The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  18.    We may go even further back to mention Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s second discourse, A Discourse on Inequality, as another imitation and parody of academic discourse.

  19.    The article was published as “Autonomie et dépendance de la conscience de soi” (Autonomy and Dependence on Self-Consciousness), Mesures (January 14, 1939).

  20.    This problem is inherent in all interpretation where the original author cannot respond to correct or clarify his text in light of the interpretation. Dialogues with the dead are impossible, other than in the form of a deceptive metaphor.

  21.    See Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 191.

  22.    It is not clear whether Derrida would refute this account, as if repetition were something to be abhorred. Indeed, Derrida’s own concerns with radical novelty are apparent in “Cogito and the History of Madness” as well as in many other arguments he makes against the possibility of unmediated access to what is. The repetition of failure to achieve that access is not negative for Derrida but the source of a certain beneficial humility.

  23.    The “canonical” text here is of course Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

  24.    See Eric Michael Dale, Hegel, the End of History, and the Future, 80.

  25.    ILH, 8.

  26.    ILH, 11; IRH, 3. For the Hegelian text, see G. W. F. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Heinrich Clairmont and Hans-Friedrich Wessels (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988), 127–135; or G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111–119. Further references to the Phenomenology shall give English pagination and paragraph numbering first, then the pagination of the German text, in brackets.

  27.    Of course Hegel himself introduces the relation of self-consciousness and desire (Begierde) in chapter 4, but Kojève’s development of the relation is extraordinary. Moreover, to begin one’s commentary by ignoring the introduction and first three chapters of the Phenomenology is itself very provocative; hence accusations that Kojève’s interpretation is bad because it ignores crucial aspects of the Phenomenology. See, for example, Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, 11. As to desire, see Pippin; and Frederick Neuhouser, “Deducing Desire and Recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, no. 2 (April 1986): 243–262. For another view, see Paul Redding, “Hermeneutic or Metaphysical Hegelianism? Kojève’s Dilemma,” The Owl of Minerva 22, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 175–189.

  28.    Redding, “Hermeneutic or Metaphysical Hegelianism?”; Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 79.

  29.    Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 69. Kleinberg suggests that Kojève’s understanding of Heidegger was “sophisticated, if slightly impressionistic.” It may be better to suggest that Kojève’s interpretation is tendentious, distorting Heidegger’s terminology by interpreting it as an attempt to escape from Hegel or the philosophy of self-consciousness. Kojève’s remarkable note on Hegel and Heidegger, an unpublished book review, tends to confirm this thesis. See Kojève, “Note inédite sur Hegel et Heidegger,” ed. Bernard Hesbois, Rue Descartes 7 (June 1993): 35–46.

  30.    Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarriere, De Kojève à Hegel: 150 ans de pensée hégélienne en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 64. Kojève’s words are striking: “On the one hand, my course was essentially a work of propaganda intended to make a striking impression [frapper les esprits]. That’s why I consciously emphasized the role of the dialectic of Master and Slave and, in general, treated the content of the Phenomenology schematically.” Given Kojève’s habitual irony, it is hard to say to what extent this passage reflects the truth about the lectures. If, however, one takes Kojève seriously in “Tyranny and Wisdom,” it is at the least a fair conjecture to attribute to his arguments a polemical, political intent and not a scholarly one (as that may be traditionally understood).

  31.    ILH, 11–12; IRH, 4.

  32.    One should be careful here. The freedom of the beginning is the only point of freedom that seems absolute, and even it cannot be absolute because the beginning is negative, thus conditioned by whatever it negates (even if that negation is a negation of the “absolute” beginning). These conditions come to clarity as the activity of negation continues, and one might argue that the continued process of negation is merely a process of coming to grasp clearly the limitations established by that beginning—indeed, this may be said of Kojève’s thinking as a whole insofar as it insists upon self-understanding as explicitation of the implications relevant to or contained in the beginning. While Kojève emphasizes human identity as negative in itself, as empty or un vide, the process of negation produces a positive discursive identity and is not, in this sense, merely a “deconstructive identification of man with negation,” as Geroulanos suggests, but rather is that and its opposite, the difference between negation and creation having been effaced when viewed from the final end point, the universal or homogeneous state or the “Book” (which I will discuss in chapter 6). See Geroulanos, An Atheism, 151.

  33.    We must assume that Kojève refers to Hegel’s famous equation of self-consciousness and desire in the Phenomenology (121, §167 [105]). But as I have noted, Kojève’s account seems to “float free” of the Hegelian text, at least for the initial six pages of the French text, which effectively replaces Hegel’s own introduction to chapter 4.

  34.    ILH, 12; IRH, 5.

  35.    The comparison with Plato is obvious and instructive. In this sense, Kojève engages in a (slightly) veiled commentary on the Symposium and the two forms of erōs, the lower and the higher.

