Angela asked (off list):
>doncha reckon the kojevian reading of hegel, which butler more or less
>adopts/adapts, sees the dialectic as little more than repetition?
Angela, no, not in Kojeve I don't see it. But it's been like 10 years since I read it. So. Although I do understand what you're getting at w/ Butler, but I think she's trying her bestest not to fall into that trap.
this is my
>problem with her stuff, when you come right down to it.
Now, Lacanian pscyhoan *might* just might get us out of this cul-de-sac. Excess, you see, and this has a long tradition going back at least til Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel which pre-figured Nietzche and yet managed to hang on to some sense of the importance of the social--and thus some sense of practice, possibility, and faith in the future. Something Nietzche Lacks <snort> ( I think, and it's been a long time, that Soren had some insights--sociologically--that we don't appreciate b/c well....another post for probably another list). Anyway, as for Lacan and existentialism deconstructed:
"Opacity...opaque. The ability of a mirror to reflect is conditioned by its opacity. It is a pane(pain) of glass, like a window; but unlike a window, it is neither transparent nor translucent. Opacity requires the impenetrability of light. In order to see oneself in a mirror of one's own making, in order to be self-reflective, there is a fundamental opacity at the very core of one's being. It is an opacity that cannot be penetrated if one is ever to become self-reflective, to take oneself as an object of reflection, of thought, of consideration. This is source of both the agony and joy of the human condition....
The self and self-reflection is captured in Jean-Paul Sartre's imagery of the 'opaque blade." In an early essay, Sartre criticized the Cartesian philosophical tradition which maintained that it was quite possible to know oneself, to penetrate the interior of one's self through transcendent self-reflection in which one comes to fully know oneself. For Sartre, such a self has no reason for being for it would "be a sort of center of opacity...This superfluous "I" would be a hindrance. It would tear consciousness from itself; it would divide the self like an opaque blade."
And yet, perhaps there is some truth to this fundamental opacity, this inability to penetrate the inner most self. The interior self is a subject, a subject of desire. On this view, the subject of desire is, indeed, an opaque blade incessantly slicing through itself, always dividing itself into self and not self, into me and you, and, in its more gracious moments, into I and Thou. The interior self is the foil--the silvering for the looking glass--which must always deflect desire for the Other. And what is this desire that must always be deflected? Desire is a longing for a state of wholeness, an expression of the need for unity, the dream of reconciliation of self/not self, me/you, I/Thou. And yet, the joy and agony of the human condition rests on the fact that this desire and longing can never, ultimately, be achieved. The subject--internally and eternally divided against itself is a foil which foils the satisfaction of desire by distortiing its own image of--misrecognizing--what it desires. The self is a self because it is founded on the need for wholeness, a longing for reconciliation, the desire for unity. Yet, at the same time, the self bars the path to wholeness, unity, and reconciliation by deflecting desire, misrepresenting itself, misrecognizing what it truly desires. It is a seductive deception which only serves as the conception for further loss and fragmentation. The dream of plenitude is a deceitful dream; wholeness, unity, reconciliation can never be achieved."