Senses of the Subject by Judith Butler

Senses of the Subject by Judith Butler

Author:Judith Butler [Butler, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-01-31T16:00:00+00:00


Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair

Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion, and no reflection can produce a movement. This is the continual leap in existence that explains the movement, whereas mediation is a chimera, which in Hegel is supposed to explain everything and which is also the only thing he never has tried to explain.

—Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel concerns primarily the failure of a philosophy of reflection to take account of what exceeds reflection itself: passion, existence, faith. The irony in Kierkegaard’s challenge to Hegelianism is, however, minimally twofold. On the one hand, Kierkegaard will ask, where is it that Hegel, the existing individual, stands in relation to the systematic totality that Hegel elucidates? If for Hegel the individual is outside the complete system, then there is an “outside” to that system, which is to say that the system is not as exhaustively descriptive and explanatory as it claims to be. Paradoxically, the very existence of Hegel, the existing philosopher, effectively—one might say rhetorically—undermines what appears to be the most important claim in that philosophy, the claim to provide a comprehensive account of knowledge and reality. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s counter to Hegel consists in the valorization of passion and existence over reflection and, finally, language. It is in relation to this criticism that a different sort of irony emerges, one that Kierkegaard appears not to know, but that attends his various claims to be writing on behalf of what is beyond speculation, reflection, and language. If Kierkegaard is right that Hegel omits the existing individual from his system, it does not follow that Kierkegaard maintains an unsystematic or nonspeculative view of the existing individual. Although Kierkegaard sometimes uses the speculative terminology of Hegelianism, he appears to parody that discourse in order to reveal its constitutive contradictions. And yet, in Kierkegaard’s descriptions of despair in Sickness unto Death (1849), his use of Hegelian language works not only to displace the authority of Hegel, but also to make use of Hegelianism for an analysis that both extends and exceeds the properly Hegelian purview. In this sense, Kierkegaard opposes himself to Hegel, but this is a vital opposition, a determining opposition, one might almost say “a Hegelian opposition,” even if it is one that Hegel himself could not have fully anticipated. If Hegel’s individual is implicated in the very existence that he seeks to overcome through rationality, Kierkegaard constructs his notion of the individual at the very limits of the speculative discourse that he seeks to oppose. This appears to be one ironic way, then, that Kierkegaard’s own philosophical exercise is implicated in the tradition of German Idealism.



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