In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche Dubois describes her journey: “They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!”* When she hears that her present dismal location is Elysian Fields, she is sure that the directions she received were wrong. Her predicament is implicitly philosophical. What kind of journey is desire that its direction is so deceptive?
And what kind of vehicle is desire? And does it have other stops before it reaches its mortal destination? This inquiry follows one journey of desire, the travels of a desiring subject who remains nameless and genderless in its abstract universality. We would not be able to recognize this subject in the train station; it cannot be said to exist as an individual. As an abstract structure of human longing, this subject is a conceptual configuration of human agency and purpose whose claim to ontological integrity is successively challenged throughout its travels. Indeed, like Blanche and her journey, the desiring subject follows a narrative of desire, delusion, and defeat, relying on occasional moments of recognition as a source of merely temporary redemption.
Introduced in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, this subject’s desire is structured by philosophical aims: it wants to know itself, but wants to find within the confines of this self the entirety of the external world; indeed its desire is to discover the entire domain of alterity as a reflection of itself, not merely to incorporate the world but to externalize and enhance the borders of its very self. Although Kierkegaard wondered aloud whether such a subject might really exist, and Marx criticized Hegel’s conceit as the product of a mystified idealism, the French reception of Hegel took the theme of desire as its point of critical departure and reformulation.
The works of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite redescribe Hegel’s subject of desire with a more restricted set of philosophical aspirations. For Kojève, the subject is necessarily confined within a post-historical time in which Hegel’s metaphysics belongs, at least partially, to the past. For Hyppolite, the subject of desire is a paradoxical agency whose satisfaction is necessarily thwarted by the temporal exigencies of human existence. Jean-Paul Sartre’s dualistic ontology signals a break with Hegpl’s postulated unity of the desiring subject and its world, but desire’s necessary dissatisfaction conditions the imaginary pursuit of Hegel’s ideal. Indeed, for Sartre and for Jacques Lacan, desire’s aim is the production and pursuit of imaginary objects and Others. And in the work of Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, Hegel’s subject is criticized as itself a wholly imaginary construct. For Lacan, desire no longer designates autonomy, but characterizes pleasure only after it conforms to a repressive law; for Deleuze, desire misdescribes the disunity of affects signified by Nietzsche’s will-to-power; and for Foucault, desire is itself historically produced and regulated, and the subject always “subjected.” Indeed, the “subject” now appears as the false imposition of an orderly and autonomous self on an experience inherently discontinuous.
The French reception of Hegel may be read as a succession of criticisms against the subject of desire, that Hegelian conceit of a totalizing impulse which, for various reasons, has lost its plausibility. And yet, a close reading of the relevant chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit reveal that Hegel himself was an ironic artist in the construction of this conceit, and that his vision is less “totalizing” than presumed. Further, Hegel’s French critics appear to ground their refutations of Hegel in terms which, ironically, work to consolidate Hegel’s original position. The subject of desire remains a compelling fiction even for those who claim to have definitively exposed his charades.
This inquiry neither provides an intellectual history of the French reception of Hegel, nor does it serve as a sociology of knowledge concerning twentieth-century French intellectual trends. And it is not the history of a line of influence between the authors considered here. Readers who seek a comprehensive understanding of the works of Kojève or Hyppolite are advised to wait for a different sort of study to appear. This is but the philosophical narrative of a highly influential trope, the tracing of its genesis in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, its various reformulations in Kojève and Hyppolite, its persistence as a nostalgic ideal in Sartre and Lacan, and the contemporary efforts to expose its fully fictional status in Deleuze and Foucault. Although the trope often functions where clear references to Hegel are absent, its reemergence is nowhere more provocative than in those contemporary theories which assert that the subject of desire is dead.