The Black Circle
Page 36
“THE BEST PRIZE OF ALL”
Does this vitiating irony disqualify the Kojèvian project? Does it work to marginalize a philosophical project whose own “life” has largely been on the margins, despite its immense influence? I would suggest that this vitiating irony serves to cast the Kojèvian project in a certain light as a sober critique of the modern bourgeois emancipation narrative. As a philosophy in the conventional sense—as a doctrine to live by—Kojève’s thinking is quite obviously extravagant. There is further irony in this extravagance, since Kojève’s own cultivation of mystery and dramatic presence is flatly opposed by the teaching he labors to unfold. And this goes even for the bureaucrat that Kojève became.
The irony can be taken too far. At his best, Kojève reveals a vital difficulty by emphasizing the problematic nature of both finality and nonfinality—finality reduced to becoming unconscious or animal, nonfinality reduced to wandering aimlessly in discourses that are interminable. One ends up perplexed or, in Kojève’s case, making a choice to reject perplexity, which never seems to have succeeded, as the volume of his unpublished work indicates.
In the end, Kojève resembles the tragic figure of Oedipus at Colonus. Having glimpsed difficulties that could not admit of reconciliation with each other or with any singular form of life, Kojève became a sort of wanderer, with a proper title and function that disguised his lack of rootedness in any solid conviction other than that uttered by the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus:
The deliverer comes at last,
When Hades is to have his share,
Without marriage song, lyre or dance,
Death at the end.
Not to be born is the best prize of all.
But if one is born, the next best thing is
to return from whence one comes
As quickly as possible.10
The contrast between Kojève’s thought and life are captured here. The philosopher who exhorts us to correct the mistake nature made, to return to blessed unconsciousness, stands in marked contrast to the bureaucrat who strove to unify Europe, to create a final state that might well have been the state envisaged by the Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. Indeed, the sparkling commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit stands in marked contrast to the Outline. Perhaps Kojève did not have the courage to face what he truly knew, as Nietzsche might have put it.11
But such conjectures are idle. What we have before us is a remarkably divided body of work. One may refer to that division as ironical (as Kojève seems to have wished), as inconsistent, or even as farcical. What remains is a testament tied to a “monstrous site,” the site of death. Kojève, like the great death-haunted titans of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, wanders, afflicted by this site, by the question of why we are the death that lives a human life, the death that hides from itself until it is unable to summon the resources to hide anymore. Like the old prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, who, before his death, sleeps in a different room every night so as to evade the inevitable, Kojève’s inability to decide on a final road, on a way not interrupted or fettered by doubt, is a manner of glimpsing the inevitable without finally succumbing to it. But Kojève did succumb. His supposed antihumanism is a clear vision of our tragic (and darkly comic) position in the world, announced via a commentary on the ostensibly optimistic philosophy of Hegel—a vision Kojève spent the remainder of his life denying, without success.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. An excellent English-language account of Kojève’s seminar is given in Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 49–110.
2. Robert Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Death and Desire in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), vii; Michael Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 294.
3. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 305.
4. The two main biographies of Kojève are those by Dominique Auffret and Marco Filoni. Neither has been translated into English. See Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l'état, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1990); and Marco Filoni, Il filosofo della domenica: vita e pensiero di Alexandre Kojève (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008).
5. Bene vixit qui bene latuit (He who lived well, hid well) is a Latin motto used by Descartes. It may be taken to reflect either the contemplative nature of philosophical life or—much more likely, in the case of Kojève—the philosopher’s overcoming of concern for purely individual, animal life.
6. Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 65–68.
7. There is an important irony here, because Dostoevsky himself seems to have been influenced by radical thinkers of the Hegelian left, whose thought seeped into Russia in the 1840s. Thus, Kojève’s approach to Hegel offers a distinctively Russian response to Hegelian influence. While Kojève’s peculiar Christology shows affinities with Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, it is much more intimately linked to Kojève’s Russian philosophical predecessors precisely in terms of its distinctive focus on self-abnegation. For Dostoevsky’s influences, see Nel Grillaert, What the God-seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche’s Übermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance (Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2008), 107–139.
