Subjects of desire

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By JUDITH BUTLER*

Author's prefaces to the newly published book

Foreword to the second edition (1999)

Subjects of desire is my doctoral thesis, defended in 1984 and revised between 1985 and 1986. In it, I wrote about the concept of desire in Phenomenology of Spirit, by GWF Hegel, and some of the main uses of this theme in twentieth-century French philosophy. Before embarking on this research, I was a Fulbright Fellow and devoted myself to the study of Hegelianism and German idealism at the University of Heidelberg, attending the classes of Dieter Henrich and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In the early 1980s, as a student in the Philosophy Department at Yale University, I was formed in the tradition of continental philosophy, studying Marx and Hegel, phenomenology, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty and the Frankfurt School. I wrote my final paper under the supervision of Maurice Natanson, a phenomenologist who kindly supported my research, but warned that French philosophy found a reasonable limit in the work of Sartre and in some passages of Merleau-Ponty.

During my research at Yale in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was quite familiar with poststructuralist thought, but I tended to locate it outside the sphere of the continental philosophical tradition I sought to study. I occasionally attended Jacques Derrida’s class and, more frequently, Paul de Man’s. But I worked mostly within the legacy of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the Frankfurt School as I sought to establish a foundation in German idealism. In the context of a women’s studies course, I was introduced to the work of Michel Foucault.

And it was only when I left Yale and became a visiting professor and postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University, from 1983 to 1986, that I became open to French thought in a way that was different from the resistance that had existed at Yale. At the humanities center, I came into contact with French-inflected critical theory, and it was in the early stages of this contact that I was able to revise a thesis as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, published in 1987 by Columbia University Press. The final chapters of this thesis, dedicated to Deleuze, Lacan and Foucault, initially outline what I have since understood as something that deserves a more complex analysis.

I published this book in a very hasty manner, under pressure from the job market, and I have republished it now, when it is too late for revision. Any revised version of this book would, in general, be an entirely new work, a project that I do not feel ready to embark on now. Between 1985 and 1986, I was not quite ready to take the theoretical steps that I tried out in the final chapters of this book and that I did later in gender problems, published at the end of 1989. Although I am not exactly old today, this book presents itself to me – as far as I can read it – as a writing from my youth, so I ask readers to take a generous look at it.

This text is neither an exhaustive narrative of French Hegelianism nor a work of intellectual history.[I] This is a critical questioning of the repeatedly figured relationship between desire and recognition.[ii]

If I had intended a broader approach, I would have included, without a shadow of a doubt, a chapter on the work of Georges Bataille. Thus, Subjects of desire would have considered in detail the influence of Logic, by Hegel, dealing especially with the work of Jean Hyppolite, for whom the Logic offers the legitimization of essential truths revealed by the subjective experience of Phenomenology of Spirit. To the extent that Subjects of desire is dedicated to Phenomenology of Spirit, it would also be possible to include in this book a consideration of the Hegelian chapter “Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness”. Jean Wahl’s work on this subject could well be considered the best approach to Hegelian philosophy in twentieth-century France, and, in fact, it is precisely in this chapter that the entire French philosophical reception of the century begins.

Jean Wahl's short text, entitled Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929), establishes his own reading of Hegel, bringing within himself the internally divided consciousness as a support for simultaneously religious and existential aspects, emphasizing the negativity of consciousness, which plays a very prominent role in the readings undertaken later by Kojève and Hyppolite.

In 1995, I published the essay “Obstinate attachment, bodily subjection: rereading Hegel on the unhappy consciousness”, which constitutes a resumption of reflection on the Hegelian subject.[iii] There, I have sought to show how Hegel offers an unfolding of the chapter “Domination and Slavery,” which is rarely considered by those who privilege the apparently emancipatory conclusion of this section. Hegel provides a configuration of the subject in which subjection is made a psychic reality, a reality with which oppression is articulated and embedded in psychic means. I suggest that Hegel begins to expose how inversions of power gain ground as they achieve the status of a psychic reality, an explanation that is often attributed to Nietzsche and Freud.

