Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France is a work of philosophical criticism that examines the concept of desire as it emerges in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and traces its various appropriations, revisions, and rejections across twentieth-century French philosophy. The book originated as Judith Butler’s doctoral dissertation, completed in the mid-1980s, and was subsequently revised for publication. Butler describes the work as her “juvenilia,” acknowledging that it appeared in print earlier than she might have ideally chosen, driven in part by the exigencies of the academic job market.
The book is neither a comprehensive survey of French Hegelianism nor a systematic exposition of Hegel’s entire system. Rather, it pursues a specific philosophical thread: the fate of the Hegelian subject of desire as it passes through the interpretive frameworks of Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. Butler notes in retrospect that a fuller treatment would have included a chapter on Georges Bataille, more detailed consideration of Hegel’s Logic particularly as it bears on Hyppolite’s reading, and engagement with Luce Irigaray’s feminist critiques of Hegel. She also indicates that the final chapters on Deleuze, Lacan, and Foucault were not part of the original dissertation proper but were added during revision.
The book emerges from a particular intellectual biography. Butler studied Hegel and German Idealism at Heidelberg under Dieter Henrich and Hans-Georg Gadamer as a Fulbright Scholar, completed graduate work in continental philosophy at Yale under Maurice Natanson, and encountered Foucault’s work in a women’s studies seminar. She taught at Wesleyan University from 1983 to 1986, a period during which she became increasingly open to French theoretical currents. This trajectory—from German idealism through French post-structuralism—shapes the book’s dual orientation: it takes Hegel seriously as a philosopher of desire while also attending to the ways French thinkers found in Hegel both a resource and a provocation.
The book’s scope extends from Kojève’s famous seminar at the École des Hautes Études in the 1930s through the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the mid-1970s. Within this span, Butler identifies two broad orientations among Hegel’s French readers. The first generation—Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre—undertook an anthropological and existential revision of Hegelianism, asking whether desire can be satisfied and whether satisfaction fulfills the desiring subject while revealing its ontological lack. The second generation—Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault—sought to depose the metaphysics of identity, subject, or presence that supposedly supports the Hegelian doctrine of desire, attempting to articulate a nondialectical thought of difference. Butler’s central contention is that these two orientations are not as distinct as they appear: the anti-Hegelianism of the later generation remains deeply indebted to the Hegelian problematic it seeks to escape.
Context
Subjects of Desire participates in several overlapping intellectual contexts. Most immediately, it engages the long tradition of French Hegelianism—the reception of Hegel in France that began in earnest with Kojève’s seminar in the 1930s and continued through Hyppolite’s translation and commentary. This reception was never merely academic; it was bound up with questions about history, politics, and human finitude that preoccupied French intellectuals in the aftermath of the Second World War. Kojève’s reading of Hegel as a philosopher of history and recognition, filtered through Marx, shaped an entire generation’s understanding of what was at stake in the Phenomenology. Hyppolite’s more scholarly and existentially inflected reading offered an alternative that emphasized the tragic structure of conscious experience and the irreducibility of time.
The book also emerges from the Anglo-American philosophical context of the 1980s, when French theory was being imported into English-language philosophy departments with considerable controversy. Butler’s own trajectory—from German idealism to French theory—mirrors a broader disciplinary shift. Her encounter with Foucault in a women’s studies seminar is telling: the questions that animate Subjects of Desire are not purely exegetical but are bound up with emerging concerns about gender, sexuality, and the politics of recognition that would come to define Butler’s later work.
The book is situated at a particular moment in the reception of Hegel in France. Butler notes that criticisms of Hegel often rest on a misapprehension: critics impute to the Hegelian subject an ontological autonomy and self-sufficiency, whereas being a “subject of desire”—subject to desire and to a desire for recognition—puts into play a negativity and dialectic of intersubjectivity that renders the subject’s supposed plenitude problematic. This misreading is not merely an error but is itself philosophically significant: it reveals the persistence of Hegelian questions even in the thought of those who claim to have moved beyond him.
Butler’s reading of the Phenomenology challenges both orthodox Hegelianism and its French critics. She argues that the “science of the experience of consciousness” is not an undertaking in constitution or foundation but opens onto a self-dissolution of consciousness when confronted with the demands of absolute knowledge—a regime of truth exceeding any objective constitution by consciousness. The Hegelian subject appears afflicted by negativity that undermines its identity, condemning it to permanent ec-stasis without final return of the self to itself. This reading aligns Hegel more closely with his French critics than with his traditional defenders, while also suggesting that the critics’ attempts to escape Hegel are themselves caught within Hegelian assumptions.
The book’s intellectual context also includes the debate over the legacy of German idealism more broadly. Butler’s engagement with Spinoza, Kant, and the tradition of philosophical reflection on desire situates Hegel within a longer history. She notes that philosophers have either dismissed desire or discovered philosophical truth as desire’s essence. Desire has been figured as philosophy’s Other—immediate, arbitrary, purposeless, animal—requiring transcendence. The book examines how Hegel transforms this relation, making desire internal to the philosophical project itself.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized as a philosophical narrative that follows the concept of desire from its Hegelian formulation through its various French appropriations. Butler describes this as “the philosophical narrative of a highly influential trope”—its genesis in Hegel, its reformulations in Kojève and Hyppolite, its persistence as a nostalgic ideal in Sartre and Lacan, and its exposure as a fiction in Deleuze and Foucault.
The opening sections establish the stakes of the inquiry. Butler begins with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens on poverty and desire, and an earlier epigraph from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire—Blanche Dubois’s journey via streetcars named Desire, Cemeteries, to Elysian Fields. This literary framing suggests that the journey of desire is deceptive in its direction: what appears to be a movement toward fulfillment may be a movement toward death, and what appears to be a movement toward the self may be a dispersal of the self.
The first major section of the book examines desire in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Butler analyzes the rhetorical structure of the Phenomenology, arguing that it is a narrative designed to seduce the reader into identifying with its traveling subject. The subject’s journey is a series of instructive fictions, each undermined by what it excludes and reassembled as more complicated arrangements. Butler traces the emergence of desire in “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” where Hegel introduces desire as the sensuous articulation of self-consciousness’s relation to the world. She examines the double object of desire—the external object and the self—and shows how this doubleness generates the movement toward recognition. The analysis culminates in a reading of “Lordship and Bondage,” where desire is transformed into the struggle for recognition and labor becomes “desire held in check.”
The second major section examines Kojève’s anthropological reading of Hegel. Kojève halts the Phenomenology at the end of “Lordship and Bondage,” retelling the narrative from the viewpoint of the struggling individual. His subject is an historical actor requiring recognition, tempered by a Marxian distrust of Hegel’s idealism. Kojève argues that human desire is fundamentally a desire for recognition, and that history is the arena in which this desire is played out. Butler critiques Kojève’s reading for its disembodied conception of desire and its restriction of negation to creative human power applied externally to nature.
The third section examines Hyppolite’s alternative reading. Hyppolite brought the Logic and the Early Theological Writings to bear on the Phenomenology, seeking to escape Kojève’s anthropocentric biases. For Hyppolite, desire can have no ultimate satisfaction within finite life; human negativity is never integrated into a higher-order identity. The infinity of desire is the incipient modernism of Hegel’s notion of the Absolute. Hyppolite interprets absolute knowledge as the “disquiet of life,” aligning Hegel with Kierkegaard. To think the absolute is to think time itself, an experience of anxiety; the truth of time must be suffered to be known.
