Judith Butler

Sari Roman-Lagerspetz

Abstract
Judith Butler (1956-) is an American political philosopher. The main thread in
Butler’s works is to explore the relation between desire and recognition and the
constitution of the human subject. For Butler, recognition always contains an
aspect of misrecognition. Recognition necessarily excludes something important.
Thus, it is a never-ending process. Butler’s ideas have proved influential
in feminism, gender studies and queer studies.

Keywords
Judith Butler (1956-) · Recognition · Desire · Hegel · Misrecognition

Judith Butler (1956-) is an American political philosopher and one of the most
influential thinkers of our time. Her influence in gender studies, queer studies, political
philosophy – as well as in contemporary feminist and queer politics – is enormous
(Salih 2002; Chambers and Carver 2008; Loizidou 2007; Lloyd 2007). The main
thread in Butler’s works is exploring the relation between desire and recognition, and
how this relation constitutes the subject and its relation to itself, to other subjects and to
the world. Butler’s most important ideas like “the ek-statism of the subject”, “the
relation between the self and the other”, “the relation between the subject-position and
the constitutive outside” (Butler 1997a) and “performative politics” (Butler 1997b) are
based on the dynamics of these two modalities. Butler studied Hegel and German
idealism at Heidelberg University and continental philosophy at Yale. In Subjects of
Desire (1987), a book based on her dissertation, she analyses Hegel’s reception in
twentieth century France by Alexandre Kojève and other prominent philosophers such

S. Roman-Lagerspetz (*)
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finnland
E-Mail: sari.roman-lagerspetz@helsinki.fi

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L. Siep et al. (Hrsg.), Handbuch Anerkennung, Springer Reference
Geisteswissenschaften, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19561-8_81-1
2 S. Roman-Lagerspetz

as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, all of whom
Butler identifies as post-Hegelians. She focuses on the French interpretations of
Hegel’s theory of the relation between desire and recognition and the way this relation
constitutes the subject, its consciousness and self-consciousness. In the preface to the
1999 edition of the book she says: “In a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit
of a certain set of Hegelian questions: What is the relation between desire and
recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and
constitutive relation to alterity” (Butler 1987/1999, xiv). Butler does not present a
thorough explication of what she means by desire or recognition. Nevertheless, she
sees that in Hegel desire means the subjects deepest existential striving to be one with,
to know, relate to, and to possess itself and the world. In Hegel, desire is constitutive of
self-consciousness and the self’s pursuit of unity and identity with what appears to be
different. In this pursuit the desiring self turns towards its “outside”, which is ulti-
mately found in another self. The self finds in the other a similar “negating” power as
itself. The first experience of this similarity is that of a self-loss, a fear of being
“negated” (determined from the other’s point of view) and absorbed by the desire of
the other. Nevertheless, the other becomes the source of the satisfaction of desire when
the self and the other learn to recognize each other as equals and to treat each other as
co-authors in various ways, for example, in a joint production of knowledge and
creation of social norms and institutions. The self realizes that mediation through the
other in a reciprocal process of recognition constitutes the very structure of dialectics
by which it can know itself and the world. In this process desire becomes transformed
into reciprocal recognition between equals. For Butler, the main question is whether
Hegelian absolute knowledge is possible, whether human beings can overcome the
external differences and become subjects who really understand each other and the
world. For Butler, universal recognition would mean, among other things, that lingu-
istic terms could name their objects fully and that subjects would fully know them-
selves. Throughout her works she pursues the question of whether differences or
radical otherness among subjects, or between subjects and their worlds, are always
capable of being recast as internal features of an internally integrated world.
Butler herself maintains that the subject can know itself and the world only
partially. There remains always a “constitutive outside” that is unknown, and
differences that cannot be integrated into a unity of reason and recognition. This
means that an aspect of “ek-stasis”, radical alterity (being outside of and strange to
oneself) and misrecognition remain internal to self-consciousness, relations between
subjects, social institutions and, in general, all linguistic and conceptual frameworks.
Recognition always fails, at least partly. However, for Butler misrecognition is not
something that should be lamented. It contains a promise of future re-articulation by
those who are excluded from the present relations and norms of recognition. Butler’s
way to interpret misrecognition as a sign of the continuation of a democratic process
owes to the Kojèvian reading of Hegel (see the entry on “▶ Alexandre Kojève” in
this volume). Political processes are interpreted as struggles for recognition and the
idea of universal recognition is seen by Butler as a utopian illusion. A belief that
universal recognition has been achieved would just mean that the exclusion of the
other goes unnoticed. Butler refers also to the French Marxist Louis Althusser’s idea
Judith Butler 3

of interpellation. She speaks of an “Althusserian reversal of Hegel” (Butler 1997b,

5). Interpellation means that ideology “calls” individuals into subjects. Here, “sub-
ject” has a double meaning. Individuals are made subjects in the sense that they
acquire a normative social existence. At the same time, they are subjected to social
power and its conceptual framework. For someone to be recognized she must be first
“recognizable”. Social mechanisms that render someone identifiable as a human
subject and thus “recognizable” are a part of a system of ideological power. The
“Althusserian reversal of Hegel” means that recognition is partly interpreted as
ideological interpellation. For Butler, ideological interpellation is, however, not a
sovereign performative that brings into existence and controls fully what it names.
Subjects can expropriate the prevailing terms of recognition, politicize them and use
them in a different way. This idea sets the foundation for Butler’s idea of “perfor-
mative politics” in which terms of recognition are politicized by their “constitutive
outside” (Butler 1993).
One may argue that Butler ultimately ends up in a paradoxical position. Follo-
wing Hegel, she still conceives reciprocal recognition as an ideal. Nevertheless, her
theory seems to imply that this ideal cannot and should not be reached. Politics
seems to become a continuous striving for the impossible (Weir 1996; Roman-
Lagerspetz 2009).

References
Butler, Judith. 1987/1999. Subjects of desire. Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1997a. The psychic life of power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1997b. Excitable speech. A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.
Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver. 2008. Judith Butler and political theory. Troubling
politics. New York: Routledge.
Lloyd, Moya. 2007. Judith Butler. From norms to politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Loizidou, Elena. 2007. Judith Butler. Ethics, law, politics. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish.
Roman-Lagerspetz, Sari. 2009. Striving for the impossible, The Hegelian background of Judith
Butler. Acta Politica: Department of Political Science, University of Helsinki. http://urn.fi/URN:
ISBN:978-952-10-5387-0.
Salih, Sara. 2002. Judith Butler. New York: Routledge.
Weir, Allison. 1996. Sacrificial logics. Feminist theory and the critique of identity. New York:
Routledge.