Introduction
1. See Unger, Knowledge and Politics, for a sustained criticism of desire as arbitrary.
2. Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, prop. 3.
3. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Preface, ff.#7; theorem 2, remark 1 (¶ 24).
4. See Diotima’s final speeches in Plato’s Symposium.
5. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, ch. 13, ¶1102b29–30, for an explanation of the unification of desires under a rational principle.
7. The term “repression” is used loosely in this context, although it will be considered in a more detailed fashion in chapter 4, opening section.
8. In fact, Nietzsche and Freud present different theories of psychic organization which do not rely on the principle of self-identity. We will see the extent to which post-Hegelian French thought relies on both of these theories in chapter 4.
9. Sartre refers to Hegel’s “ontological optimism” in BN, 243.
10. The desire-to-be can be seen to be the first principle of Sartre’s theory of the emotions inasmuch as all emotion problematizes this project to be. Negative emotions such as fear, distrust, sadness, and even jealousy, can be derived from the fear of not-being, and joy, pleasure, and enthusiasm can similarly be understood as temporary appearances of the project-to-be’s success.
11. The final paragraph of the Phenomenology (¶ 808), closes on a note of significant nonclosure: the final word is “infinitude.”
12. See Gadamer, “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic” in his Hegel’s Dialectic, for a discussion of the primacy of Becoming in Hegel’s Logic.
13. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 102; see Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 234–38.
14. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, trans. (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), 3:289.
15. Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, prop. 1.
16. Aristotle, De Anima, book 3, ch. 10., pp. 20–25.
17. Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, prop. 2, note.
18. For a more thorough discussion of Spinoza’s solution to the mind/body problem, see Marx Wartofsky, “Action and Passion: Spinoza’s Construction of a Scientific Psychology,” in Marjorie Grene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 329–55 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973).
19. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 3:256.
22. Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 44.
24. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 3:287.
25. For Fichte, perpetual longing is the human consequence of a dialectic without the ontological possibility of synthesis.
26. See my “Geist ist Zeit: French Interpretations of Hegel’s Absolute”, Berkshire Review (September 1985), for a more extended discussion of the Absolute as time.
27. See Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology”; first presented as a paper at the Séminaire de Jean Hyppolite, at the Collège de France in 1968 and subsequently published in a collection in honor of Hyppolite, Hegel et la pensée moderne, séminaire sur Hegel dirigé par Jean Hyppolite au Collège de France (1967–68) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1970) and published in English in Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy.
1. Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
1. A “psychological novel.” See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, “Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of the Spirit’: Metaphysical Structure and Narrative Plot,” pp. 225–37.
2. Derrida argues in “The Pit and the Pyramid: An Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” that dialectical movement, in virtue of its circularity, circumscribes a stationary place which precludes the possibility of movement. This leads Derrida to argue that for Hegel, the process of signification is a kind of death-in-life, a posture of stasis which implicitly refutes its own claim to being a kind of movement. Derrida’s assumption, however, is that Hegel’s system, understood in terms of his semiology, is completed and self-sufficient, when it is precisely that assumption that first requires clarification.
3. Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste renders a master-slave dialectic which clearly influenced Hegel’s own discussion of the dynamic. Diderot implicates his reader directly, exaggerating the polemical purpose of the text, and indirectly setting up the relation between text and reader as its own dialectic of power. Hegel’s narrative strategy is less self-consciously polemical, avoiding the direct assertion of pronouns. In part, this narrative strategy appears to conform to his design to show the dramatic emergence of the subject, i.e., the impossibility of simple reference to an “I” or a “you” precisely because we cannot yet be sure what these designations mean.
4. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 200 (freely interpreted).
5. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ¶ 535.
6. Nietzsche’s critique of morality and philosophical abstraction generally reveals one kind of lie that aids in the living of a “slave’s existence,” but in “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” he argues that the “truth” counterposed to this lie is itself a kind of necessary falsehood. In Beyond Good and Evil, it becomes clear that concepts are such necessary falsehoods, that they invariably reduce the multiple significations from which they are generated, i.e., that they are “dead” rather than living, metaphorical, fluid. The stages of the Phenomenology can be read as frozen moments in a necessarily fluid movement; hence, they are necessarily false, but nevertheless informative, if deconstructed into the suppressed multiplicity at their origin.
