Preface to the Paperback Edition (1999)

Subjects of Desire is my 1984 dissertation, revised in 1985-86. I wrote on the concept of desire, concentrating on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and some of the central appropriations of that theme in twentieth-century French philosophy. Prior to my graduate studies, I was a Fulbright Scholar studying Hegel and German Idealism at the Heidelberg Universitat, attending the seminars and lectures of Dieter Henrich and Hans-Georg Gadamer. As a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University in the early 1980s, I trained in the tradition of continental philosophy, studying Marx and Hegel, phenomenology, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, and the Frankfurt School. I wrote the dissertation under Maurice Natanson, a phenomenologist who generously supported my scholarship, but let me know that French philosophy met its reasonable limit in the work of Sartre and selected writings of Merleau-Ponty. Studying at Yale in the late '70s and early '80s, I certainly knew about poststructuralist thought, but tended to place it outside the sphere of the continental philosophical tradition I meant to study. I occasionally attended a seminar by Derrida, and more often audited Paul de Man's lectures, but for the most part worked in the traditions of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the Frankfurt School while seeking to acquire a background in German Idealism. It was in the context of a women's studies faculty seminar that I encountered the work of Michel Foucault. And it was not until I left Yale and became a visiting faculty member and then a postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University from 1983-86 that I became open to French theory in a way that I mainly resisted while at Yale. At the Center for the Humanities, I was exposed to critical theory in the French vein, and it was in the initial stages of that exposure that I revised the dissertation as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, published by Columbia University Press in 1987. The final chapters on Deleuze, Lacan, and Foucault were not part of the dissertation proper, and they represent first forays into material that I have since come to understand deserves a more complex consideration.

I published the book too early, pressured by the job market, and I republish it now too late to make revisions. Any revised version of this work would be a new work altogether, one that I am not prepared to embark upon at this time. In 1985-86, I was not quite prepared to make the theoretical moves that I begin in the final chapters and that I subsequently made in the writing of Gender Trouble, published in late 1989. Although at the time of this writing I am not yet ancient, the book reads to me -- to the extent that I can read it -- as my juvenalia, which means that I ask the reader to approach it with abundant forgiveness in reserve.

The text is neither a comprehensive account of French Hegelianism nor a work in intellectual history.1 It is a critical inquiry into a relation repeatedly figured between desire and recognition. If it were to have been a comprehensive treatment, it most certainly would have included a chapter on the work of Georges Bataille.2 Subjects of Desire would have also considered the influence of Hegel's Logic in greater detail, especially on the work of Jean Hyppolite in which the Logic provides validation for the essential truths revealed in subjective experience in the Phenomenology.3 To the extent that Subjects of Desire focuses on the Phenomenology, it could have included as well a consideration of Hegel's chapter "Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness." This key chapter's appropriate by Jean Wahl might reasonably be said to be the first major work on Hegel in twentieth-century France, indeed, it is the chapter through which the twentieth-century French reception of Hegel began. Wahl's short text, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Monfort, 1929), established an appropriative reading of Hegel, bringing the internally divided consciousness to bear on both religious and existential themes, and emphasizing the negativity of consciousness that plays such a prominant role in the subsequent readings provided by Kojeve and Hyppolite.

In 1995, I published an essay, "Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness," which constitutes a continued reflection on the Hegelian subject.4 There I sought to show that Hegel offers a sequel to the Lordship and Bondage chapter that is rarely considered by those who prize the apparently emancipatory conclusion of the former chapter. Hegel offers a configuration of the subject in which subjection becomes a psychic reality, one in which oppression itself is articulated and entrenched through psychic means. My suggestion is that Hegel begins to explain the inversions of power that take place as it acquires the status of psychic reality, an explanation that allies him with insights credited to Nietzsche and Freud.

