The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  For Kojève, freedom comes down to freedom from our animal nature, a freedom that he readily admits can never be fully achieved because we cannot, in the very end, simply eradicate the beginning point. On the contrary, the beginning point determines the entire course of the movement away from it. Our freedom is thus based on the extinguishment of our animal nature, and the final mark of that freedom is the sage and, in particular, the Book, which has nothing more to do with our animal nature since it is itself pure discourse. To put this differently, our freedom consists in an act of suppression of our animal nature, which means that we bring our death upon ourselves so that the achievement of our freedom, the Book, may live on, unlimited by animality.

  Likewise, our uniquely human task consists in eradicating the individuality of the animal, the radical separation among members of a species that results from their corporeal individuation. The correlate of freedom as a distinctively human or free creation is the suppression of individuality whereby the differences that emerge from our corporeal separation are overcome. Once again, the most pertinent figuration of this overcoming is the Book, the uniqueness of which arises from the distinctiveness of the story it tells and then retells in the form of pure abstraction. The individual—or transindividual subject—that emerges in the Book at the end of history is a perfect fusion of the one and the many, each individual a mirror reflecting all others, each being all and all being in each, the perfectly Hegelian “we” that is “I” and “I” that is “we” from chapter 4 of the Phenomenology. Indeed, we might say that each individual is a perfect replica of the other, differentiated only by homogeneous space, and that each individual conveys all.

  Needless to say, these notions of individuality and freedom have little to do with the “free, historical, individual” as typically conceived, and Kojève’s challenge is precisely leveled at the difficulties that seem to coalesce around the figure of the “free, historical individual.” These difficulties might be expressed as stemming from the central claim to self-determination that seems quite explicit: the free individual is free only to the extent he is not restricted by others, and the central freedom afforded to the free individual is freedom from the fear of violent death. But the significance of this central freedom is of course that it makes self-preservation into the governing principle of political community and action.

  Hence, as I have already suggested, Kojève’s seemingly outlandish radicality is in fact a challenging affront to the conception of man as “free, historical individual,” which assumes more or less explicitly that self-preservation, or perhaps even self-interest, is the highest value—a very precarious value, to be sure. The ghastly visions of the end of history that Kojève provides strike at the desire for self-preservation that animates most utopian visions, as if one could simply live on in one’s present form forever, or for a very long time, undisturbed by fear or boredom. These visions express the same sense of ridicule that one finds in Kojève’s claim that resurrection is the only “theist” mistake of Christianity.46

  III

  THE LATER WRITINGS

  7

  NOBODIES

  Taken in itself, negation is pure nothingness: it is not, it does not exist, it does not appear. It is only as negation of identity, that is, only as Difference. It can thus exist only as a real negation of Nature.

  —Alexandre Kojève

  Kojève’s equation of time and concept, arguably the guiding equation of his thought, leads to seemingly insuperable difficulties.1 One may be pardoned for assuming that the pattern of self-immolation asserted so regularly in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel has general application, possessing the authority of an irreducible truth. Kojève does nothing to dispel this identification. And yet, if we take the connection between time and concept seriously, the notion of truth as we understand it—as a fixed standard having application to various “cases”—can no longer be sustained, at least as a transcendent truth applicable to all possible worlds and not just to our own, unless of course our own contains all possible worlds.

  To get a sense of the difference of Kojève’s thought, we have to come to terms with the fact that the identification of time and concept suggests not only that the concept is narrative but also that this narrative relates only to itself. The narrative cannot have “general” application as a truth outside of itself, for the atemporal or eternal dimension in which that truth resides is denied from the outset by the equation of time and concept. Simply put, the truth achieved by equating concept and time can only relate to that equation itself immanently; thus, it cannot be said to be a general or eternal truth applying to all possible narratives in the traditional sense. On the contrary, the holism of this equation can result only from its comprehensiveness—all possible narratives play but a part in this greater, singular narrative, the “Book,” the final end of which is to liberate them from their particularity by demonstrating their subservient role in the construction of precisely this final narrative and no other, since at the end of history no other is possible: “Absolute philosophy has no object that might be exterior to it.”2

  “The truth is the whole”—yet again. This famous Hegelian phrase seems also to govern Kojève’s work. But we might just as well reformulate this phrase as “The truth is death.” For the progress of truth toward itself is a process of universalization that undermines the particular in its inexorable movement to completion. Indeed, universalization may be described as a process of negation of all attachments to a particular context, and all attachments are particular attachments, even to the extent that they are abstract.