8. An important specific task outside the general purview of this book is an investigation into Kojève’s debts to the tradition of Russian Hegelianism. Both Bernard Hesbois and Philip Grier raise questions about the originality of Kojève’s approach by reference, respectively, to the work of Kojève’s friend Alexandre Koyré and that of Ivan Il’in, whose capacious work on Hegel may well have influenced Kojève (who, as Grier points out, appears to deny that influence). See Bernard Hesbois, “Le livre et la mort: essai sur Kojève” (PhD diss., Catholic University of Louvain, 1985), 10–11, note 15; and Ivan Il’in, The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity, ed. and trans. Philip T. Grier, 1:lviii–lix (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010).
9. And quite consciously so. Kojève is the best reader of Dostoevsky whom no one knows as such, and he profoundly influenced René Girard’s later discussions of Dostoevsky as well. His interest in both Dostoevsky and Soloviev are well known in any case, as his biographer Dominique Auffret attests. See Auffret, Alexandre Kojève, 180–197; and Filoni, Il filosofo della domenica, 34–101. Filoni is particularly good on the Russian context, the thought of the “Silver Age.”
10. Kojève conceives of history in a curiously cyclical way, as “happening once” completely and then potentially repeating any number of times. That is, for Kojève, the Hegelian circle can be traversed originally “without blueprint” only once, but is repeated thereafter almost “mechanically.” See Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 391. Where there is an English translation, I include reference to the pagination of the English edition. Since the English translation omits roughly three hundred pages of the original French text, many references are not followed by an English reference, and I supply translations where appropriate.
11. I say “explicit” here because the book contains what amounts to a running commentary on the relation of Kojève to Heidegger to clarify their opposed positions and, I hope, the implications of those positions. In this latter regard, the comparison with Heidegger is illuminating.
12. Kojève’s relation to Heidegger warrants its own book. While it is a commonplace of Kojève scholarship to view his commentary on Hegel as profoundly indebted to both Marx and Heidegger, other writings, such as his unpublished manuscript from 1931, entitled Atheism, evince an inte
nse polemic against Heidegger as well. Regarding the commentary, see Dominique Pirotte, “Alexandre Kojève Lecteur de Heidegger,” Les Études Philosophiques 2 Hegel-Marx (April–June 1993): 205–221.
13. In this respect, I think it is somewhat problematic to claim that Kojève is a positive biopolitical thinker, since elimination of animality as the locus of interest is a rather extreme example of biological “management.” While we may argue that Kojève is a transhumanist thinker as well, the concern of transhumanism with complicated variations of our relation to animality far exceeds Kojève’s rather modest contribution—in the end Kojève’s thought remains profoundly hostile to all compromises with animality, and he rarely presumes to imagine radically new types of being, as transhumanists do. If Kojève seeks to correct the “error” that is humanity, his new “overman” ends up assuming that status in the unheroic form of the static Sage. If anything, Kojève’s thought challenges transhumanist fantasies as inherently contradictory, animal fantasies that dream of eliminating the negative features of animality and therewith animality itself. See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 12.
14. Of these philosophers, Alain Badiou is no doubt the most outspoken as a defender of the truth against what he refers to as antiphilosophy, perhaps in emulation of Kojève. Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy is a case in point, a polemic that seeks to turn away from the philosophy of errancy without, however, going so far as to declare a final truth. See Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
15. The anti-Hegelianism of French philosophy of the 1960s has much to do with Kojève (as, perhaps, does the reaction to structuralism, which has many affinities with Kojève’s thought as well). See J. Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–28; and his brilliant critique of Michel Foucault, J. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); and Jim Vernon and Antonio Calcagno, eds., Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity (London: Lexington, 2015), 18.
16. Many studies decry Kojève’s “nihilism” or “antihumanism,” by which they mean his resolute resistance to the free historical individual, understood as the individual self that holds to what Kojève considers the modern myth of self-creation and self-determination. Kojève advocates reification, to use a different vocabulary, but certainly not in the sense of Georg Lukács or Theodor Adorno. For Kojève, the concern with reification betrays a refusal to relinquish self-interest, which Lukács may have sought to correct but Adorno, whose emphasis on suffering as central to morality retains a crucial aspect of self-interest, did not.
17. This view of Hobbes appears vividly in Leo Strauss’s early book on Hobbes, which Kojève read. See Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 15–16; and Alexandre Kojève to Leo Strauss, November 2, 1936, in Strauss, On Tyranny, 231–234.
18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concerns about the proliferation of desires, in the Second Discourse, are of particular relevance here. The notion of the owner or property holder who declares that a certain property is “his” comes to mind as a basic move in the structure of self-assertion that is at the heart of Rousseau’s critique of modern bourgeois society as the society where the “I” triumphs over the “we,” where self-interest triumphs over republican virtue. This movement from “I” to “we” is also fundamental to Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, as we shall see.
