The Gender of Spirit: Hegel’s Moves and Strategies

Abstract

The figure of Hegel as a thinker as well as the image, however distorted, of “the Hegelian system” have proved to be a constant target of criticism as well as a point of reference for feminist theorists and philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriation and creative re-conceptualization of Hegel’s dialectics of lordship and bondage to depict the origins of gender inequality in Le Deuxième Sexe is arguably her most well-known encounter with Hegelian dialectics, although it is her earlier Pour une morale tie Vambiguitê that contains Beauvoir’s clearest confrontation and critique of Hegel’s thought. For Luce Irigaray, Hegel is an explicit conversation partner in Speculum as well as, more emphatically, in J’tzime à- toi. In Judith Butler’s latest works, she openly posits her thought in the Hegelian tradition—a situating that is perhaps not very surprising considering her doctoral dissertation Subjects of Desire that examined the philosophical reception of Hegel’s concept Begierde (desire) in twentieth-century French thought from Kojève and Hyppolite through Sartre and Lacan to Deleuze and Foucault.¹