This text relies on the available English translations of Hyppolite, Kojève and Sartre, and on selected works of essays in French due to the fact that most of Kojève's untranslated writings (including the complete translation of his Introduction to reading Hegel) remains unknown. His classes, taught between 1933 and 1939 at School from the Heights Studies, include extensive discussions of the relationship between Hegel and Kant, the place of poetic language, tragedy and religion in Phenomenology, as well as a broad approach to the figure of Christ and the meaning of Christianity that were not conveyed in the English translation collection.[iv]

Claimed, on the one hand, by the Straussian tradition of Alan Bloom, Stanley Rosen and Francis Fukuyama, and supported, on the other hand, as a Marxist by Pierre Macherey and others, Kojève remains an author difficult to understand.[v] Even though he insisted on the idea that the Hegelian text is open to a series of historical appropriations not foreseen in Hegel’s own time, his reading made it possible to open it up to a myriad of conflicting interpretations. This dilemma may well be the result of the kind of “reading” that Kojève himself calls into question, a reading that does not seek to be exactly faithful to the Hegelian letter, but rather seeks to produce new interpretations that reflect the changing historical circumstances of the reading itself.

As it moves through time, the Hegelian text continually poses the question of its own readability, all the more so because the end of history anticipated by it does not consist of the end of time and, much less, the end of the temporality of reading.[vi] The Hegelian text, perhaps in spite of itself, opens itself up to the question of the relationship between time and legibility. For Kojève, the future is no longer constrained by teleology; and the future that Hegel somehow glimpses consists precisely in what Kojève mourns as a lost idealism.

Kojève’s “reading” brings to the fore the temporality of the Hegelian text, showing that the temporality in which the text survives demands a different kind of reading, one that does not move toward progress with the same confidence as before. This dilemma of post-Hegelian temporality has led some Straussians to the conclusion that history itself must be resolved into “perennial” themes, and it has also led Althusserians to claim that a structuralist analysis of society, stripped of the presumption of diachrony, is the preferable conclusion.

However, it is possible to derive from Kojève another perspective, such that temporality is irreducible to historicity and even to teleology. The temporality of the concept is neither static nor teleological, but requires a doubly inverted reading that knows no closure, and which undoubtedly displeases common sense, but without which no approach to Hegel is possible.

The speculative statement that Hegel brings in his Logic highlights this problem of temporality as a reading dilemma. It is not possible to expect language to transparently show what it says, nor can it be expected that this truth be found outside of language. Truth is not what is offered to the narrative of Phenomenology, and yet it manifests itself only through its own presentation. The statement moves in such a way that the familiar is made unfamiliar, and this participates in the grammar common to the statement itself. This becomes especially true when we consider the grammatical function of “negation,” a term that not only suffers semantically from the change of meaning, but also “acts” in essential ways in the unfolding of fundamental truths.

These functions of “negation” evoke the common jokes about Hegel made by contemporary analysts who insist that the philosopher can be simplified or rejected outright. However, Hegel has other plans in mind when he states in Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, that the speculative proposition destroys the general nature of the proposition. The question is not what can be done with the logical sense of negation in Hegel, but how the use of negation in his philosophy calls up the problem of our understanding of logical relations.

Denial emerges in countless forms in Phenomenology, and not merely in the service of assimilating or domesticating the logical operation that subjugates the alterities that confront it. In the section “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” consciousness denies its objects by consuming them; in the section “Domination and Slavery,” negation appears first as the effort of the two figures to annihilate each other, and then to be transmuted into relations of domination and slavery. In what sense does negation “appear” through these multiple figures? And in what way is it possible to understand these transmutations undergone by the appearance of negation?

I suggest that, in Phenomenology, these figures emerge to describe a moment in which a stable logical status has not yet been achieved; such figures mark, in fact, the instability of logical relations. On the other hand, however, every logical relation assumes a form or appearance that is figurative. If we are willing to read Hegel, what might this reading produce in a grammar designed to express logical relations (the Husserlian idea in logical investigations and, likewise, the early Wittgenstein)?

