Judith Butler

Sara Salih

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134608966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

First guidebook on Butler! Butler's work on performativity and body is receiving more and more attention in literature departments Makes very hard material accessible without simplifying beyond recognition Places Butler in ideological context

KEY IDEAS

1

THE SUBJECT

Context

Butler’s analysis of ‘the subject’ begins in her first book, Subjects of Desire, a text that has assumed a variety of different forms. Originally submitted as a dissertation at Yale University in 1984, the work was revised in 1985–6, published in 1987, and not reprinted until 1999. In the Preface to the 1999 edition Butler calls Subjects of Desire a piece of juvenilia which was published too early, and she asks for her reader’s ‘abundant forgiveness in reserve’ for a work which, she claims, would now require extensive rewriting and revision (SDII: viii). The subject of Subjects might indeed seem anomalous to the reader for whom ‘Judith Butler’ signifies formulations of queer identity and discussions of gender and the body, neither of which seem to be much in evidence in this study of Hegel and twentieth-century French philosophy. In spite of this, and notwithstanding the author’s retrospective disclaimers, it is an important philosophical text in its own right, and it also contains a number of the ideas Butler develops in later, better-known works.

Subjects originally dealt with the reception of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by French philosophers of the 1930s and 1940s. In her Preface to the 1999 paperback edition of the book Butler explains that, as a Fulbright scholar at Heidelberg University in Germany, she trained mainly in continental philosophy, studying key thinkers such as Karl Marx (1818–83) and Hegel, along with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) and critical theorists of the Frankfurt school. In the 1970s and 1980s Butler had only dabbled in the post-structuralist theories of Derrida and de Man, and she writes that it was later, at a Women’s Studies Faculty seminar, that she ‘discovered’ Foucault, whose writings were to influence her own to a great extent. After leaving Yale to take up a position as a postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University in the States, Butler became receptive to the French theory she had previously resisted, and when she revised her dissertation she added sections on the next generation of French philosophers – Lacan, Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) – which had not been part of the original study.

Butler acknowledges the continuity between her early and late work in the 1999 Preface, where she claims that her interest in Hegelian formulations of the subject, desire and recognition runs throughout her writing: ‘In a sense, all 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 and constitutive relation to alterity?’ (SDII: xiv). Butler ‘returns’ to Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power, and she has published articles on Hegel, feminism and phenomenology (see Further Reading). Perhaps most importantly, Subjects asks whether subjectivity necessarily rests upon the negation of the ‘Other’ by the ‘Self’, an idea to which Butler repeatedly returns.

Key Strands of Critical Thought

Phenomenology

This is the study of consciousness, or the way in which things appear to us. The term has been used since the eighteenth century and is associated with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) in the nineteenth century, and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) in the twentieth century.

There are many different strands to phenomenology, so it is not easy to summarize in a sentence or two, but, for Husserl, the world as experienced in consciousness is the starting point for phenomenology. Very broadly speaking, it is concerned with how the mind perceives what is external to it, i.e. the perception of the essence of things.

Frankfurt School

This comprises philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt in 1929. Key thinkers include Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Erich Fromm (1900–80), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Jürgen Habermas (1929– ). The Frankfurt School is usually divided into three phases and two generations, moving through historical materialism, critical theory and ‘the critique of instrumental reason’. Habermas, who belongs to the second generation, emphasizes the importance of normative foundations and interdisciplinary research.

Structuralism

This is a movement that largely took place in France, stemming from the work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Key thinkers include the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908– ) and the cultural and literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–80). Structuralism, as its name suggests, focuses on the analysis of structures and systems rather than content.

Post-Structuralism

This is a much-disputed term that is sometimes used interchangeably with deconstruction. Key thinkers associated with post-structuralism include Jacques Derrida (1930– ), Paul de Man (1919–83) and Michel Foucault (1926–84). Deconstructive critique sets out to undermine Western metaphysics by contesting and undoing binary oppositions, revealing their idealism and their reliance on an essential centre or presence. A deconstructive reading of a text never arrives at a final or complete meaning, since meaning is never self-present but is a process continually taking place. The author is no longer taken to be the source of meaning for a text, and Roland Barthes accordingly announced ‘the death of the author’ in his essay of that title.

