Judith Butler E-Book

Judith Butler

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 87

Beschreibung

 » Liebe bedeutet dem anderen kein Toter zu sein und dass der andere einem selbst kein Toter ist « , schreibt Judith Butler über den Philosophen Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel und die Liebe. Auf der Grundlage seines Aufsatzes  » Liebe « (1797/98) und dem » Systemfragment von 1800 « (1800) ist sie Hegels frühen Reflexionen über Liebe auf der Spur.  Ihr besonderes Moment liegt laut Butler in der Umkehrbarkeit; so käme es bei Hegel wie auch in der Liebe vor, dass die auktoriale Stimme die Richtung wechselt und eine Aussage trifft, die die vorangegangene infrage stellt. Butler stellt die These auf, dass Liebe eine eigene Logik besäße, die von  » unbeschränkter Offenheit «  durchzogen sei. Selbsthass und Eigenliebe, die Beziehung zwischen dem Einzelnen und der Welt, zwischen dem Lebendigen und dem Toten, die Entstehung der materiellen Welt und der Liebe als Enteignung des Selbst sind Themen dieses Essays über die  » Wurzel unseres Wesens « .      Die Philosophin Judith Butler (*1956) ist Professorin an den Fakultäten für Rhetorik und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaften der University of California, Berkeley, und Gastprofessorin an der geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Columbia University, New York.      Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch  

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº066: Judith Butler

To Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love /

Fühlen, was im anderen lebendig ist: Hegels frühe Liebe

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

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© 2012 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Judith Butler

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Students on deck of Chalet III (Farrally Hall) / Studenten auf der Terrasse des Chalet III (Farrally Hall), The Banff Centre, 1956 (detail / Detail), courtesy Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives at The Banff Centre; p. / S. 2: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, München/UAB 457; © Cy Twombly

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Cy Twombly Bacchanalia-Fall (5 days in November), sheet / Blatt 4, 1977Collage: oil, chalk, pencil, gouache on Fabriano paper, millimeter paper, transparent adhesive tape / Collage: Öl, Kreide, Bleistift, Gouache auf Fabriano-Papier, Millimeterpapier, transparentes Klebeband 101 × 150 cm

Judith ButlerTo Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love / Fühlen, was im anderen lebendig ist: Hegels frühe Liebe

Judith ButlerTo Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love

There are not many manifest reasons to think about Hegel and love together. First of all, Hegel is hardly lovable to most people; many readers do not want to take the time to sort out those sentences. Second, the language of love is usually understood to be a direct proclamation or a lyrical expression of some kind. Third, love has a relation to images and motions, to what we imagine time and again or, rather, to a form of imagining and moving that seems to take us up into its repetitions and elaborations. So the topic of love seems an odd way to approach to Hegel, whose language is dense, who explicitly devalues non-linguistic forms of art, and for whom direct address and lyrical style seem equally remote. And yet it was a topic to which he turned in his early work, where “love” is the name for what animates and what deadens, and his views have clear implications for thinking about the senses and aesthetics more generally. In the years prior to writing The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), for example, Hegel wrote a short essay called “Love” (1797–98), a fragment of which remains.1 And we find further remarks in a small piece now called “Fragment of a System” (1800).2 Later, it seems, love falls away, or is pushed away, or becomes silently absorbed into his writing on spirit.

How do we read Hegel reading love? Is there love in his language? His early writing pushes forward with declarative sentences. This is not simply because he knows the truth and declares it with great confidence, but because the declarative sentence is a way of pushing forward and pushing off. One sentence lays the groundwork for the next, and an idea is probed or developed without precisely being derived in a sequential way. In fact, although we could try, as readers of Hegel surely have, to extract the propositions from his writings, organize them into arguments that rely on primary and secondary premises and logically derived conclusions, I want to suggest that something else is happening here. When a sentence is declared, or arrives in the form of a declaration, something is being shown, a particular way of looking at the world is instated, a certain way of taking a stance is enacted. We might say that a point of view is enacted in the sentence form. So when the next sentence follows, it is not always an amplification of that same point of view. Sometimes it is another point of view that critically comments on the first, or shows us an unexpected consequence of the first. Sometimes that can happen over the course of a few sentences, or even a paragraph or two, and we remain pondering within the terms of that framework being enacted for that time. But then a certain turn takes place—sometimes it is within a subordinate clause, or sometimes it takes place through a shift in tone or modulation of voice. At such a point we see that the original point of view that was confidently declared within a single or short series of propositions has slowly been called into question. For that particular claim to be called into question is not quite the same as exposing a basic corrosion within the propositional or the declarative sequence, and yet something of the confidence of the initial sequence is rattled by what comes next. And what has come next actually seems to follow from what came before, which means that the seeds of unrest—what Hegel time and again called Unruhe—were there from the start; they were simply unseen or set aside at the beginning of the exposition. So this unsettling happens, but neither as the sudden outbreak of nihilism nor as the violent renunciation of what came before. In the midst of the development of the exposition, the declarative form has lost its confidence. This can happen simply by a repetition of the declarative form in a similarly confident mode, at which point the reader is confronted by two competing claims articulated with equal confidence. At such junctures, we might ask, does the authorial voice retain control over its material? Or is there something about the material itself, its very elaboration, that involves a reversal? The voice has reversed itself without exactly vilifying itself, and without exactly repudiating what has come before. What, we might ask, do such convolutions have to do with love?

Hegel enacts a reversal in his exposition of love that belongs as much to the topic as to its exposition. We might say that now we understand that something in the nature of love is reversible, or reverses itself, and we have to find a mode of writing that acknowledges or explains that reversibility. The mode of presentation has to conform to the demands of what is presented; what “is” requires its presentation in order to be at all. In other words, the presentation of love is a development or temporal elaboration of the object of love, so we cannot rightly distinguish love itself as an object, theme, or problem from its presentation (which does not mean that the object is reducible to how it is presented, only that the object only becomes available through that presentation). Love cannot remain a mute and internal feeling, but requires the presentation of love in some way. I do not mean that all love must be confessed or declared to qualify as love, but only that the declarative mode is not simply an idiosyncratic way of approaching the problem of love for the Hegel of 1797. Love has to develop in time; it has to take on a certain shape or form that cannot be restricted to a single proposition. There has to be something like a chain of sentences, declarative and interrogative, that not only records a growing confidence and its undoing but initiates unexpected modes of arrival, all as ways of enacting those movements as part of the phenomenon itself. After all, the phenomenon of love, no matter how mute or vociferous, no matter how inward or outward, has something of its own logic—one that unfolds or develops in time, and which, as we shall see, never actually blossoms into final form, but remains defined by its indefinite openness.

One perhaps expects a totalizing system from Hegel, but that error has outlived its time. In The Phenomenology, he establishes this openness in his analysis of how indexicals work.3 In relation to the “now,” that most immediate moment, it turned out that the “now” was always