7. Rosen, Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom, p. 159.
8. Taylor, Hegel, p. 146.
9. See Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, p. 62, ff.7.
10. Goethe’s Faust, part 1, p. 146.
11. Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, Preface, p. 88.
12. See Findlay, Hegel: A Reexamination, p. 96.
13. Rosen, Hegel: Introduction to the Science of Wisdom, p. 41.
14. For a discussion of this notion of self-alienation in terms of the religious concept of ecstasy, see Rotenstreich, “On the Ecstatic Sources of the Concept of Alienation,” Review of Metaphysics, 1963.
15. The “experience” of the Phenomenology ought not be understood as ordinary experience, but, rather, as the gradual and insistent cultivation of philosophical truths embedded in ordinary experience. Werner Marx accounts for the distinction between natural and phenomenal consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Commentary on the Preface and Introduction, pp. 12–16. Although Hegel occasionally claims to begin his phenomenological narrative with ordinary experience [¶ 8: “It has taken such a long time… (to) make attention to the here and now as such, attention to what has been called ‘experience,’ an interesting and valid enterprise”)] he also claims that philosophy must now lift Spirit beyond the realm of pure sense. The philosophical cultivation of sensuousness into an all-embracing truth begins not with “ordinary experience” or daily life, but with the philosophical assumptions of ordinary experience. Hence, the “experience” of the Phenomenology is never devoid of philosophical appropriation; although the referent is implicitly the ordinary experience of human beings, this referent is never disclosed as outside of the philosophical language that interprets it.
16. In German: “Es ist für das Selbstbewusstsein ein anderes Selbstbewusstsein; es ist ausser sich gekommen. Dies hat die gedoppelte Bedeutung: erstlich, es hat sich selbst verloren, denn es findet sich als anderes Wesen; zweitens, es hat damit das Andere aufgehoben, denn es sieht auch nicht das Andere als Wesen, sondern, sich selbst im Anderen.” Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 146.
17. For a subject whose ideal is that of self-sufficiency, self-estrangement might well be understood as a threat to that project and that identity. Anger thus makes sense as a counterpart to ecstasy for such a subject.
18. The struggle for recognition was reconceived a number of times throughout Hegel’s early writings, but the Phenomenology establishes the struggle as consequent upon the experience of desire for and by another. Although Kojève and Leo Strauss have interpreted this struggle as emerging from a conflict of desires over goods, the scarcity of which sets individual wills against each other, this interpretation has been deftly refuted by the scholarship of Ludwig Siep in “Der Kampf um Anerkennung;” “Zur Dialektik der Anerkennung bei Hegel”; and “Zum Freiheitsbegriff der praktischen Philosophie Hegels in Jena,” pp. 217–28. In his “Der Kampf um Anerkennung” Siep traces the evolving conception of the struggle for recognition throughout the Jena writings, and discovers that Hegel’s conception of the struggle between self-consciousness differs significantly from Hobbes’ notion of the conflict of interests that forms the basis of contractarian legal theory. While Hobbes understood the conflict of desires to give rise to an artificial state apparatus which would limit the (naturally) limitless freedom of egoistic individuals, Hegel developed the view that the struggle for recognition gave rise to a concept of the individual essentially defined in terms of a larger cultural order, which, rather than limiting the individual’s freedom, provided for its concrete determination and expression. In the System der Sittlichkeit (1802–3), Hegel viewed the struggle for recognition, not as a pursuit of property or personal honor but of the integrity of the family. The struggle was enacted within the family as a struggle between members who must reconcile their individual wills with the exigencies of collective family life, and as a struggle between distinct families for recognition. The act of recognition ensures that the individual is no longer a discrete entity, but is, rather, “ein Glied eines Ganzen” (System der Sittlichkeit, p. 50). That recognition aids in the construction of a collective identity is reinforced by Henry Harris’ analysis of the System der Sittlichkeit in “The Concept of Recognition in Hegel’s Jena Manuscripts” Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 20.
In the Realphilosophie II (1805–6), Hegel reconceives the struggle for recognition as a pursuit of property and honor, but even here it is not the individual who seeks recognition of his own interests, but, rather, a set of individuals who seek to find recognition for their common identity. Hegel here develops his notion of absolute freedom which calls for the surpassing of individual wills: “die einzelnen haben sich durch Negation ihrer, durch Entäusserung und Bildung zum Allgemeinen zu machen” (Realphilosophie II, ¶ 245). The Realphilosophie II envisions the struggle for recognition as following the breakdown of a contractual agreement; hence, the struggle does not, as it does for Hobbes, signify the need for a contract, but, rather, for an ethical community based on nonartificial, i.e., natural, ties.