This text relies on available English translations of Hyppolite, Kojeve, and Sartre, and works with selected essays in French with the consequence that the bulk of Kojeve's untranslated writings (including the full version of his Introduction a la lecture de Hegel) remain largely unconsidered. His lectures, offered from 1933-39 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, include extensive discussions of Hegel's relation to Kant, the place of poetic language, tragedy, and religion in the Phenomenology, and an extended discussion of the figure of Christ and the meaning of Christianity that did no survive into the abridged English translation.5

Kojeve remains a difficult author to understand, claimed on the one hand by the Straussian tradition of Allan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, and Francis Fukuyama, and heralded on the other hand as a Marxist by Pierre Macheray and others.6 Even as Kojeve insisted that Hegel's text is open to a set of historical appropriateions unanticipated in Hegel's time, so his own reading of Hegel has become open to widely conflicting readings. And this predicament may well be the result of the kind of "reading" that Kojeve himself put into place, one that sought less to be faithful to the letter of Hegel's text than to produce new interpretations that reflect the changed historical circumstances of reading itself. Hegel's text, as it moves through time, thus continually re-poses the question of its own readability, most clearly because the end of history that he foretells is not the end of time and not the end of the temporality of reading.7 Thus Hegel's text, perhaps despite itself, opens up the question of the relation between time and readability. The future is, for Kojeve, no longer constrained by technology, and the future that Hegel anticipates is in some way precisely the one that Kojeve mourns as lost idealism. Kojeve's "reading" brings into relief the temporality of Hegel's text, showing that the temporality into which it has survived demands a different kind of reading, one that does not move progressively with the same confidence. This predicament of temporality post-Hegel has lead some of the Straussians to conclude that history itself must resolve into "perennial" themes, and it has also led Althusserians to conclude that a structuralist analysis of society relieved of the conceits of diachrony is the preferable conclusion. But another perspective can be derived from Kojeve, one that insists that temporality is irreducible to historicity, and that neither is reducible to teleology. The temporality of the concept is neither static nor teleological, but requires a double inverted reading that knows no closure, which will no doubt offend the avatars of common sense, but without which no approach to Hegel is possible.

The speculative sentence that Hegel outlines in the Logic underscores this problem of temporality as a predicament of reading. We cannot expect that language will transparently show the truth of what it says, but neither can we expect that this truth will be found outside of language. THe truth is not the same as the narrative that the Phenomenology provides, and yet it is made manifest only through its exposition. The sentence moves in such a way that the familiar is rendered unfamiliar, and this pertains to the familiar grammar of the sentence itself. This becomes especially true when we consider the grammatical place of "negation," a term that not only undergoes semantically important shifts in meaning, but that also "acts" in essential ways in the unfolding of essential truths.

These functions of "negation" elicit the usual jokes on Hegel by contemporary analysts who insist that Hegel either be made plain or be rejected once and for all. Hegel has other plans in mind when he claims, for instance, in the Phenomenology that the speculative proposition destroys the general nature of the proposition (Miller 38). But the question is not what logical sense can be made of negation in Hegel, but how the very use of negation in Hegel calls into question our understanding of logical relations.

In the Phenomenology, negation emerges in a number of ways, and not merely in the service of an assimilating or domesticating conceptual operation that subdues the alterities it confronts. In the section, "The Truth of Self-Certainty," consciousness negates its objects by consuming them; in Lordship and Bondage, negation appears first as the effort of both figures to annihilate one another and then transmutes into relations of domination and servitude. What does it mean that negation "appears" through these various figures? And how are we to understand the transmutations that the appearance of negation undergoes?

My suggestion is that in the Phenomenology, figures emerge to describe a state that has not yet achieved a stable logical status; indeed, the figure marks the instability of logical relations. Conversely, though, every logical relation assumes a shape or an appearance that is figural. If we are to read Hegel, what will this reading do to a grammar that is preconceived to express logical relations (the conceit of Husserl's Logical Investigations and the early Wittgenstein alike)? One reads along in the Phenomenology with the assumption that a stable reality is being described only to come up against the obduracy of descriptive language itself. We think we know at any given textual moment what negation "is" and what it does, only to find out by following the course of its action, indeed, by reading it, that our former convictions were unfounded. It is the term, in other words, that constantly undermines our own knowingness. The language we thought was reporting on the reality of negation turns out to take part in the activity itself, to have its own negating function, and, indeed, to be subject to negation itself. The language of the text thus exhibits its own rhetoricity, and we find that the question of logic and that of rhetoric are indissociable from each other. Similarly, no claims of cognition can be made apart from the practice of reading: the temporality of the concept is not finally separable from the temporality of reading.

