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Original language
English

SUBJECTS OF DESIRE

Judith Butler

Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

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 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. 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.

(The 2012 edition contains a new foreword by Philippe Sabot)

Judith Butler is the Maxine Eliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Available products
Book Published 1987-05-10 by Columbia University Press

Comments

"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." ? Annals of Scholarship "[Butler] writes clearly and without jargon.... The impact of Butler's work is immense." ? The French Review "Subjects of Desire gives evidence of long reflection on important texts and issues in the Continental tradition. There is a sure-footedness of judgment here that historians ought to envy." ? The Journal of Modern History "What [Butler's] 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." ? The Philosophical Review