Subjects of Desire [Paperback]

Judith Butler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0231064519 | ISBN-13: 978-0231064514 0

This now classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the trajectory of desire and its genesis from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit through its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, presenting how French reception of Hegel posed successive challenges to his metaphysics and view of the subject and revealed ambiguities within his position. Subjects of Desire provides a sophisticated account of the post-Hegelian tradition that has predominated in modern France and remains timely in thinking about contemporary debates concerning desire, the unconscious, subjection, and the subject.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Butler's book...is an outstanding one, and deserves to be read by anyone interested in the question of the survival(s) of Hegel in contemporary French philosophy. -- Allan Stoekl Annals of Scholarship

What her account suggests is that the most damaging aspect of contemporary French Hegel reception is that its highly critical emphasis on the metaphysical issues of identity, rationality, and historical closure have so obscured Hegel's original idealism, especially his theory of reflection, that the rejection of Hegel brings with it, with a kind of dialectical necessity, the return of the pre-Hegelian, even the pre-Kantian, a kind of naive hope for 'immediacy' and, paradoxically, a commitment to a realism that the idealist tradition was to have finished off. -- Review

What her account suggests is that the most damaging aspect of contemporary French Hegel reception is that its highly critical emphasis on the metaphysical issues of identity, rationality, and historical closure have so obscured Hegel's original idealism, especially his theory of reflection, that the rejection of Hegel brings with it, with a kind of dialectical necessity, the return of the pre-Hegelian, even the pre-Kantian, a kind of naive hope for 'immediacy' and, paradoxically, a commitment to a realism that the idealist tradition was to have finished off. -- Robert B. Pippin The Philosophical Review

Review

What her account suggests is that the most damaging aspect of contemporary French Hegel reception is that its highly critical emphasis on the metaphysical issues of identity, rationality, and historical closure have so obscured Hegel's original idealism, especially his theory of reflection, that the rejection of Hegel brings with it, with a kind of dialectical necessity, the return of the pre-Hegelian, even the pre-Kantian, a kind of naive hope for 'immediacy' and, paradoxically, a commitment to a realism that the idealist tradition was to have finished off.

(Robert B. Pippin, The Philosophical Review )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231064519
• ISBN-13: 978-0231064514
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #123,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Psychic Life of Power, Excitable Speech, Bodies that Matter, Gender Trouble, Frames of War, and with Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.






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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hegel in France, June 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Subjects of Desire (Paperback)

Judith Butler, who is nowadays best known for her theory of "performative" gender differenciation, wrote her thesis about the reception of Hegel's philosophy in France. The book is not an exhaustive overview of Hegelian reflections as they appeared, in various forms, in the twentieth century France, but it certainly does include the most important of them (except for Georges Bataille, whose version of Hegelianism is not mentioned in the book, but in her new preface, Judith Butler herself admits this absence). In the first part of the book, Butler deals with Kojeve's and Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel's Phenomenology, while the second part is concerned with Sartre, Lacan, Foucault and Deleuze. Even though the book doesn't bring anything new to those who are already familiar with the work of the thinkers mentioned above, it may be read as an extremely clear and concise introduction to the French Hegelianism.