It is customary to read the Phenomenology with the certainty that there is in it the description of a stable reality only to oppose the stubbornness of descriptive language itself. We think we know at every textual moment what the negation “is” or does, only to find, when we follow the course of its action and actually read it, that our primary convictions were completely unfounded. In other words, it is precisely this that impedes our knowledge itself. The language that, as we thought, corresponded to the reality of the negation, in the end took part in the activity itself, acquired its own negative function, and in fact became subject to the negation itself. Thus the language of the text presented its properly rhetorical character, and then we discovered that there was no difference between the question of logic and that of rhetoric. In the same way, no cognitive statement can be separated from the practice of reading: the temporality of the concept is, after all, not separable from the temporality of reading.

One of the most current French readers of Hegel, Gérard Lebrun (2006), in The patience of the concept: an essay on Hegelian discourse, maintains a similar position by claiming the possibility of a Hegelian dogmatism, showing how Hegel's discourse actively initiates the reader into a new form of philosophical thought.[vii] Just as for Kojève, so for Lebrun the reading of Hegel must traverse a past temporality (an idea of ​​the future that is past), so that the reading of Hegelian grammar in relation to the demands of speculative affirmation is interpreted “retroactively”, only to discover that the presuppositions that animated this reading, in turn and in themselves, will be led to a turnaround that does not precisely undo what was done (that is, in a strictly grammatical sense, they put into action a certain idea of ​​negation inherent in interpretation in itself).

Jean Luc-Nancy supports this position in another way in his recent Hegel: l'inquiétude du negatif.[viii] For him, the subject is not only trapped within itself, but also fundamentally defined as an act by which the self overcomes itself in its passage into and towards the world. The subject disperses itself in the world, and this self-overcoming consists precisely in the operation of its negativity. Nancy's work frees Hegel from the trope of totality, insisting on the fact that the “restlessness” of the self consists precisely in its mode of becoming, its lack of substantiality in time, and its very specific expression of freedom.

Thus, this work is important rhetorically because, instead of a systematic Hegelian exegesis, it offers a discontinuous set of meditations on the Phenomenology through key terms through which the author addresses the issue of freedom. Who expects that Phenomenology of Hegel, an illustrious clear teleology finds, in this text, a kind of productive confusion.[ix]

Indeed, the status of teleology appears to be significantly controversial within the twentieth-century French approach to Hegel. Although it was in the context of French philosophy that Hegel ultimately became synonymous with totality, conceptual domination, and the imperialist subject, the French appropriation of Hegel also called into question the totalizing and teleological presumptions of his philosophy. More often than not, in fact, the marks of a distinctively “post-Hegelian” position are not so easily separable from an appropriative reading of Hegel himself.

In particular, Kojève’s texts are pertinent insofar as they question the emergence of a time after the end of history, thus signaling a closure to teleology that does not exactly consist of a teleological closure, but rather an end that is supported, above all, by the lines of a certain rupture, interruption and loss. Although Althusser described Kojève’s work as “foolish”, he took seriously his effort to consider Hegelian teleology as anthropocentrism.[X]

Louis Althusser's youthful reflections on Hegel develop an immanent critique of Kojève's view, claiming that the author was responsible for a subjective dimension of negativity that led to the exclusion of the objective dimension. The attempt to reduce the work of negativity to the subject would therefore consist of a bourgeois revisionism that affirms the individual at the expense of his objective situation (Althusser, 1997, p. 171).

And when objectivity returns in Hegel, it is devoid of its specifically economic content, which leads to valuing a philosophically abstract notion of equality and democracy to the detriment of that which is forged from the class struggle. To the extent that he reads Kojève's Hegel through the lens of the young Marx, so that both Hegel and Marx are understood as the affirmation of the subjective dimension of negation, Althusser states that “Kojève's existentialist Marx is a farce in which Marxists will not recognize themselves” (Althusser, 1997, p. 172).

Although Althusser devotes many essays to Hegel in his Écrits philosophiques et politiques, in which he presents a critique of Hegelian abstraction and begins the practice of an immanent critique that articulates a totality without a subject, he rushes to insult, in particular, Hegel and French Hegelianism. Althusser praises Kojève ambivalently: “His book is more than a Introduction to reading Hegel: it is the resurrection of a corpse or, better, the revelation that Hegel, a dismantled thinker, torn to pieces, trampled on and betrayed, haunts and profoundly dominates a posthumous era” (Althusser, 1997, p. 171).