One of the more recent French readers of Hegel, Gerard Lebrun, in his La patience du Concept: Essai sur le discours hegelien, makes a similar point as he disputes the possibility of a Hegelian dogmatism and shows that Hegelian discourse actively initiates the reader into a new mode of philosophical thought.8 Just as for Kojeve, the reading of Hegel must traverse a temporality that is past (an idea of the future that is past), so the reading of Hegel's grammar according to the demands of the speculative sentence can be read "forward" only to find that the presuppositions that animated the reading must themselves be read in turn, compelling a reversal that does not quite undo what has been done (and that, at the very level of grammar, enacts a notion of negation proper to reading itself).

Jean-Luc Nancy makes this point in a different way in his recently published Hegel: L'inquietude du negatif,9 For him, the subject is not recoiled into itself, but is defined fundamentally as an act by which the self overcomes itself in its passage toward and into the world. The subject disperses itself into its world, and this self-surpassing is precisely the operation of its negativity. Nancy's work releases Hegel from the trope of totality, insisting that the "disquiet" of the self is precisely its mode of becoming, its final nonsubstantiality in time, and its specific expression of freedom. Nancy's work is rhetorically significant as well because in the place of a systematic exegesis of Hegel's work it provides a discontinuous set of meditations on the Phenomenology through the key terms by which the question of freedom is approached. Those who expect Hegel's Phenomenology to illustrate a clear teleology will be productively confounded by such a text.10

In fact, the status of teleology seems significantly contentious in the reconsideration of the twentieth-century French appropriateion of Hegel. Although it was within the context of French theory, after all, that Hegel became synonomous with totality, teleology, conceptual domination, and the imperialist subject, the French appropriation of Hegel also puts the totalizing and teleological presumptions of Hegel's philosophy into question. Indeed, often the marks of a distinctively "post-Hegelian" position are not easy to distinguish from an appropriative reading of Hegel himself. Kojeve's writings are especially pertinent here to the extent that they interrogate the time that emerges after the end of history, thus signaling a closure to teleology that is not precisely a teleological closure, an ending that is more on the lines of a break, interruption, and loss. Although Althusser once termed Kojeve's work "silly," he takes seriously Kojeve's effort to recast teleology in Hegel as anthropocentrism.11 Althusser's early reflections on Hegel develop an immanent critique of Kojeve's view, arguing that Kojeve develops the subjective dimension of negativity to the exclusion of the objective one.12 The attempt to reduce the workings of negativity to the subjective is bourgeois revisionism, affirming the individual at the expense of his objective situation. And where objectivity returns via Hegel, it is always devoid of its specifically onomic content, which leads it to valorize a philosophically abstracted notion of equality and democracy at the expense of one wrought from the class struggle. To the extent that Kojeve's Hegel is read through the lens of the young Marx, and both Hegel and Marx are understood to affirm a subjective dimension of negation, "Kojeve's existentialist Marx is a travesty in which Marxists will not recognize their own" (172).

Although Althusser devotes several essays to the reconsideration of Hegel in his Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, where he offers a critique of Hegelian abstraction and begins through the practice of immanent critique to articulate a totality without a subject, he is quick to insult Hegel and French Hegelianism in particular. He commends Kojeve's book with ambivalence: "His book is more than an Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: it is the resurrection of a corpse, or, rather, the revelation that Hegel, a thinker dismantled, torn to pieces, trampled underfoot, and betrayed, profoundly haunts and dominates an apostate age" (171). And later, he remarks in the same vein that despite the discrediting of Hegel's philosophy, "this dead god, covered with insults and buried a hundred times over, is rising from the grave" (174). Finally, Althusser not only accuses Hegelian philosophy of providing a philosophical glorification of the bourgeois status quo, but of supplying a revisionism "of a fascist type" (183).

