The Black Circle
Page 14
There is even another possibility, perhaps the least likely at first blush, but important nonetheless, since it is one that Kojève himself relies on time and again: that he is merely repeating Hegel’s text in a manner suitable to a different time. In this respect, the enormous philosophical project that Kojève engaged in, largely in secret, after the war was, in his own words, an attempt to bring the Hegelian system up to date for a new audience. But the question remains: If Hegel’s system is the end of history or the end of philosophy, why would it need an update? It is not at all unreasonable to assume that an update is needed precisely because history or philosophy did not end—people did not get the point, so it needs to be made again.
If we boil the options down, we get two: either Kojève is an innovator or tendentious simplifier who transforms Hegel for his own revolutionary purpose; or he is a faithful commentator who transforms Hegel, in service to the master, as a contemporary renovator of the truth, as if Kojève were a nineteenth- or twentieth-century Thomist attempting to prove the adequacy of Aquinas to the modern age. Kojève is either master or servant, as the case may be, one who negates or upholds the claims of the master in purporting to explain them. Or perhaps, in a more complex act of extreme fealty and betrayal, Kojève is a modern-day Judas whose betrayal of the master first allows the master to appear in his true role as the culmination of history, and who does so in a way that surpasses even his predecessors among Hegel’s earliest students.24
We may examine all these options, initially, by exploring the opening text of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Accordingly, I intend first to provide a reading of this text in order to set the stage for a careful reading of two other crucial texts from the Introduction, the lectures from 1938–1939, which, in my view, are the other centerpiece of the entire book, and the book’s dramatic coda, the remarkable lectures on death. In brief, the opening text sets out the basic mytheme of the lectures, the recognition narrative, in a way that offers an implicit account of Kojève’s own interpretive procedure, one that has a significant impact on what I am doing myself as an interpreter of this most devious and self-aware interpreter of Hegel.
I might add in passing that, by proceeding in this manner, I am disregarding the advice Queneau gives to the reader in his editor’s note (which is not reproduced in the English translation). Queneau asks the reader who does not want to follow the text of the Phenomenology to read only the introduction, the two appendixes, and the first three lectures from 1937–1938.25 While Kojève’s English translator and editor seem, in part, to have followed this injunction, which may very well be traced back to Kojève himself, the elimination from the English edition of almost three hundred pages of the French text, including an important appendix on death, all the lectures from 1935–1936 and 1936–1937, and half of the lectures from 1938–1939 seems wholly inappropriate. This radical truncation of the original French text omits a large portion of what Kojève himself wrote, and one wonders whether the argument for Kojève’s violence as an interpreter does not unduly benefit from this omission.
DESIRE, THE BIRTH OF THE HUMAN
The opening text of the Introduction, “In the Guise of an Introduction,” sets out a creation narrative, a story or philosophical myth of origins based on the famed chapter 4 of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which Hegel describes in extremely compressed form his notion of self-consciousness. Kojève does not open with a citation from Hegel’s text but with his own words: “Man is self-consciousness.”26 The opening text is the creation narrative of self-consciousness and thus of man as well. The equation of man with self-consciousness is not terribly bold within the Hegelian context, nor is the claim that Kojève makes a few paragraphs further along, that self-consciousness presupposes desire, that the I which emerges as the first sign of self-consciousness is an I of desire: “The (human) I is the I of a desire or desire itself” (Le Moi [humain] est le Moi d’un—ou du—désir). Far bolder, however, is Kojève’s justification of this claim by means of an apparently original creation narrative about the birth of the word I (la naissance du mot “Moi”). Kojève provides no further justification or deduction of the claim.27
According to Kojève, man initially contemplates or is totally absorbed in what he contemplates. As such, man is not aware of himself. More abstractly stated, the knowing subject simply loses itself in the object it knows. Kojève explicitly makes the connections between man and knowing subject, the thing contemplated and the object. He thus transforms the terms of his initial discussion from something akin to the natural attitude to one that fits within the terminology of subject and object, the terminology of modern philosophy. Kojève makes another connection by referring to the birth of the I, of self-consciousness, as the birth of human reality (la réalité humaine). Not only man but also human reality is self-consciousness, a connection that makes perfect sense on its own but also has wider implications, because the term “human reality” seems to be a reference to another definition of the human, Heidegger’s “Dasein.” One of Kojève’s students, Henry Corbin, used the very French term “réalité humaine” as a translation for Dasein in the 1930s.28 Thus, Kojève affirms the equation of being human with self-consciousness not only against the ancient and Christian definitions of man but also against that of Heidegger or existential philosophy, this being one of the first of many critical asides aimed at Heidegger, whose significance will become increasingly apparent as we move further into the text.29
How is self-consciousness “born”? Of course, it is born through desire. Kojève claims that man remains absorbed in what he contemplates only as long as desire does not recall him to himself. I use the unusual English construction “recall him to himself” because Kojève uses the French verb rappeler (to recall) to describe how desire reveals the self to the self. The use of this verb is intriguing for two reasons. First, it seems to contain a (largely parodic) reference to the notion of the call (Ruf) in Heidegger, whereby Dasein comes to itself. Second, it suggests a waking up or a returning to a self, which is initially quite confusing, for how can man be recalled to himself if he has not yet been constituted as a self? If the moment of desire is the moment of emergence of the I as I, of the self as self, how can this action possibly be what it claims to be: a founding, a beginning? To put the matter more starkly, how can a self first be revealed to itself if the act of revealing presupposes the very identity (of the self, the I) it is supposed to establish? Do we not enter here into an infinite regress or vicious circle?