Hegel’s Unhappy Hero

The German title of Phenomenology of Spirit is Phänomenologie des Geistes, where ‘Geist’ may be very loosely translated either as ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’, and in it Hegel charts the progress of an increasingly self-conscious Spirit towards absolute knowledge. Hegel’s ‘Geist’ resembles the protagonist of fictional narratives in which the hero (and it is usually a male) gradually progresses from ignorance to enlightenment and self-knowledge, and although the Spirit is not exactly the same as Butler’s ‘subject’, it is sufficiently close that the two terms will nevertheless be used more or less interchangeably in this chapter. Contemporary philosopher Jonathan Rée compares Hegel’s account of the Spirit’s metaphysical ‘journey’ to texts such as Homer’s Odyssey (c.750–700 BC), Dante’s Divine Comedy (c.1307–21) and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), in each of which the hero’s experiences on his travels lead him towards the state of greater wisdom, or Christian enlightenment, which he ultimately attains. Rée writes that Hegel’s Phenomenology is a story, ‘the story of Spirit – or Everyman – “the universal individual” – travelling the long road leading from the dull realm of “natural” consciousness to absolute knowledge and “working its passage” through every possible philosophical system on its way’ (1987: 76–7).

Although Phenomenology is the story of the Spirit’s progress towards absolute knowledge, unlike the narratives I have just mentioned Hegel’s Spirit does not actually go anywhere, since its ‘journey’ is a metaphysical one that also stands for the progress of world history. ‘Phenomenology’ may be described very generally as the study of the way things appear to us and the nature of perception, so that Hegel’s Phenomenology is a study of successive forms of consciousness. ‘Absolute Knowledge’ is knowledge of the world as it really is, and at the end of Phenomenology we discover that this ultimate reality resides in our own minds. In other words, everything in the material world is a construct of consciousness, which is why it is so important to understand how consciousness functions, or how it is that we come to know. Absolute knowledge is only reached when the mind grasps the fact that reality is not independent of it, and that what it is striving to know is really itself.

The Phenomenology is also frequently compared to a Bildungsroman or novel of experience. Literally translated from the German, Bildungsroman means ‘formation’ or ‘education novel’, i.e. a novel which documents the formation or education of its protagonist. Examples of this genre might include Frances Burney’s Evelina, or a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World (1778), J.W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795), Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860–1), and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15); it would seem that the Bildungsroman is usually by men and about men. These novels chart the metaphorical or literal journey of the hero or heroine from inexperience and ignorance to experience, and, like Bunyan’s Christian or Burney’s Evelina, the Spirit commits a series of errors during the course of its educational journey, acknowledging each mistake as it goes along and assimilating the lesson afforded by the error before moving on to the next stage.

This progression from error to enlightenment to increased self-knowledge is a movement that may be characterized as dialectical, a key term in the Hegelian lexicon (see ‘Why Butler?’). Dialectic is not a philosophical method (although it is sometimes regarded as such), but a movement from one apparently secure position (thesis) to its opposite (antithesis), before a reconciliation of the two is brought about (synthesis). In an article on the twentieth-century American poet, Wallace Stevens, Butler cites Hegel’s definition of dialectic as ‘the unity of apparent opposites – more precisely … the logical and ontological relation of mutual implication that persists between ostensibly oppositional terms’ (NTI: 269). In other words, to make any affirmation (e.g. ‘God exists’; ‘Australia is a big country’) is to presuppose that such a statement or thesis could be denied by its antithesis, so that, as Hegel asserts, there is a relation of ‘mutual implication’ between terms which appear to be opposites.

In the context of Phenomenology or a Bildungsroman, a dialectical movement would be the progression from belief through error to recognition and experience, ultimately resulting in absolute knowledge. Not all syntheses are as final as that however, and it is likely that the synthesis will form the next link in the dialectical chain: the synthesis is the starting point for the next thesis and the antithesis and synthesis following on from it. The Spirit progresses by acknowledging the mistakes it has made, so that its life journey resembles a game of snakes and ladders in which it repeatedly moves upwards or forwards, only to slither back down again when it commits an error before moving on to the next stage. (Jonathan Rée also compares the Phenomenology to ‘a kind of map or game’ (1987: 84)). Hegel’s subject is therefore a subject-in-progress, that, as Rée points out, can only build itself by ceaselessly destroying itself (or falling down the ladder), fleeing in horror from its previous errors and finding itself in its utter dismemberment (1987: 81). The Spirit progresses by negating everything that falls in its way without ever being certain that a happy ending ultimately awaits it, and it is only once it has passed through the successive stages that Hegel describes – sense-certainty, perception, force and understanding, self-certainty, stoicism, scepticism, unhappy consciousness, reason, logic, psychology, reason, and so on – that it finally reaches its ultimate destination of absolute knowledge.

