The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  There are a number of interesting examples that may be adduced here, especially in terms of art, where the connection of Kojève’s thought with the notion of the postmodern that appeared in architecture in the 1980s and 1990s is astonishing.24 According to that notion of the postmodern, architecture and art become increasingly devoted to the rearrangement of forms that have already emerged, the possibility of new forms having become exhausted. All that is left to the architect or artist is the art of combining forms already at hand. What might have once been referred to as mere eclecticism is now all that is left to art, as an ars combinatoria. While Kojève does not go this far, it is evident that he also affirms something similar insofar as all that is left to human beings in the post-historical epoch is repetition of forms that were created in another time. The situation must be so, since by definition the end of history means that all possible forms of human action have been realized. Unlike the postmodern architect, then, the post-historical human being Kojève projects does not seem capable of new combinations of forms torn out of their original historical context—this implies a certain negation of the given that suggests that history has not ended. By contrast, Kojève’s post-historical human being would simply repeat, without being aware of that repetition as having any other significance other than as repetition.

  Here one might be tempted to compare post-historical life to a play or drama repeated endlessly in the post-historical epoch. The post-historical being is an actor who follows the guidelines of a role created once and repeated potentially infinitely afterwards. Since the post-historical human being could have no sense of self, even to confer a consciousness of his own position as an actor in a play would have to be impossible.

  The obvious model for this kind of attitude is to be found in Martin Heidegger’s distinction between inauthentic and authentic modes of existence for what Heidegger refers to as “Dasein.” The inauthentic life, for Heidegger, is the life that does not become aware of itself as such. This is the life that is lived according to whatever conventions govern that particular life. The conventions are never called into question, never contravened (except as purely “mechanical” error to be corrected instantly); rather, they are followed, as we might say, “mindlessly,” or more precisely, “unconsciously.” That is, inauthentic Dasein lives in a kind of oblivion of his own life; he merely repeats the same patterns without even recognizing them as such. In this sense, we may say that the inauthentic Dasein is very much like an animal, having instinct, even if this instinct has been acquired through a struggle that had no model or template. What was first created in a conscious relation of struggle is now repeated without any notion of creation or struggle.

  We say “unconscious” because Kojève is also getting at a central aspect of the kind of repetition that attends ritual—that it is not the object of thought. We seem to engage in a variety of these kinds of activities every day. They mimic, so to speak, our involuntary functions so effectively that it takes a considerable effort of thought even to recognize that these activities are acquired through human action. To the extent that we live without taking account of these activities, we live oblivious to them, and, if we are the post-historical beings of Kojève, we cannot help but live oblivious to them—if not, indeed, to all activities.

  “Oblivion” is perhaps the best word to describe the post-historical state. It is a state of oblivious or blind action; it is the state in which human beings exist in a manner of total oblivion, as if they had managed to return to that inchoate beginning from which they came with the advent of the first act of human desire. But Kojève does not give us this kind of account, which is more in line with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in any case. Though he may allude to Rousseau—how could he not, in dealing with Hegel’s description of the master-and-slave relation?—he never directly refers to Rousseau. And this is curious, since Kojève’s final state seems to seek to achieve the kind of completion that Rousseau identifies with the state of nature and tries to recreate in the notion of the general will.25

  ERADICATING HISTORY AS BREAKDOWN

  If we put this squarely within Kojève’s own terms we arrive at a most unusual result. The aim of Kojève’s account of history is to eradicate history; the aim of history is to overcome whatever gave birth to history in the first place. As we already know, history is associated with error, an error of nature, the correction of which we might describe as history. History, as a movement from an initial breakdown in the natural order to the reestablishment of an order that is no longer natural but created by the work of the human being, is nonetheless a correction in that breakdown in the natural order.

  Kojève’s thinking is in this sense a philosophy of breakdown or crisis. History is the overcoming or correction of that breakdown. To be human, to negate, is to negate the error that created the human in the first place. This surely has to be one of the most intriguing aspects of Kojève’s thinking, since it is a thinking that seeks to eliminate thinking as error. In other words, Kojève tacitly reconceives the project of emancipation from nature as a project whereby the equilibrium of nature is reestablished through the action of human beings. If we indeed become masters of nature or of the world in a certain sense through the work of the slave, the final result of that mastery is the extirpation of the error that led to the human being in the first place. Our mastery is, from this perspective as well, a termination of the human or, better, the full expression of the human as coming to itself in self-termination.

  To get a better sense of what Kojève is after, let us take the presumably contrary position. Human being is not an error but, rather, human beings are creatures of nature who either have a natural purpose or whose purpose is to design their own purposes; human being is a free, creative being—almost like a god.

