The Black Circle
Page 2
The book itself comes to a close by placing this discourse of discursive finality and self-abnegation in explicit contrast to Kojève’s antipode, Martin Heidegger.11 One can argue, indeed, that Kojève’s thinking as a whole presents a hidden polemic against Heidegger, whose claims against the possibility of finality, of an end that merely repeats what has come before, offer a strong challenge to Kojève’s advocacy of finality.12 If Heidegger speaks of an end as well, it is only to come to another beginning that is like the first only in regard to the openness it promises. For Kojève, this other beginning requires an impossible transition, a forgetfulness of history that is a tempting ruse and deception. Yet, as we have seen, Kojève confronts the very same problem, because the moment of the end that leads to repetition of what has come before requires a similar forgetfulness.
In the end, we have two kindred attempts to be free from history and thus to be free, one where freedom is predicated on emancipation through extinction of the self, the other presuming a similar extinction but promising another beginning of history, not an end for all times. It seems to me that this contrast brings to the fore a powerful commentary on the nature of freedom and the possibility of revolutionary change that shows the full extension and challenge of Kojève’s work. While I begin by attempting to recover aspects of Kojève’s thinking that have been neglected, in the end I attempt to stress the more general provocation of his thought. Few contemporary philosophers, indeed, would openly equate freedom with a kind of suicide, as Kojève does; fewer still might associate suicide, literal or figurative, with final and full emancipation. In this sense, the end of history is clear and perpetually shocking, an affront to self-interest and common sense that recalls the genuine radicality of Dostoevsky and Fedorov.13
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
Kojève’s insistence on finality and repetition is untimely. It reveals the way in which Kojève’s thought is deeply hostile to the governing dogma of our time, a dogma anticipated trenchantly by Dostoevsky’s underground man: that freedom is continuous striving without limits; that, in a pregnant phrase, error is freedom. The praise of error or errancy is everywhere in evidence; it is virtually the rallying cry of modern emancipatory French philosophy, with several notable exceptions, largely from the Marxist camp.14 The truth as truth has become tyrannical, terrifying. One seeks “infinite play,” polysemy, différance, the free creation of concepts, or various kinds of transgression that satisfy our demand for freedom from hegemonic narratives.15 Finality is to be rejected in favor of lasting openness, nonfinality, a horizon of possibility that beckons, seduces us to what might be rather than what must be.
Surely, this way of thinking is to be preferred to Kojèvian irony, to the notion that freedom may be finally achieved only through self-immolation, the abandonment of the self entirely to a final narrative from which no deviation is possible other than as nonsense or madness. And here is the most potent challenge to modern philosophy posed by Kojève. For Kojève calls into question, in the most aggressive way possible, the cherished basic atomic unit of modern thought: the free historical individual. Kojève questions each element of this atomic unit, and when Kojève declares dramatically the death of the human, he is speaking directly of the death of this particular view of the human, a view born from a radical commitment to the individual self or, in Kojève’s terms, to the primacy of animality.16
Kojève reverses the basic, often deeply hidden, assumption informing much of modern social theory: that self-interest can lead to a stable political order and that society is the creation of mutual self-interest because society protects individuals from their greatest fear—death and, in particular, violent death. The modern political compact as established by Thomas Hobbes identifies genuine freedom as having a fundamental precondition: freedom from the fear of death. For Kojève, such freedom is in reality the most abject slavery.17 Rather than becoming free to live one’s life as guided by precepts formulated without reference to an underlying fear of death or other finite limitation, the ostensibly free historical individual enslaves herself to the most primitive animal desire for self-preservation. In the guise of freedom to pursue whatever they may like, modern human beings have enslaved themselves so completely and convincingly to the animal desire for self-preservation that they take what is perhaps the most extreme collective expression of this desire, modern consumer capitalism, to be the greatest and most noble “system of freedom” that history has ever known. This is so because modern consumer capitalism allows us the freedom to pursue our desires as we see fit, granting us the illusion of possessing a power over the world itself that a finite creature cannot possibly have. The freedom to proliferate desires, to indulge them endlessly, is the wellspring of an illusion of power, flattering to human hopes of longer, if not continuous, well-being, the precondition of which is the preservation of the self as an animal being.18
Kojève’s essential challenge, then, does not end in a sort of skulking skepticism or pessimism about human life, though these elements of Kojève’s thought should not simply be ignored as irrelevant. To the contrary, Kojève’s essential challenge is to the reign of self-interest in its most profound form, self-preservation, as well as to the hegemony of the self, understood as devoted to its own flourishing and expansion at almost any cost, whether that relates to other human beings or to nature. Nothing could be further from Kojève’s development of Hegel than the notion that there can be a “self-interest well understood,” a selfishness that is praiseworthy, the bedrock of political union.19