The fourth section examines Sartre’s post-Hegelian philosophy. Butler reads Sartre’s ontology as “a disintegrated Hegelianism”—consciousness as permanent negation, desire as “vain passion.” Sartre’s dualistic ontology of the in-itself and the for-itself breaks with Hegel’s unity, but desire’s dissatisfaction conditions the imaginary pursuit of Hegel’s ideal. For Sartre, desire aims at imaginary objects and Others, and satisfaction remains perpetually deferred.
The final sections examine the post-Hegelian critique in Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. These thinkers criticize Hegel’s subject as imaginary: for Lacan, desire characterizes pleasure only after conforming to repressive law; for Deleuze, desire misdescribes Nietzsche’s will-to-power’s disunity; for Foucault, desire is historically produced and the subject always “subjected.” Butler shows how these critiques nevertheless remain within the orbit of Hegelian questions, particularly the relation between desire and recognition.
Main Arguments
The central argument of Subjects of Desire is that the French reception of Hegel—both its Hegelian and anti-Hegelian moments—constitutes a single philosophical narrative whose coherence has been obscured by the polemical self-understanding of its participants. Butler contends that anti-Hegelianism is nothing other than a sophisticated version of post-Hegelianism. The attempts by Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault to escape Hegel’s orbit are shown to depend on Hegelian assumptions and to reproduce Hegelian gestures in their very efforts at escape.
Butler argues that the standard criticism of Hegel—that his subject is an ontologically autonomous, self-sufficient entity that appropriates all difference into identity—rests on a misreading. The Hegelian subject is not a definitive given but the ideal or fictive precipitate of a process of assimilation and appropriation of differences. Being a “subject of desire” means being subject to desire and to a desire for recognition, which puts into play a negativity and dialectic of intersubjectivity that renders the subject’s supposed plenitude problematic. The subject is “ek-static”—constantly finding itself outside itself, with periodic expropriations that do not lead to a return to a former self. No return to self is possible; there is no final recovery from self-loss.
This reading of Hegel has implications for understanding the French reception. Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre ask whether desire can be satisfied and whether satisfaction fulfills the desiring subject while revealing its ontological lack. Butler shows that each of these thinkers restricts the Hegelian subject’s aspirations in different ways. For Kojève, the subject is confined within post-historical time. For Hyppolite, desire’s satisfaction is thwarted by temporal exigencies. For Sartre, the dualistic ontology of in-itself and for-itself makes satisfaction structurally impossible, reducing desire to a “useless passion.”
The antidialectical generation—Deleuze, Foucault, and to some extent Lacan—interprets Hegelian Aufhebung as a strategy of dissimulation or denial of difference. These thinkers attempt to disconnect desire from the subject, attributing the subject’s constitution to an imaginary construction. In Deleuze, the opposition between desire-lack and productive desire is accompanied by the idea that living desire is suppressed by the positing of a Subject of desire. Butler argues that Deleuze’s “post-Hegelian erotics” delivers desire to an enigmatic outside—Life or Being—linking his critique of negativity to the Hegelian dream of plenitude. Foucault’s genealogy of the desiring subject seeks to claim an “other economy of bodies and pleasures” as an alternative to the apparatus of sexuality, putting into play a dialectic of pleasure and law.
A related argument concerns the role of fiction in the Phenomenology. Butler reads Hegel’s text as “a study in fiction-making” that shows the essential role of fiction in the quest for truth. The subject can be read as a trope for the hyperbolic impulse, the frantic pursuit of the Absolute which creates that place when it cannot be found. As a being of metaphysical desires, the human subject is prone to fiction, telling itself the lies it needs to live. The Phenomenology is a series of deceptions forming a via negativa to truth. The deceptive pursuit of the Absolute is a progressive cycle revealing every deception as permitting grander synthesis. This reading, which Butler acknowledges is Nietzschean in inspiration, suggests that the Phenomenology‘s claim to experiential truth is more complicated than either its defenders or critics have recognized.
Butler also argues for the permanence of desire in Hegel’s system. Desire is not superseded in “Lordship and Bondage” but is aufgehoben—canceled yet preserved—transformed into “a more internally complicated mode of human striving.” The drama of recognition and labor must be seen as “permutations of desire.” Labor is “inhibited desire,” and recognition becomes the sophisticated form of reflection promising to satisfy desire. Desire is the “logical motor” of the Phenomenology, embodied by human subjects. The gradual sophistication of desire—”the expanding inclusiveness of its intentional aims”—is the principle of progress.
Key Concepts
Desire (Begierde): Butler emphasizes that the German word Begierde suggests animal appetite rather than the anthropocentric sense of French le désir or English “desire.” The term acquires the meaning of animal hunger: the sensuous and perceptual world is desired as required for consumption and as the means for reproducing life. Human desire is distinguished from animal desire through its reflexivity, its tacit philosophical project, and its rhetorical possibilities. Hegel claims that “self-consciousness in general is Desire,” meaning that desire signifies consciousness’s reflexivity—the necessity that it become other to itself in order to know itself.
The Double Object of Desire: In desiring some feature of the world, self-consciousness effects a unity that consciousness could only achieve theoretically. Desire becomes the sensuous enactment of this unity. Hegel explains that self-consciousness has a double object: the object of sense-certainty and perception, which has the character of a negative, and itself, which is the true essence. These two aims are also developmental stages of consciousness. Desire is always desire for something other which is always a desire for a more expanded version of the subject.
Recognition (Anerkennung): Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when it so exists for another; it exists only in being acknowledged. The struggle for recognition is the drama through which desire becomes human. Recognition is the sophisticated form of reflection promising to satisfy desire. Mutual recognition is possible only in a shared orientation toward the material world; we are recognized for the forms we create of the world.
The Ek-static Subject: Butler characterizes Hegel’s Phenomenology subject as “ek-static”—constantly finding itself outside itself. The German ausser sich denotes coming out of oneself, ecstasy, and anger. Self-consciousness finds itself “besieged by the Other,” discovering that self-negation is a “detachable attribute” that might inhabit different embodiments. The subject neither has nor suffers its desire but “is the very action of desire” perpetually displacing the subject. Hegel provides “a definition in displacement, for which there is no final restoration.”
Negativity: Desire is conceived as lack, signifying negativity. Satisfaction transforms difference into identity. The “insurpassability of externality implies the permanence of desire.” Self-consciousness never achieves static union with externality, remaining “hopelessly beyond its own grasp.” Hyppolite suggests desire is “the power of the negative in human life.” The negative cannot be harnessed within being; the subject cannot wholly identify with plenitude.
The Labor of the Negative: The subject cannot wholly identify with plenitude; the negative cannot be harnessed within being. Though Hegel insists “the truth is the whole,” it is unclear this totality can be reproduced by the existing subject through finite acts. The Absolute is achieved when history is reconstituted as immanent to the subject, but this reconstitution does not escape history nor is it reproducible in a single moment. The task is infinite; new experience occasions an entirely new narrative.
Aufhebung: The Hegelian term for the simultaneous cancellation and preservation of a moment in the dialectic. Butler argues that desire is aufgehoben in “Lordship and Bondage,” transformed into a more internally complicated mode of human striving. The concrete meaning of Aufhebung is the developing sequence: consuming desire, desire for recognition, desire for another’s desire. The antidialectical generation interprets Aufhebung as a strategy of dissimulation or denial of difference.
The Unhappy Consciousness: Though Butler notes she would have included a chapter on Hegel’s “Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness” and its appropriation by Jean Wahl, the concept haunts the book’s analysis of French Hegelianism. The unhappy consciousness is the shape of self-consciousness that experiences its own division as irremediable, a theme that resonates with Hyppolite’s tragic reading and Sartre’s “useless passion.”
