The first discusses extracts from Judith Butler and Genevieve Lloyd's "Man of Reason" (which I am in the midst of reading at the moment) on Hegel's famous "Lord and Bondsman" theory.
Judith
Butler and Genevieve Lloyd on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”
Lloyd sees in
Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman Dialectic a rejection of the female world; she argues
that the male has identified the female as the ‘particularity’ that needs to be
transcended and removed in order to reach ‘universality’ and subjectivity. She
notes that Sartre interprets the dialectic between master and slave as a
struggle between being the observer and the observed. Here he observed ‘Other’
would be forced to become an object, stripped of subjectivity and therefore placed,
like the bondsman, in a lower position, as their purpose is to reflect the
observer’s subjectivity back to himself. According to Lloyd, Simone de Beauvoir
argues that woman has permanently and intentionally placed herself in the position
of this looked-at ‘Other’. The possibility of transcendence for the female is therefore
prevented; it is further made impossible by male conception of the female body.
Beauvoir argues that a prison-like “feminine domain” was created by male
society in order to identify femininity and the female body in particular as
the site of life and immanence; this enables male society to identify transcendence
in direct opposition as a ‘male ideal’, as Lloyd states. However if the male
concept of attainment of subjectivity relies on identifying and contrasting the
self with particularity and therefore femininity (which remains as an
identifiable, still-existent ‘zone’ embodied by the female, similar perhaps to
Hegel’s bondsman) this creates a problem for the female who cannot do the same,
as she would need to alienate herself from her own body as well as her
femininity in order to reach transcendence, leaving nothing to define
particularity itself. Therefore Lloyd disagrees with Beauvoir in arguing that
‘transcendence’ can be ‘gender-neutral’.
Butler, in
contrast to Lloyd, focuses on Hegel’s conception of desire and the centrality
of desire in creating subjectivity. She argues that desire is present in
“Lordship and Bondage” and does not become replaced by recognition once a
consciousness encounters another consciousness; instead, it becomes more and
more sophisticated. In “Lordship and Bondage” Desire becomes self-conflicting;
on one hand, it is “ecstatic self-sacrifice’, recognising that the ‘Other’ has
‘consumed’ the subject and giving itself up to this process. On the other the
ultimate aim of desire is for the subject to be entirely self-sufficient and
free. Therefore in the struggle onto death the subject tries to deny its dependence
to the external ‘Other’, in whom the subject finds itself. This becomes a
desire to annihilate the Other by dominating it and reducing it to a lesser
form, a ‘body’ which the subject can define himself against. Butler sees both
domination and enslavement as different forms of ‘death in life’, expressing
desire’s unfulfillable wish to die. The lord’s desire becomes the transcendence
of desire itself, implicit in his desire to be ‘beyond life’. In contrast, by
‘dreading freedom’ the bondsman discovers life as a site for expressing
subjectivity. Butler also discusses the reception of Hegel by Kojève, who
rejects this concept of nature being able to confirm human subjectivity as well
as rejecting corporeality. Kojève identifies desire as something both
transformed by expression; when desire is articulated it creates a
‘non-natural’ self separate from nature and therefore enables the subject to
transcend the natural world and its determinism, and become historical agents.
Therefore action by the subject on the world instates human freedom; instead of
‘revealing’ the relationship between the world and subject, it ‘creates’ a new
relation to the world. This subject is defined by its own desire, which creates
temporality in its anticipation of being fulfilled.
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