by Jeff Love
THE BLACK CIRCLE
Alexandre Kojève, Boulogne-sur-Seine, July 6, 1930. Anonymous photo. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Kojève.
THE BLACK CIRCLE
A LIFE OF ALEXANDRE KOJÈVE
JEFF LOVE
Columbia University Press
New York
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54670-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Love, Jeff (G. Jeffrey), author.
Title: The black circle : a life of Alexandre Kojève / Jeff Love.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007435 | ISBN 9780231186568 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Kojève, Alexandre, 1902–1968. | Philosophers—France—Biography.
Classification: LCC B2430.K654 L68 2018 | DDC 194—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007435
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Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky
Cover image: Black Circle by Kazimir Malevich © State Russian Museum
FOR GLORIA, JACK, DYLAN, AND GARRETT
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION: A RUSSIAN IN PARIS
I. RUSSIAN CONTEXTS
1. MADMEN
2. THE POSSESSED
3. GODMEN
II. THE HEGEL LECTURES
4. THE LAST REVOLUTION
5. TIME NO MORE
6. THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
III. THE LATER WRITINGS
7. NOBODIES
8. ROADS OR RUINS?
9. WHY FINALITY?
EPILOGUE: THE GRAND INQUISITOR
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began with a seminar on historical narrative that took place in Beijing during the summer of 2013. I owe a debt of thanks to the organizer of that seminar, my colleague Yanming An. I also wish to thank the resourceful staff at the National Humanities Center, where I spent a year (2014–2015) as a John E. Sawyer Fellow and managed to complete an initial draft of the book in the ideal working conditions created by the Center. Vladimir Alexandrov, Caryl Emerson, Michael Forster, Markus Gabriel, Ilya Kliger, Nina Kousnetzoff, Bill Maker, Donna Orwin, Lina Steiner, and William Mills Todd were all instrumental at various stages in the project, as were Jon and Nancy Love. Finally, I have benefitted a great deal from the unflagging encouragement of António Lobo Antunes as well as from the many astute comments and questions of my colleague and serial collaborator, Michael Meng. The latter have left their impression on virtually every page of this book.
Wendy Lochner has been an ideal editor—patient, thorough, and generous with her time.
I have used available English translations for material quoted in other languages throughout the book and have frequently modified them.
ABBREVIATIONS
CTD
Alexandre Kojève, Le concept, le temps et le discours, ed. Bernard Hesbois (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
EHPP
Alexandre Kojève, Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968–1973).
EPD
Alexandre Kojève, Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
IDH
Alexandre Kojève, “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” trans. Joseph Carpino, Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (Winter 1973): 114–156.
ILH
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
IRH
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr., 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969).
OPR
Alexandre Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
OT
Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
TW
Alexandre Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth, 135–176 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
INTRODUCTION
A Russian in Paris
The pagan way: become what you are (as idea = ideal). The Christian way: become what you are not (yet): the way of conversion.
—Alexandre Kojève
Alexandre Kojève was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant, elusive, and wide-ranging thinkers. He exerted a profound influence on a generation of French intellectuals through the lectures he gave on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, from 1933 to 1939. His audience included André Breton, Georges Bataille, Henry Corbin, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.1 These lectures were published, after the Second World War, by another of Kojève’s students, Raymond Queneau, and they constitute a classic work on the Phenomenology that has divided Hegel scholars not only in terms of what the lectures say about Hegel but also in regard to the claim that they are merely commentary. Among contemporary Hegel scholars, Robert Pippin, for one, finds Kojève’s reading of Hegel tendentious, while his colleague Michael Forster takes almost the opposite view, suggesting that Kojève’s reading of Hegel is broadly justified within its own terms.2 Whatever the final judgment, few scholars have taken the commentary as a “literal” reading of Hegel, citing a plethora of influences, from Martin Heidegger to Karl Marx, that shape Kojève’s approach.
Surprisingly, one important stream of influence has been habitually neglected: the Russian literary, theological, and philosophical tradition from which Kojève sprang. This is an extraordinary omission, because Alexandre Kojève was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov, in Moscow, in 1902, and belongs to a dynamic generation of Russian artists, writers, musicians, poets, theologians, and thinkers. Indeed, the title of this book alludes to a painting by a distinguished artistic revolutionary of this generation, Kazimir Malevich, whose depiction of circular darkness offers an enticing visual metaphor for the final extinction of individuality that is a key feature of Kojève’s thought. This generation flourished during the first quarter of the twentieth century despite the turmoil of the early postrevolutionary years and an increasingly violent imposition of doctrinal conformity in the Soviet Union. Although these difficult circumstances contributed to the undeserved obscurity of several important members of this generation, it is also not unfair to say that the omission is all too typical, another example of Western neglect of the richness, originality, and complexity of the Russian intellectual heritage.