Post-Hegelianism: Butler interrogates the ambiguity of French “post-Hegelianism”—attempts since the 1960s to “escape from Hegel.” She shows that criticisms of Hegel often rest on a misapprehension of the Hegelian subject’s nature. Anti-Hegelianism is nothing other than a sophisticated version of post-Hegelianism. The foreword concludes: “We are (still) not finished with Hegel.”
The Imaginary: For Sartre and Lacan, desire aims at imaginary objects and Others. Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault criticize Hegel’s subject as imaginary: for Lacan, desire characterizes pleasure only after conforming to repressive law. The imaginary pursuit of being characterizes Sartre’s account of desire as a “vain passion.”
Desire-Lack vs. Productive Desire: Deleuze opposes desire-lack to productive desire, arguing that living desire is suppressed by the positing of a Subject of desire. Butler shows how this opposition remains caught within the Hegelian problematic it seeks to escape.
Themes
The Journey of Desire: Butler frames the book through the image of Blanche Dubois’s journey in A Streetcar Named Desire—a journey via streetcars named Desire and Cemeteries to Elysian Fields. The inquiry follows desire’s journey, a desiring subject “nameless and genderless in its abstract universality,” a conceptual configuration whose ontological integrity is successively challenged. Like Blanche, this subject follows “a narrative of desire, delusion, and defeat.” The journey of desire is deceptive in its direction; what appears to be a movement toward fulfillment may be a movement toward dissolution.
The Subject as Fiction: The Phenomenology is a study in fiction-making showing the essential role of fiction in the quest for truth. The subject can be read as a trope for the hyperbolic impulse, the frantic pursuit of the Absolute which creates that place when it cannot be found. Like Don Quixote, Hegel’s subject is an impossible identity pursuing reality in systematically mistaken ways. Readers indulge in the same exorbitant desires, becoming makers of fiction who cannot sustain belief in their creations.
The Comic Structure of Hegel’s Narrative: Butler finds a comic, even burlesque, dimension in the Phenomenology. The reader waits for the subject’s arrival, but the subject only offers “choice morsels of himself, gestures, shadows, garments.” This “waiting for the subject” is compared to attending Godot. Hegel’s protagonists reassemble themselves, enter a new scene with new insights, and fail again, resembling the comic myopia of Mr. Magoo, whose car always lands on all four wheels. Renewal is always close; tragic events are never decisive.
The Body and Embodiment: The body is not merely the precondition for desire but its essential medium. Kojève’s reading deprives his position of embodied understanding of desire—his subject becomes an abstract creator. In Hegel’s chapter, the bondsman discovers he is not thing-like but capable of negation, rediscovering the “natural” aspect of existence as a medium of self-reflection. The body signifying enslavement becomes the precondition and instrument of freedom. The lord’s project of disembodiment becomes a posture of greed; a passive consumer, he can never be satisfied.
Death and Desire: Self-consciousness’ desire is to discover itself as an all-inclusive identity and a desire to live. Death is the end of desire. The lord acknowledges with self-deception his tie to life, while the bondsman asserts the desire to live in the face of the fear of death. Both postures are configurations of “death in life,” defenses against life emerging from a failed effort to die. Domination and enslavement are projects of despair, akin to Kierkegaard’s “despair of not being able to die.” If desire has a telos, it can only be understood as death.
Temporality and History: Human beings are necessarily projected into time. Kojève’s subject is posthistorical, no longer requiring dialectical narrative. Hyppolite argues that the demise of teleological history necessitated the further circumscription of the Hegelian subject; the subject’s “place” turns out to be its “time.” For Hyppolite, time constitutes human reality as ek-static, a mode of permanent self-estrangement. Time is the necessary limit on human creativity. The absolute is not an achievement but the dialectic of achievement and loss, the permanence of desire, the inevitability of transience.
Recognition and Community: True subjectivities flourish only in communities providing reciprocal recognition. The desire to live fully is synonymous with attaining a more capable identity through reciprocal recognition. Mutual recognition is possible only in a shared orientation toward the material world. Kojève’s theory does not rely on a Hobbesian view of conflicting desires; the conflict of individual desires implies its own supersession through a universally accepted social order based on reciprocal recognition.
The Persistence of Hegel: The book’s overarching theme is the persistence of Hegelian questions even in the thought of those who claim to have moved beyond him. Butler states that all her work remains “within the orbit” of Hegelian questions: the relation between desire and recognition, and how subject constitution entails a “radical and constitutive relation to alterity.” The foreword concludes: “We are (still) not finished with Hegel.”
The Author’s Conclusions
Butler concludes that the French reception of Hegel—both its affirmative and critical moments—demonstrates the inescapability of Hegelian questions about desire, recognition, and subject constitution. The attempts by Deleuze, Foucault, and others to escape Hegel’s orbit are shown to depend on Hegelian assumptions and to reproduce Hegelian gestures in their very efforts at escape. Anti-Hegelianism is nothing other than a sophisticated version of post-Hegelianism.
Butler’s reading of Hegel emphasizes the subject’s constitutive exposure to alterity. The Hegelian subject is “ek-static”—constantly finding itself outside itself, with periodic expropriations that do not lead to a return to a former self. No return to self is possible; there is no final recovery from self-loss. “Difference” is misunderstood when contained within the subject: the Hegelian subject’s encounter with difference is not resolved into identity. The moment of “resolution” is indistinguishable from dispersion. Misrecognition is not a Lacanian corrective to Hegel, for the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers self-loss through misrecognition. This self is “constitutively at risk of self-loss.” The subject neither has nor suffers its desire but “is the very action of desire” perpetually displacing the subject.
Butler suggests that the dissatisfaction of desire is not a failure of Hegel’s system but its animating principle. Desire has an animating function in the Bildung of consciousness, testifying to the precarity of the ego while constituting the matrix of possible identification and satisfaction emerging from the specular play of recognition. The subject is not a definitive given but the ideal or fictive precipitate of a process of assimilation and appropriation of differences.
The book ends with the recognition that contemporary thought cannot separate itself from the Hegelian conception of desire. Deleuze’s “post-Hegelian erotics” delivered desire to an enigmatic outside—Life or Being—linking his critique of negativity to the Hegelian dream of plenitude. Foucault’s genealogy of the desiring subject seeks to claim an “other economy of bodies and pleasures” as an alternative to the apparatus of sexuality, putting into play a dialectic of pleasure and law. These attempts to think beyond Hegel remain caught within the problematic they seek to escape.
Butler’s own trajectory after Subjects of Desire confirms this conclusion. She notes that her interest in Hegel has persisted, and that all her work remains “within the orbit” of Hegelian questions. Her subsequent engagement with Hegel’s reading of Antigone in the Phenomenology, Philosophy of Right, and Aesthetics raises questions about the political limits of the subject—both who qualifies as one and the limits of the subject as politics’ point of departure. The question of whether Antigone functions as a subject for Hegel is continuous with the questions about desire and recognition that animate Subjects of Desire.
