by Jeff Love
The fourth and final part of Fedorov’s text completes the discussion of universal resurrection with an astonishing exhortation to move beyond the confines of our planet by transforming our planet into a sort of space vehicle. By means of this vehicle, we may proceed to distribute the resurrected dead throughout the universe.
GOD OR BEAST?
Let us state the obvious: Fedorov’s thought is outlandish, mad—perhaps the dream of a madman whose essential premise is that life makes no sense unless it can be redeemed by resurrection. The structure Fedorov builds on this premise may seem absurd, the brainchild of a madman, but one may also counter the immediate dismissal that accompanies such assertions with the fact that his basic premise is not so easily dismissed. Indeed, it is an ostensibly Christian restatement of the Platonic challenge that tries to transform history from a narrative of error and errancy into a positive project seeking to correct that error and to do so in the name of Christ. That is, Fedorov claims that Christ is a redeemer precisely insofar as he shows us the way to redeem our existence on earth by literally, not metaphorically, overcoming death.
The contrast with Soloviev is instructive. While Soloviev showed tremendous sympathy for Fedorov’s project, he seems to have been ultimately unable to accept the extreme transition from the realm of metaphorical to literal resurrection. Aside from the obvious, there are more subtle reasons for Soloviev’s resistance, and they have to do with the very notion that bodily death is to be overcome. For, if Soloviev is to be consistent, he cannot argue that bodily death is the terminal event that it seems to be for Fedorov. To become a Godman is no longer to fear bodily death; it is to be one with God as what ultimately expresses its perfection in the embodied world.48 To demonstrate an attachment to the body, such that one should seek to transform the world and the body by technology in order to become immortal, represents for Soloviev, at the very best, an essential confusion that betrays an inability to become God other than by perpetuating our material being. And it is exactly by freeing ourselves from the obsessive concern with the material body, with the particular, that we truly participate in God. For if God appears to us in bodily form in the guise of his son, God himself is ultimately beyond this corporeal appearance. Failure to realize this crucial distinction is failure to realize what becoming God really entails. Rather, the attachment to the material that anchors Fedorov’s project suggests—despite Fedorov’s attempt to obscure the animal selfishness of his project through its connection to a greater moral project, our duty to our ancestors—that Fedorov’s project is a kind of bestializing in which all that matters is the continuation of material existence.49
What does one become, then, a god or a beast? Must man be overcome? Is the truly human fate of the human being to overcome or destroy itself? Indeed, is this overcoming or destruction the aim of history? These questions, which emerge directly from the radical speculations of Dostoevsky and his followers, are fundamental to the sprawling philosophical project of Alexandre Kojève, as we shall see in the following chapters.
II
THE HEGEL LECTURES
4
THE LAST REVOLUTION
Kojève’s lectures on G. W. F. Hegel, published after World War II by Raymond Queneau, constitute the boldest and most comprehensive introduction to Kojève’s revolutionary project. It is now commonplace to dismiss these lectures as philosophically and philologically unsound—as “bad” Hegel. Unfortunately, it is equally commonplace to dismiss these dismissals with the confident declaration that they are beside the point, Kojève being not merely an interpreter of Hegel but also a philosopher himself, who is thereby permitted greater interpretive license.1 There is a powerful precedent for this defense of Kojève in the interpretive practice of Martin Heidegger.2 Throughout the 1920s, and perhaps even more aggressively in the 1930s, Heidegger developed a style of interpretation that he himself, not without boasting, referred to as “violent.” In the preface to the second edition of his famous book on Immanuel Kant, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger responds to accusations of Gewaltsamkeit—violence or even brutality—in his interpretation of Kant:
The accusation of violence can indeed be supported by this text. Philosophico-historical research is surely correct with this accusation whenever it is directed against attempts to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers. In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own task, a thoughtful dialogue is subject to other laws. These are more easily violated. In a dialogue what comes short is more threatening, the shortcomings more frequent.3
Heidegger speaks to two audiences here, the philosophic and the nonphilosophic. He defends interpretive violence as being almost, if not surely, inevitable in genuine philosophy, defined as a “thoughtful dialogue” (denkerische Zwiesprache), and he concedes that this violence appears to be a shortcoming only for those who are not philosophic. Heidegger simply closes the door on his critics—presumably even the “violent” ones—since merely to critique his interpretive style shows their unsuitability for philosophy.
Those who defend (or attack) Kojève as something more than an interpreter or commentator repeat a variant of this argument.4 While I shall not repeat this defense, I do think the question of interpretive violence is vitally important if we are to come to terms with the complicated attitude to Hegel’s text that emerges in Kojève’s lectures. For Kojève certainly does not seem to engage in a standard academic exposition of the Hegelian text, despite his frequent reliance on academic conventions of interpretation. One might even argue that his reliance on convention tends to do little more than leaven or disguise the sheer outrage of his approach, as if a patina of social grace were enough to conceal a more thoroughgoing affront. One of Kojève’s most notorious affronts is his predilection for broad generalization or aphoristic reduction, which so outstrips the limits of careful, reasonable research that it asks to be dismissed as fanciful or extreme.
