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Four The Dialectic of Desire IN “THE ‘UNCANNY’,” Freud tells us a personal anecdote of when he once encountered an unsavory old man on a train, until he realized that he was staring at his image in a full-length mirror at the end of his compartment.1 This experience of misrecognition points to the uncanny powers of projection and personal alienation, a theme that preoccupies spirit’s self-estrangement lost in the intersubjective field of the Other. For Hegel, self-consciousness initially does not recognize itself in the face of the other; it is only through the struggle for recognition that spirit eventually comes to identify with its alienated structure and properly reclaim its desire as its own. But as Hegel informs us, even in alienation, “the self-conscious subject knows itself to be implicitly identical with the general object external to it” (EG § 427, Zusatz). As alienated desire, self-conscious spirit is aware of its own liberated ego even if such awareness is unconscious. From this standpoint, there is a real uncanniness to self-consciousness, for there is a familiar unfamiliarity with its primordial lost self-certainty manifest within the gaze of the other. Alienation is thus the appearance of absence, of lack, a repetition as the return of its original prefamiliarity with its unconscious nature, a return of the repressed. The problem of alienation and spirit’s struggle for recognition has received overwhelming attention in the Hegel literature, influencing the rise of Marxism and critical theory, French phenomenology, and the psychoanalytic movement initiated by Lacan. Within this context, there has been almost an exclusive fixation on the master-slave dialectic introduced in the Phenomenology. It is interesting to note that Hegel’s treatment of desire and recognition is contrasted differently in the Encyclopaedia Phenomenology and the Berlin Phenomenology from that of his Jena period. The most notable difference in his later writings is his scant discussion of self-consciousness in comparison to his original work, and that his famous section on “Freedom of Self-Consciousness,” thereby explicating stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness, has been entirely purged. 135 Hegel’s master-slave discussion, or what we may refer to as lord and servant , and more generally the “relationship of mastery [Herrschaft] and servitude [Knechtschaft]” (EG § 433), is given the briefest summation in the Encyclopaedia. This is undoubtedly why almost all interpretations of desire and recognition rely exclusively on the Jena Phenomenology. It is interesting to note that the terms master and slave may be translated differently, although most scholars agree that the actual arguments in the two books appear to be essentially compatible. Herrschaft is customary translated as lordship, although supreme rule, reign, and governorship are the main implications. Der Herr means Lord, also God, but today it is used as a polite address for any male, thus, Mister. At Hegel’s time, however, “Herr” was reserved for wealthy landowners, sometimes of nobility, not for the average man. In his days, one would have expected the servants of a count and countess to refer to their employers as “die Herrschaft.” Knechtschaft is typically rendered as bondage; however, it is difficult to find an exact English equivalent for Knechtschaft. Today, the word bondage has sexual connotations and this is far from what Hegel had intended.2 Knecht means farmhand , but it is often translated as servant, serf, or slave. A Knecht is someone who works the land without owning it, but who is a free man—not a slave, although poor. Knechtschaft is a state of living in material dependence on another person, often without the ability to leave, and working for them under austere circumstances . Knechtschaft can also be symbolic: for instance, one could say that someone who lives in a country that offers no freedom of speech and no human rights lives in servitude. The exact translation of “serf” would be ein Leibeigener. Der Leibeigener, in contrast to the Knecht, would physically be a property of his Herr, and work his land. He could be sold, but generally only together with the land. Der Sklave is the translation of “slave” and obviously means that the person is considered a thing. While Knecht refers to a singular person, Schaft suggests the relational involvement of several people or what John Russon calls the “institutional”3 character of this situation. In standard discussions of Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness, desire is portrayed as self-consciousness itself, the truth of self-certainty. Although this position is explicitly outlined by Hegel...

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