itself) that opens only onto satisfactions that are either imaginary (man as God) or in the imaginary (literature) clearly mark the double orientation of this first French reception of Hegel. In a sense, both expose the historical collapse of a metaphysical model of the subject as assured of itself and of its own identity in its immanent relation to the Absolute. Hyppolite elaborates the story of this collapse in his commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit, which underscores the tragic structure of conscious experience. In the tradition of Jean Wahl, he imagines a Kierkegaardian Hegel!
At the same time, a temptation persists here to overcome this failure in an attempt to restore the subject’s lost unity with itself and with the world, even if in the imaginary or posthistorical domain. And according to Butler, it is precisely to this fictive re-elaboration and dialectical restoration of a subject lacking substance, lacking the absolute, that the overtly antidialectical posture of the following philosophical generation responds. For that generation, Hegelian Aufhebung must be interpreted either as a strategy of dissimulation or as the denial of difference by a positing of fictive identity. The Kojevian-Sartrean appropriation of the dialectical motor of desire thus finds itself called into question in favor of a radical reformulation and reworking of the relationship between desire and the subject. The contemporary thought to which Butler devotes the final chapter of her work attempts to disconnect desire from the subject, or at least to attribute the constitution of that subject to an imaginary construction, a hypostatization from the multiplicity and heterogeneity of desires, exerting a pressure and exercising a regulatory power over those desires that are thereby constrained to assemble into unity by this fiction of a unifying subject. In Deleuze in particular, the opposition between a desire-lack, founded on an inherent negativity of self-consciousness, and a productive desire, expressing the plenitude and fecundity of life, is accompanied by the idea that this living desire is suppressed by the positing of a Subject of desire, which normalizes and limits its expressive power in bringing it back to the unity and identity of the ego, that henchman of the repression imposed by the cultural order.…
Butler’s analysis, however, goes beyond merely inventorying different post-Hegelian positions and identifying in each its particular manner of disarticulating the subject of desire. Above all, it seeks to show—and this is its strength—how these contemporary reflections cannot separate themselves as much as they purport to, or would like to, from the Hegelian thought of desire that seems to have decidedly and durably contaminated the relations between French philosophy and Hegelianism. So, for example, even as the “post-Hegelian erotics” of Deleuze sought to rescue desire from the unity of the subject and from the constraints of the law associated with the Hegelian tradition, yet his work managed to deliver desire to an enigmatic outside—Life or Being—thus linking his own critique of the negativity of desire paradoxically to the Hegelian dream of plenitude and a restored ontological integrity. The same ambiguity appears on occasion in Foucault, albeit starting from different premises: If Foucault lays out the project of a “history of sexuality” in response to the myth of a desire that would be somehow outside or prior to power, Butler does not fail to point out that the Foucaultian genealogy of the forms of constitution of the desiring subject itself seeks to (re)claim an “other economy of bodies and pleasures,” presented as a credible alternative to the apparatus of sexuality dominated by the normative authority of “sex-desire.” The history of sexuality thus puts into play its own sophisticated version of a dialectic of pleasure and law organized from the perspective of a satisfaction that would be free from all sexual regulation.
In elaborating her own genealogy of French Hegelianism in the twentieth century, Butler endeavors to demonstrate the ambiguities that attend the explicitly anti-Hegelian philosophical project that, in an effort to free desire from negativity and from the subject (mutually implicated in the reflexivity of self-consciousness), restages implicitly the fiction of the satisfiability of desire. Anti-Hegelianism would thus be nothing other than a sophisticated version of the (post-)Hegelianism that Judith Butler’s own thought proposes, in its fashion, to reclaim. We are (still) not finished with Hegel.
Translated by Damon Young