The aim of this book is to correct this omission with regard to one of the more striking intellectual figures of this generation and to assert that Kojève is not merely a commentator on Hegel but also, as some have suspected, a provocative thinker in his own right, worthy of our attention. Kojève’s substantial archive of material, largely unpublished in his lifetime, reveals a polymath who wrote thousands of pages on Hegel and other philosophers as well as a prescient book on quantum physics, book-length studies on problems of the infinite and on atheism, and shorter works on the Madhyamaka tradition in Mahayana Buddhism (for which he learn
ed Sanskrit, classical Tibetan, and Chinese). Kojève emerges as a highly unorthodox and playful thinker, in the best Russian tradition, whose commentary on Hegel blends distinctively Russian concerns with the end of history in complete self-overcoming (or self-abnegation) into the thought of the ostensibly universal philosopher. The eccentric persona Kojève cultivated—he refused to publish his own work because, as he said, he did not want to take himself too seriously3—reflects an insouciant, subversive ambivalence toward European cultural norms that extends to his commentary on one of its foremost figures.
This book is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different facet of Kojève’s thought. It is expressly interdisciplinary, merging intellectual history, close textual analysis, and philosophical speculation just as Kojève himself did. The main thread that ties these parts together is the distinctive form of speculation about the proper ends of human life, which emerged in Russia during the latter half of the nineteenth century as a debate about the nature of genuine human emancipation.
Before proceeding to a brief description of each of these parts, let me provide a biographical sketch of this most unusual man.4
BENE VIXIT QUI BENE LATUIT
Kojève had what we may call a storied life, the end of which reflects an intriguing and enduring discord, barely hidden under the surface.5 He died suddenly, on June 4, 1968, while giving a speech in Brussels at a meeting of an organization he had done much to create and foster: the European Common Market. He was born in Moscow sixty-six years earlier, into an affluent family of the high bourgeoisie. His uncle was the famed painter Vasily Kandinsky, with whom the young Kojève corresponded. Like so many others of his generation, his properly Russian life ended with the revolution, although he did not leave the Soviet Union until 1920. He left in most inauspicious circumstances, fleeing, along with a friend, through Poland to Germany, where he stayed until 1926, mainly in Berlin but also in Heidelberg. During that period, he lived well on investments of the proceeds from valuables he managed to smuggle out of Russia, and he pursued an astonishing variety of studies, ranging from Kant to Buddhism, Vedanta, and other religions, to the languages of the Far East. He finally obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, in 1926, under Karl Jaspers, with a voluminous study of Vladimir Soloviev.
In that same year he moved to Paris, where he continued his studies in Eastern thought as well as in mathematics and quantum mechanics. The stock market crash of 1929 ruined him, and he had to cast around for income to survive. Finally, in a remarkable twist of fate, fellow émigré Alexandre Koyré asked him to take over his seminar on the religious philosophy of Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études for one year, in 1933. Of course, this seminar continued until 1939, with its varied and distinguished audience. Kojève became a legend.
But the convulsion of the Second World War changed his life again. He was drafted into the French army but saw no action. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he fled to Marseilles, where he lived until the end of the war. While accounts differ, he seems to have been active in the French Resistance and, perhaps, in Soviet intelligence as well.
After the war, he was asked by a former student, Robert Marjolin, to join him in the Direction des Relations Économiques Extérieures as an “adviser.” From this time on, Kojève seems to have played a role of considerable importance in the postwar French government, shaping economic policy, promoting the common market, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and support for third world development. Anecdotes abound regarding his influence on French policy making, the 1957 creation of the European Community from the Coal and Steel Treaty, and his unusual position as a feared and enigmatic éminence grise who, together with Bernard Clappier and Olivier Wormser, dominated French economic policy for more than a decade.