  If we take the first alternative, that human beings have a natural purpose, then we of course rob human beings of their freedom. There is no way to differentiate human beings from animals in this respect. All we might do is indicate that human beings are in the peculiar position of being able to grasp their own want of freedom. Error for the human being, in this scenario, is to not grasp one’s proper place in nature, to offend against nature such that nature returns with a vengeance. Here we have an essentially tragic model of human errancy. The tragedy inheres in that we are conscious of ourselves as beings, that we sense in some fundamental way that we have a freedom or power to dispose of our own fate, but that in the end we find out that we are terribly deceived. Our efforts to overcome our destiny can only meet with failure and show us to be a being most unkindly disposed to be aware of its own limitations without being able to overcome or change them in any substantial way.

  If we take the second alternative, that human beings design their own purposes, then we grant to human beings the most radical freedom imaginable. The human being is the self-creating being par excellence. Human being, in this respect, has no essence; indeed, the essence of the human being is to have no essence. All origins—and, finally, death itself—may be completely overcome. Now, one has to ask exactly what this notion of self-creation can concretely mean. What is it to be a being that is in a continual process of creating itself? Is such a being even thinkable? Moreover, is there a point at which self-creation becomes a possibility, the point of overcoming the mortality or death that seems to limit self-creation? Or is it indeed the very condition of possibility of self-creation?

  The latter point seems prior. One may argue that only a limited being can possibly be creative and that the aim of creativity must be to overcome the limits of that limited being. What sense, after all, may one apply to the notion of an immortal or unconditioned being as a creative being? There are perhaps too many difficulties here, because the notion of an immortal or unconditioned being is itself so problematic. While our imaginary abounds in immortal beings, most of them bear a strong resemblance to mortal beings whose lives do not end. To imagine a being that does not live in time as a real limit, that has no fears for its own security, no
needs to secure itself—to imagine such a being must be almost impossible, because it would be so utterly different from what we can possibly know, we who live within limits at any and every given moment. If we cannot imagine the immortal self-creating being, then we have to return to the first alternative, that human beings have a natural purpose. And if we do so, we give to creativity a necessary condition: that it overcome mortality. Our creative power has first a simple purpose that it must overcome in order to exercise itself with utter freedom.

  The problem is that, once this is overcome, the being that might emerge is likely outside the powers of our imagination. If it has no need to create, why does it create? If there is no need prompting creation, what can creation even be? Does it coalesce in a form? Why would it ever choose to coalesce into a finite form, thus restricting its own freedom or returning, tacitly, to the finite world it has left behind? If the self-creating being cannot overcome mortality, then to what extent can it be self-creating? Surely it cannot be fully self-creating, because to be fully self-creating is of course to banish death as a limit, to banish any limits whatsoever. Thus the difficulty of imaging a being whose essence is to not take any one form or any form at all—pure self-creating sounds suspiciously like pure spontaneity and thus cannot be anything other than essentially inscrutable if it is to retain its curious identity. If it is not, therefore, fully self-creating, then to what extent, if any, can it create?

  What can be the meaning of finite creativity? The finite in this combination refers back to a context, and creation, which is necessarily based in that context, can only realize itself as a negation of that context. But even that negation affirms the context. There is no absolute self-creation but rather a relative one, and is relative creation really creation? A relative creating is nothing like an absolute creation. A relative creation has to be an unfolding of the possibilities inherent in the original context. In overcoming the origin by negating it, one also realizes the possibilities inherent in it, since the negation always relates back to a conditioned starting point. Is this creation?

  We end up with two very different models of creation—one infinite, the other finite. We can perhaps dispense with the first model fairly quickly, since infinite or unconditioned creation, the creatio ex nihilo, can only be an abstract supposition for human beings, who never find themselves capable of unconditioned creation because they themselves are conditioned, most fundamentally, by death itself. If creatio ex nihilo proves to be entirely impossible for human beings, radical self-creation can be little more than a deception or handy myth that flatters us with powers we cannot possibly possess. The second model seems to be the only one pertinent to human beings, and it proves to be far less flattering to human beings because it emphasizes that creation is not bringing something literally out of nowhere but only enumerating possibilities that must somehow be inherent in whatever context we are in. The origin dictates the possibilities of creation; the origin dictates the end.

  If this is so, we come quite close to Kojève. Far from disproving Kojève’s model of ostensibly creative development, we seem to be close to affirming it. Indeed, if we return to the opening discussion of this chapter, we see that Kojève’s equation of the concept and time is a way of describing the complete unfolding of the possibilities inherent in a given situation. The key point to keep in mind is that all situations turn out to be the unfolding of an original situation; we can know no other beginnings than our own. The creative journey of Kojève’s history turns out to be nothing more than the discovery of ourselves as created out of a certain historical context. But this creation is manifestly not a creation from nothing, merely the enumeration or expression of the possibilities inherent in the beginning. It is a self-unfolding of the individual that is concomitant with the self-unfolding of the whole to which the individual belongs—again the “I” that is “we” and the “we” that is “I.”

