by Jeff Love
Politics gives way to right, to the juridical situation. Kojève addresses the distinction between the political and the juridical relation by arguing that the former presupposes conflict between friend and enemy whereas the latter presupposes a more general amity.16 In other words, the juridical relation presupposes general agreement among the parties as to the procedures and institutions of conflict resolution; it thus assumes that the desire for recognition, which gives rise to such conflicts, has been satisfied. If that desire has been satisfied conclusively, we have the advent of the universal and homogeneous state and thus a final perspective from which to judge differences, which themselves must be errors or the persistence in error, a persistence which may be incorrigible.
The treatise admits this difficulty somewhat by suggesting that the universal and homogeneous state in its “purity” is a “limit case,” as noted earlier. Nonetheless, the comprehensive teaching of the treatise makes no sense without a firm presupposition that the juridical signals the end of the political. The end of the political, as Carl Schmitt feared, is precisely the universal state. Where the political finally ends, the juridical truly comes into its own as the authoritative ordering of action in the universal and homogeneous state in which the relation of master and slave has begun to dissolve.17
EQUALITY, EQUIVALENCE, EQUITY
Kojève devotes the second major part of the treatise to a discussion of this relation, which in many respects follows the discussion Kojève set out in the Hegel lectures. But there are some telling differences. Kojève develops the master-slave relation in the context of justice or the search for justice that underlies the development of a system of right. He grounds the concept of justice in equality, as we might expect, given the general tendency of Kojève’s thinking, his persistent emphasis on equilibrium, balance, and harmony as the proper ends of truly human striving. He develops two different notions of equality that ground a justice of the master and of the slave. The justice of the master is based on an equality of recognition; a master recognizes other masters as equals insofar as they, like the master, show no fear of death. The justice of the slave is based on equivalence—it is a calculative understanding—whereby others have a position equivalent to that of the slave. Thus, the justice of the master is based on an equality of risk, that of the slave on an equivalence of position or circumstances.18
Kojève sees these two different relations as emerging from a deeper equality, that of the initial combat between master and slave, in which, at least at the beginning, both parties are equal.19 It is the slave who forfeits this equality by voluntarily acceding to the master in return for his life. By forfeiting this equality, the slave voluntarily submits to the inequality between himself and the master, which distinguishes his status as slave. Yet there is also an equivalence here, albeit an inverse one: the master is equivalent to the slave insofar as the master values death above servitude and the slave values servitude above death.20 Most interesting here is that the relation of equivalence is based on interests. The slave imputes an interest to the master that, as interest, is similar to what the slave expresses in refusing to risk his life. That this equivalence does not properly express the reason for the master’s risk, or expresses it in terms of the notion of interest, merely indicates the radicality of the qualitative difference between the two, notwithstanding their ostensive underlying equivalence.
The striving of the slave, the work that creates society and thus a juridical polity, attempts to regain the slave’s original position of equality in the sense that the rights of the slave will come to be equivalent to the rights of the master. The slave will come to enjoy the freedom of the master, though, to be sure, this freedom will still be marked by interest; the slave’s interest in self-preservation leads to a desire to overcome the master not by facing risk but by eradicating it. The ultimate end of the slave’s striving is to create a state in which equivalence reigns, in which all citizens are equivalent on the basis of the equitable management of what amounts to self-interest. Nonetheless, Kojève insists that the slave’s regaining of equality leads not to a return to the original position but to its fullest unfolding as a historical development, which is equivalent to the development of the slave’s interest in overcoming his fear of death by transforming the world through work and transforming his relation to the master through struggle.
Kojève refers to the two models of equality in the sense of historical struggle, as aristocratic right against bourgeois right. Kojève calls the final relation of these two equalities the “right of equity” (droit d’équité) and claims that it is in fact a synthesis of the different kinds of justice applicable to the master and the slave in the person of the citizen, who fuses both.21 What exactly this fusion means is somewhat more delicate. How may one fuse a right of risk with a right of conservation or self-preservation?
This is perhaps the most delicate question in the treatise because it brings out the difficulty of the end of history. If equity is the final mode of justice reflected in the final system of law, what exactly does this mean? Does this final satisfaction entail a freedom from self-preservation, its elimination? The distinction between the two forms of right gives rise to concern; if the master has no regard for self-preservation, the slave’s entire being is defined by it. The end, for the slave, is final satisfaction, the vanquishing of death. This is the slave’s version of suicide. The slave comes to be like the master in a radically different way, while the result, a kind of self-immolation, is clear. The animal fear the slave overcomes by the conquest of nature is utterly different from that of the master. Hence the question: How can the two possibly be reconciled? What can equity mean?