Significance
Subjects of Desire is significant for several reasons. First, it established Butler as a major voice in the Anglo-American reception of continental philosophy, demonstrating a command of both German idealism and French theory that was rare in
Inside the Book
Desire and the French Hegel
The foreword by Philippe Sabot situates Subjects of Desire as a work emerging from Butler’s mid-1980s dissertation on the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century French thought. Sabot emphasizes that the Hegelian reference remains crucial to Butler’s later work, particularly her critical elaboration of the theme of recognition, a theme that continues to animate contemporary philosophy. The book’s central stakes, he argues, involve reconstituting the conditions of a Hegelian paradigm of desire as it appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and then tracking its re-appropriations through French philosophy, from Alexandre Kojève’s influential 1930s seminar to the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Butler distinguishes between two broad groups of French readers: Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre, who ask whether desire can be satisfied and what that satisfaction reveals about the subject’s ontological lack, and Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, who seek to depose the metaphysics of identity that supports the Hegelian doctrine of desire. Sabot notes that Butler interrogates the ambiguity of French “post-Hegelianism,” showing that criticisms of Hegel often rest on a misapprehension of the Hegelian subject as ontologically autonomous, when in fact being a “subject of desire” entails a negativity and a dialectic of intersubjectivity that render any supposed plenitude deeply problematic. Butler’s reading of the Phenomenology reveals that the “science of the experience of consciousness” is not a project of foundation but opens onto a self-dissolution of consciousness when confronted with the demands of absolute knowledge. The Hegelian subject is afflicted by a negativity that undermines its identity, condemning it to a permanent ec-stasis without any final return to itself. Desire, in this account, has an animating function in the Bildung of consciousness, testifying to the precarity of the ego while constituting the matrix of identification and satisfaction that emerges from the specular play of recognition. The subject is not a definitive given but the ideal precipitate of a process of assimilating differences. Sabot concludes that anti-Hegelianism is itself a sophisticated version of post-Hegelianism, and that we are still not finished with Hegel.
In her preface to the paperback edition, Butler describes the book as her 1984 dissertation, revised in 1985–86, and calls it her “juvenilia,” published early due to the pressures of the job market. She recounts her academic formation: a Fulbright year studying Hegel and German Idealism at Heidelberg under Dieter Henrich and Hans-Georg Gadamer, graduate work at Yale in continental philosophy, and a dissertation under Maurice Natanson. She notes that the final chapters on Deleuze, Lacan, and Foucault were not part of the original dissertation. Reflecting on revisions she would have made, she mentions Derrida’s criticism of the Hegelian concept in “The Pit and the Pyramid,” his later views in the introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typographies, and his Glas, as well as Luce Irigaray’s engagements with Hegel, particularly “The Eternal Irony of the Community” in Speculum of the Other Woman. She also signals a future project on Frantz Fanon’s engagement with Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks, reading Fanon’s Hegel as an appropriation of Kojève’s thesis on desire’s centrality to the struggle for recognition. Butler insists that all her work remains “within the orbit” of Hegelian questions, particularly the relation between desire and recognition and how subject constitution entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity. She describes her current work on Hegel’s reading of Antigone, asking whether Antigone functions as a subject for Hegel and what that reveals about the political limits of the subject. Crucially, she characterizes the Hegelian subject as “ek-static,” constantly finding itself outside itself, with no final recovery from self-loss. The moment of “resolution” is indistinguishable from dispersion, and misrecognition is not a Lacanian corrective to Hegel, for the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers self-loss through misrecognition. This self is constitutively at risk of self-loss, and the subject neither has nor suffers its desire but is the very action of desire, perpetually displacing itself.
The Journey of Desire
The preface proper opens with a citation from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, noting Blanche Dubois’s journey via streetcars named Desire, Cemeteries, to Elysian Fields, and asking what kind of journey desire is when its direction is so deceptive. The inquiry follows the journey of a desiring subject, “nameless and genderless in its abstract universality,” a conceptual configuration whose ontological integrity is successively challenged. Like Blanche, this subject follows a narrative of desire, delusion, and defeat. Introduced in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, this subject’s desire is structured by philosophical aims: to know itself while finding within itself the entirety of the external world, discovering all alterity as self-reflection. Though Kierkegaard questioned whether such a subject exists and Marx criticized Hegel’s conceit as mystified idealism, the French reception took desire as its critical departure. Kojève and Hyppolite redescribe Hegel’s subject with restricted aspirations: for Kojève, the subject is confined within post-historical time; for Hyppolite, desire’s satisfaction is thwarted by temporal exigencies. Sartre’s dualistic ontology breaks with Hegel’s unity, but desire’s dissatisfaction conditions the imaginary pursuit of Hegel’s ideal. For Sartre and Lacan, desire aims at imaginary objects and Others. Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault criticize Hegel’s subject as imaginary: for Lacan, desire characterizes pleasure only after conforming to repressive law; for Deleuze, desire misdescribes Nietzsche’s will-to-power’s disunity; for Foucault, desire is historically produced and the subject always “subjected.” Butler argues that Hegel was “an ironic artist” in constructing this conceit, less totalizing than presumed, and that his French critics ground their refutations in terms that consolidate Hegel’s position. This is the philosophical narrative of a highly influential trope: its genesis in Hegel, its reformulations in Kojève and Hyppolite, its persistence as a nostalgic ideal in Sartre and Lacan, and its exposure as fictional in Deleuze and Foucault.
Desire as Philosophy’s Other
The introduction opens with lines from Wallace Stevens on poverty and desire. Butler argues that philosophers have either dismissed desire or discovered philosophical truth as desire’s essence. Desire has been figured as philosophy’s Other—immediate, arbitrary, purposeless, animal—requiring transcendence. Philosophy presents itself as not needing the world it seeks. Because philosophers cannot obliterate desire, they formulate strategies to control it; even negation is another modality of desire. The alternative is domestication: the philosopher as “a being of rational desire who knows what he wants and wants what he knows.” If desires are essentially philosophical, reason characterizes our impulsive selves, and desire’s immediacy is “always already mediated.” Butler questions whether this integration is viable or a sophisticated reformulation of alienation, cautioning against univocal meanings of “philosophy” and “desire” and asking what philosophical circumstances occasion the question of desire. Desire is deemed dangerous for blurring vision, yet moral philosophy asks whether desire evinces moral intentionality, as with Plato’s philosophical eros, Aristotle’s unified desire, Kant’
The Rhetorical Movement of Transition
The transition from consciousness to self-consciousness is not a logical deduction but a rhetorical movement. Insight is first enacted without self-awareness, and only after the enactment is completed and the Explanation stated does consciousness examine this product and recognize itself as its author. The Explanation’s original purpose becomes irrelevant because consciousness discovers it has the capacity to recognize itself—it is a reflexive structure inhabiting a place in the world. As external, consciousness is “other” to itself, meaning it is what is generally understood as “other” to itself, namely the world. Therefore, the inverse of this identity statement also holds: consciousness of the world is always consciousness of itself in its alterity. This rhetorical movement reaffirms the principle of identity, the ontological place of difference, and the supporting web of internal relations.
As a rhetorical agency, the Hegelian subject always knows more than it thinks it knows. By reading itself rhetorically—reading meanings it unwittingly enacts against those it explicitly intends—it recovers greater dimensions of its own identity. Rhetoric is thus both the condition of deception and of illumination: the subject is always beyond itself, meaning what it does not necessarily intend but nevertheless externalizes, then reads, and finally recovers for itself.
From Explanation to Desire
The rhetorical drama of Explanation is recapitulated on a more concrete level in the drama of desire. The problem of consciousness is how to conceptualize its relationship with the sensuous and perceptual world. As the advanced form of Understanding, consciousness could delineate features or “moments” of this world but could not achieve unity with it. Consciousness has only a theoretical experience of its object—a notion of what it must be like—while the sensuous and perceptual world remains remote, conjectured, experientially unknown. In the transition to self-consciousness, we are told to expect: “the Notion of the object is superseded in the actual object, or the first, immediate presentation of the object is superseded in experience: certainty gives place to truth.”