Kojève’s apparent concentration on recognition via the relation of master and slave in The Phenomenology of Spirit is a case in point. But one can find many extreme statements strewn throughout Kojève’s commentary that seem at once bathetic and contradictory in their exhortation to declare a particular aspect of Hegel’s text the most important. For if Kojève emphasizes time and again the centrality of recognition—the volume edited by Raymond Queneau opens with a commentary on this section—there also are countervailing declarations like that found in the book’s final lecture: “The key to understanding Hegel’s system as a whole” may be found in a short passage in the preface to the Phenomenology, whose main contention is that “all depends on explaining and grasping the truth not only as substance but as subject as well.”5 The contrast between the beginning and the end of the book raises a number of fundamental questions about its underlying structure and coherence.
Other startling declarations abound, with Kojève’s pronounced epigrammatic talent showing itself to good effect: “Man is absolute dialectical disquiet (Un-ruhe)”;6 “Human existence is a mediated suicide”;7 “Language is born of discontent. Man speaks of Nature that kills him and makes him suffer”;8 “Rameau’s Nephew universalized—that is the Aufklärung [Enlightenment]”;9 “Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, that is not pure nothingness, reines Nichts, but something that is insofar as it annihilates Being”;10 “One could define man as an error that maintains itself in existence, that endures in the real”;11 and “Human existence itself is nothing but this Action: it is the death that lives a human life.”12
These aphoristic phrases are not the common coin of academic discourse; on the contrary, they resemble philosophic bons mots meant to astonish or beguile his French audience, whether with ironic intent or not, and are part of Kojève’s “philosophical pedagogy.”13 Kojève would surely be censured for his exuberance and lack of probity—he must explain, not create puzzles or riddles. The task of the interpreter or commentator comes down precisely to this: he or she must explain the enigmatic, must clarif
y, must bring to light whatever in the text seems recalcitrant—what is, in other words, resistant to explanation. Interpretation begins with what resists access, what holds itself back from immediate comprehension. Kojève seems freely to admit this elsewhere, but he also seems content to leave something for interpretation, with the claim that “one has to leave something for the reader: he should go on to think on his own.”14
More than that, the published commentary is notoriously unbalanced, with an overwhelming focus on two narratives: that of the master and slave and that of the sage. The master and slave, from section A, chapter 4, of the Phenomenology—a mere nine pages in the German edition Kojève used—is discussed in detail throughout Kojève’s commentary. Likewise, the narrative of the sage, from the final chapter of the Phenomenology, is fifteen pages in the German text but comprises 173 pages of Kojève’s commentary—the concluding twelve lectures. In contrast, Kojève’s treatment of the first three chapters of the Phenomenology is schematic, a mere nine pages in the French edition. The same may be said for his treatment of the long fifth chapter of the Phenomenology; Kojève’s commentary comprises seventeen pages covering 129 pages of German text. Kojève is more careful with chapters 6 and 7 of the Phenomenology, but it is clear, in the end, that Kojève’s commentary is almost wholly focused on two short chapters. Kojève’s own division of the text confirms this dramatic preference, with emphasis given only to chapters 4, 6, 7, and 8.15
In all these respects, Kojève’s commentary flaunts its departure from academic propriety, its “eccentricity,” and this raises serious issues of interpretation. How are we to approach Kojève? If we approach his work as if he is an academic interpreter or commentator, do we not betray its spirit, the predilection for “violence” or “eccentricity” that seems to course through the text? And if we approach it as Kojève seems to approach Hegel, do we not arrogate to ourselves the title of “philosopher,” the one entitled to engage in violent or eccentric interpretation? After all, am I not supposed to interpret Kojève according to the very conventions that Kojève may be mocking, and perhaps nowhere more powerfully so than in regard to the generally unspoken imperative to provide an interpretation of his text that holds together?16
KOJÈVE AS THE COMMENTATOR
Stefanos Geroulanos makes the important comment that Kojève’s ties to Friedrich Nietzsche have generally been underestimated, and I think he is right.17 Perhaps the closest analogue for Kojève’s treatment of Hegel may be found in a work that has many startling connections with Kojève’s commentary, Nietzsche’s Towards a Genealogy of Morality.18 In both cases, a specific genre, ostensibly devoted to the painstaking and sober treatment of a topic—the kind of work, we may presume, that occupies the sober English psychologists Nietzsche so delights in mocking—becomes the vehicle for proposals of extraordinary daring. Here we have a Trojan horse that seeks not the edification but the conquest of its audience by means of a dramatic and extreme rhetoric—indeed, an almost apocalyptic rhetoric—that suggests the significance of our current epoch and thus of the actions we might take in response to the doctrines contained in these works. This is not a rhetoric of reserve, of cautious consideration, but of revolution, and in both cases the exhortation is to throw off the shackles of the slave in favor of a radical form of emancipation.