Then, he emphasizes in the same tone with which he despises the irrelevance of Hegelian philosophy: “this dead god, covered with insults and buried more than 100 times, rises from his grave” (Althusser, 1997, p. 174). Finally, Althusser accuses Hegel’s philosophy not only of making possible the glorification of status quo bourgeois, but also to support a “fascist-type” revisionism (Althusser, 1997, p. 183).

Pierre Macherey's recently published book (1990), Hegel or Spinoza, is clearly influenced by Althusser, but takes more seriously the critical potential of Hegelian philosophy.[xi] By contrasting Spinoza and Hegel, Macherey asks himself how each of their philosophical positions defines the necessary limits of one for the other. The author defends a dialectical conception of history supported by the theological assumption that there is a certain “struggle of tendencies that do not carry within themselves the promise of a resolution, […] of a unity of opposites, but without the negation of the negation.”[xii]

In opposition to Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey considers that there is a certain sense of the Hegelian subject that remains irreducible to the ordinary use of predicative judgments. The Hegelian subject is one for whom, within grammar, the stable relationship between subject and predicate becomes incomplete. Thus, as a reader of the Althusserian tradition, Macherey still supports an interpretation that is in line with the readings of Lebrun and Nancy, affirming the conception of a subject understood as a mere term in the process that it seeks to achieve, someone who has no substance and for whom the absence of limits destroys the grammatical function itself.

The review I would have done of Subjects of desire would include Jacques Derrida's (1991) original critique of the Hegelian conceptualization in The well and the pyramid, as well as the later revision and reworking of his perspective in Lacoue-Labarthe's introduction to Typographies and in the book Glass, written by Derrida himself.[xiii] A complete analysis would also have included, without a shadow of a doubt, a chapter dedicated to Luce Irigaray's many engagements with Hegelian work, especially the text “The Eternal Irony of the Community”, in Speculum of the Other Women, as well as his reflections on the philosopher's work, kinship and universality in Sexes and Parentage.

Frantz Fanon's approach to Hegel can also be read as a very relevant appropriation of Kojève's thesis on the centrality of desire within the struggle for recognition and the constitution of the subject (and the problematic mimicry of work as a constitutive condition for recognition).

My interest in the Hegelian legacy was not exactly overshadowed by the rather hasty publication of this book. I have taught a number of courses on Hegel and contemporary theory, and I continue to be interested in the way Hegel is read and misread in the context of the creation, establishment, and dissemination of structuralism. In a sense, all of my work can be traced back to certain Hegelian questions: what is the relation between desire and recognition? How does the constitution of the subject form a radical and constitutive relation to otherness?

I am currently working on a book to be published in the Wellek Library Studies series, in which I consider the centrality of Hegel's writing on Antigone in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Principles of the philosophy of law e Esthetic. In this text, I dedicate myself to the way in which Antigone is systematically misinterpreted by Hegel in the provocative way in which she understands her criminal act, an eruption of an alternative legality within the public sphere of law.

To the extent that, in my reading, Antigone fulfills the function of the subject in Hegelian writing, she raises the question about the political limits of the subject as a starting point for politics. Hegel remains very important here, so that this subject is not stuck in its proper place, but acts through a critical mobility that may well be useful for future appropriations of Hegelian philosophy. The emergent subject of Phenomenology, by Hegel, is an ek-static subject, which is constantly outside itself and whose periodic expropriations do not lead to an encounter with a previous version of itself.

In fact, the self that is made other for itself, for whom ek-stasis consists of a certain condition of existence, it is that for which there is no possible return, for which there is no ultimate recovery of the loss of self. I would suggest that the notion of “difference” is equally misinterpreted when considered circumscribed to the interior of the subject: the encounter of the Hegelian subject with difference is not resolved in identity. On the contrary, the moment of its “resolution” is, finally, indistinguishable in relation to the moment of its dispersion; the thought about this temporality crossed by a vector is important to the Hegelian understanding of infinity, offering a notion of subject that cannot remain bound in front of the world.

