The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  Errancy becomes the supreme expression of the human, thus transforming the association of error with evil. For evil disappears once the notion of a final normative end has also been obliterated. Indeed, the only evil that exists, for these modern thinkers of unfinishedness, is precisely the desire to conclude, to finish, to meet that fixed point from which no deviation is possible other than as error meriting punishment. The final defeat of these ends is the victory of the free historical individual capable of expressing himself as he sees fit, almost as a god, or indeed as a god on earth, free to do as he chooses, without regard to any overarching standard. Perhaps the only standard left, albeit a vexing one, is the standard imposed by the concern for the freedom of others, the essentially liberal notion that the exercise of my freedom is not noxious to the extent that it does not impede the freedom of others to express themselves.

  This standard is of course deeply problematic because it enshrines self-interest, discarding the association of evil with self-interest, a relic of Christian concerns with evil and original sin, in order to make self-interest the grounding principle of action and modern political action. The question is whether self-interest can assume the role of grounding principle. Indeed, the horror before technology or reification can quite easily be read as a horror before limitation of self-interest of any kind, even in its ostensibly more benign appearance as collective self-interest.

  Heidegger attempts to overcome self-interest by assigning us a responsibility to Being as a whole. Lukács seeks to overcome self-interest by the imperative of community creation based on the promotion of the welfare of all and the assertion of equality.23 The central struggle in much of twentieth-century thought is in this sense axiological, an attempt to reconcile the interest of individuals with each other and, thus, with the attempt to create a community in which all may be able to express themselves without the threat of sanction. The freedom that seems to be at the center of these concerns is the freedom of self-interest, the very interest, of course, whose expression was understood as evil in itself during the Christian era.

  It is therefore not surprising that the concept of evil has suffered an eclipse in the modern age, since the original identification of evil with self-interest and self-will has been transformed into an identification of evil with limitation on self-interest, this transformation being one of the most radical, and perhaps least discussed, aspects of modernity. One may argue that Hegel plays a decisive role in this development. His theodicy—at least for Kojève—is predicated upon the reshaping of reality in the human image, not the proper location of our humanity within a specific framework. In this respect, Hegel brings collective self-interest to its highest expression as the hegemony of the subject over all that is, subject having finally become substance and vice versa.

  The apparent terror created by Hegel is that he establishes once and for all the hegemony of the subject, that he is the one who brings the long history of Western philosophy to a close, not in the announcement of the victory of freedom but rather in the victory of a singular way of thought from which no deviation is possible. Indeed, this system of thought is tyrannical, reducing the possibility of new modes of thought or experience to nothing. We are all familiar with this caricature of Hegel, which is promoted in differing ways by Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as by their French descendants, who, almost as a chorus in unison, reject what they see as the monstrous desire to end philosophy, to promote finality, to leave nothing more to the human imagination than an abstract “science of logic” sufficing to settle all possible disputes.

  We are again reminded of the underground man, whose hostility to this finality has so many traits in common, even if distantly so, with that of the rebels of the twentieth century who sought to recast Hegel’s theodicy as the ultimate expression of evil, the complete and cheerful eradication of human freedom, in favor of a permanent self-perpetuating order. So many crucial figures in the twentieth century, from Heidegger to Gilles Deleuze, stuck their tongues out at this Crystal Palace, mocked it, and tried to undermine or overcome it as an unacceptable image of finality. Some of these acts of rebellion aimed at the Hegelian edifice as an attempt to create a final model of reason; some attacked the Hegelian edifice as denying any place for human creativity and identified philosophy with creativity; some simply mocked history’s apparent refusal to prove Hegel right.

  One wonders about the foundation of these rejections of Hegel. What prompts them? What is it about finality that seems so unacceptable? If philosophy has for such a long time aimed for finality, sought to find the truth, the final account, why does that enormous effort change so quickly over to its reverse? Is Dostoevsky again right when he claims that we love to build things, to create, but we also very much love to destroy, to frustrate finality, if nothing else? Is Dostoevsky’s fundamental point—that we are more deeply attached to our freedom than to any one position, however salubrious it might seem—correct? Let us recall Dostoevsky’s words:

  But I repeat to you for the hundredth time, there is only one case, one only, when man may purposely, consciously wish for himself even the harmful, the stupid, even what is stupidest of all: namely, so as to have the right to wish for himself even what is stupidest of all and not be bound by an obligation to wish for himself only what is intelligent. For this stupidest of all, this caprice of ours, gentlemen, may in fact be the most profitable of anything on earth for our sort, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more profitable than all other profits even in the case when it is obviously harmful and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason concerning profits—because in any event it preserves for us the chiefest and dearest thing, that is, our personality and our individuality.24