In § 167, the Phenomenology answers how the sensuous world becomes experience for self-consciousness by invoking desire. Hegel introduces desire casually, at the end of a complicated explanation. The problem is how to make the sensuous and perceptual world a difference that is no difference—how to recapitulate this world as a feature of self-consciousness itself. Explaining the world went partway but seemed too abstract. In the “first moment” of the Phenomenology, the sensuous world endures as appearance—ostensibly different from reality or essence, but this distinction turns out not to hold: it is “difference which, in itself, is no difference.” Consciousness has learned through explanation that it appears to hold the truth of the opposing world, yet a new disparity arises between the world’s appearance as external and unreachable and its truth evidenced in consciousness’s well-wrought Explanation. To overcome this distinction, the sensuous world must become unified with consciousness; since one term of this unity is the sensuous world, self-consciousness itself must have a sensuous expression—and that sensuous articulation “is Desire in general.”
The German word Begierde suggests animal appetite rather than the anthropocentric sense of French le désir or English desire. The term acquires the meaning of animal hunger: the sensuous and perceptual world is desired as required for consumption and as the means for reproducing life. Human desire is later distinguished from animal desire through its reflexivity, its tacit philosophical project, and its rhetorical possibilities. At this point, equipped only with insights from Force and Explanation, desire initially appears as a synthesis of movement and alterity.
Desire’s Double Object
In desiring some feature of the world, self-consciousness effects the unity that consciousness could only achieve theoretically and inadvertently. Desire becomes the sensuous enactment of this unity—the sensuous articulation of a sensuous object that is simultaneously a reflexive pursuit of self-consciousness itself. Hegel explains desire’s ambiguity: “Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, viz, itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object.” These two aims are also developmental stages of consciousness. The first aim—the object of sense-certainty and perception—is the conventional object of consciousness. The second aim—consciousness’s reflexive pursuit of itself—was already found in the drama of Explanation. Hence, desire is always desire for something other which is always a desire for a more expanded version of the subject. The immediate object appears as “a negative” because it is not consciousness. In this initial phase, the pursuit of alterity and the pursuit of oneself seem in stark opposition. In desiring something else, we lose ourselves; in desiring ourselves, we lose the world. Desire appears contradictory and dissatisfied—either as narcissism or enthrallment with an object.
Desire’s “double-object” becomes a source of deception when a single univocal aim becomes the object of “true desire.” The confrontation with the object of sense-certainty is intrinsically dissatisfying: that object is “other,” absolutely different, signifying nothing for consciousness except its own ontological limitations. Otherness incites self-consciousness and occasions its articulation as desire, but is also the source of suffering. Hegel defines self-consciousness as “essentially the return from otherness.”
The Encounter with the Other
The passage opens mid-argument about desire as the logically appropriate object of desire, noting that only in “Lordship and Bondage” do we encounter such an Other. Desire has been understood as “the effort of a disembodied consciousness to acquire reality from an ostensibly disparate world of substance.” Through desire, self-consciousness participates in what it investigates. The progression from Force to Explanation to consumption of Life reveals the “ever widening circumference of reflexivity” constituting the emerging subject. The subject both consumes its world (internalization of otherness) and externalizes itself—two moments of the same movement. Desire is “necessarily ambiguous movement toward the world, consumption and externalization, appropriation and dispersal.” As desire becomes desire-for-another-desire, the subject hopes to obtain a self-sustaining picture of itself as “absolute negation.” However, this subject’s vision is too narrow: it restricts dependence to natural objects, underestimates human embodiment, and fails to anticipate dependence on the self-consciousness it will meet. “Vain and headstrong, this subject once again travels swiftly toward defeat.”
Butler argues desire is aufgehoben (canceled yet preserved) in “Lordship and Bondage,” transformed into “a more internally complicated mode of human striving.” Though desire may seem supplanted by the struggle for recognition, the drama of recognition and labor must be seen as “permutations of desire.” Labor is “inhibited desire,” and recognition becomes the sophisticated form of reflection promising to satisfy desire. Butler contends it is inappropriate to ask whether desire is superseded as an independent agency—”desire is nothing other than the action of supersession itself.” The concrete meaning of Aufhebung is the developing sequence: consuming desire, desire for recognition, desire for another’s desire. Desire is the “logical motor” of the Phenomenology, embodied by human subjects.
From “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” self-consciousness discovers itself as “essentially negative.” The “insurpassability of externality implies the permanence of desire.” Self-consciousness never achieves static union with externality, remaining “
The French Hegel: Kojève and Hyppolite
Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, Butler explains, does not rest on a Hobbesian premise of naturally hostile desires. Instead, following Hegel, Kojève sees the conflict of individual desires not as a permanent natural state but as one that implies its own supersession through a universally accepted social order based on reciprocal recognition. Individuality is not understood strictly in terms of individual desire; rather, desire creates human subjectivity through recognition by another desire. Society does not arise as an artificial construct to arbitrate between naturally hostile desires; it provides for the articulation and satisfaction of desire. Recognition itself facilitates the constitution of true individuals, and the end of history and the satisfaction of desire consist in the successful recognition of each individual by every other.
Butler critiques Kojève’s reading, noting that his acceptance of the subjective point of view allows an analysis of desire in terms of freedom and temporality, but his distinction between consciousness and nature leads him to promote desire as a disembodied pursuit. Desire becomes a negation unsupported by corporeal life, and his references to desiring agents as “negations” and “nothingnesses” suffer from abstractness. The body is not merely the precondition for desire but its essential medium. This raises questions about the heroic subject, desire as disembodied generativity, and whether the subject becomes a tragic figure if Kojève’s project of anthropogenesis proves impossible.
Hyppolite’s Revision: Time, Life, and the Absolute
Hyppolite initiated his studies of Hegel to continue and revise Kojève’s effort to ground Hegelianism in a post-historical time. By bringing the Logic and Early Theological Writings to bear on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hyppolite sought to escape Kojève’s anthropocentric biases. In Hyppolite’s view, the demise of teleological history necessitated the further circumscription of the Hegelian subject; heroism inevitably has its demise. The subject’s “place” turns out to be its “time.” Hyppolite’s reflections are found in his commentary Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit (1946), following his translation of the Phenomenology (1939–1942). The title suggests the problem: the text requires another conceptual schema to be understood. Hyppolite argues that phenomenological presumptions about the progressive movement of history are historically conditioned, and he uses the principle of retrospective wisdom to criticize the Phenomenology for its presumptions of progressivity. To question the teleological model and remain a Hegelian, one must find the posthistorical prefigured in the text. Kojève finds this in the slave who flees the body for dissociated abstraction, but Hyppolite stops the narrative further back, at the moment of Life and the infinite labor of desire.
Hyppolite is clear that desire can have no ultimate satisfaction within finite life; human negativity is never integrated into a higher-order identity. The infinity of desire is the incipient modernism of Hegel’s notion of the Absolute. Hyppolite’s rehabilitation of time as a monistic absolute offers an alternative to Kojève’s ontological dualism, as the common structure of time governs both human and natural worlds. Hyppolite extends negation, arguing human subjects are negativity as temporal beings comported toward death. Kojève’s historical actor denies temporality, having internalized a telos for human existence, but Hyppolite suggests Kojève’s “ends” are only momentary achievements, and he refuses to think through the consequences of posthistorical time. Hyppolite believes Kojève’s interpretation is too exclusively anthropological. Absolute knowledge is not a theology or an anthropology; it is the discovery of the speculative, a thought of being appearing through man and history. Hyppolite distinguishes two tendencies in Hegel: one beginning with the subject, and one beginning with substance, the “adventure of being.” Life is the speculative element understood through human temporality but transcending it, and Hyppolite asks after the being of “life,” not “man,” finding the absolute as dynamic and monistic.