Kojève’s critique of self-interest merits renewal in a day when consumer capitalism and the reign of self-interest are hardly in question, either implicitly or explicitly, and where the key precincts of critique have been hobbled by their own reliance on elements of the modern conception of the human being as the free historical individual that have not been sufficiently clarified. Kojève’s thought is thus anodyne: far from being “philosophically” mad or the learned jocularity of a jaded, extravagant genius, it expresses a probing inquiry into the nature of human being that returns us to questions that reach down to the roots of the free historical individual. Moreover, it extends a critique of self-interest deeply rooted in Russian thought, and Kojève does so, no doubt with trenchant irony, in the very capital of the modern bourgeoisie decried violently by Dostoevsky in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.20
Yet, there is of course another nagging irony in Kojève’s later career as bureaucrat and “Sunday philosopher” who seems to shed the purported masks of the earlier Kojève, evoking what has become a cliché of twentieth-century philosophy: Did Kojève in effect accept the failure of revolution, of complete, final, and universal emancipation, and acquiesce in “bourgeois” philosophy? As everyone knows, we have paradigmatic examples of the earlier and later divisions in Heidegger, Georg Lukács, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, each in some way featuring an indissoluble opposition between the two different periods as an incentive for interpretive speculation. In the case of Kojève, however, it is quite clear that the later writings are a painstaking and extensive development of his earlier views. The generic peculiarity and enormous size of Kojève’s final project, Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy, suggest an uneasy irony: Why should Kojève need to prove to us that wisdom has come, so vehemently and at such length, if it indeed has come? Kojève’s comprehensive, unfinished attempt to impose finality seems to be an uneasy contravention of the declaration that history and thought have come to an end. Is it indeed possible ever to say that last word? Or does Kojève not merely say it again and again? After all, once the truth is settled, there is nothing left but repetition in the final state, the universal and homogeneous state that is the home of wisdom having been achieved at last.
Here is Kojève the “enlightened” and implacable Stalinist, and one wonders to what extent Kojève’s supposed irony is not merely a protective mask for his creation of a distinctive, philosophical Stalinism. Kojève’s final order, the universal a
nd homogeneous state of human beings freed of Hobbesian self-interest, is a radical project indeed, for Kojève thinks through to its conclusion the achievement of truth as finality: a state of endless repetition where all citizens have freed themselves of self-interest and thus of the fear of death—the foremost sting of individuality. Whatever Kojève’s intentions may be, his project throws down the gauntlet to modes of thinking rooted in the appeasement or cultivation of self-interest and, as such, Kojève, the “modern,” finds himself in the sharpest opposition to modern “bourgeois” narratives of self-creation, emancipation, and advancement.
THE RECEPTION OF KOJÈVE IN ENGLISH
There is no comprehensive account of Kojève as a philosopher in his own right that delves into the Russian context of his thinking in detail and focuses on his challenge to the modern free historical individual that he describes in his Hegel lectures. Indeed, most writing on Kojève in English comes from students of Leo Strauss, who write about Kojève mostly in terms of his relation to Strauss and of Kojève’s famous debate with Strauss collected in the book On Tyranny.21 Though Kojève can count among his many admirers figures as diverse as Jacques Lacan, Carl Schmitt, and Jacob Taubes (who considered Kojève the greatest eschatological thinker of his time), comprehensive English-language accounts of Kojève from other perspectives are rare. The only—and best—English accounts of Kojève’s Russian roots come from chapters in books dealing with other issues, such as Boris Groys’s Introduction to Antiphilosophy and Stefanos Geroulanos’s An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought.22
Geroulanos’s extremely perceptive discussion of Kojève is oriented primarily toward his influence in France. Notwithstanding that orientation, Geroulanos recognizes the Russian element in Kojève’s thought, primarily by addressing Kojève’s critical relation to Soloviev. He does not examine the crucial Dostoevskian background, nor does he consider Fedorov. Moreover, Geroulanos’s notion of the death of the human, while firmly grounded in Kojève’s Hegel lectures, tends to turn away from Kojève’s central thesis that problematizes the very notion of the “free historical individual” that Geroulanos defends. In this respect, Kojève ultimately repudiates the equation of the human with the free historical individual, understood as the self-interested modern actor, central to Geroulanos’s argument. To assert that Kojève announces the death of the human is thus somewhat questionable since, as I have said, Kojève announces what amounts to the death of only one notion of what is human as essential to becoming truly human, and does so with considerable irony. Nonetheless, one of the many signal virtues of Geroulanos’s interpretation of Kojève is his recognition and characterization of the different responses Kojève offers regarding the end state, from the “citizen soldier” to the “bodies without spirit” of the 1939 lectures.
Groys refers to the influence of Soloviev as well, specifically to Soloviev’s text On Love as well as to his sophiology. These are important references that the present study expands in its close reading of a text that was central both for Soloviev and Kojève, the Lectures on Divine Humanity from 1877 to 1878. Groys has also attempted to give a novel reading of Kojève’s concern about originality by suggesting that, like Jorge Luis Borges, Kojève’s originality consists precisely in his claim not to be original.23 While I have alluded to this issue in the preceding section, the emphasis in my book is not so much on the issue of originality and repetition as on the problem of finality itself, and I shall argue that this problem was central to Kojève’s later thinking.