In the Hegel lectures, Kojève wavers in a very significant way. On the one hand, Kojève asserts that the slave transforms his servitude in the final revolution by making revolution, thus risking his life for an ideal.22 On the other hand, Kojève holds that the animal triumphs because that is all that remains—the new being created by the slave is essentially like an animal, since it is “programmed” and, consequently, no longer conscious of death. The slave does not kill the animal in order to overcome it; rather, the slave becomes fully animal. If the first case is somewhat murky—what brings the slave to conquer servitude through risk so late in the game?—the second certainly does not seem to be an Aufhebung (overcoming/sublating) in the Hegelian sense, in which both master and slave are preserved in a harmonious balance. Rather, the master as master disappears and does not reappear in the slave, other than as that which drove the slave to most fully express his animality.
Equity would seem beset by similar difficulties. If the slave’s work aims at annulling risk, then the slave overcomes the master by refuting his position. Hence, as in the previous case, that position is only incorporated in the slave’s equity as a position to be overcome; it is preserved or conserved as overcome or discarded. As a result, the slave’s equity emerges as a system of mutually beneficial exchange that sounds a lot like an idealized form of capitalism. The “bourgeois” in bourgeois right comes to dominate the notion of right as a system of equivalences that seems little different from the economic system Karl Marx describes so brilliantly in the first few chapters of Capital or, for that matter, from the reified social relations that emerge within that system.23
Perhaps Kojève’s irony lies in the fact that the system in effect reduces the slave to taking up positions of equivalence. All are equivalent, and particularity or individuality thus disappears. In attempting to overcome servitude, the slave only most perfectly expresses servitude to a regulatory system that seems to be the precursor of the type of ritualized structure Kojève famously describes in his 1962 note to the Hegel lectures. The remarkable aspect of this account is its similarity to the accounts of reification, in Georg Lukács, and technology (Machenschaft), provided by Martin Heidegger.24 The de-individualizing final state is the machine state or the state of complete reification. The victory of the slave ends up transforming the interest of the
slave into a nullity or an interest that describes the self and the whole because what has taken place in this final juridical order is the perfect reconciliation of whole and part.
The corollary to this elimination of interest in the name of interest is the elimination of thought in the name of thought, which is at the core of the later presentations of Hegel’s philosophy, when Kojève reprises, with obsessive attention to detail, his discussion of the reconciliation of time and the concept. Hence, we might make an argument to counter our previous claim about the radicality of the Hegel lectures, for it may now be evident that Kojève’s later works pursue the notion of de-individualization, of reification, with superbly consistent logic. That is, these works are just as radical in intent as the Hegel lectures, but they differ in that they provide a more subtly nuanced picture of the various kinds of possible movement toward the end state. The roads to the end are indeed varied.
SOPHIA, PHILOSOPHIA, PHENOMENOLOGIA
Kojève seemed to have worked on a methodical presentation of his interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy from the end of the 1930s until the mid-1960s, when he seems to have abandoned further attempts at this presentation. The appearance of the Introduction, in 1947, may seem to have rendered additional writings irrelevant. But Kojève obviously did not hold this view, because he wrote thousands of pages after the appearance of the Introduction.25 One may identify two general projects that remained mostly unpublished until after Kojève’s death. The first is the remarkable manuscript that Kojève seems to have completed at lightning speed in 1940–1941. The second is the series of texts that, taken together, constitute an enormous text of 1,292 pages that develops in prodigious detail the crucial insight about the evolution of the identity of the concept that Kojève sketched out in the 1938–1939 lectures.
The 1940–1941 manuscript, Sophia, Philo-sophy and Phenomeno-logy, was discovered in 2003 in the archives of Georges Bataille, to whom Kojève had entrusted it before fleeing Paris in 1941. This large manuscript, some nine hundred pages of handwritten text in Russian, remains unpublished, except for two fairly short excerpts (81 pages in all) culled from the introductory sections and published in Russian in 2007 and 2014.26 The excerpts reprise aspects of the 1938–1939 lectures, particularly the focus on the notion of wisdom as perfect self-knowledge, at least in regard to the decisive questions one may pose to oneself. Kojève once again points out that the conclusion that wisdom cannot be achieved is an essentially theist position implying the existence of a reality which by its very nature is not accessible to philosophy. In this same vein, he argues that genuine philosophy must insist on the attainability of wisdom through human thought, a position that brooks no gods of any kind and is thus atheistic. Kojève goes on to attempt to prove that wisdom may be achieved, that thought may bring closure to itself consistently.