By all accounts, Kojève fascinated, with his secretive, charismatic personality, his coruscating irony, and the capacious mind that Raymond Aron, for one, considered the most extraordinary he had ever encountered (and in express comparison with Jean-Paul Sartre and other luminaries). Georges Bataille confirms this impression in one of his more florid letters. Kojève also was the only person whom Lacan always referred to as “mon maître.” In these and many other cases, his students remained in thrall to the unusual master who elaborated, in six years of lectures, a remarkable reading of Hegel that addressed basic questions of the ostensibly modern project of emancipation, declaring that history had come to an end.6
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The first part of this study addresses these questions in the Russian context, providing a brief orienting review of Plato and the Platonic notion of perfection or divinization that has played such an important role in Russian religious thought. From this introduction, the text moves on to Fyodor Dostoevsky, who lays the foundation for the subsequent Russian debates about divinization—whether human beings should strive to be like gods or should create a community that embodies that striving through a unified adherence to a divine ideal.7 The basic question here—whether we should pursue the transformation of the human being into a god literally free of the limitations that beset our mortal existence or create an emancipatory community of equals—drives the exploration of two Russian thinkers much influenced by Dostoevsky, Nikolai Fedorov and Vladimir Soloviev. Fedorov claims that the only emancipatory ideal for humanity is to achieve universal immortality (and universal resurrection of the dead) through technological advancement; Soloviev argues that this comes about through adherence to a divinely inspired community: one becomes God by embodying his law and, in so doing, freeing oneself of the self, along with the suffering that originates in the self. This rich and radical heritage of emancipation through divinization emerges in Kojève’s commentary on Hegel and sheds light on some of the characteristics of that commentary that have most angered or mystified critics, such as Kojève’s notorious end-of-history thesis, which is both a commentary on and an extension of his Russian predecessors.8
The second part of the book examines the commentary itself, providing a close reading of the introduction and, thereafter, of the lectures from 1938 and 1939 that are the commentary’s culminating point. By examining these texts, I focus on the two principal narratives developed by Kojève: the narrative of the master and slave, culminating in the creation of the universal and homogeneous state, and that of the final ascent to wisdom that ends history in complete self-transparency. This close reading is not an attempt to ascertain whether Kojève “got Hegel right” but proceeds as an extension of the discussions carried out in the first part. As such, this reading is an independent investigation into aspects of the commentary that have bothered its critics or been ascribed to Kojève’s alleged Marxism or Heideggerianism or, indeed, to extravagant simplification. The discussion of the master-slave relation for which Kojève is so famous thus emerges in the context of the Christian community advocated by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by Soloviev in his lectures on divine humanity. Moreover, the discussion of the sage, central to the 1938–1939 lectures, emerges from the account of divinization articulated throughout the first part of this book, most radically in the discussions of Alexei Nilych Kirillov, the theoretical suicide in Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, and the doctrine of universal resurrection advocated by Fedorov.9
In both cases, my intention is not to show that other readings of Kojève’s commentary as Marxist or Heideggerian are wrong or unjustified, but rather to supplement or transform these readings by clarifying the largely hidden Russian context. My intention is also more general, for the provocative end of these lectures, which equates emancipation at the end of history with the complete abandonment of the self, our individuality, is a searching rebuke of Hobbesian self-interest and a form of suicide or self-annihilation that reflects the influence of many religious traditions. The end of history, for Kojève, is to end history. As Kojève hauntingly notes, history is nothing more than the persistence of error, understood by Kojève as the adherence to ways of
justifying self-preservation. The task of coming to wisdom is to correct history by ending it and, therewith, the dominion of self-preservation.
The final part of the book examines Kojève’s later work and, more extensively, the central question of perfection or complete emancipation that informs all his work, from the Hegel lectures to his remarkable 900-page manuscript called Sophia, Philosophy, and Phenomenology (still largely unpublished), written at white heat in Russian in 1940–1941; to Outline of a Philosophy of Right, a 500-page treatise on law from 1943; to his final examination of the Western tradition, the enormous Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy, published largely after his death in 1968. By focusing on the latter two texts, I develop the relation between the universal and homogeneous state and the temporalizing of the concept—the liberation from eternity—that constitutes a crucial narrative nested within the narrative of the ascent to wisdom. The difficult and broader question here is profoundly Kojèvian: How does one abandon the individual self’s need for permanence, or freedom from death, while still living? Kojève provides no unified answer to this question. To the contrary, he ends up most frequently in irony, the irony that arises from describing the final state as something that dispenses with further descriptions. In other words, the final state is one in which the only possible discourse is repetition. By the mere fact of proclaiming that history, and with it the possibility of novelty, is over, one risks ending up in irony, inevitable and mocking—repetition offers the illusion of the eradication of the self that cannot but return to talk about itself.10 If Kojève indicates that the end of history eradicates further reflection, then continued talk about that end postpones it, perhaps indefinitely, as the individual clings to her fear of death.