The emphasis on emancipation is central to Kojève’s commentary, and it invokes an obvious irony because the “ordinary” work of the commentator is not one of liberation from the text but of humble servitude to it. As I have already noted, the commentator is supposed to explain the text using careful principles of explication whose authority has been established by the tradition of commentaries going back to the ancient commentaries on Aristotle, if not further. These commentaries emerged out of the ancient academic milieu and sought to explicate difficult texts of the master—referred to merely as the Philosopher in a later tradition of commentaries, those of the great Arab thinker Averroes, which exerted enormous influence in the medieval West. These commentaries were ways of continuing and refining the tradition, not of bringing it to an end or transforming it. They dealt with each part of the Aristotelian text, and they tended to shy away from the broad statements that pepper Kojève’s work. To put a long story into a few words, these commentaries were acts of service to a grand tradition that they sought to preserve.
We seem to find nothing of the sort in Kojève’s commentary, in which an ironic and playful self-consciousness reigns supreme, as the very first section of the Hegel lectures indicates. This section, taken from an article Kojève published in 1939, plays the role of commentary, providing both the Hegelian text and Kojève’s comments.19 But, unlike most traditional commentaries, the setting off of the two texts is rather confusing because they are separated only by brackets and italics. Moreover, the commentary freely intrudes on the Hegelian text at many points. One has the impression not of respectful commentary but of an attempt to create a dialogue of equals or, even more radically, a dialogue in which the commentator—who is surely in a superior position in this respect, since the philosopher himself cannot respond—prevails by clarifying what the master was evidently unable or unwilling to say.20
Let me be perfectly clear here: Kojève’s commentary develops a philosophical theory—specifically that of the origins and ends of identity—that seems to use the Hegelian text as a pretext. To be sure, Kojève shows a basic fidelity to the Hegelian text, but he spins an entire philosophical theory out of it in a way that constitutes much more than a tried-and-true explication of the text. Rather, Kojève takes the text as a basis for an imaginative construction of his own whose story of origins and ends can be connected to the Hegelian text only imprecisely or ambiguously. Kojève pays heed to the master but also departs from the letter of Hegel’s teaching to create what seems to be a teaching of his own.
Perhaps I have engaged thus far in what one may consider only a pedantic way of suggesting that Kojève’s commentary is not “merely” a commentary but in fact a philosophical construct of its own. One need not debate the issue of correctness or adequacy of the interpretation, because these concerns are largely beside the point. Moreover, this approach to the accuracy of interpretation, under the influence of Heidegger but also of Kojève, has become common coin in contemporary academic discourse. There is now no original text but merely a proliferation of discourses, which is itself supposed to be a kind of “proof” of the absence of an original. Dogma becomes Derridian in the sense of the singular Derridian declaration that the condition of possibility of interpretation—and thus interpretations—is that there is no one interpretation of any text.21 That this condition of possibility becomes Derridian dogma is itself ironic because the dogma is belied or betrayed by its content; if there is no interpretation that can claim to be the final one, no interpretive dogma should be final, provided that the ascription of dogma itself is an interpretation, a story that, like any other, is neither more nor less authoritative.
This complete collapse of the text is one of the outcomes of Kojève’s approach to the Hegelian text. Not so obvious is the corollary: that Kojève’s text itself collapses as well. There is no final text, no original, merely a proliferation of texts, all of which are ironic “simulacra,” copies of an absent original.
Yet this is manifestly not what Kojève is after in his commentary. The commentary is designed to lead to a decisive final point that does not engage in the sort of “spinning in the void” that may result from Derridian proliferation. But Derridian proliferation is no doubt a possible outcome of Kojève’s approach and, by revealing this possible outcome, Derridian proliferation points to an underlying tension in Kojève’s approach, between interpretive license, or philosophical madness, and final constraint, the end of history or final state that is one of the most important dogmas Kojève proclaims throughout his lectures. To put this in terms we have already employed, there is a marked tension in Kojève between what appears to be a purely negative approach and a positive one, betwee
n the opposed and perhaps mutually exclusive tasks of destruction and creation.
These arguments require a much more thorough account of Kojève’s interpretation than I have given so far. For the moment, suffice it to say that the interpretive license that Kojève seems to allow himself opens up formidable, indeed vertiginous, possibilities, which Kojève himself would later seek to undermine. One of the most powerful aspects of Kojève’s later thought is its attempt to show that the kind of proliferation evinced by what I have called (somewhat jocularly) the Derridian dogma is impossible, or not a proliferation, but its opposite: the potentially endless repetition of a simple operation.22
What, then, is the significance of Kojève’s distortion or parody of the generally accepted approach to commentary? Is it really, as I have noted, an arrogation of authority based on Kojève’s philosophical nature, his assumption that he is a philosopher himself and not merely a commentator? Is the commentary on Hegel, then, an example of that denkerische Zwiesprache whose radical shortcomings may be excused as the inevitable byproduct of genuine philosophical discourse? Or should we take another tack, that of Kojève’s friend Leo Strauss, the rather notorious advocate of the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of a text?23 From this point of view, might we say that Kojève is concealing his radicality behind the mask of academic propriety?