Table Of ContentRECOVERY AND INVENTION: THE PROJECTS OF DESIRE IN HEGEL, KOJEVE, ...
BUTLER, JUDITH PAMELA
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; 1984; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global
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8509692
Butler, Judith Pamela
RECOVERY AND INVENTION: THE PROJECTS OF DESIRE IN HEGEL,
KOJEVE, HYPPOLITE, AND SARTRE
Yale University PH.D. 1984
University
Microfilms
International
300N.Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M148106
Copyright 1985
by
Butler, Judith Pamela
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Recovery and Invention:
The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojeve,
Hyppolite, and Sartre
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of
Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Judith Pamela Butler
May 1984
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
©
Copyright by Judith Pamela Butler
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ABSTRACT
RECOVERY AND INVENTION:
'
THE PROJECTS OF DESIRE IN HEGEL, KOJEVE
HYPPOLITE AND SARTRE
Judith Pamela Butler
Yale University
1984
This inquiry develops a theory of desire as a tacit effort to
overcome ontological difference through a philosophical reconstruction
of the treatment of desire in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and se-
lected works of Jean-Paul Sartre, paying some attention to the writings
of Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite. The central concern is to estab-
lish an ontology of desire which accounts for the interrelationship of
choice, imagination, temporality, and personal and cultural history in
the experience of desire. Hegel's discussion of the ontological signi-
'
ficance of desire provides the framework by which Kojeve and Hyppolite
analyze desire with to its relation to temporality and historical
res~ect
life generally. Koj~ve, Hyppolite and Sartre accept and extend Hegel's
contention that desire must be understood in terms of the problem of
negation, and this implies that desire plays a constitutive role
tha~
I in all conscious activity. Although Sartre's view of desire presupposes
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a critical reformulation cf Hegelian ontology, it nevertheless extends
the doctrine of negation with clear consequences for concretizing and fur
thering the phenomenological understanding of desire. Sartre's reformu
lation of desire as negation involves a view of desire as choice (mani
festing the lack which is freedom) and as a mode of apprehending the
world (the 'nihilating' or discriminatory function of consciousness).
Sartre's later biographical studies on Genet and Flaubert provide
culturally and personally concrete analyses of this view of desire.
Moreover, they reveal that the Hegelian project to achieve ontological
unity of substance and subject is an imaginary one, one which, accordingly,
can only be achieved in imaginary works. In these biographical studies
Sartre also returns to an Hegelian formulation of desire, recasting
the relationship between desire and recognition in. terms of early child-
hood experiences and the task of literary writing.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My deepest thank~ be~ong to Professor ~uri.ce Nat~nson whose
patience, dedication, and friendship have made my graduate years
and the time spent on this project a labour of honesty, struggle,
and celebration. He has been a teacher in the Kierkegaardian sense,
one who gives his students the condition with which to look to them-
selves.
I am also deeply grateful to Professor George Schrader who
has always prompted me to cast a critical eye on what I write, and
to Larry Vogel whose philosophical acuity and connnitment to the truths
of experience have aided me throughout the years I have known him.
I also thank Stacy Pies for her friendship, her love, her painstaking
work on the drafts of this and for being my through
proje~t, ~oul-mate
out. I also thank Mara Miller, Judy Malamut and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl for
their friendship and for their willingness to give of their hearts and
minds. I thank Alexandra Chasin who helped me to learn much of
what I have written here. And I thank Lois Natanson, my regular
friend, and Wendy Owen who gave me the courage to finish and who
shared my struggle in the deepest of terms.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Hegel on Self-Certainty: The Ontology of Desire 17
Chapter Two
Hegel on Lordship and Bondage: Desire and Recognition 47
Chapter Three
Alexandre Koj~ve: Desire and Historical Agency 71
Chapter Four
Jean Hyppolite: Desire, Transience, and the
Absolute 97
Five
Chapte~
Sartre's Early Works: The Imaginary Pursuit
of Being 127
Chapter Six
The Strategies of Pre-reflective Choice:
Existential'Desire in Being and Nothingness 157
Chapter Seven
Trouble and Longing in Being and Nothingness:
Tlle Circle· of Sexual Desire 181
Chapter Eight
The Struggle to Exist: Desire and Recognition
in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr and
The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857,I 208
Selected Bibliography 239
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