Misrecognition does not present itself as a distinctly Lacanian correction in relation to which the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers the loss of himself. This subject does not suffer from what he himself desires – it is, on the contrary, the action that perpetually displaces him. Hegel, therefore, does not offer a new subjective theory or a definitive displacement of the subject, but rather a displaced definition, for which there will be no type of final restitution.

Foreword to the first edition (1987)

Em A Streetcar Named Desire, a play by Tennessee Williams, the character Blanche DuBois describes her own journey: “They told me to take a streetcar called Desire, then change to another called Cemetery, go six blocks and get off at the Champs-Elysees!” (Williams, 1980, p. 31). When she hears that her sad current location is the Champs-Elysees, she is certain that she has been given the wrong coordinates. Her dilemma is implicitly philosophical. What kind of journey makes desire such an illusory path?

And what kind of vehicle is desire? Will this vehicle have other stops before reaching its mortal destination? This question accompanies the journey of desire, the travels of a desiring subject who remains nameless and genderless on the path of his abstract universality. It would not be possible to recognize him at the train station; it cannot be said that he exists as an individual.

As an abstract structure of human longing, this subject consists of a certain conceptual configuration of human agency and purpose whose claim to ontological integrity is successively challenged by its own journeys. Indeed, like Blanche and her journey, the desiring subject follows a narrative of desire, deception, and defeat, buttressed by occasional moments of recognition, sources of merely fleeting redemption.

In the introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit, by Hegel, the desire of this subject is structured by philosophical claims: he wants to know himself, but also to discover, within the confines of himself, the entirety of the external world; he wants, in fact, to discover his desire over the full domain of otherness as a reflection of himself, not only to incorporate it into the world, but also to externalize it and improve the limits of himself.[xiv] Although Kierkegaard speculated aloud whether such a subject really exists, and Marx criticized the Hegelian concept as the product of a mystified idealism, the French reception of Hegel took the theme of desire as a starting point for its own critique and reformulation.

The works of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite describe the subject of Hegelian desire from a more narrow set of philosophical aspirations. For Kojève, the subject is necessarily confined within a post-historical time, so that Hegelian metaphysics participates, at least partially, in the past. For Hyppolite, the subject of desire consists of a paradoxical agency whose satisfaction is necessarily linked to the temporal demands of human existence. Jean-Paul Sartre's dualist ontology signals a break with the supposed unity between the subject's desire and its world, but the dissatisfaction necessary for desire conditions the imaginary search for the Hegelian ideal.

Indeed, for Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, the purpose of desire consists in the production and search for imaginary objects and Others. And, based on the work of Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the subject of Hegelian desire is criticized in itself as an absolutely imaginary construction. For Lacan, desire does not designate autonomy, and only after conforming to the repressive law does it qualify as pleasure; for Deleuze, desire fails to describe the disunity of affects understood by the Nietzschean will to power; for Foucault, desire is, in itself, historically produced and regulated, and the subject is always “subjected”. In fact, the “subject” now appears as the false imposition of an organized and autonomous self within a discontinuous experience.

The French reception of Hegel can be read as a succession of criticisms against the subject of desire, a Hegelian concept of a totalizing impulse that, for many reasons, has ceased to be plausible. And yet, a careful reading of the main chapters of Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates that, as an artisan of irony, Hegel himself constructed this concept and that his vision is less “totalizing” than is generally assumed. Thus, the French critics of Hegel present themselves by founding refutations of the philosopher in terms that, ironically, end up consolidating his original position. The subject of desire remains a fiction even for those who claim to have definitively solved his riddles.

This investigation does not offer an intellectual history of the French reception of Hegel, nor does it serve as a sociology of knowledge inherent in twentieth-century French intellectual trends. Nor is it the history of a lineage of influence between the authors discussed here. Readers seeking a clear understanding of the works of Kojève and Hyppolite must expect a different kind of study. This is the philosophical narrative of a highly influential trope, the mapping of its genesis in Phenomenology of Spirit, its multiple reformulations in Kojève and Hyppolite, its persistence as a nostalgic ideal in Sartre and Lacan, and contemporary efforts to expose its fully fictional status based on Deleuze and Foucault.