  36.    ILH, 66.

  37.    Nonetheless there does seem to be an element of question begging here, since the story of self-emergence seems to presume the existence of the self that comes to itself in the dialectical process, this being another version of the problem set out previously with regard to the identity of the self to which desire forces a return.

  38.    Kojève comments on the dialectic in the first appendix to the Hegel lectures. See ILH, 453; IRH, 176.

  39.    Kojève, following Rousseau, privileges history, defined as the human elimination of nature as such. Indeed, for Kojève, it seems that history has no other sense than as the negation of nature, its antipode. He goes so far as to argue that the retention of a philosophy of nature is Hegel’s principal mistake. See ILH, 377–378.

  40.    The universal and homogeneous state will be discussed further in the following chapters, particularly chapter 8. Still, this is a curious identity because it must be something like an absolute identity, and what can an absolute identity be? Kojève hesitates here, even suggesting at one point that the universal and homogeneous state is a “limit case.” See Kojève, Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 182 (hereafter abbreviated as EPD); Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 165 (hereafter OPR).

  41.    Here in embryonic form is the tension between finality and negation that will loom large in Kojève. How does one know when negation is complete?

  42.    ILH, 13; IRH, 6.

  43.    Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 56.

  44.    Rousseau is arguably the originator of the recognition thesis in his notion of the relation of amour de soi and amour propre. See Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 29–53.

  45.    Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, vii. Pippin otherwise distances himself from Koj
ève’s reading of Hegel.

  46.    ILH, 14; IRH, 7.

  47.    Of course, the mere possibility of a common object of different desires raises a question as to the origin of the commonality. Different desires would seem to presuppose a difference in the object desired, which also presupposes a common identity transcending the difference. But whence this common identity? If identity is created by negation, by human activity, there cannot be a positive “given” prior to that activity. The plurality Kojève associates with this activity has to be at odds with any overarching commonality. The common object itself can only be a creation of previous negation, but it is by no means obvious that the prior negation reveals anything like a nature or common underlying identity, a “given,” albeit implicit.

  48.    Again, this identification seems problematic. Is self-preservation not a given for Kojève? And, if so, then how is it given if human (not animal) negation creates the given? As we shall see, self-preservation is not a given for Kojève; it is the result of a specific choice, the decision to surrender in combat rather than to die, and this choice reveals two identities, that of the master, which Kojève associates with the human, and that of the slave, which Kojève associates with the animal. The master rejects any given, whereas the slave hesitates in this respect, and it is not clear why, for Kojeve, the slave chooses to be human—or if this is indeed the case. Kojève’s own hesitations about the emancipation of the slave, via either technology or revolutionary terror, illustrate the problem: the slave who conquers death through technology seems more beast than human, while the slave who achieves emancipation through terror looks more human than beast.

  49.    ILH, 14; IRH, 7.

  50.    The expression is quite awkward in French as well. I have translated it literally—one might prefer “desire for”—to capture the peculiarity of the genitive.

  51.    Kojève utilizes the image of a ring, both in the Hegel lectures and in his Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, to describe his “dualist ontology”: “An image might compel one to admit that the project of a dualist ontology is not absurd. Let us consider a gold ring. There is a hole, and this hole is just as essential to the ring as is the gold: without the gold, the ‘hole’ (which, moreover, would not exist) would not be a ring; but without the hole the gold (which would nonetheless exist) would not be a ring either.” This image recalls the black circle insofar as the center is the “trou” (hole), the emptiness, the absence surrounded by a frame. See ILH, 487; IRH, 214–215.

  52.    ILH, 14; IRH, 7.

  53.    ILH, 15; IRH, 8–9.

  54.    “La seule erreur—théiste—du Christianisme est la résurrection” (The only—theistic—error of Christianity is resurrection). Kojève, “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” trans. Hilail Gildin, Interpretation 1, no. 1 (1970): 41.

  55.    Hegel, Phenomenology, 111–119 (§178–196) [127–136].

  56.    In his famous letter to Tran Duc Thao, Kojeve himself admits that this is an innovation of his own, though Kojève’s account is not an implausible one. See Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarriere, eds., De Kojève à Hegel: 150 ans de pensée hégélienne en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 64–65. For differing discussions of desire in Hegel’s chapter 4, see, again, Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, 6–53; and Neuhouser, “Deducing Desire,” 243–262. For an overview of the issue, see Scott Jenkins, “Hegel’s Concept of Desire,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47, no. 1 (2009): 103–130.

  57.    This reading of Kojève shows his affinity with Carl Schmitt, whose insistence that conflict is the foundation of the political (whence emerge, we may surmise, all other modes of human activity) broadens Kojève’s exclusive focus on one such relation.

  58.    Indeed, Kojève goes so far as to translate Hegel’s rather neutral “das Sein des Lebens” as la vie-animale, a possible if tendentious rendering of the German.

