Judith Butler’s philosophy of the desiring subject traces back to their first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, where they traced the genesis of the desiring subject back to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its influence on Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. In this work on Hegel, we can locate the thread that leads to Butler’s philosophy of gender.

In this final segment, we will also explore the future of Hegelian confrontations. Heidegger famously argued that Hegel brought about the end of history. Many in Heidegger’s wake argued that Hegel had no future. As Jacques Derrida wrote in the Preface to Catherine Malabou’s book, The Future of Hegel: “We are all the inheritors or the descendants of Marx, of Heidegger, and a few others, and we often, perhaps always, have lived, for many decades, in the reassuring certainty that the Hegelian legacy is over and done with.”[i]

The Hegelian legacy may be over—or not—but the task of Hegel 13/13 has been to explore the productivity of confronting Hegel even today. Where do these confrontations ultimately lead us? We close the 13/13 on this question.

Core Reading

Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012 [1987]).

Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Additional Reading

Omar Quiñonez, “Plasticity and neoplasticity in Malabou’s the future of Hegel: addressing the concept’s ambiguity,” Continental Philosophy Review (2025), available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-025-09673-7.

Notes

[i] Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004), xviii.