The issues raised by this question at the very beginning are momentous. If the self-founding of the I is flawed or not possible, then we must take Kojève’s account as flawed in a crucial respect, or grossly mythic, merely giving an impression of logical development that cannot withstand closer inspection. One might argue that this flaw simply points to the rhetorical nature of the Kojèvian enterprise, its reliance on narratives that seem convincing but are not worthy of rigorous inspection, and we have Kojève’s own admission in a letter to Tran Duc Thao that the lectures were a kind of philosophical propaganda.30 To put the matter with less decorum, must we come to the conclusion that Kojève lies to us in order to convince us to accept a philosophical construct that is nothing else than a lie or fiction carefully wrought? This would seem to be a paltry result, or an assertion of Kojève’s weakness as a propagandist, since it is surely no hallmark of propaganda to make arguments that may be so quickly and easily pulled apart and fail to compel assent from the outset. I do not think it wise to take Kojève so lightly.
How then can the self reveal itself to itself for the first time? The properly Kojèvian answer, I think, comes only with the definition of desire. Kojève initially defines desire in terms of purely biological needs, like the need to eat, for example, and he maintains that self-consciousness cannot emerge in any other way than within the context of a “biological reality” (une réalité biologique). Kojève further identifies that reality with animality—the first appearance of desire is in the form o
f pure animal necessity, such as food, sex, protection, and so on. But this appearance of desire, while necessary, is not yet a sufficient condition for the emergence of self-consciousness, which first emerges with a different kind of desire, the object of which is not immediately found within the biological world. Still, Kojève has given us only the kinds of desire. He has not yet told us what desire is.
Desire is negation. What sort of equation is this? Kojève introduces negation by identifying it first with disquiet or restlessness and then with action. Desire is disquiet, restlessness that leads to action. Once completed, action returns us to a state of quiescence, a state that we may identify with satisfaction. Now Kojève makes a crucial move in describing the action of satisfying desire as negation, as the “destruction or at the very least the transformation of the desired object.” He provides an example by referring once again to eating, his metaphor of choice for describing animal desire. To satisfy hunger, one must destroy or transform the food. In a typically sweeping gesture, Kojève indicates that “all action is negative” in this sense: “Far from leaving the given as it is, action destroys it; if not in its being, in its given form.” Desire is action that negates or transforms the given so as to become satisfied or “full”—complete in such a sense that desire dissipates in contentment or satisfaction. The emphasis on transformation rather than destruction leads to Kojève’s next point. Desire as negating action transforms the given into a new reality, a subjective one: “For if the action born of desire destroys an objective reality in order to attain satisfaction, it creates in its place and by means of the destructive act itself, a subjective reality.”31
Desire creates by negating. The first thing it creates is a subject. Every action brings—or recalls—the subject to itself as the negating actor, as negation in process. Thus, Kojève’s claim that the I of desire is a void (un vide) that only receives positive content by its negative actions seems now to make better sense as an origin that does not presuppose the very identity it is supposed to create. Rather, Kojève describes a dynamic process of construction of the self, the first step of which is a negative relation of the self to the self as the void of desire. It thus is not identity that is presupposed but rather the absence of identity, a beginning point from which to proceed to acquire identity through actions that negate or transform the given.
Kojève creates what seems initially to be a productionist model of the subject, including the idea that truth is itself a “product.” He then sketches out the plan of production. But this is a radically simplified productionist model that reduces the apparatus of mediation to negation itself. One imagines a negating machine that transforms its inputs into outputs according to a program that determines the production process from the outset—that is, the production process merely repeats a production pattern that functions a priori. According to Kojève, the difference between a negating machine and an animal (whose instinct presumably plays the role of program) is the “sentiment of self” possessed by the animal—curiously enough, a sentiment of self that is, strictly speaking, impossible to prove definitively. The difference between a negating machine and the human being must be somewhat more complicated, since the human being apparently negates without a prior program. The human being becomes itself in a process of negation not foreordained in advance. There is no a priori, no plan to be repeated; the “plan” (if one may still call it that) first emerges from the process of production itself. This is in nuce a distinction between nature and history, where the former is the realm of necessity, the latter of freedom.32
To characterize human action as a process of production not dictated a priori is perhaps unfair to Kojève. I say this because human production is distinguished from that of animals not only by its non-aprioristic character but also by its object, the given that is supposed to be the target of negation. What is the distinctively human given, the “food” that the human being “negates” by ingesting it or by transforming it so that it may be ingested? For what does the human actor hunger?
