Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Title: Subjects of Desire : Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
Author: Judith Butler
ISBN: 978-0231064514
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 268
Price: $27.00

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 Phenomenology of Spirit 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. Subjects of Desire 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.

Review

Robert B. Pippin, The Philosophical Review - "What her 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." —