In every case in the Jena writings, Hegel conceives of the struggle for recognition as one that is resolved through a discovery of a prior unifying ground which remains concealed throughout the struggle itself. Both of the above cited texts resolve the struggle through positing love or family as its necessary solution. This struggle for a community based on agape is prefigured in Hegel’s early essay on love (Die Liebe), written between 1797 and 1798. By the time of the Phenomenology (1806) Hegel views the struggle for recognition as motivated by the demands of reciprocal desire, but the life and death struggle emerges as an intermediary stage of this development. Siep points out that the struggle for recognition is often misconceived as a struggle that begins with the life and death struggle, but he argues that the life and death struggle is itself precipitated by the prior struggle for recognition implicit in desire: “Die Bewegung des Anerkennens beginnt nämlich nach Hegel damit, dass es ‘ausser sich’ ist, sich als ‘Fürsichseiendes aufhebt’ und sich nur im Anderen anschaut.… Diese Struktur entspricht nicht dem Kampf, sondern der Liebe.… Nicht der Anfang der Bewegung des Anerkennens, sondern erst der Schritt des Selbstbewusstseins, ‘sein Andersein auf(zu)heben,’ ist im Kampf auf Leben und Tod verkörpert” (Siep, “Der Kampf um Anerkennung,” p.194).
The struggle for recognition arises, then, not from a primary competitive attitude toward the other, but from the experience of desire for and by another. Specific desires for property, goods or positions of social dominance must be, according to Hegel’s framework, seen as derivative expressions of the desire for a community based on love. Desire is, thus, not originally an effort of acquisition or domination, but emerges in such forms only when a community based on the principles of reciprocal recognition has not yet been developed.
19. See Gadamer, “Hegel’s Dialectic of Self-Consciousness,” p. 66: “self-consciousness… is unable to achieve true being-for-self without overcoming its attachment to life, i.e. without annihilating itself as mere ‘life.’”
20. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 18.
21. It is not merely the failure of desire that precipitates the experience of death in life, for desire is itself an expression of the negative. The failure to achieve substantial being, which is, strictly speaking, not the failure of desire, but the failure of satisfaction, must be viewed in Hegelian terms as philosophically important. Prefiguring Kierkegaard’s frustration with those “too tenacious of life to die a little,” Hegel claims in his preface that “the life of the spirit is not the life which shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life which endures it and maintains itself in it” (¶ 32). Walter Kaufmann’s translation of the rest of the paragraph elucidates the project to which devastation, the failure of desire, the experience of death in life, gives rise: “Spirit gains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. This power it is—not as the positive that looks away from the negative—as when we say of something, this is nothing or false, and then, finished with it, turn away from it to something else: the spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and abiding with it. This abiding is the magic force which converts the negative into being,” Kaufmann, Hegel: Texts and Commentary, p. 50.
2. Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel
1. See Koyré, “Rapports sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France.”
2. Hegel’s early theological writings were edited and made available in 1907 by Henri Niel in German, as the Theologische Jugendschriften, Wahl cites this edition, as well as the histories of Hegel’s development by Rosenkranz (1844), Haym (1857), and Dilthey (1905) as central to his own investigation of the tragic element in Hegel’s early religious writings through the Phenomenology of Spirit. He quotes very few French texts in his work with the exception of Léon Brunschvicg’s Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris: 1927). Before the publication of Kojève’s lectures (1933–39) and Hyppolite’s Genèse et structure de la “Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel” both in 1947, only Henri Niel’s De la médiation dans la philosophie de Hegel stands out as a major, full-length study in French. The publication of the Phenomenology in French by Hyppolite from 1939 through 1941 prompted a good number of critical articles in various French philosophical and intellectual journals.
Hyppolite gives an account of Hegel’s emergence into French intellectual life during and after the war years in pp. 230–41 in his Figures de la pensée philosophique. He credits the interest in Bergson in the 1920s with introducing certain themes, i.e., life and history, into French intellectual life which ultimately made a serious consideration of Hegel possible. Mikel Dufrenne in “L’actualité de Hegel” also likens Hegel’s dialectical notion of becoming with the notion of durée in Bergson. Only Mark Poster among the major intellectual historians of the period sees in the turn to Hegel a reaction against Bergson.
3. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 109–10.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, p. 34.
5. Alexandre Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), p. 34.
6. See Descombes, Modem French Philosophy, p. 14.
7. Dufrenne, “L’actualité de Hegel,” p. 296.
8. See Dufrenne, pp. 301–3; and Henri Niel, “L’interprétation de Hegel,” p. 428.
9. For a consideration of Kojève’s view of nature, see Dufrenne’s “L’actualité de Hegel.” Kojève’s view is problematic not only in the context of Hegel’s apparently more complex view, but also in terms of contemporary scientific accounts of nature. Kojève is clearly writing in the context of a philosophical tradition that maintains a view of natural existence as static and nondialectical; he does not consider the possibility that nature is itself an evolving system, nor does he consider the kinds of “reasons” that account for evolutionary schemes in nature. In his single-minded account of nature as brute and unintelligible, he seems to discount the possibility of a dynamic conception of nature.
10. For a discussion of Kojève’s atheistic interpretation of Hegel, and a defense of Hegel’s theism, see Niel, “L’interprétation de Hegel.” In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève calls for an overcoming of Christian society, and appears to subscribe to the conventional Marxist view of religion as a mystification. See also Kojève’s “Hegel, Marx et le christianisme,” p. 340. Hyppolite in “Note sur la préface de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit et le thème: l’Absolu est sujet” in Figures, 1 rejects this interpretation of Hegel as an atheist—as do Niel and Wahl—claiming instead that the very meaning of God is transformed within the Hegelian system such that it is not vulnerable to the criticisms of the conventional Marxist view.
11. Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, p. 4.
12. Hyppolite claims. “There is little doubt that in general Kierkegaard is right against Hegel, and it is not our purpose here to enter a defense of the Hegelian system against Kierkegaard’s attack. What interests us is to reveal in Hegel, as we find him in his early works and in the Phenomenology, a philosopher much closer to Kierkegaard than might seem credible. This concrete and existential character of Hegel’s early works has been admirably demonstrated by Jean Wahl in his work on The Unhappy Consciousness in Hegel” (CE 22–23).
13. Hyppolite, “The Human Situation in the Hegelian Phenomenology,” in his Studies on Marx and Hegel, p. 169. See also CE 26–27.
15. Goethe, Faust, p. 146.
16. See Klaus Hartmann, Sartre’s Ontology: A Study of Being and Nothingness in the Light of Hegel’s Logic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
3. Sartre: Imaginary Pursuit of Being
1. See Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique, ch. 9, “The Phenomenology of Husserl” for Sartre’s early understanding of the Ideas as laying the framework for a non-solipsistic psychology.
2. Husserl’s theory of intentionality may be seen as exemplifying the principle of ontological harmony that we considered in the context of Hegel. Aron Gurwitsch’s many comparisons between Husserl and Leibniz give credence to the claim that Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality is an effort to reinterpret the doctrine of internal relations in terms of a modern epistemology.
3. See Gurwitsch, “On the Intentionality of Consciousness.”
4. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds. (London, 1890), 1: 505–06.
6. Sartre refers throughout The Transcendence of the Ego to the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness as portraying a non-egological theory of intentionality which he himself accepts; see TE 39, 42, n.21.
7. PI 10: “the image… is complete at the very moment of its appearance.”
8. “This act… can posit the object as nonexistent, or as absent, or as existing elsewhere; it can also “neutralize” itself, that is, not posit its object as existing.”
9. Sartre uses the expression “degradation” to refer to the state of consciousness in emotion throughout E; in PI he implies that consciousness, as imaginary, is involved in a purposeful project of self-obfuscation, a belief in plenitude which turns out to be an “essential poverty” (p. 11).
10. “I” 4: “there is nothing in (consciousness) but a movement of fleeing itself” and (p. 5), “everything is finally outside.”
11. Robert Solomon, “Sartre on Emotions,” in Schilpp, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 284.
12. BN 384: “The first apprehension of the Other’s sexuality in so far as it is lived and suffered can be only desire; it is by desiring the Other (or by discovering myself as incapable of desiring him) or by apprehending his desire for me that I discover his being-sexed. Desire reveals to me simultaneously my being-sexed and his being-sexed, my body as sex and his body.” Also, see page 382: “My original attempt to get hold of the Other’s free subjectivity through his objectivity-for-me is sexual desire” The understanding of desire in exclusively sexual terms can be found in Marcuse’s “Existentialism,” p. 326 and Natanson’s A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology, p. 44.
