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Enduring Desire: Becoming Spirit

In this paper, I would like to reassess the significance of Hegel’s famous statement in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), „self-consciousness is Desire in general“ in order to grasp desire as the finite articulation of the becoming of spirit (Geist).1 For this purpose, I will briefly emphasize the central role of desire in the Phenomenology, and focus more on the terms of its origination and its phenomenological structure. In this regard, I will highlight the dynamic, transformative, and temporal elements that I find operative and inspiring in disclosing the phenomenological significance of desire (Begierde). Through this exposition, I will introduce a possible interpretation of the Phenomenology that displays the ways in which desire articulates itself into other forms and endures in a more refined shape by setting its transformative power over against what Hegel calls the „Absolute Lord“, that is, the absolute loss of all sense and all determination, death. Finally, I would like to raise the question whether recollection (Erinnerung) can be conceived as the end of desire. Judith Butler interprets desire as „the operative force in the Phenomenology at large, its logical motor“ because she takes desire as displaying the moments of cancellation, preservation and transformation in a more concrete sense than Aufhebung.2 Here I will follow Butler’s central claim that „desire and its satisfaction constitute the first and final moments of the philosophical pursuit of self-knowledge“.3 I think the significance of desire is not confined to the initial dialectic we find in self-consciousness’s quest for self-certainty. For instance, in the section „Lordship and Bondage“, desire articulates itself in a more complex manner by duplicating itself as „enjoyment“ and „work“, where each displays a mode of self-relation and a relation to the other. The significance of desire can further be seen in the sections „The Unhappy Consciousness“ and „The Ethical Order“. We can read the latter, with reference to Antigone’s deed, as disclosing the way in which desire figures as a form of self-relation arising in relation to the death of the other, i. e. as mourning. We can read „The Unhappy Consciousness“ as a stage in which desire articulates itself into a form of self-relation that arises in relation to a beyond. Thus in „The Unhappy Consciousness“, we discover that the truth of the duplication of desire as enjoyment and work, and of self-consciousness as the lord and the bondsman, respectively, resides in its being an inner duplication, i. e. an inner difference.4 As Hegel claims, „the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual natured, merely contradictory being“.5 For instance, one can read „devotion“, which Hegel depicts as „the movement of an infinite yearning“ for an unattainable other, as a more articulated form of desire, given that it is now a desire neither for a living thing nor for recognition by another consciousness, but for „the Unchangeable“, that is, for the infinitely „Other“.6 In devotion, the unhappy consciousness faces itself as the desire which, in its yearning for the unchangeable, displays an infinite self-difference and comes to know itself as an absolute contradiction that is in an absolute unrest. What is at issue here is to understand the significance of desire as the locus of the becoming of spirit. Thus Angelica Nuzzo claims that Hegel’s phenomenological approach offers us „a logic of change that takes consciousness as its concrete object, i. e., as the place in which change