"I couldn't possibly love such a person": Judith Butler on Hegel

Bruce Robbins "I couldn't possibly love such a person": Judith Butler on Hegel1 In 1987, three years before Gender Trouble made her the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States,Judith Butler published a book on Hegel's dialectic of Lordship and Bondage and its impact on twentieth-century French thought. The book had nothing to say about bondage in the recreational sense and, aside from a few pages at the end about Julia Kristeva and Simone de Beauvoir, was mostly indifferent to questions of sexuality. It is sexual politics that has generated Butler's present celebrity, which has no doubt facilitated the republication of the Hegel book—unchanged except for an astringently self-critical new preface—but does not guarantee it will be read. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France is often overlooked in accounts of Butler's career, especially polemical ones. It is the one book left unmentioned, for example , in last year's much-discussed broadside by Martha Nussbaum. To catch Butler in the act of not thinking about sex is no doubt less interesting to Butler's more gladiatorial critics than skewering her for sins deconstructive. Some will certainly find it inconvenient that, as this book reveals, her anti-identity politics was more shaped by Hegel than by Derrida. Like Freud, Hegel told a story about the emergence of the self. One thing Butler seems to prefer about Hegel's version is that there is no sex in it, or at least no biologically-given sexual identity. Hegel describes the coming to self-consciousness of a heretofore undefined being by way of a life-and-death struggle with another undefined being. It is the struggle itself, and not any characteristics of either, that turns one into the Lord, the other into the Bondsman. Further struggle will take these identities away again. The story famously centers on a reversal in which weak and strong change places, and it gestures toward an eventual endpoint (though one that is never achieved in the Phenomenology) involving reciprocal recognition among equals. In the poststructuralist tradition with which Butler has come to be associated, however, both this democratic ending and the shared, identity-resistant starting-point (which the ending in a sense reaffirms) are abandoned. When Nietzsche retells Hegel's story in his Genealogy ofMorals, for example, the identities of Lord and Bondsman are given at the outset. Some of us are lambs, and some are birds of prey; some are strong, and some are weak. That's just the way it is. And what Nietzsche adds at the beginning of the story, he takes away from the end. The moment of Hegelian reversal —the revolt of the weak against the strong that produces Chris- 264 the minnesota review tianity—becomes for Nietzsche a misguided and even tragic departure from this initial alterity Hence the sequel must involve not transcending this alteritybut conserving it. For Nietzsche and even more so for the French Nietzscheanism that has followed, including Foucault's, the most powerful ethical imperative has been to protect a mysteriously pre-given, all but sacred otherness from the apparently benevolent humanism that threatens to violate it, its syntheses and resolutions promising emancipation and equality but delivering only appropriation and defilement. For this anti-humanist tradition, Hegel's dialectic of self and other must be arrested in mid-course. It is by arresting the dialectic, however, that you leave yourself with such fixed species of identity as "the feminine" or "the lesbian ." And Butler's later impatience with that identitarian result can now be read back into her early enthusiasm for Hegel's dialectic , her willingness to let it play out or at least to hold open the question of whether those who stop it short do so out of philosophical tough-mindedness or political faint-heartedness, as a proper chastening of Hegel's imperial ambitions or as a retreat from the world into what Butler terms "linguistic idealism." Butler remains ambivalent about Hegel; she does not allow him to offer a definitive commentary on his successors. But even to raise the possibility that Nietzsche's French heritage might be better seen as a fearful, truncated , and...