13. This broader conception of desire is discussed at length in the section “Existential Psychoanalysis” where desire is identified with the for-itself conceived as a lack: “Freedom is precisely the being which makes itself a lack of being. But since desire… is identical with lack of being, freedom can arise only as being which makes itself a desire of being” (BN 567).
14. Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, prop. 6.
15. The cited excerpts are my translations from the French transcript of this session published as “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi,” Bulletin de la Societé Française de Philosophie (1948) 13: 49–91.
16. See Hartmann, Sartre’s Ontology, p. 21, n. 59.
17. Although Sartre appears to be aligned with the Nietzschean criticism of egological views of consciousness (see TE), we can nevertheless consider what a Nietzschean criticism of Sartre’s postulation of a unified subject might be like. Nietzsche’s Will to Power supports a view of the fundamental multiplicity of desires, and the unified self as a deceptive construct. In section 518 of that text, Nietzsche argues against the idea of the self as a unity: “If our ‘ego’ is for us the sole being, after the model of which we fashion and understand all being; very well! Then there would be very much room to doubt whether what we have here is not a perspective illusion—an apparent unity that encloses everything like a horizon. The evidence of the body reveals a tremendous multiplicity.…” (p. 281). To this purpose one ought also to consult sections 489, 492, and 259. According to Nietzsche, the principle of identity that structures egological theories serves a normative purpose; the positing of a singular or unified identity masks a wish to overcome the multiplicity of the body, the contradictoriness of desires, “the systematic reduction of all bodily feelings to moral values” (section 227). For Nietzsche, ontology cloaks morality, and morality is motivated by a desire to overcome the body altogether. One might extrapolate from this position a criticism of Sartre’s view that desire is internally unified and that it seeks a transcendence of facticity. These positions could then be seen not as a consequence of an ontological situation, but as a transcription of a religious wish into the rationalizing language of ontology. In section 333, Nietzsche explains, “it is only this desire ‘thus it ought to be’ that has called forth that other desire to know what ‘is.’ For the knowledge of what is, is a consequence of that question: ‘How? is it possible? why precisely so?’ Wonder at the disagreement between our desires and the course of the world. But perhaps the case is different: perhaps that ‘thus it ought to be’ is our desire to overcome the world.” See chapter 4 of this text for further discussion.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” in his Life/Situations, p. 11.
19. Sartre describes both sadism (BN 378) and masochism (BN 405) as “failures” of desire. The true aim of desire he defines as “reciprocal incarnation” (BN 398), but then goes on to claim that this is a necessary failure (BN 396). Sadism and masochism appear to be the most pronounced ways in which reciprocity breaks down into non-reciprocal exchange.
20. See Hegel, “The Revealed Religion,” pp. 453–78 in the Phenomenology.
21. For an interesting article tracing Sartre’s cartesianism and its eventual dissolution, see Busch, “Beyond the Cogito.”
22. See Marcuse, “Existentialism,” p. 330.
23. Monika Langer, “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: A Reappraisal,” in Schilpp The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, pp. 300–25.
24. Sartre clearly does not consider the “look” as a figurative expression insofar as it can be a “rustling of branches” or “the slight opening of a shutter” (BN 257-58). Objects can manifest a look, and a look can persist in the mode of memory or anticipation: cf. The Words: “Even in solitude I was putting on an act. Karlemamie and Anne Marie had turned those pages long before I was born; it was their knowledge that lay open before my eyes. In the evening they would question me: ‘what did you read? What have you understood?’ I knew it, I was pregnant, I would give birth to a child’s comment. To escape from the grown-ups into reading was the best way of communing with them. Though they were absent, their future gaze entered me through the back of my head, emerged from their pupils, and propelled along the floor the sentences which had been read a hundred times and which I was reading for the first time. I who was seen saw myself” (p. 70).
25. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception sought to refute the notion, subscribed to by Sartre in PI, that perception confronts a factic world which is brutely given at an insurpassable distance from consciousness. Perception is not a mode of knowing the world which requires distance between the perceiving agent and the world it knows: for Merleau-Ponty, perception is already flesh, a sensuous act which apprehends an object in virtue of a common sensuousness. See also ‘The Intertwining” in his The Visible and the Invisible.