In general, my study seeks to offer a different perspective on Kojève’s thought as a whole, by enriching the account of the Russian context as well as by discussing a somewhat wider selection of texts from the later Kojève. As such, it seeks to complement the pioneering work of Groys and Geroulanos while departing from them in its greater emphasis on the nature and consequences of human emancipation. Rather than viewing Kojève as one whose originality resides in his claim not to be original or in his declaration of the death of man, the book explores the consequences of radical emancipation as both a correction of history and the purest expression of the truly human power to counter natural necessity. In this respect, the question about finality (and repetition) emerges as a question not only about the possibility of complete emancipation but also about its desirability. Kojève sets us a most difficult task: On the one hand, complete emancipation, full self-transparency, appears to extinguish our very consciousness of ourselves as such—we become free, universal beings at the expense of knowing what we are and might be. On the other hand, the failure of such emancipation bequeaths us instability and endless conflict as we attempt to find a sense to our lives that might allow us to accept an essential inconclusiveness. Put in the language of revolution so important to Kojève, we are stuck between the choice of a success that overcomes us as a being or failure and, indeed, a fetishizing of failure that is indistinguishable from the punishment imposed on Sisyphus. Which should be our destiny?
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Kojève wrote a great deal but published very little in his lifetime—only two major texts, in fact: the famed Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (first published in 1947 at the behest of Raymond Queneau and consisting mainly of lecture notes reviewed by Kojève), along with the first volume of Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy, which came out shortly after his sudden death in 1968. If the former was released with not much more than Kojève’s desultory approval, the latter seems to have been published as part of a larger publication plan. Kojève also published several articles, among which the most well known are no doubt his “Tyranny and Wisdom,” included in the book On Tyranny, which features a debate between Kojève and Leo Strauss, and “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” a condensed epitome of Kojève’s thought that first appeared in Bataille’s journal Critique immediately after the war.
Since Kojève’s death, a number of the unpublished works have appeared. Aside from the final two volumes of the Attempt and a volume on Kant (1973) that is likely the final installment in that history, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right was published in 1981. Since that time, there has been a steady stream of publications, including Atheism (1931/1998), The Concrete Paintings of Vasily Kandinsky (2002), The Concept, Time, and Discourse (1953/1990), The Idea of Determinism in Classical and Modern Physics (1929/1990), Identity and Reality in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary (1937/2010), and The Notion of Authority (1942/2004).
Despite these publications, the archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris still contains a wealth of as yet unpublished material, of which the manuscript Sophia, Philosophy, and Phenomenology is perhaps the most notable example. There is also the substantial store of writings I have mentioned as well as an immense cache of meticulous notes for the Hegel lectures, drafts of the postwar “system of science,” together with notebooks, book reviews, and various opuscula.
In this book, I have chosen to concentrate my account of Kojève’s thought on what I consider to be his principal published works, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, and Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy (including the volume on Kant). I do so because, in my view, these works provide the most comprehensive account of the two dominant narratives of Kojève’s mature philosophical work: the struggle for recognition between master and slave, terminating in the universal and homogeneous state; and the ascent to wisdom or, in terms worked out exhaustively in the Attempt, the completed story of the radical temporalizing of the concept.
Nonetheless, while I focus on these volumes, I have not hesitated to refer to other works where that reference might assist in clarifying the principal narratives. And while I discuss Sophia, Philosophy, and Phenomenology in very general terms in chapter 8, I have not endeavored to give any greater account of that work, which, to my knowledge, remains as yet unavailable in anything other than manuscript form. As for The Concept, Time, and Discourse—a very intriguing text to be sure, and one soon available in transl
ation—I have avoided any detailed discussion because many (though by no means all) of its arguments are taken up in somewhat greater detail in the Attempt.
In general, I have sought to appeal to a heterogeneous audience whose only common feature is likely a level of interest in the cultures and issues involved. The result of attempting to appeal to such a broad audience is a certain lack of balance; some discussions will prove too detailed, others not detailed enough. The latter response seems to me particularly likely with regard to my consideration of Kojève’s later works, which I confine to one long chapter (chapter 8). Proper consideration of the richness of those works belongs to an extensive separate study, and I have covered them only in broad strokes and in conformity with the purposes of this book.
I
RUSSIAN CONTEXTS
1
MADMEN
Behold Kazimir Malevich’s provocative painting Black Circle. What may we say of it? An ordinary circle, a period, a pothole, dark sphere, spherical blackness, emptiness, void, pinhead, oil droplet, pupil, and so on. Yet we have here merely an ordinary circle against a white square frame—simplicity itself. What may we say of it? Nothing more than a minimal contrast of color and shape, it is certainly not depicting anything from nature, anything in our everyday world, any objects we encounter at home or on the way to work—indeed, any objects we encounter outside of a book or a museum. But it also may be seen in almost all of them. What may we say of it? All or nothing. Its simplicity is the simplicity of extreme abstraction, two of the most basic shapes, two of the most basic colors, nothing more, nothing less. The abstraction is arresting and estranging, reducing the profligate plurality of our everyday experience to a set of basic components, like a mathematical equation, at once beautiful and ugly, orderly and mad.