  ERROR AND EGOISM

  Kojève’s basic response to errancy and error: error is the refusal to relinquish the individual self, and its self-interest, chiefly in preserving itself. Error is thus servitude and the persistence in servitude. The claim of unfinishedness is seductive. It may appear to offer the possibility of relinquishing the individual self, but in reality it allows the individual self to retain its prerogative—indeed, it must retain its prerogative, because there is no superior point of view that can possibly controvert it, to which it must subordinate itself in the end. If we argue that there is a powerful element of self-negation in Heidegger as well, an attempt to overcome the modern hegemonic subject (or collective egoism) in a surrender of all hegemonic projects to Being as that which both precedes and always exceeds them, we may also argue that Heidegger’s self-negation, never complete, never finished, cannot ultimately avoid retraction into the very individual self or modern hegemonic subject it seeks to overcome. The human being may become Dasein, a rather abstract “being-there” or “there-being,” which for Heidegger lives in the peculiarly numinous realm of “the between” (das Zwischen) or is “appropriated over to the appropriating event” (dem Er-eignis übereignet zu werden), the fact is that this “placeholder” of the nothing persists precisely as such, or as an entity of some kind, whose definition remains the basis for an absence of final definition, a pretext for continued affirmation of intrinsically selfish self-preservation.25

  The human being or Dasein now acts, in a way analogous to Being itself, as a term for a determinate indeterminacy, an identity whose identity is precisely not to have an identity. This definition has long applied to evil, whose being is not-being, the one thing defined by absence of definition. To be sure, we may become strangers to ourselves, but is this enough? Are we truly freed from the necessity of having some identity so as to function with other human beings? Not at all. Rather, we retain an identity that is sort of a parody of identity. We are a conduit of God’s mocking humor, neither strong enough to disappear entirely nor so weak as to become wholly convinced of a divine destiny that we are powerless to influence; we are indeed the “between.”

  Kojève is much more radical than this. We must transcend ourselves, our individuality or collective subjectivity, t
o the extent that it is merely the vehicle of collective self-interest (such as nationalism). This is the imperative and end of history. The only truly human destiny is to overcome the human, to cancel the human out definitively. This is Kojève’s genuine madness. Any other destiny, partial or otherwise, merely perpetuates an error that cannot make sense of itself. Kojève rejects the heroes of nonsense, from the underground man, who becomes a durable literary figure in the twentieth century, to the hero of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, through Bardamu, to Molloy, to Camus’s rather more anemic stranger. These ostensibly modern or postmodern heroes live the absurd, the pointless, not necessarily as something to regret or with a disdain for the ugliness of nihilism. On the contrary, one may forcefully celebrate nihilism as the final advent of freedom, as diverse embodiments of the gesture of negation made by the underground man.26

  Is this not indeed what is left to freedom, or to the modern free historical individual? Or is the better representative the modern consumer, sensitive to the new trend, the new gadget, the new way to dress? Or is this the post-historical creature for whom all values melt into the delight of acquisition of the latest products? The despairing nihilist becomes the cheerful nihilist of Americanization—the final embodiment of freedom, understood as victory of sheer pointlessness.27 The highest value is the freedom to recreate oneself in ever more trivial ways, triviality itself being a celebration of the freedom from conflicts, from pain, from the difficult hold of nature.

  SELF-OVERCOMING

  The bite of Kojève’s thought is precisely in its emphasis on the need to overcome the individual, its fervent opposition to the extolling of self-interest that is, by all accounts, the supreme, unchallenged dogma of our time. For Kojève, the individual makes no real sense—the individual is a sign of error, and the kind of error that cannot find satisfaction other than in self-immolation. The individual, then, is a mistake. Kojève is of course not alone in thinking in this way. While, on the surface, he seems vulnerable to ridicule for the extremity of his thought and for the extremity of the hostility it reveals toward the supreme atomic unit of our modern self-understanding, the free historical individual, his thought has close affinities to the venerable tradition of self-sacrifice one finds in both Christianity and Buddhism as well as in some of the most astonishing modern works of art, like those of his Russian predecessors in visual art and the powerful achievements in serial music of composers like Arnold Schoenberg. Indeed, in the fervent atmosphere of the nascent Soviet Union of the 1920s, a whole tendency of radical thought could be found in many realms of cultural production, as well as in the political arena, a clear movement away from the free, historical individual.

  Kojève thus stands for the rejection of the modern liberal tradition and its emphasis on what he views as an incoherent individual—incoherent because self-interest cannot be a coherent grounding principle, as I have noted in several contexts. Self-interest is malleable, unreliable, and inherently in conflict with any overriding polity, because self-interest has to place the interest of the one over all others. Even when gestures are made to community, the ultimate principle of community is fear of death, of violent death, as Thomas Hobbes indicated in Leviathan. Thus, self-preservation is hallowed, becoming the true alpha and omega of all human relations, and can thus easily be turned to the various myths of “mutual satisfaction” that play a role in the propaganda of “self-interest well understood” or in the essentially contractual models of modern sociality, which assure the stability of social relations or the appropriate apportionment of selfish gain.