26. BN 308: “The point of view of pure knowledge is contradictory; there is only the point of view of engaged knowledge.”
27. Sartre refers to emotion as “an intuition of the absolute” (E 81), a phrase that is echoed in Hyppolite’s “CE” 26, when he claims that “desire is an absolute impulse.”
28. See BN 615: “Generally speaking, there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here.”
29. Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” pp. 50–51: “The reason why I produced Les Mots is the reason why I have studied Genet or Flaubert: how does a man become someone who writes, who wants to speak of the imaginary? This is what I sought to answer in my own case, as I sought it in that of others.”
30. Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert, p. 2.
31. Sartre uses this term in FI ix. He also entitled a lecture on Kierkegaard “The Singular Universal,” delivered at an international colloquium entitled “Kierkegaard Living” in Paris in April 1964. A translation by Peter Goldberger can be found in Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.
I will be using only volume 1 of The Family Idiot in my discussion; the succeeding volumes, available in French in the Gallimard editions, are not considered here mainly because the first volume elaborates the theory of desire more explicitly than the later volumes. The English version of volume 1 also attends to the problem of childhood experience and its relation to the literary imagination. The later volumes cover the material and cultural traditions from which Flaubert labored, and thus do not attend the problem of how the dialectic of desire and recognition constitute personal identity. Certainly, these themes are taken up in a limited way in the succeeding volumes, but Sartre’s efforts seem more concerned with a reconciliation of psychoanalysis and Marxism than with a concretization of his own earlier theory.
32. Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” p. 52.
33. Ibid.
34. See Sartre, What Is Literature?, pp. 35–37.
35. Douglas Collins argues that in SG “the most powerful outside influence is Hegel,” that “the master-slave relationship… reappears in Saint Genet as the framework for moral questions” and that “in Saint Genet all issues are approached dialectically.” Sartre clearly departs from Hegel’s program in Collins’ view: “Hegel’s individual consciousness, without being annulled, becomes at one with itself and others, whereas Sartre’s unhappy consciousness must resort to a more earthly cure… the projection of the self upon the other.” Sartre as Biographer, pp. 84–85.
36. Without recognition, Sartre argues, a child lacks a sense of personal rights. Flaubert does not dare to desire in his early years, for desire itself presupposes belief in the right and capacity to be fulfilled: “In order to desire one has to have been desired; because he had not internalized—as a primary and subjective affirmation of the self—this original affirmation of objective, maternal love, Gustave never affirmed his desires or imagined they might be satisfied. Having never been valorized, he did not recognize their value. As a creature of chance, he has no right to live, and consequently his desires have no right to be gratified; they burn themselves out, vague transient fancies that haunt his passivity and disappear, usually before he even thinks to satisfy them… he is consumed by the negative of desire, by envy” (FI 409).
37. See Freud’s explanation of ego formation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the experience of loss precipitates the formation of an ego ‘shell’ for protection. See also Freud’s discussion of ego formation in “Mourning and Melancholia” for which the notion of internalization is central. In that essay, Freud claimed that the loss of a loved one becomes internalized as part of the ego itself, at least in the case of melancholia. Mourning is distinguished from melancholia insofar as it does not essay to “preserve” the other through incorporating the other into the ego; the mourner recognizes the other as both other and lost. Later in The Ego and the Id Freud argued that the work of melancholia, the incorporation of lost loved ones into the ego itself, provides a model for understanding all ego formation. In this developed theory, Freud seems to be arguing in consonance with Sartre that the ‘self is wrought through the internalizations of early losses.