  Kojève explicitly connects this movement to negation and death in his comparison of G. W. F. Hegel with Martin Heidegger, which appeared in a book review from 1936 that remained unpublished during Kojève’s lifetime.3 There, Kojève quotes Hegel as affirming the proposition that negation in its complete or absolute form is death: “The absolute of negation, pure freedom, is—in its appearance (Erscheinung)—death.” This may seem to be logical enough; surely death is an absolute of sorts, since it negates completely the particular life whose final end it is. Our “growth” is a movement toward an end that cancels out that growth by bringing it to its terminal point. In this respect, one’s life is indeed a self-canceling narrative, or a narrative whose end is its own elimination. As Sigmund Freud laconically put it, the end of life is death.

  Has Kojève simply generalized this narrative to history as a whole? Is the end of history the eradication of history? This latter point initially seems a plausible argument because human action negates, and what it negates is its relation to a given. To employ a perhaps questionable metaphor, negation is motion that burns up the fuel of the given in coming to a final stop. Kojève uses a similar metaphor, of the ingestion of food, in describing the basic arc of negation that he associates with desire: the animal negates a given in order to continue to move. Movement stops either when the given is exhausted or the animal’s capacity for ingestion has collapsed, along with its other functions.

  Of course, there is a significant distinction here, for Kojève is careful to indicate that, unlike the animal, the truly human human being embraces his death by negating first and foremost the animal imperative to self-preservation. The human being freely brings about his own end. He does not acquiesce in his end but he freely brings it on by becoming a different kind of being, to the extent that he can eradicate his attachment to self-preservation. The master does this immediately, while the slave, through work and struggle, comes to the same conclusion, having transformed himself and the world into an artifact that overcomes his fear of death and thus negates the imperative of self-preservation.4

  The upshot is that the slave recognizes that he is negation and, as such, death. His identity is the eradication of identity, and he learns to free himself by freeing himself of identity. He overcomes individuality by becoming universal, and thus comes to pass the final state, when all individual lives match the universal narrative, when there is complet
e harmony between part and whole, a harmony that signals the end of history in the universal and homogeneous state.5

  Thus, if we return to our opening point, the truth only emerges in the complete harmony of the universal and homogeneous state, the state in which the individual life, the animal life, has been completely eradicated—we all become nobody or something akin to nobody, each is all and all is each. What one has, in effect, is a state of replicas, different from one another only in position but otherwise exactly alike. The final negation of the given produces absolute identity as the negation of any given identity.6 Absolute negation leads to the kind of death Kojève describes in the context of the sage, who ceases to be human (and animal) the moment he has become wise and left behind his life as the life of everyman in the reified Book.

  Kojève seems to regard this basic structure as having final authority. If that is so, it cannot apply to any other circumstances, since other circumstances cannot come into play. If they did, finality would not have been achieved. No other circumstances would be possible; all that one could contemplate would be repetition of what has already been. Nothing new would be possible, as Kojève indicates in his startling end to the 1938–1939 lectures.

  Yet what kind of repetition could this possibly be? Or more pertinently, how can we be sure that we have reached an end point? How can negation come to an end? The fundamental question is of course that of equilibrium: Is it ever possible to create an equilibrium or harmony between negation and finality? How can we ever become nobodies, eliminating our own individuality, our own attachment to the world, without being dead? And how can we experience our own death, know that we are in fact dead?

  If we know we are dead, death is not the end, and death is not complete or absolute. But if we cannot know our own death, then how can we identify with death or the end while still alive in some sense?7 This problem is no minor one. It threatens to mock Kojève’s claims for finality at every step, because the declaration of an end, of having come to the end of history or time, presupposes what it must otherwise deny—that there is a position somehow beyond the end that allows one to claim that end. But if the notion of an end cannot allow for that position, one comes into insuperable difficulties that align themselves with the difficulties with which we began. If Kojève declares that only the truth is the whole, and the whole must be complete for there to be truth, then he must make that claim either immanently, from within the “logic” of the whole itself, or from without—and, of course, to make the latter claim undermines the claim to finality.

  Does this logic apply to negation as well? If it does, then negation would be interminable—every “final” point would in fact imply another, and so on ad infinitum. If no final point may be reached, then the entire structure of negation comes into question. Kojève is well aware of the difficulty, and his response seems to amount to a claim that negation comes to a final point that is in fact its starting point. Kojève considers this aspect of Hegel’s logic its circularity and insists that circularity is necessary to any logic at all. Thus, negation persists until it reaches a point that resembles a return to its beginning—absolute negation leads to the complete negation of the given, a negation that may in turn be negated by a new beginning itself. Negation negates itself in the positing of a new beginning, and negation only negates itself when there is nothing more than itself as the given. We end up with a circular version of history in which the end of history designates that point at which history begins again. What Kojève describes is a variant of eternal return in which a finite series repeats itself exactly and infinitely, or at least potentially infinitely. The alternative, the infinite repetition of an infinite series, is outside the range of cognition, at least of nonmathematical cognition.8