  59.    ILH, 18; IRH, 11. Commenting on Hegel, Phenomenology, 111 (§178) [127–128].

  60.    Once again, for Kojève there is no nature, no given. Even the relation of master and slave is not a given; rather, it is a productive origin that the philosopher merely describes. Kojève is of course aware that this relation is not obviously decisive to all as a “given” not given necessarily but contingently through human action, and thus requires the “pedagogical” or “propagandistic” activity of the philosopher.

  61.    ILH, 19; IRH, 13. Commenting on Hegel, Phenomenology, 113–114 (§187) [130–131].

  62.    Conatus refers to Spinoza’s choice of the Latin verb conari (to attempt; to try): “Unaquæque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur” (Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in being). Baruch Spinoza, Ethics part 3, prop. 6, in Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 283.

  63.    There is nothing new in the thesis that the servant creates culture, that culture is indeed the product of servitude—this much may be gleaned by even a casual reading of Nietzsche’s Towards a Genealogy of Morality. Here, as elsewhere in Kojève, the Genealogy an important point of reference for Kojève’s commentary (since the Genealogy is in some ways itself a commentary on Hegel).

  64.    “But one cannot live as master.” Or better still (from Outline of a Phenomenology of Right), “The Master appears in history only in order to disappear. He is only there so that there will be a Slave” (EPD, 242; OPR, 213, translation modified). On “catalyst,” see ILH, 175.

  65.    To be sure, this is a problematic point, because the master, though at an impasse, needs the slave to continue his life. Servitude to the slave is the master’s eventual undoing, his corruption. Kojève notes that the master “can die as a man, but he can live only as an animal” (ILH, 55).

  66.    ILH, 28; IRH, 23. Commenting on Hegel, Phenomenology, 117 (§194) [134].

  67.    ILH, 34; IRH, 29–30. Commenting on Hegel, Phenomenology, 119 (§196) [136].

  5. TIME NO MORE

    1.    “It is the Slave who will become the historical human, the true human: in the last instance, the Philosopher, Hegel, who will understand the why and the how of definitive satisfaction by means of mutual recognition.” Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 54. Hereafter abbreviated as ILH.

    2.    Kojève writes, “The Sage is the man who is fully and perfectly conscious of himself.” See ILH, 271; and Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 76 (hereafter abbreviated as IRH).

    3.    Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 163–200.

    4.    See Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 270–304. As I noted previously, this well-received book examines some of the central issues pertinent to Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Fedorov, and Kojève from a perspective that shows strong affinities with both Soloviev and Kojève, though more with Soloviev.

    5.    Stefanos Geroulanos is particularly helpful in this respect, with his interesting and nuanced reading of Kojève’s differing attempts to characterize the end of history (and death of man) narratives. Geroulanos describes three differing approaches, two arising in the Hegel lectures, a third from Kojève’s Notion of Authority, written in 1942 and unpublished in Kojève’s lifetime. In his account, Geroulanos tends to focus on the result as one of enervation (the “last man”) or bestialization (a failure to overcome nature), and, in either case, with the death of man as a free historical individual. While Geroulanos’s account is no doubt justified within its own terms, I seek to address the problem Geroulanos identifies so effectively in a different manner, as a problem having
to do with the dilemma of emancipation, of becoming truly human, the ostensibly free historical individual being, despite these terms—the problem of a slave not yet emancipated but still very much on the way to emancipation. As Kojeve notes, “It is only in negating this existence [man’s ‘animal existence’] that he [man] is human” (ILH, 53). The problem for Kojeve that I seek to clarify is twofold, since he wavers both on how emancipation may be achieved (through terror, technology, or both) and on what an emancipated state might look like. Do we become like animals, having returned to the freedom from error of nature, the state prior to the combat that creates history, or do we become something wholly different, neither human nor animal? This final irony (which Geroulanos denies) is that the complete negation of nature returns us to a state that is like nature though radically different, since it is created by humanizing work.

    6.    ILH, 144. Commenting on chapter 6, part B.3, in G. W. F. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Heinrich Clairmont and Hans-Friedrich Wessels (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988), 385–394; or G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 355–363 (§582–597).

    7.    The images Kojève uses, of “bodies emptied of spirit” or “bees,” suggest bestialization. But there is no necessity to come to this conclusion. These images—which we will discuss in chapter 7—seem to form part of Kojève’s provocative “propaganda.” Considered somewhat more perspicuously, the post-historical state, as Kojève also hints, is more likely impossible to imagine, because the death of man that is the highest expression of the human brings with it the death of the animal as well. As Kojève writes, “A purely human Universe, by contrast, is inconceivable, for without Nature, the Human is nothingness, pure and simple.” Kojève, Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 244; Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 214, translation modified. This sentence comes right after a discussion of the ring and emphasizes the importance of the relation between the human and nature and, consequently, the unusual aspect of the end of history—that neither can remain at the end.