For Hyppolite, time constitutes human reality as ek-static, a mode of permanent self-estrangement. Time is the necessary limit on human creativity. Kojève’s view of History is opposed to time; historical deeds are meant to stay time. Kojève has elevated the wisdom of the bondsman to an absolute task, but for Hyppolite, an actor who lifts himself out of time is a lifeless being. The absolute is not an achievement but the dialectic of achievement and loss, the permanence of desire, the inevitability of transience. Hyppolite interprets absolute knowledge as the “disquiet of life,” aligning Hegel with Kierkegaard. To think the absolute is to think time itself, an experience of anxiety; the truth of time must be suffered to be known.
Desire, Death, and Negation
Butler argues that for Hyppolite, the noncoincidence of life and thought does not warrant despair. The project of attaining capable identity is not forfeited despite lacking any guarantee of success. This project is neither necessitated by natural or teleological principles nor sustained by hope of success—it is both arbitrary and doomed to failure. Self-knowledge, thinking the conditions of one’s own life, functions as the desire to be free. Only by assimilating Otherness can human consciousness escape the vulnerability of merely positive being. The desire to reflect is indebted to establishing oneself as a negating being. If desire has a telos, it can only be understood as death. As merely positive being, human life would lack capacity to influence surroundings—relationless, brute, existing and perishing. Desire emerges as a negative principle constitutive of finite life, a principle of infinite alteration overcoming positive being by revealing the self’s ever-shifting place within internal relations. Paradoxically, desire enlivens the body with negation, proclaiming the body as expressive or transcendent project. Desire seeks to escape death’s verdict by preempting its power.
Butler notes this is her reading of Hyppolite’s implications, though Hyppolite accepts this view. In “The Concept of Existence in the Hegelian Phenomenology,” he claims negation of every diremption is revived in desire’s negative principle. Death in life drives self-consciousness to transcend diremption. Desire negates determinate being repeatedly—a quieted version of death. Human life is not robbed of meaning through death, being always already partially beyond determinate life. Hyppolite states man cannot exist except through death’s negativity, taken upon himself as transcendence. Self-consciousness exists partially in rancor against determinate life, and Butler suggests understanding desire as “the thought of death.” The self extends beyond the body’s positive locus through encounters with alterity, becoming the relations it pursues.
One might conclude Hyppolite engaged Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but Hegel’s and Hyppolite’s Christianity implies death is a fuller notion of life. The bondsman’s “trembling” aligns Hegel with Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling. Following Kojève and Jean Wahl, Hyppolite restricts himself to the lordship and bondage interpretation of death, taking seriously the body’s facticity and finitude. A life beyond death remains conjectural—a conjecture holding sway in human life. Desire affirms itself as an impossible project whose fulfillment remains imaginary—a theme Sartre will elaborate.
Sartre’s Hermeneutic of Desire
Sartre argues that the fundamental “desire to be” does not exist as a separate, prior entity that then manifests itself through subsequent, concrete desires. There is nothing outside its symbolic expression. The desire to be exists and is made manifest only through the specific, contingent, and empirical expressions of a person’s life—their jealousy, greed, love, art, cowardice, and courage. These acts are not mere symptoms of a deeper drive; they are the very substance of that drive, the only way human reality appears as a specific person.
Sartre calls the task of uncovering these opaque projects of desire a “hermeneutic.” Truth is not stumbled upon but is an a priori possibility of human comprehension. The essential task is one of deciphering, determination, and conceptualization. The inquiring subject can decipher these hidden projects because he is himself the origin of the object of his inquiry. These projects are not known through empirical induction but through a process akin to recollection, where the self-interpreter must be “able to know what he already understands.”
This leads Sartre to a direct critique of Freud, whom he charges with creating an ontological disjunction between the original desire (the sign) and its determinate manifestations (the signified). If desires gain their true meaning in the unconscious and conscious expressions are reducible to a system unrecoverable by consciousness, then conscious understanding is always deceptive. Sartre calls the notion of desires originating in the unconscious an absurdity and a hypostatization. Freud’s bifurcation of the psyche precludes recovering desire’s aims from the subjective consciousness where interpretation must receive its final verification. Freud, in Sartre’s view, builds alienation into the very structure of the psyche, making self-comprehension a vain illusion. His theory is at best speculative and at worst self-defeating. This response to Freud parallels Sartre’s critique of Husserl’s epoché: he seeks to expand the natural attitude to include a radical self-reflection that Husserl thought required a transcendental perspective and Freud thought required the unconscious.
Desire is a mode of pre-reflective consciousness, which is a non-positional awareness of consciousness itself while it is intending an object. The battle between reason and desire is really a battle between reflective consciousness and pre-reflective aims. The existential project of desire is obscured by its object, yet the determinate project is fulfilled within that object. This discussion finds its transcription in Being and Nothingness as the problem of lived experience. The self is discovered only through the intentional positing of objects; agency becomes explicit through deeds. The self is given “at the horizon of states,” permanently outside consciousness, and self-revelation is an inadvertent consequence of positing objects other to the self.
A common ploy of bad faith is to treat emotions as contingencies that happen to us rather than as expressions of a knowing self. For Sartre, desire and emotion are chosen, though not in the ordinary sense of conscious deliberation. Empirical psychologists treat desires as psychic irreducibles, but for Sartre, desire is created and recreated, indicating a free agency prior to its emergence. “Desire is consent to desire.” One who desires an impossible object may do so precisely because it is impossible; one “sets it up,” arranging one’s own victimization and enthrallment. For Hegel, opacity is necessary to self-consciousness, which cannot be coincident with itself. For Sartre, opacity is a function of pre-reflective consciousness whose reflexivity is obscured by its intentional object. The “implicit” dimension is less an identity with the world than an interpretive effort to position oneself regarding it.
In a 1947 debate, Hyppolite argued that Sartre’s pre-reflective consciousness equals Hegel’s principle of negativity, claiming knowledge must be synthetic mediation. Sartre responded that pre-reflective consciousness is “all the originality and ambiguity of a position which is not the immediacy of life and which prepares this act of consciousness which is reflection.” He defended instantaneous knowledge, citing Husserl as the first to describe a dimension of consciousness that is neither knowledge nor life but consciousness of itself. When Hyppolite asked about perpetual progress, Sartre replied that progress “depends on the kind of person one is” and that he “never pretended that there was a progress.” Butler notes Sartre’s inconsistency here: his notion of a unifying pre-reflective project assumes a moral force to intentionality. The project to be God represents “complete self-understanding” and perfect freedom, yet the satisfaction of this existential desire presupposes bad faith, while authenticity requires perpetual dissatisfaction.
The Embodied Consciousness and the Circle of Desire
While Sartre accepts a normative view of human identity as a project toward omnipotent subjectivity, he recognizes this ideal as impossible. In other contexts, he suggests authenticity is “the paradoxical journey of an embodied consciousness.” In discussing sexual desire, Sartre offers a project for embodied identity where the body is not merely a factic limit to freedom but a material condition for freedom’s determination and expression. In sexual relations, the desire to “be” is not only a desire for omnipotent transfiguration of the world but also “the desire to be known, to come into being through the look of the Other.” This look is not merely hostile, and the exchange between selves is not merely a fight where each asserts himself as God. Reciprocal desire becomes “the locus of a progressive movement of freedom.”