Although this trope often functions where explicit references to Hegel are absent, its reappearance is no less provocative here than in contemporary theories that claim that the subject of desire is dead.

*Judith Butler is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She authored, among other books by Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (Authentic).

Reference


Judith Butler. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century France. Translation: Beatriz Zampieri, Carla Rodrigues, Gabriel Lisboa Ponciano and Nathan Teixeira. Authenticity, Belo Horizonte, 2024, 300 pages. [https://amzn.to/3WKkWhP]

Notes


[I] For an excellent work of intellectual history with an extensive bibliography, see Roth, Michael S. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

[ii] "Recognition.” The theme of the reconhecimento (recognition) is fundamental to Hegelian philosophy and to Butler's investigation of desire. It is necessary, however, to note the presence of another term frequently translated as “recognition” in the translations

[iii] Clarke, David; Rajan, Tilottama (ed.). Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory. Albany: Suny, 1995. Reprinted in Hegel is past, Hegel is coming. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995. See also my book The psychic life of power: theories of subjection. Translated by Rogério Bettoni. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017 [The Psychic Life of Power: Essays in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997].

[iv] The French edition, originally published by Gallimard in 1947, has an important appendix entitled “L'Idée de la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel”, which was not translated in the English version. For the English edition, see Queneau, Raymond (ed.); Bloom, Allan (ed.). (1969). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

[v] For a recent intellectual bibliography, see Auffret, Dominique. Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l'Etat, la fin de l'Histoire. Paris: Grasset, 1990.

[vi] The thesis of the contingency of the end of history is indicated by Hegel himself at the end of Phenomenology of Spirit, in which “infinity” exceeds the historical domain, but also when one reads the Phenomenology in the context of Logic and the specific temporality of the concept developed in the work.

[vii] It can be said that Lebrun expands on Kojève’s provocations in the essay “La Terminologie hégélienne”. See Lebrun, Gérard. The Patience of the Concept. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. [Ed. bras.: The patience of the concept: an essay on Hegelian discourse. Translated by Silvio Rosa Filho. New York: Unesp Publishing, 2006.]

[viii] Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1997. English edition: Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Translated by Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. See also Nancy's work on the speculative sentence in La Remarque speculative: Hegel's bon mot (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1973).

[ix] See the translation and commentary on Hegel’s text “How Common Sense Understands Philosophy” by Jean-Marie Lardic, in which the author argues that the contingency and radical disorientation of common sense are fundamental to the meaning of dialectics (Lardic, Jean-Marie.Comment le sens commun comprend la philosophie suivi de la contingence chez Hegel. Paris: Actes Sud, 1989).

[X] Althusser writes: “Hegelian history is not biological, providential, or mechanical, for these three schemes imply an exteriority. The negative dimension by which history is constituted by and for itself […] is not outside history, but within itself: the nothingness by which history is engendered and through which it takes possession of itself and restores itself to its generation is within itself. This nothingness is man” (Althusser, Louis. Écrits philosophiques et politiques. Paris: Stock; lMEC, 1994. t. I.p. 136; Althusser, Louis. The Specter of Hegel. Early Writings. Edited by GF Matheron. Translated by GM Goshgarian. London: Verso, 1997).

[xi] See also Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre; Macherey, Pierre. Hegel and Society. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. In this book, the discussion on the Principles of the philosophy of law, by Hegel, emphasizes the inversion between the “beginning” and the “end” in the text, scrambling the prevailing notions of teleological development.

[xii] Macherey, Hegel and Society, p. 259, author’s translation.

[xiii] I published a brief analysis of Derrida's early considerations on Hegel in the article “Commentary on Joseph Flay's 'Hegel, Derrida, and Bataille's Laughter'” (In:

[xiv] "Self.” Whenever possible, the translation of “self-”, when it appears as a prefix, was transported to the Portuguese prefix “auto-”, while “self”, noun, was translated as “si


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