Subjects of Desire

Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Judith Butler author Damon Young translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Columbia University Press

Published:15th Jun '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Subjects of Desire cover

A new, critically-situated edition of the genre-breaking work that recast modern French thought.

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojeve, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition that has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject.

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 Annals of Scholarship [Butler] writes clearly and without jargon... The impact of Butler's work is immense.The French ReviewThe French Review 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

ISBN: 9780231159982

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

304 pages