  THE FINITE GOD

  Kojève finally rejects any homology between God and man that transforms man into God, capable of infinite self-creation or transformation. On the contrary, Kojève creates a finite God. That he does so is an accepted interpretation in Kojève scholarship.26 But, of course, a finite God is not really a god at all. If anything, a finite God is a parody of God, since a finite God can free itself of its finitude only through an absolute act: suicide. The finite God may choose suicide freely—the master—or may choose the mediated suicide of the slave who works to liberate himself from himself in the end. In either case, the only truly Godlike act the finite God can take is to eliminate himself, to cancel himself out, to become nobody, either with the dramatic flourish of Alexei Kirillov or in the innocuous acquiescence of the bureaucrat, whether Stalinist or the architect of a universal bureaucratic state.

  8

  ROADS OR RUINS?

  A work of poetry is never finished, only abandoned.

  —Paul Valéry

  The extent to which Kojève’s final works are themselves attempts to complete the “Book” that the sage leaves behind is likely a question with no simple response. Although it is a well-known biographical tidbit that Kojève referred to himself as a “god”—perhaps ironically, perhaps not—it is also fair to say that Kojève’s doubts about G. W. F. Hegel’s own achievement of this status apply equally to Kojève, who is no better than Hegel at explaining why the end of history in the figure of the sage is necessary. Indeed, a less generous mind might assert that Kojève’s own work, as philosophical propaganda ushering in the end of history, makes no sense unless that end is not necessary; Kojève’s ambiguous admission that the end of history is a project merely confirms this want of necessity.1

  If this is so, then the works Kojève produced as attempts to “update” or repeat Hegel’s own have no greater right than Hegel’s to be considered the Book, within the terms Kojève himself employs. One has to conclude, then, that the large corpus Kojève wrote after Introduction to the Reading of Hegel amounts to an attempt to complete the Book from the precarious position of a project whose chances for completion are by no means certain. The grand enterprise of philosophical propaganda that Kojève attempted to complete after the Introduction remained for the most part incomplete or unpublished, and this itself tends only to affirm once again the central difficulty of declaring finality.

  If the end of history is the finite god or the sage, then the danger is that the point of absolute proof of this status—self-immolation—cannot come to pass, for the reasons I have already set out in some detail. While Kojève may deride Alexei Kirillov, it is by no means obvious that Kojève’s finite God does not find himself in the same sardonically ironic position: to declare definitively the end of history is to kill oneself or become unconscious. If one does neither, however, one is in the uncomfortable position of writing tracts, of continually contemplating final status in a way that betrays finality. The act of betrayal, which I have already referred to as the act of Judas, is the ultimate acknowledgment of the comic pathos attendant on the finite God, who, in the end, is no god at all.

  Kojève’s immense corpus of post-historical writings attests to this pathos. They do so most spectacularly in the often strained, ironic jocularity that accompanies an evident delight in ornate complexity, which Kojève himself refers to as “preciosity.”2 Kojève’s final writings proclaim a finality that they cannot seem to endure, or they address this finality by elaborating it obsessively, by digression, indirection, and, especially, an increasingly involved mode of presentation in which the proliferation of distinctions, terms, and introductions seems to belie the finality they all declare with studious monotony.

  Yet this view is arguably unfair to Kojève. While we have abundant evidence of the ironic Kojève, this later work is also an impressively detailed and serious attempt to address the problem of declaring finality (and of not declaring it), a problem of which Kojève was perhaps only too keenly aware. More than that, the two most important strands in this later work, the juridical and the historical-philosophica
l, reveal the originality of Kojève to an extent that is simply not available in the Hegel lectures. Both Outline of a Phenomenology of Right and Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy are intensely original works, even when we accept the pervasive influence of two fundamental narratives of Hegelian provenance: that of master and slave and that of the ascent to wisdom.

  While Kojève generally claims merely to follow Hegel, both of these major works are heterodox. His exploration of right has little in common with Hegel’s Elements of a Philosophy of Right, even while developing an entire theory of the final state on the basis of the master-and-slave narrative. Moreover, his capacious study of pagan philosophy has no direct equivalent in Hegel and creates its own interpretation of dialectical logic as part of a distinctive theory of discourse intended to negotiate a final narrative situated between silence and infinite conversation. In this instance, Kojève provides an enormously expanded version of his somewhat cryptic argument, featured in lectures 6, 7, and 8, from 1939, that the history of philosophy is essentially the story of the temporalizing of the concept, of its (and our) discursive liberation from silent eternity. The idea that distinctively human life is a liberation from eternity shows, without a doubt, the influence of existentialism, but, given its end in an ending, it might also be viewed as a critique or parody of existentialism.