a truckload of thoughts and provocations, so I'll only comment on a few:...
-----Original Message----- From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at tsoft.com>
>Intellectually, it is important to keep the French revolution
>separated from its idealizations, and inspirational expressions.
you certainly can't reduce them to this, and nor can you maker these stand in for an explanation/analysis of the writings themselves. but there is another sense in which it might be useful to think of our perpetual return - something which you've already hinted at as I read - to kant, hegel, marx, and others. that the aporias of bourgeois life are here the very stuff of discussion, and that life is still with us.
... Part of
>that appropriation was the supreme position that the concept of Self
>occupies. I don't mean mere egotism. I mean the celebration of Self
as
>something fundamental and universal to humanity, nature, and the
>cosmos.
but also, and I think more decisively, of the self as origin. this being the counterclaim against monarchic and religious authority, the very idea of revolution as set down for us by the French revolution and its various expressions. the question of the failure of revolutions is posed first by the French revolution, and subsequently by every designated revolution since. by failure, I don't mean they didn't succeed in establishing a new, or somewhat new set of social relationships, but more in the senses of the distance to be traversed between promise and actuality, especially that of the promises of human rights, etc and the actuality of neo-liberal capitalism. (in this context, and relating to your remarks below on the unfolding of essence in history, I think that the whole idea of essence and its relation to appearance, have been rendered highly problematic.... that is, if the self is regarded as origin, the self as perpetual origin regarded as essence - as in the principles of reason, etc - and history/actuality as appearance, then the failures of the bourgeois revolution have to be accounted for somehow. if we do this explaining from within a notion of essence and appearance, then I think we are either destined for depression (the loss of hope where hope was regarded as eventual redemption through revelation of essence); or we choose to abandon the essence bit but not the appearance (a la rorty, fukuyama, baudrillard, lyotard); or we attempt a critique of the whole idea of history, of the dialectic, as the relation between essence and appearance.
I'm also thinking that here - for me - is an explanation of racism and sexism in particular: that the failure of the French revolution is reinscribed as an attribute ( and one replete with physicality and beyond or prior to 'society') of certain categories of people. (here's my pitch once again for why I don't think racism and sexism are pre-modern; but rather the most clear way of papering over the contradictions between ostensible essence of bourgeois subjectivity and actuality of bourgeois life.)
>So, connecting the dots, you see the link to Butler. She centers
>Psychic Lives squarely about Hegel's concept of Self. I can not
>support this at the moment, but if you think about this centrality,
>and then consider that Hegel conflated Mind with Universe, you see
the
>boundary seems to disappear between World and Self, one is the other
>and vice versa.
despite claims to the contrary, I think butler's reading of Hegel is too indebted to kojeve's rather anthropological reading, which is why the master-slave stuff becomes the point of departure and framework of her discussion. kojeve's reading of Hegel is more openly a matter of dispute in Europe, or at least the recognition that kojeve's reading is not the only available (albeit most dominant) one, where things like spirit, bone, universe, contract, property, etc were also regarded as important to an understanding of Hegel. briefly, the problem with Kojeve is that he attaches far too much centrality to the rather brief passages in phenomenology in which Hegel talks about the lord and bondsman, that is to a particular figuration of the dialectic. there are other figurations of relations between self and other in Hegel: marriage, contract, for instance; as there are different moments of the 'unfolding' which are designated as prior to or beyond self. Hegel is hard going, and secondary texts sure make him easier to wade through; but there is a tendency to mistake secondary texts as exhaustive, as providing the only explanatory principle of those texts.
.....>
>But the strange connections keep threading themselves in my
>mind. Hegel examines Religion and decides to meld religion and
history
>together so that the universal spirit (a religious concept) is both
>manifested and expressed as concrete History.
but it isn't manifested at all. this I would have thought is why Hegel sits down to write, to give us a story of why it is (should be) manifested, when he knows it isn't - this latter knowledge being what drives the narrative itself.
cheers, angela