Chapter II: Ek-static Relational Subjectivity

Butler’s Hegel

Let us begin by first noting the importance Hegel places in The Phenomenology of Spirit, on the relational nature of subjectivity. He does this by first proposing that to attain true self-consciousness human subjectivity must go outside itself and recognize another self-consciousness, and thus be recognized by that self-consciousness in return. This is captured nicely by Robert R. Williams who reminds us that Hegel’s subject is emphatically not a “stable, quiescent self-identity.” No such self-satisfied subject could possibly kick start a phenomenology of consciousness. As many commentators have alluded to, Hegel’s break from Spinoza’s monism is fuelled by the emphasis he placed on the negativity of consciousness; a “complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity.” What drives consciousness beyond itself is a self-repulsing negativity. It is important to note that consciousness is “not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself.” Consciousness that does not yet know what it is: “What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it” (Williams 1997, 52). The story of the Phenomenology is thus the story of this loss of an original naive certitude.¹⁵ This loss of naive certitude takes place in a scene of recognition in which an original self-consciousness looks over and sees an other.

That Butler’s reading of Hegel beguiles many readers is due in part to her treatment of the nature of the other.¹⁶ For Butler even the very act of ‘thinking’ is indelibly marked by a necessary reference to an other, of going outside oneself into alterity. To think at all is to engage that which is other to oneself, to participate “in a set of structures or conventions” that exceed one, that are part of the “broad structures of communicability.” The very personal process of forming thoughts, “does not just belong to me, it belongs to others ...” (2009c). Butler’s describes this sense of self-loss as a form of dispossession. One could in fact risk the charge and claim the ‘essence’ of Butler’s theory of the subject is its dispossession by the other. It is a subject whose very being means being beyond itself. The subject is this upending, perpetual and perpetually changing relation to the other. Reacting against political analyses that situate subjects as consolidated, stable identities, she remains critical of liberal contract theory and state of nature descriptions that come prepared to install a methodological individualism as the core feature of political subjectivity.

In Subjects of Desire Butler reads Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a journey of the Hegelian subject and its motor, the dialectic: “In reading for multiple meanings, for plurivocity, ambiguity, and metaphor in the general sense, we experience concretely the inherent movement of dialectical thinking, the essential alteration of reality” (1987, 19). This is very different from a reading of Hegel that locates in his work an inner logic and immanent unfolding of the categories of pure thought. For example, Butler explains a key transition from consciousness to self-consciousness as follows: “Consciousness gives rise to self-consciousness in the bungled attempt to explain what it knows” (1987, 28). This sentence would mystify a more traditional reader of Hegel whose understanding of the dialectical unfolding of categories leaves no room for ‘bungling.’ For example the British Hegelian Stephen Houlgate outlines the strict logical transitions that detail the necessary emergence of self-consciousness in his study of the Phenomenology.¹⁷

For Butler all dialectical movement is a configuration of desire. She puts less emphasis on testing the logical transition of categories and prefers to note instead the endless shifting of meanings. Meaning is constructed in Hegel’s text rhetorically. For example, she focuses her attention on the copula “is” in order to illustrate the cyclical process of meaning creation in Hegel’s text:

When Hegel states "Substance is Subject," the "is" carries the burden of "becomes," where becoming is not a unilinear but a cyclical process. Hence, we read the sentence wrong if we rely on the ontological assumptions of linear reading, for the "is" is a nodal point of the interpenetration of both "Substance" and "Subject"; ... To read the sentence right would mean to read it cyclically, or to bring to bear the variety of partial meanings it permits on any given reading. Hence, it is not just that substance is being clarified, or that the subject is being defined, but the very meaning of the copula is itself being expressed as a locus of movement and plurivocity ... This multiplicity of meanings is not static ... but is the essence of becoming, of movement itself. (Butler 1987, 18-19)

To state the obvious, Butler cautions against a linear reading of Hegel.¹⁸ She prefers reading the dialectic as a rhetoric of persuasion than a logical exegesis of the categories of thought. For Butler consciousness only comes to a greater understanding of itself and its place in the world by setting up obstacles in its path. The forming of a subject in the Phenomenology is a reiterative process, with the important distinction that the subject never ever returns to itself the same as it was before. Each time it is changed by its encounter with alterity, and though it may return in order to start anew, each starting point begins with the subject a touch wiser for its failing. Butler’s emphasis on the rhetorical nature in which meaning is produced in the Phenomenology sets her apart from other contemporary readers of Hegel who are more concerned with the nature of the logical transitions and categorical distinctions. Hegelian dialectical method read rhetorically means that self-consciousness is, in its journey, ek-static or constantly beyond itself in an alterity that it neither created nor controls.¹⁹ Insisting on self-loss in the Other incites bouts of Cartesian inflected anxiety for some readers, nevertheless Butler’s ek-static subject may just be the quintessential Hegelian reading of Hegel. Butler reads Hegel as constantly beyond himself, in that his thought never settles down into a static permanence:

The gradual yet insistent effort of Hegel’s journeying subject ... never relinquishes this project to relate itself to externality in order to rediscover itself as more inclusive being. The insurpassability of externality implies the permanence of desire. [I]nsofar as Hegel’s subject never achieves a static union with externality, it is hopelessly beyond its own grasp, although it retains as its highest aim the thorough comprehension of itself. (1987, 44)