The progression of Sartre’s views appears in his later works, including Critique of Dialectical Reason, Saint Genet, and The Family Idiot. In an interview, Sartre states: “For me there is no basic difference between the body and consciousness.” He asserts that we yield our bodies to everyone—through looking and touching—and exist for the other as body, though not as consciousness or ideas, even though “ideas are modifications of the body.” If we truly existed for the other as body, words would appear as formed by tongue in mouth, with no hiddenness or secrecy.
Sartre’s view of sexual desire is often read as arguing for the inevitability of sadomasochism. He affirms sadism and masochism as permanent possibilities of all sexual encounters and rejects “dialectic,” arguing the master-slave drama is not aufgehoben in universal reciprocity. Instead, sexual exchange is a “circle” where the inversion of sadism into masochism follows ontological necessity: every determinate individual “is what he is not, and is not what he is.” No third term emerges, but roles are not fixed. Inversion gives rise to a consciousness of inversion, which is both awareness and choice. Adopting sadist or masochist as a permanent identity is essentialist posturing—bad faith. The constancy of inversion is a new basis of reciprocity.
Consciousness is always individual; nothingness persists between partners as necessary difference. The Other’s interiority cannot be revealed through cognition, because the pre-reflective is private and hidden. Sexual desire seeks the Other’s interiority, bidding freedom to manifest as flesh. Knowledge of this freedom requires bodily mediation; “a freedom purified of the body is an impossibility.” Hegel surpasses the paradox of determinate freedom when the body becomes the generalized body of Christ. Sartre identifies the body with the limit to freedom and individuation, yet the body also mediates and determines freedom in sexual desire.
If freedom is the project to become one’s own foundation, and the body is contingent facticity, the body seems opposed to freedom. But in the circle of desire, the body is never purely factic—it is equally perspective and intentional relations. Freedom is also “a project of embodiment.”
Sartre on Desire, Writing, and Biography
For Sartre, desire does not simply express a pre-existing self, nor does it invent identity from nothing. Instead, it labors within the terms of historically entrenched relations. This view aligns with Freud’s theory of ego formation, where the ego arises as a defense against loss, inferring exclusion from parental presence. Sartre’s biographical works, particularly on Flaubert, treat personal identity as derived from early experiences of separation or dissatisfaction. Desire functions as a “double-negation,” creating the being of the self through a vain striving to heal the wound of original separation. Humans repeat this striving, seeking reparation but never achieving it, and can only negate constitutive negations by creating fantasies of pure presence. The imaginary poses as seamless presence but is truly nothingness; imagination reenacts negativity only to instate it again. This enactment of negation is the limit of what humans can do with past losses, yet it can occasion singular achievement. Genet and Flaubert matter to Sartre because of their extreme fertility as authors of the imaginary, transforming losses into unparalleled literary creation.
The Self as Paradoxical Task
The self appears as a paradoxical task of representing a constitutive lack. Flaubert’s passive constitution becomes pathos and a singular literary presentation of passion. Like every consciousness, Flaubert must objectify himself to know himself, yet the self he comes to know cannot exist prior to its objectification. Experience precedes self-objectification as a desire to become objectified. This inchoate self is the lived experience of internalized early relations with others, surfacing as anxiety. Flaubert writes from passivity but subverts that passivity in writing pathically. Realization of lack entails inversion; representation asserts itself as constitutive of the self it represents. No knowable self precedes representation, which draws on latent history and reworks it. Representation becomes integral to the self’s fundamental project.
Writing as Self-Negation
Writing is Sartre’s paradigmatic act of self-negation, effecting the transition from latent history to invented self. In Hegelian terms, the literary work mediates between mute self-dimensions and recognition conferring value. Double-negation forms writing’s activity, though writing is less a solution than a continuous reflection on a life with no solution. Writing sustains desire for Flaubert and Genet—both write imaginatively, desiring impossible worlds. Words realize desire and perpetually reinvent it. Sartre quotes: “the love which is lived cannot be named without being reinvented.”
Sartre’s Biographical Method
Sartre called The Family Idiot a “true novel,” questioning whether biographical narrative was not the only novel possible today. When Genet disputed Sartre’s portrayal, Sartre found the criticism inconsequential. Whether these biographies report or invent lives remains purposefully ambiguous. “To know” and “to invent” an Other are indissolubly linked. Flaubert will be transformed by Sartre. Biography is less an empirical study than an original effort to take up one’s cultural history through embodiment in another person. Flaubert is Sartre’s cultural past, champion of French Letters. Sartre maintained that empathy is the biographer’s proper attitude, though he confessed Flaubert evoked antipathy in him. His project may have been transforming antipathy into empathy. Biography enters an ongoing story to tell it again slightly altered. The dream of leaping into the imaginary free from history’s facticity is no longer tenable; invention must mediate the present through the past.
Hegelian Overtones and Two Questions
Sartre’s project to “overcome” the “difference” of Genet and Flaubert is Hegelian—both become immanent features of Sartre the biographer. Words pursuing difference become inadvertent means of overcoming it. Two questions emerge: the limits of what can be articulated, and the accessibility of the personal past. Sartre assumes language brings forth the history of negation constituting an individual, but is infantile development—primary repression—wholly accessible to consciousness and words? What happens when the unspeakable makes itself felt in speech? This poses a severe challenge to Sartre’s theory of the subject.
Hegel and Contemporary French Theory
The twentieth-century history of Hegelianism in France has two constitutive moments: first, the specification of the subject in terms of finitude, corporeal boundaries, and temporality; second, the “splitting” (Lacan), “displacement” (Derrida), and death (Foucault, Deleuze) of the Hegelian subject. The Hegelian traveler loses sense of time, location, directionality, and self-identity. Contemporary opposition to Hegel rarely shows indifference; repudiation requires the continued life of what is repudiated, paradoxically sustaining the “rejected Hegel.” Hegel became a rubric for positions defending the self-sufficient subject, even Cartesian views Hegel himself rejected. Early French interpreters were followed by the rebellion of the second generation—students of Hyppolite and Kojève reading Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, structuralist linguistics, and anthropology. Jean Wahl’s 1929 Le Malheur de la conscience showed Hegel as anticipating religious and existential critics. The generation following Hyppolite repudiates Hegel for being what Kojève and Hyppolite argued he never was—championing the “subject,” metaphysics of closure, excluding difference, and anti-life. Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” critiques dialectical philosophy of history while reworking lordship and bondage, and Derrida’s “The Pit and the Pyramid” considers Hegel’s theory of the sign, implicating Hegel in a metaphysics that contemporary thought seeks to dismantle.