He works through this point with an argument that he attributes to Hegel: to know one thing really as it is, one must know everything connected with it, and since everything is interconnected, one must end up by knowing all connections of any kind in order to know the one thing truly as it is, without omission, in its fullness. Kojève gives the example of his desk:
The circumstance that it is impossible to know my chair if this knowledge does not include knowledge of the universe may be explained by the fact that every real material thing is in reality connected with the entire remaining material world and is factically inseparable from it. Someone expressed this circumstance very perspicuously, saying that the match I light affects even the sun. Every real thing interacts with all remaining things, and they all form, in this way, a unified whole [одно-единственное целое].27
Now Kojève turns this argument back to the beginning: if I am to know myself, then I must know all these things and the interrelations among these things and myself. For Kojève, this means knowledge of the things as they are and the multiple relations we might have with them, because “it is often forgotten that the real universe includes not only all real, material things, but also all people actually living with their consciousness, knowledge, thoughts, conversations, etc.” Kojève’s notion of totality is vertiginous, comprising not only the things “themselves” but also every possible relation among them and among those who encounter them in the course of history. Indeed, one might argue that the course of history is nothing else but an exhaustive account of this encounter.
Jorge Luis Borges comes to mind. “Funes the Memorious” is an experiment in totality. The eponymous main character, after being injured by a horse, acquires a most unusual trait: an unlimited memory. He remembers not only things but his relation to the things and, indeed, any number of other relations to the things.
We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Río Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams.
Funes remembers everything connected with any given moment, and everything is connected with any given moment, so his memory expands exponentially. It expands so vastly that Funes gradually finds himself incapable of functioning in any way, much less remembering the past. As the narrator notes, “I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”28
The dissolution of Funes’s memory into grasping things in their particularity points to a dreadful problem: that the specific historical recovery of things renders them so complicated that they cease to be the things they were. Their generality dissolves as they are placed within an expanded set of particular relations, the result being that one would have to narrate the story of every thing and of everything possible thought about that thing. Since each impression grasps an aspect of the thing and of its interrelation with other things, any number of combinations is possible.
While Borges insists on the infinite here, Kojève seems to take the opposite position, insisting that the whole must be delimitable in the end or it is not a whole. And if it is not a whole, then it can contain no consistent parts, because they cannot clearly be understood until their final determination within the whole.29
Kojève’s argument for the comprehensibility of the whole as such arises from the comprehensibility of the basic formative principle of that whole. Kojève maintains that this principle is the dialectic. The dialectic organizes all relations to the thing through a process whereby things are posited, negated, and combined in a form that in its turn will be posited, negated, and combined, until the process can continue no more and returns to its beginning. This circular pattern, which Kojève stresses time and again, organizes the process of giving and taking answers to the questions one may ask of oneself, so that at some point all answers may be given and one comes back to the beginning.
How does one know when this point has been reached? When is it no longer possible to go further without returning to the beginning? We come up against the same difficulties we encountered earlier in this connection, because it must be difficult to know with certainty when one is stuck in a loop of repetition, when the possibility of something new occurring has been reduced to zero.
In this respect, we might examine a thinker of the opposite tendency, Kojève’s favored foil, Martin Heidegger. In the 1930s, Heidegger began writing a series of remarkable texts, the so-called Ereignis manuscripts. Heidegger’s stated purpose in the first of these texts, Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938), is to get beyond an impasse—that philosophy has become routine, its foundational terms “used up” or “exhausted.”30 Heide
gger seeks to overcome the impasse of an exhausted mode of thinking with a wholly new way of thinking. As many have noted, however, the Contributions are striking for their repetitiousness, a point Heidegger himself seems to stress, perhaps to mark subtle differences. Yet Heidegger’s attempt to overcome an exhausted tradition nonetheless ends up in an extraordinary litany of repetitions as he tries to express what has hitherto been incapable of expression in the tradition.
Heidegger’s experiments in the Ereignis manuscripts may be taken as evidence of Kojève’s thinking, that the tradition is indeed at an end because the attempt to break new ground shows itself to be impossible. There is nothing more to unfold in the tradition, novelty ending up identical to nonsense—one surrenders to the “madness” cultivated by the underground man.
Still, Kojève’s arguments are haunted by their internal inconsistency. How may one speak of completion without implying the opposite? The mere act of speaking about completion as completion seems to imply that there is a position beyond that completion or one that has not been assimilated to the completed position yet. Despite the ingenuity and power of Kojève’s unpublished manuscript, the problem remains unresolved. On the contrary, Kojève seems to have expended a great deal of effort on overcoming this fundamental difficulty, as his subsequent works, most of which remained unpublished at his death, show. When does repetition become otiose, a sign of failure (as in this very chapter itself)?
THE SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE (LE SYSTÈME DU SAVOIR)
The later series of manuscripts constitutes a somewhat fractured whole consisting of three introductions to Hegel’s “system of knowledge” (le système du savoir). The first two introductions are contained in a volume that was abandoned in 1953 and first published in 1990, called The Concept, Time, and Discourse, while the third is the first part of the enormous Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy, ultimately comprising three volumes, the first of which was published in 1968.