  From the very beginning of the Introduction, Kojève conducts the fiercest possible polemic against this view of the human being, which he seems to have regarded as a kind of bestialization or a refusal of the truly human potential. Nonetheless, one might argue that his countermodel—or, simply, his model—of human development cannot have seemed less convincing to a society steeped in the lore of individualism. His countermodel ends up offering the unattractive model of self-immolation, of self-cancellation, without promise of external award or benefit in heaven. Kojève offers a variant of the Christian sacrifice that could never be fully accepted within Christian society itself—recall Kojève’s dramatic comment about the one theological mistake of Christianity: resurrection. Kojève’s philosophical propaganda, then, advocates an end to history, an end to man, understood as the self-interested creature of the modern era, without remorse or reward. We are supposed to march forward to our own self-cancellation in a society that resembles a ghastly or ghostly collection of cadavers from which all life has ebbed.

  The final question, then, is are we to take Kojève seriously? Why did Kojève present such an extreme model of human activity and destiny? The operative irony of his work, one that I have expressed again and again in this study, is that genuine emancipation is emancipation from the self, the individual, an emancipation that requires, as its very condition of possibility, the most extreme self-abnegation possible. In other words, genuine emancipation requires the taking of measures that the self-interested bourgeois could not possibly accept, because the only real emancipation for the bourgeois is to allow his animal desires free rein, a potentially disgusting spectacle in which the final search for animal immortality cannot possibly achieve the desired result, other than through a transformation of the human being as radical as that contemplated by Kojève.

  Although Kojève does not make these objections explicitly, one can easily infer that his response to Nikolai Fedorov, for example, would be mocking, since a community of immortals is hard to imagine. Once released from death, these beings are released from the very animality that pushed them. The end of the pursuit of animal self-interest, in this respect, is animal self-interest itself—I kill myself to become immortal. But the simpler delusion of self-interest is that there is no emancipation involved at all. To free one’s animal desires—if these are even desires—is a bestialization, an acquiescence to rule by the body, a rule that makes of reason a tool for the pursuit of selfish interest only, a perversion and destruction of reason.

  The rule of self-interest is the rule of animal self-preservation that, with all ironies intact, must head to its own destruction in the creation of an immortal being. The animal dream of freedom ends up in the same sort of immolation of the self as that prescribed by Kojève, the major difference being that the one route is freely chosen while the other is not, being itself a product of delusion. This vexed circumstance itself—that there is no way out of human limitation, of suffering and death, other than by transforming the human into what must be its own constructive death—might explain the emphasis on voluntary self-immolation as the last nobility available to human beings.

  It may be that the best coda emerges from the desperate struggle of the underground man, whose drama set the original stage for our subsequent approach to Kojève. The underground man is unable to overcome his self-interest; neither is he capable of completely succumbing to it. He is the impressive description of the muddle, of the one who cannot decide to escape from the muddle. He is the hero of nonsense, the hero of will that is unable, in the end, to impose itself. He prefers infinite negation—and the semblance of freedom it offers—to finality.

  The underground man has not the nobility of Alexei Kirillov or Nikolai Stavrogin, both negative or darkly parodic echoes of Christ. He cannot bring himself to take on the greatest burden, to end the muddle, to sacrifice the grotesque spectacle of selfishness, of vanity, and error that must attend a creature unable to give up its desperate desire to live, who rejects its capacity to see the utter senselessness of its existence in favor of the only truly divine act available to it: suicide.

  There can be no doubt that the most shocking aspect of Kojève’s challenge to the bourgeois is contained in his notion that the purest expression of freedom is the willingness to die, to kill oneself for a purpose that has nothing to do with animal self-preservation. The purpose that has the least to do with animal preservation, of course, is the complete
rejection of animal self-preservation itself—the complete rejection of the animal, of nature, of any and all coercive aspects of our bodily or animal existence. Suicide is thus itself the highest, purest, and most powerful expression of the great refusal that is freedom—the divine refusal to be restricted by the creation, the ultimate, terrible liberty of a god.

  EPILOGUE

  The Grand Inquisitor

  Few of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writings could claim to be more famous and enigmatic that Ivan Karamazov’s “poetic” fragment “The Grand Inquisitor,” which plays a central role in The Brothers Karamazov. The fragment has been taken as a parable of twentieth-century totalitarianism, one of the most baleful examples of which is the very Stalinist regime that time and again Kojève claimed to support.1 Kojève has been accused of facile provocation, and even one of his best students, Raymond Aron, could not be sure of Kojève’s political loyalties or, indeed, whether the self-proclaimed Stalinist was truly loyal to the Stalinist regime (a fact that would seem to be belied by his residency in Paris). Whatever be the case, the ghostly specter of the grand inquisitor seems to hang over Kojève’s work, offering a rather dire interpretation of that work as promoting an essentially totalitarian political vision.