Destination Desire

Butler describes Hegel’s journeying Spirit (which she claims is always a ‘he’ (SD: 20)) as a comic figure, a cartoon character who is never put off by the reversals and obstacles it encounters in its way. ‘What seems like tragic blindness turns out to be more like the comic myopia of Mr Magoo whose automobile careening through the neighbor’s chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels’, she writes. ‘Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Sunday morning cartoon, Hegel’s protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights – and fail again’ (SD: 21). Hegel’s Geist is thus a hopeful subject, ‘a fiction of infinite capability, a romantic traveler who only learns from what he experiences’ (SD: 22), and yet at the same time he is a deluded and impossible figure who, like Don Quixote, tilts at ontological windmills in his pursuit of reality (SD: 23).

Hegel: Some Key Terms

Geist

Hegel’s ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’, Geist is difficult to translate and just as difficult to define as a philosophical category. In his Hegel Dictionary, Michael Inwood gives nine interrelated definitions of Geist; these include: the human mind and its products; ‘the subjective Spirit’; the intellect; Absolute Spirit (i.e. the infinite, self-consciousness of God); Weltgeist (world Spirit); Volksgeist (Spirit of the people) and Geist der Zeit (the Spirit of an age).

Aufhebung

Literally translated, this means ‘sublation’; again, any definition of this word will inevitably be reductive and simplistic, since the German verb aufheben contains three distinct meanings: 1) to raise, hold, lift up; 2) to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel; and 3) to keep, save or preserve. The last two meanings may appear to be contradictory, but these are the two to which Hegel explicitly refers. However, as Inwood points out, the first definition is still an aspect of Aufhebung, since the product of sublation is higher than the sum of its parts. Aufhebung therefore refers to the unifying or synthesizing of opposites into a form in which they are simultaneously cancelled and preserved. You could think of what happens to an individual brick, when, along with other bricks, cement, wood, glass, etc., it is used to build (for example) a library. The brick is still discernibly a brick, but it is now also a necessary part of a larger structure (the library), so that its ‘identity’ as an individual brick has been simultaneously cancelled and transcended (since it is now part of a building and not an individual brick) and preserved (since we can still see that it is a brick).

Dialectic

This is a mode of reasoning in which thesis leads to antithesis and is resolved in synthesis. Butler quotes the following from Hegel’s Logic: ‘Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at work’ (NTI: 282).

Absolute Knowledge

This constitutes knowledge of what ‘truly is’; the mind’s realization that what it has been seeking to know is in fact itself.

Ontology

This is the science or study of being.

What motivates the Spirit in his travels, what prevents him from simply giving up at the successive stages of his journey when he discovers his own error, is desire – the desire to overcome the obstacles placed in his way, but, more crucially, the desire to know himself. Paraphrasing Hegel, Butler describes desire as the incessant effort to overcome external differences, which are finally revealed to be immanent features of the subject itself (SD: 6). Desire, in other words, is intimately connected to the process of coming into consciousness and the subject’s increasing capacity for self-knowledge: it is ‘an interrogative mode of being, a corporeal questioning of identity and place’ (SD: 9), not merely denoting sexual desire or ‘the kind of focused wanting that usually goes by that name’ (SD: 99), but, specifically in this context, the desire for recognition and self-consciousness. Butler points out that the German word for desire, Begierde, signals animal desire as well as the philosophical desire that she claims Hegel is describing in the Phenomenology, where the subject eventually comes to know itself through the recognition and overcoming of difference (SD: 33).

In the Introduction to Subjects Butler sketches in the importance of desire for successive generations of philosophers, asking whether desire is rational and moral and whether it can be integrated into a philosophical project (SD: 3), or whether, on the other hand, it is philosophically dangerous, ‘a principle of irrationality’ (SD: 3). Only if desire is moral is a philosophical life feasible, and what follows in Butler’s study is a consideration of how two generations of French philosophers adopt, adapt or challenge Hegel’s specific formulations of desire and subjectivity. As you read on, bear in mind that, in this context, desire is defined as the impulse to know, and that, as we have seen, this is always a desire for self-consciousness.

Self and Other

Hegel writes that it is only through recognizing and knowing another that the ‘Self’ can know itself, so that desire is always desire for something ‘Other’, which turns out to be a desire for the subject itself (SD: 34). There are two modes of desiring in Phenomenology: the desire for the Other, leading to the loss of the Self, and the desire for ourselves (or, in other words, self-consciousness) which leads to the loss of the world (SD: 34). To put this another way, the subject can only know itself through another, ...