Lacan’s Critique of Hegel and the Question of Desire
Lacan argues that man can only recognize his desire as the desire of the Other, creating an obstacle to his “fading”—a point where his desire can never be recognized. This obstacle is never lifted, as analytic experience shows the subject’s desire is constituted through a chain coming into play at the level of the Other. This chain of metonymic significations, associations, and substitutions re-presents the desire of the Other while simultaneously displacing it, deflecting any effort to know desire from its course. Lacan takes issue with Hegel for conflating eros and logos, linking all desire to the desire for self-knowledge. He credits psychoanalysis with introducing opacity into Hegel’s doctrine of desire. In Hegel, desire is responsible for the subject’s connection with ancient knowledge, and the “cunning of reason” means the subject knows what it wants from beginning to end. Freud reopens the juncture between truth and knowledge, with desire becoming bound up with the desire of the Other, and in this loop lies the desire to know. Lacan’s criticism assumes the Hegelian subject “knows what it wants,” yet this subject systematically misidentifies the object of desire. Lacan’s own term méconnaissance might describe the Hegelian subject’s misadventures. However, the “cunning of reason” may operate as a metaphysical device for transitions between chapters in the Phenomenology. The Hegelian subject constantly misidentifies the Absolute, similar to how the Lacanian subject remains lured by elusive jouissance. Lacan unjustifiably attributes Cartesian self-transparency to the Hegelian subject, disregarding the “comedy of errors” marking the Hegelian subject’s travels.
Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Understanding of the Philosophical Impulse
Lacan’s position holds that knowledge becomes relevant for human beings only insofar as they desire the desire of the Other.
Foucault’s Erotics of Dissatisfaction
The passage opens by presenting Foucault as a defender of dissatisfaction’s desirability, arguing that the failure to achieve an erotic resolution of opposites is itself an eroticizing experience. This position parallels the Deleuzian defense of affirmative erotic multiplicity. Foucault’s erotics of perpetual reversal is framed as a generative activity that resists closure. Unlike Sartre and Lacan, who lament dissatisfaction, Foucault celebrates it as a condition of perpetual erotic possibility. The failure to achieve final satisfaction becomes a significant achievement—the triumph of eros over immobilizing law, or the erotic mobilization of law itself. What a Hegelian perspective would call “futile” is reappropriated as productive, generative, and life-affirming. The normative model becomes an erotic celebration of opposition rather than its resolution. Foucault ties this to sexuality in a post-dialectical age, suggesting that the emergence of sexuality in our culture is an event of multiple values, linked to the death of God and the ontological void fixed at the limit of thought, where the interrogation of the limit replaces the search for totality and the act of transgression replaces the movement of contradictions.
Foucault’s Partial Break with Hegel
The author notes that Kojève halts the Phenomenology at the lord-bondsman struggle, while Hyppolite emphasizes the temporal flux of Life, and Sartre rewrites desire and recognition. Foucault, like Lacan, reformulates the Life and Death Struggle in contemporary terms. Both the French reception and criticism of Hegel take their bearings within Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology; even post-Hegelians remain faithful to the founding struggles of Hegel’s desiring subject. Foucault’s break appears only partial. In Hegel, simple life-affirmation is inadequate because life requires maintenance, necessitating the bondsman who labors and learns self-reflection, leading to revolt. Foucault’s discourse on life is not concerned with developing the autonomous laborer—that would posit a telos other than life, an anti-life ideal. In a Nietzschean transvaluation, Foucault values life-affirmation as the highest ideal serving life, not as part of slave morality. Life requires resistance, struggle, and Others. Foucault acknowledges that promoting life requires a way of life—a certain struggle. Sexuality has become such a way of life, a contemporary locus of struggle, due to the juridical management of reproduction for population-control politics. The colonization of reproductive technology, the medical isolation of homosexuality, the hysterization of women’s bodies, and the psychiatrization of perversions are medico-legal strategies deploying sexuality for juridical discourses. “Sex” as a univocal signifier is a politically motivated construct, as is “desire,” which misses sexuality as a complex discourse.
Eroticizing the Master-Slave Relation
Foucault envisions a thorough eroticization of the body through sadomasochistic jouissance—eroticizing domination and submission, producing inadvertent intensities and pleasures, proliferating pleasures and the entire field of sexual forces against juridical reduction. Domination does not result in oppression (a consequence of juridical power relations) but engenders creative, unexpected response. Productive power becomes erotic improvisation, the sexual version of Nietzsche’s life-affirming value creation. Like Deleuze, Foucault values life as pure possibility where restriction belongs to anti-life forces. Struggle and resistance replace the law or become malleable law—the law’s plasticity. Rigid law creates desire as lack; plastic law creates “the plenitude of the possible,” desire as creative act, innovation, and production of new cultural meanings. As in Hegel, desire reaches its limit nowhere—an “absolute impulse” satisfied only in infinite dialectical play. This jouissance (Sartre’s imaginary, Lacan’s “Being,” Deleuze and Foucault’s will-to-power affirmation) matches Hegel’s assertion that “self-consciousness is desire.”
Limits of Anti-Hegelianism
Yet these efforts cannot simply be reassimilated into Hegel’s framework. Hegel’s subject can no longer be entertained apart from its impossibility thesis. With Foucault, referring to “desire” requires asking about the specific historical discourse producing the phenomenon. Both “subject” and “desire” have undergone historicization; the presumed universality of Hegelian discourse is suspect. One must ask how this subject is constituted, under what conditions, by what means; whether concrete individuals approximate Hegel’s desiring subject; what gender they are; and whether dialectical opposition characterizes binary sex relations.
Kristeva’s Critique
Julia Kristeva stands out among French Hegel readers for critiquing Hegel from the viewpoint of an embodied, gendered individual. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), she calls Hegel’s subject a “paranoid” psychological figure denying bodily materiality and psychosomatic affective origins. “Desire” names the rationalist appropriation of drives, a logocentric resistance to the body that precedes conventional signification. Kristeva aligns with Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel, which makes explicit the real basis of the subject’s totalizing and unifying aspect, revealing that certain social relations—the family, civil society, and the State—founded on this unitary subject and his desire, are the truth of Hegelian speculation in its positivistic aspect. Like Deleuze, Kristeva sees slave morality in the subject’s hostile relation to the Other; capitalism pits individuals against each other for scarce goods. She distances herself from Marxist conclusions, agreeing with Foucault that binary class division extends rather than critiques the subject notion. Capitalism induces a schizoid disorder centered on body dissociation. Identification with a desiring subject suppressing alterity characterizes a rationalistic, paranoid personality fostered by capitalism. Kristeva concludes that in the State and in religion, capitalism requires and consolidates the paranoid moment of the subject: a unity foreclosing the body’s heterogeneity.
The Book’s Endnotes and Scholarly Apparatus
The remainder of this segment consists of the book’s endnotes, which provide scholarly depth to the preceding chapters. For Chapter 1, on Hegel, desire, rhetoric, and recognition, a note discusses Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that in “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” the “truth” opposed to the lie of a “‘slave’s existence” is itself a necessary falsehood. In Beyond Good and Evil, concepts are such necessary falsehoods, reducing multiple significations and being “dead” rather than living and fluid. The stages of the Phenomenology can be read as frozen moments in a fluid movement, necessarily false but informative if deconstructed. Another note clarifies that the “experience” of the Phenomenology is not ordinary experience but the cultivation of philosophical truths embedded within it, beginning with the philosophical assumptions of ordinary experience. A further note provides a German quotation from Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes about self-consciousness finding another self-consciousness, having come outside itself, losing itself, and sublating the Other. Another note states that for a subject whose ideal is self-sufficiency, self-estrangement is a threat, making anger a counterpart to ecstasy. An extensive note discusses the struggle for recognition, noting that Kojève and Leo Strauss interpreted this struggle as emerging from a conflict of desires over goods, but this is refuted by Ludwig Siep, who traces the concept through Hegel’s Jena writings, showing it differs from Hobbes’ conflict of interests. In the System der Sittlichkeit (1802-3), the struggle concerns the integrity of the family; in the Realphilosophie II (1805-6), it is a pursuit of property and honor by individuals seeking recognition for their common identity.