  Let me explain more carefully. Kojève insists that negation as difference depends on a given that is transformed over the course of time such that it appears only as the distant antecedent of a reality that is created wholly by negation. The narrative of negation that Kojève gives is essentially that set out in his commentary on chapter 4 of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the famous narrative of master and slave. There are two crucial elements in this narrative with regard to negation: struggle and work. Struggle is the political operation of overcoming the rule of the master over the slave; work is the operation whereby the slave transforms nature itself so as to become, in Kojève’s blunt terms, “master of the world.” While the relation of the two is not without ambiguity, Kojève seems to imply that each is in fact the necessary condition of the final realization of the other. (As we noted in chapter 5, the political revolution of the terror may well be the necessary condition for completion of the technological revolution permitting final liberation from the world of the master or the world suitable to the master and vice versa.) The entire narrative, in its extreme abstraction, describes a process whereby one world is negated in favor of another; in this sense, the negation carried on by the slave is the precondition of a new beginning. But it is not immediately evident from this narrative that the narrative will in fact repeat itself. Indeed, the final state achieved by the slave, the universal and homogeneous state, seems to be a permanent end in itself. There is, in this case, no apparent negation of the slave’s negation, no new beginning; rather, there is a kind of stasis.

  Is this an inconsistency in Kojève’s account? Is Kojève’s apparently circular logic not in fact linear? Moreover, if Kojève’s logic is linear, then how is it possible for Kojève ever to claim finality, that a truly final state has been achieved? As I have already noted, the mere existence of a description of this final state suggests that it is not final or that there is some perspective that is not wholly assimilated in the final state. But if this perspective has not been wholly assimilated into the final state, then the final state is certainly not final, and so on. Kojève may counter that his account of the final state is merely descriptive, an articulation of the Logos of the Book, but one wonders to what extent such an articulation as articulation can really take place after history has ended and the need for articulation of the Book must seem superfluous.

  To put the problem in different terms, if the end of history is the complete overcoming of individuality, the emptying out of the individual in the “trans-individual” universal and homogeneous state, why would anyone need to articulate that process? To be sure, there is the Book, but why would anyone read it? Would there be any “one” to read it? If, as Kojève acknowledges in a manuscript not published until 1990, “philosophy eliminates bit by bit all reflection to the extent that it transforms itself into Knowledge or Wisdom,”9 then what would this reading be? Can one read “unreflectively”? By this I mean to question the possibility or, indeed, coherence of a reading that is not aware of itself as such. If it is aware of itself as such, then wisdom has not yet been achieved, since wisdom brings about the end of self-awareness, understood as a gap of sorts, the very gap that creates the reflexivity wisdom is supposed to overcome.

  This is a complicated point worth considering. The achievement of complete self-consciousness is the extirpation of difference—there is nothing left to negate, nothing that is not known discursively. This is the day in which all cows are transparent white, a brilliant day that is not really even day anymore because night has been overcome: it is pure immanence. If the Book records the struggle and retains the memory of the struggle, such that one sees the dialectical tension that led to its own overcoming/sublating (Aufhebung/suppression)10 or completion or consummation (Vollendung), then there can be no one left to read it because there can be no one left who is not fully transparent to himself—no one is left at all. We have absolute identity as the absolute negation of identity, at once positive and negative, pure being and pure nothingness, an “is” that “is not” insofar as determinateness itself has been overcome; identity and nonidentity are one.

  Is this not the same state that Kojève critiques in the case of Parmenides and Baruch Spinoza? Once time and the concept are one and that relation h
as come to its fulfillment in a given narrative of narratives, how may one discuss that fulfillment without calling it into question? How may one speak after the end of history? Kojève seems to hold that one may speak only as Pierre Menard speaks, by repeating the words of the Book.11 But is this speech? Of course, we have the problems I have already mentioned: Who speaks? And what does this “one” do in speaking? What is it to repeat syllables on a page—is that speech?

  To declare the end of history is simply ironic; the declaration itself seems to belie the end declared. There is a stubborn homology with death here, to the extent that it is equally impossible to speak about the end of one’s own history. Of course, there is the attractive dodge—that the end describes the state where all possibilities of life or historical action have been explored, the rest being “mere” repetition. But is there any such thing as mere repetition?

  AUTOMATIC LIFE

  Here we come to a governing issue in Kojève’s later thought, that attractive dodge of repetition. If history comes completely to an end, then it seems quite obvious that any post-historical speech is nonsense, or “mindless” repetition, or ironic to the degree it is not mindless. If history comes to an end as the discovery of the new and turns into repetition of what has already come before, then repetition has a different function. In this sense, repetition returns us to the Greek concept of nature as Kojève characterizes it. We read and live the Book without exception or deviation or awareness that we are doing so.