Kojève’s answer is clear: desire. The object of human desire is desire. Now, this may sound estranging, even arbitrary. Kojève has not even bothered to cite the relevant Hegelian text yet.33 We are still in the beginning. While the simple productionist metaphor may adequately describe Kojève’s basic approach to animal desire, whereby “raw material,” the given, is physically transformed into something else by the activity of the animal, it seems to fail, at least at first blush, when loaded with this second object, whose givenness is unmistakably different because it relates to an object that in turn describes a relation to the given. Thus, the desire for a desire is a relation not to an object as concrete given but to another relation.
So we have a relation relating to another relation that relates in turn to something else. What is this something else? Is it the raw material, the given or “object” of animal desire, or yet another relation? The distinction here is of some importance, since the one relation is “grounded” in a given that offers a starting point for the hierarchy of desire, whereas the other, the relation to yet another relation, may end up deferring that starting point endlessly. In the first case, there is a sort of ground, a fixed originating referent, whereas in the second case such a ground is absent or infinitely deferred. Since the second case would undermine the model of desire that Kojève creates (and lead perhaps to the kind of Derridian proliferation I mentioned above), it is quite unlikely that human desire may relate only to other human desires. We must in fact accept what Kojève has indicated earlier, that desire as negation is not purely ideal but presupposes a biological starting point. The origin story only makes sense, it would seem, if the origin is biological, rooted firmly in the material world. But one wonders all the same if it has to be so. There is, in other words, an ambiguity about the given, whether that given is in fact already a product itself or is raw material, something akin to nature.
This is important because Kojève justifies his claim that desire for desire is distinctively human on the basis that it is not natural, that its object is not the raw material of nature that the animal transforms but, rather, already another desire. This other desire is not natural insofar as it transcends (dépasse) the given reality: “For Desire taken as Desire—i.e., before its satisfaction—is but a revealed nothingness, an emptiness that is unreal. Desire, being the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality, is something essentially different from the desired thing, something other than a thing, than a static and real being that stays eternally identical to itself.”34
Human desire presupposes animal desire, which is the condition of possibility of any notion of desire, but also surpasses it. Since human desire surpasses animal desire, it must also surpass the concrete (or “immediate”) materiality of animal desire, and the way to denote this surpassing is by identifying human desire with nonidentity or negation as Kojève uses the term. But there is nothing self-evident about this conclusion. It warrants careful consideration.
On the one hand, it is hardly clear how animal desire can generate human desire. The genesis of human desire from animal desire shows no necessity whatsoever. So why does it come about? On the other hand, it is also unclear why the content of human desire must be emptiness or nothingness, a paradoxical content, since it seems to turn what cannot be an object into an object. Perhaps these two objections are merely two different ways of approaching the central dilemma of Kojève’s definition of human desire: the creation of an object that cannot truly be an object, an object whose content undermines its form, an object afflicted by paradox or inconsistency.35
Kojève seems to hold that this paradox or inconsistency is the “wound” that desire seeks to heal. Human desire is born of dissatisfaction with natural ends, though it cannot fully free itself from natural ends (as origin of this dissatisfaction). Nonetheless, it is this very desire for freedom from natural ends that characterizes human desire, which, in this precise sense, must be understood in itself as negation
or emptiness because there is no natural object or given that can possibly correspond to it. To put this in different terms, Kojève appears to describe human desire as dissatisfaction with natural ends—human desire emerges with dissatisfaction, with some kind of breakdown in the functioning of the natural order. Human desire emerges from animal desire because something breaks down in the latter.
Where does one find this claim in the text? Is this an inference one must make? And if so, is it a fair inference? The clearest anticipation of this characterization of desire is Kojève’s identification of desire with disquiet or restlessness. Note Kojève’s piquant observation that “Man is absolute dialectical disquiet (Un-ruhe).”36 Of course, dialectical restlessness is associated with the “monstrous power of the negative,” the engine of dialectical movement in the Phenomenology that emerges in the three chapters that precede the chapter on self-consciousness.37 So there is nothing extraordinary about this claim, from the perspective of the movement forward, other than its obstinate focus on man as the dialectical agent. This focus brings up several thorny issues with regard to the dialectic and reveals one of Kojève’s most distinctive assumptions: that the dialectic does not necessarily describe a structure immanent in the world itself, in mind and nature, but in the form of the human response to nature, a response that can only be coherent as negation insofar as it is a sign of dissatisfaction, of enmity, of conflict.38 Kojève’s utter disregard for Hegel’s philosophy of nature becomes quite comprehensible when viewed from this perspective—there can be no positive philosophy of what, for us, is little more than an object to be negated or transformed, regardless of its specific contours.39