Subjects of Desire

Summary

Butler examines the influence of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on 20th-century French philosophy. Influenced by Alexandre Kojève, she follows and expands upon his definition of desire as the feeling of an absence or lack. Hegelian desire is in this sense a desire for non-being or death.

While Butler ultimately calls for a rejection of standard Hegelianism, this moving forward itself represents a triumph for Hegel's dialectical method of the negation of difference.

Influenced by psychoanalysis she sees the subject as having to lose identity before becoming itself. The sense of self is lost in desire, as desire is a pull towards an Other. It is a hunger for that which is not present within.

Butler reinterprets Hegel's category of sublation to be the developing sequence of the subject's desire for recognition.

Butler uses Hegel's category of sense-certainty, to question whether the subject can truly ever be aware of its on gendered sexuality. Sexual identity is hence formed in the unconscious. The creation of the "I" of sexual identity is also a radical concealment.

In the battle of recognition between the Master and Slave, the ultimate Lord is death. Hence the triumph of the Master, is not the victory of any subject or man, but of death and desire itself. Death and desire are inherently linked. And all desire is ultimately a wish for that which is not, a wish for suicide. Desire is the impetus towards non-existence. Death is the ultimate fulfillment of all human desires. It is this embrace of death that is true mastery. Slavery is the fear of ceasing to be.

Reception and influence

Butler's interpretation of Hegel-Kojève's master–slave dialectic has been applied by feminist theory to the gender relations between man and woman.