Pierre Macheray's recent book, Hegel et Spinoza,13 is clearly influenced by Althusser, but takes the critical potential of Hegel's philosophy more seriously.14 By counterposing Spinoza to Hegel, and by asking how each philosophical position defines the necessary limit of the other, Macheray argues for a dialectical conception of history relieved of the teleological presumption, in which there is a "struggle of tendencies that do not carry in themselves the promise of a resolution ... a unity of contraries, but without the negation of negation."15 Moreover, Macheray considers, contra Althusser, the sense of a Hegelian subject that remains irreducible to its ordinary use as a bearer of predicative judgements. The Hegelian subject is one for whom the stable relation between subjet and predicate within ordinary grammar becomes undone (248). Thus, as a reader in the Althusserian tradition, Macheray nevertheless yields an interpretation that converges with that of Lebrun and Nancy in that he acknowledges that the subject is only the term for the process that it accomplishes, is nonsubstantial, and is one whose illimitability destroys its ordinary grammatical function.

The revision of Subjects of Desire that I might have done would have included as well as Derrida's original criticism of the Hegelian concept in "The Pit and the Pyramid," the subsequent revision and restaging of his view in the introduction to Lacou-Labarthe's Typographies and Derrida's own Glas.16 A fuller consideration would also no doubt include a chapter on Luce Irigaray's various engagements with Hegel, especially in "The Eternal Irony of the Community" in Speculum of the Other Woman, and in her reflections on Hegel, kinship, and universality in Sexes et parentes.17 One of my future projects will be to consider Frantz Fanon's engagement with Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks on the problem of recognition within the dynamics of hierarchical racial exchange. Fanon's treatment of Hegel can be read as an important appropriateion of Kojeve's thesis of the centrality of desire to the struggle for recognition and the constitution of the subject (and the problematic minimization of labor as a constitutive condition of recognition).18

My interest in the Hegelian legacy was not precisely overcome through the early publication of this book. I have taught courses on Hegel and contemporary theory, and continue to be interested in the way Hegel is read and misread at the advent, institution, and dissemination of structuralism. In a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions: What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical constitutive relation to alterity?

I am currently at work on a book to be published as part of the Wellek Library Lectures series that centrally engages Hegel's writing on Antigone in the Phenomenology, The Philosophy of Right, and the Aesthetics.19 In it I am as much concerned with the way in which Antigone is consistently misread by Hegel as with his provocative way of understanding her criminal act as an eruption of an alternate legality within the sphere of public law. Whether Antigone functions as a subject for Hegel remains a compelling question for me, and raises the question of the political limit of the subject, that is, both the limitations imposed upon subjecthood (who qualifies as one), and the limits of the subject as the point of departure for politics. Hegel remains important here, for his subject does not stay in place, displaying a critical mobility that may well be useful for further appropriations of Hegel to come. The emergent subject of Hegel's Phenomenology is an ek-static one, a subject who constantly finds itself outside itself, and whose periodic expropriations do not lead to a return to a former self. Indeed, the self who comes outside of itself, for whom ek-stasis is a condition of existence, is one for whom no return to self is possible, for whom there is no final recovery from self-loss. The notion of "difference" is similarly misunderstood, I would suggest, when it is understood as contained within or by the subject: the Hegelian subject's encounter with difference is not resolved into identity. Rather, the moment of its "resolution" is finally indistinguishable from the moment of its dispersion; the thinking of this cross-vectored temporality ushers in the Hegelian understanding of infinity and offers a notion of the subject that cannot remain bounded in the face of the world. Misrecognition does not arrive as a distinctively Lacanian corrective to the Hegelian subject, for it is precisely by misrecognition that the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers its self-loss. Indeed, this is a self constitutively at risk of self-loss. This subject neither has nor suffers its desire, but is the very action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject. Thus, it is neither precisely a new theory of the subject nor a definitive displacement of the subject that Hegel provides, but rather a definition in displacement, for which there is no final restoration.