38. Interview with Sartre, “On the Idiot of the Family,” in Sartre’s Life/Situations, p. 112.
4. The Life and Death Struggles of Desire: Hegel and Contemporary French Theory
1. This consideration of the contemporary reception of Hegel’s conception of desire in France is necessarily restricted in scope. The chapter considers a selective number of works by Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, and also contains shorter discussions of Derrida and Kristeva. Clearly, there are a number of French intellectuals whose work is not only significant in itself, but significantly influenced by a critical reading of Hegel, and this inquiry cannot hope to do justice to this array of intellectual enterprises. Among the most clearly influential students in Kojève’s seminar who are not considered here are Georges Bataille, author of L’Érotisme and, earlier, L’Histoire de l’érotisme, and a critical discussion of Hegel via Nietzsche in his Sur Nietzsche, volonté de chance; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, author of several comparative discussions on Hegel and existentialism, and one who thought that the dialectical method offered the possibility of a concrete revision of Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality; Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski, Eric Weil, and Alexandre Koyré, among others. Hyppolite’s seminar spawned a number of other prominent thinkers: Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Colleagues who benefited from long-standing intellectual dialogues with Hyppolite were Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Poulet. Yet other thinkers became influential as critics of Hegel: Tran Duc Thau, whose Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique sought to resolve both Hegelian and Husserlian idealism into Marxism, and Louis Althusser, whose critique of the subject sought to put an end to Hegelianism through structuralist and Marxist means. Jean-François Lyotard waged a similar critique of Husserl in his La Phénoménologie and called for a Marxist-Freudian conception of pleasure and desire in his Économie libidinale. As followers of a theological appropriation of Hegel exemplified by Henri Niel, Jean Wahl, and Hyppolite, other philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur drew upon Hegelian themes in the formulation of their highly eclectic theories. Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex employs a dialectical framework as well for understanding the nonreciprocal relations between the sexes, and her novel, L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), opens with the Hegelian epigraph: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the Other.”
2. Foucault’s essay was published in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris, PUF, 1971), translated as Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trs. Donald F. Bouchard, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
3. Derrida’s essay was originally presented in Hyppolite’s seminar in 1968 and later published in Jacques d’Hondt, Hegel et la pensée moderne (Paris: PUF, 1970) and translated in Margins of Philosophy. See also “An Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference.
4. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 142. Subsequent page references in the text refer to this essay.
5. Jacques Derrida, Glas: Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu?, p. 169.
6. The German, Verneinung, is translated into French as la dénégation. Lacan’s comments can be found in “Introduction au commentaire de Jean Hyppolite.” The notion of denial is of special interest to Lacan and Hyppolite because it is understood to be an intellectual denial of repression and, thus, constitutes a double negation. Lacan remarks that “the ego that we speak of is absolutely impossible to distinguish from the imaginary captations of which it is thoroughly constituted… we are obliged to understand the ego from beginning to end in the movement of progressive alienation where self-consciousness situates itself in the Phenomenology of Hegel” (p. 374, my translation).
7. Hyppolite in Lacan, Écrits (PUF), p. 883.
8. See Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” General Psychological Theory, Philip Rieff, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 87–89.
9. Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing…,” p. 193. Subsequent page references in the text refer to this essay.
10. See J. Melvin Woody and Edward Casey, “Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan: The Dialectic of Desire,” in Smith and Kerrigan, Interpreting Lacan. They argue that the supersession of desire in the Phenomenology is equivalent to its transcendence, and consider that Hegel was wrong to dismiss desire as an elementary form of self-consciousness. A quite different interpretation which argues that desire is not eliminated but, rather, rendered foundational to the progress of the Phenomenology is to be found in Stanley Rosen’s Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom, p. 41.
11. See Gadamer, “The Dialectic of Self-Consciousness,” Hegel’s Dialectic p. 62 ff.
12. In the French edition of Écrits (PUF), Hyppolite contributes a lecture on the Hegelian possibilities of Verneinung cited above, suggesting that the defense against eros which every psychological defense tacitly effects is subject to a second-order negation in the work of psychoanalytic practice, and that successful transference is the resultant eros of this double negation. In effect, Hyppolite sees a confirmation of dialectical logic in the practice of psychoanalysis. The double negation effective in transference is the unity (Vereinigung: literally, binding) achieved through the labor of the negative (repression and, then, substitution).
13. See Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne.
17. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 28.
19. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, p. 36.
21. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 9. Subsequent page references in the text refer to Nietzsche and Philosophy.
22. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 339.
23. Deleuze argues that the will-to-power or productive desire entails the thorough eradication of negativity, although the negative may be deployed by productive desire in the service of its own self-enhancement. Whether this second sense of negativity is different from Hegelian negativity is not immediately clear because Deleuze does not specify its sense.
28. Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 50.
30. See Foucault, Herculine Barbin.
31. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 5.
32. HS 152; Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, p. 25.
33. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 5.
35. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” p. 148.
24. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 198.
26. Interview with Foucault, Salmagundi (Winter 1982–83), p. 12.