19. In this sense, Kojève is profoundly opposed to Francis Fukuyama.
20. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. David Patterson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997).
21. The translation of Kojève’s major manuscript on legal theory, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, by two fine Straussian scholars, constitutes a notable exception.
22. Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2012), 145–167; Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 130–172.
23. To be fair, Georges Bataille originally made this claim in 1955, in his article “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice”: “The originality and, it must be said, the courage of Alexandre Kojève is to have perceived the impossibility of going any further, consequently the necessity of renouncing the production of an original philosophy and thus the interminable recommencement that is the admission of the vanity of thought.” Cited in Dominique Pirotte, Alexandre Kojève: un système anthropologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 159.
1. MADMEN
1. As does the related notion of nonsense, particularly in terms of Kojève’s concern in his later works to provide a theory of sense as opposed to silence and nonsense, the latter being described most succinctly as unending or infinite discourse, a discourse than cannot find or limit itself. See Kojève, Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968–1973), 1:23–33, 57–95.
2. Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth, 135–176 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 153. Hereafter abbreviated as TW. See also J. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 31–63 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 36.
3. Kojève’s abiding and profound interest in Dostoevsky is well documented. See Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l’état, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1990), 183–197. Auffret reiterates the view that Dostoevsky’s role for Kojève was fundamental, at least as important as that of Soloviev and Hegel.
4. This radical change is registered as “the birth of the self-conscious anti-hero in Russian literature.” See Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevskij’s Underground Man in Russian Literature (’s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1958), 14. We may consider this figure the hero of nonfinality, giving a different dialectical edge to the underground man as the hero of negation as well.
5. This is perhaps the most distinctively “Russian” aspect of Kojève’s approach to Hegel.
6. Plato, Republic, trans. Chris Emilyn-Jones and William Preddy, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 112 [516b]. The customary Stephanus numbers are indicated in brackets after all page references to the relevant modern translations.
7. For a more general discussion of madness in Plato and in the philosophical tradition in general, see Ferit Güven, Madness and Death in Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 13–29.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 49 [245c]; for the Greek text, see Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 51. The translation may be controversial, since it suggests that all soul is essentially one. The Greek could mean also that “every soul is immortal.” What is the import of this distinction? In the former case, soul is one—all souls participate in this one soul, are manifestations of it. In the latter case, souls are multiple, while all retaining the same essential being. What is at issue is the relation of the one and the many, an important issue in Plato, since the unity of soul, as an ideal being, suggests that soul as such is unity and is reflected in the empirical world in various embodiments, in flesh and bone. If plurality i
s merely the result of embodiment, then all soul is one; if not, then there is plurality in the ideal being itself, each individual is ideal.
9. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Nichols, 49–50 [246a].
10. See Plato, Republic, 330–337 [414e–415c].
11. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 471–473 [246a–246c].
12. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Fowler, 477–479 [248b–248c].
13. Plato, Phaedrus, Fowler edition, 466 [244d] (my translation).
14. The phrase is a slight distortion of James Joyce’s celebrated phrase about the exalted role of the artist. See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 253.
15. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 58–59 [210c–211d].
16. Fanā refers to the state of self-annihilation achieved by the Sufi adept. See Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 8, 44.
17. Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155–182. This brief essay was culled from a lecture course Heidegger gave in the winter of 1931–1932. It was, however, not published until after the war, together with the famed “Letter on Humanism.” Heidegger’s basic claim is that the installation of the Platonic idea as the measure for what constitutes a being is a decisive move in the creation of a hegemonic metaphysics that has prevailed into the twentieth century. Platonism in its various avatars is still the ruling thought of the West. Regarding Kojève’s thought, see TW, especially where Kojève locates universalist imperialism in Plato (169–173). Also, as to the connection with deification, pagan and Christian, see John R. Lenz, “The Deification of the Philosopher in Classical Greece,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 47–67. As to Soloviev, see Kojève, “La métaphysique religieuse de V. Soloviev,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 14 (1934): 534–554; and 15 (1935): 110–152. This text was adapted from Kojève’s doctoral dissertation (of more than six hundred pages), which was supervised by Karl Jaspers. See Kojève, Die religiöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, manuscript NAF 28320, Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 6).