Judith Butler: Fühlen, was im anderen lebendig ist Hegels frühe Liebe(dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts, 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken # 066)

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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Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

To 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