The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

    7.    Philip T. Grier, “The End of History and the Return of History,” in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 186–191; Joseph Flay, Hegel’s Quest for Certainty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 299.

    8.    Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 130–132; Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2012), 145–167; James H. Nichols, Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 11–13. One could argue that Kojève’s major difference with Soloviev is in his collapsing of the “two absolutes” of Soloviev into one “finite” absolute—the citizen of the universal and homogeneous state, the sage. Against Soloviev, Kojève’s interpretation of Christianity holds that it evolves naturally into atheism through the assumption of divine identity as the final emancipation of the slave. Christianity leads to the divinization of the slave that is in turn the creation of a finite deity. Hence, Kojève agrees that becoming God, or deification, is the proper end of Christian thinking, but only as a finite God and in a different sense than might be understood more generally in the Russian tradition. This tradition is capably surveyed by Nel Grillaert, who also points to the presence of Left Hegelian influence in Dostoevsky’s heroes, especially Kirillov. 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.

    9.    For an overview, see Marshall Poe, “ ‘Moscow the Third Rome’: The Origins and Transformations of a Pivotal Moment,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas Neue Folge 49, no. 3 (2001): 412–429.

  10.    This is a rather fanciful reading of both the Third Rome idea and Kojève. But there is an affinity between the assertion of a distinctly Russian identity in the realm of Christendom and Kojève’s appropriation of Hegel to the Russian deification narrative (which he also inverts insofar as it is God that becomes man, the infinite thus surrendering to the finite).

  11.    See Geroulanos, An Atheism, 136–141; Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, 166–167; Shadia Drury, Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 12–15.

  12.    See Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l’état, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1990), 243–244.

  13.    Kojève, “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” trans. Hilail Gildin, Interpretation 1, no. 1 (1970): 41. Kojève develops this point more generally in the lectures from 1936–1937:

  Man will want to make the world in which he lives agree with the ideal expressed in his discourse. The Christian World is the world of Intellectuals and Ideologues. What is an ideology? It is not a Wahrheit (an objective truth), nor is it an error, but something that can become true by Struggle and the Work that will make the World conform to the ideal. The test of Struggle and Work renders an ideology true or false. It will be worth noting that at the end of the revolutionary process what is realized is not the ideology pure and simple from which one began but something that differs from it and is the truth (the “revealed reality”) of this ideology. ILH, 117.

  14.    “Hegel can refer to the fact that he is himself a Sage. But can he truly explain it? I doubt it. And I thus doubt that he is the Sage completing History, for it is precisely the capacity to explain oneself that characterizes Wisdom.” ILH, 400.

  15.    This aspect of Kojève’s text offers evidence of its modernity as a text that directly mirrors its content.

  16.    Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 1:2.

  17.    “Religion is therefore a epiphenomenon of human Work. It is essentially a historical phenomenon. Accordingly, even in its theo-logical form, Spirit is essentially becoming. There is thus no God revealed outside of History.” ILH, 390.

  18.    ILH, 540. See also “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” trans. Joseph Carpino, Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (Winter 1973): 124. Hereafter abbreviated as IDH.

  19.    Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002), 3.

  20.    See Leo Strauss, “Notes on Lucretius,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85.

  21.    Plato, Republic, trans. Chris Emilyn-Jones and William Preddy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2:14–19.

  22.    Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, in Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1990), 23.

  23.    ILH, 436; Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 159 (hereafter abbreviated as IRH).

  24.    ILH, 388.

  25.    See Geroulanos, An Atheism, 169–172. Geroulanos’s approach is very refreshing because he takes Kojève’s avowed Marxism as a red herring. To my mind, one might take Kojève’s Marxism in the same way as his Hegelianism: it is both homage and correction. Kojève’s final state, the ostensive realization of work, is a challenge to a crude notion of liberation that one may associate with Marx, according to which material satisfaction suffices to create “happiness.” Nonetheless, it would be going too far to suggest that Kojève was not Marxist or not attracted to the Marxist final state. Proof for this is provided by the second excerpt from Kojève’s still largely unpublished manuscript from 1940–1941, Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia, which explicitly makes the connection between omniscience (and hence, the final state) and “Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist philosophy.” See Kojève, Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia, ed. A. M. Rutkevich, Voprosy filosofii 12 (2014): 79; autograph manuscript in Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 20).

  26.    ILH, 443; IRH, 167–168.

  27.    F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 1.

  28.    Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 33–35.

  29.    Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1977), 2:6–7.

  30.    This is where Geroulanos’s antihumanism thesis may run into difficulties, because it simply assumes a point of view—that of individual freedom attached to humanism (or bourgeois humanism, whatever that might be)—which Kojève seeks to refute and which, at the very least, Kojève shows to be problematic, if not incoherent. For the ostensibly free historical individual is in reality a servant to the body, to the overwhelming fear of death. In fairness, however, it must be said that Geroulanos’s charge of antihumanism hits deeper if one regards Kojève’s “humanism” as an extreme form of pessimism concerning the human—and it is hard not to do so.

  31.    Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 50.

  32.    ILH, 384–385.

  33.    ILH, 391.

  34.    Piet Tommissen, ed., Schmittiana, vol. 6 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1998), 34.

  35.    ILH, 554; IDH, 139.

  36.    ILH, 418–419.

  37.    F. M. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 7.

  38.    See Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, 166–167. Groys might be read to suggest that the Kojevian cycle repeats a series of ends of history. It seems to me that this interpretation risks turning Kojève’s thinking into a thinking of cycles divorced from each cycle, as it would have to be to provide a general thinking of cycles—the repetiti
on, that is, of an abstract paradigm. The evidence that Kojève seeks a general thinking of this type is at best equivocal; indeed, Kojève avows that his thinking is an explicitation of a given history—just as Hegel’s is—and thus is immanent to the conceptual history it describes and of which it is a part. Kojève’s discussion of dialectic, not as a method but as description—given in the famed essay “The Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel,” which is included in the appendix to the lectures—seems to confirm this line of thinking. As a result, the only kind of repetition that Kojève’s thinking allows is the exact repetition of one history, complete and final in and of itself. By this, I do not mean a repetition that shows a similarity in difference but rather a final, complete history that repeats itself in every detail, rather like Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. Still, as in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, the first narrative is the crucial one. The Book it writes is read thereafter verbatim, again and again. Kojève is clear: “But while not being cyclical, time is necessarily circular; in the end one attains the identity of the beginning.… Just like Time, History, and Man, Knowledge [La Science] is thus circular. But if the historical Circle is gone through but one time, the Circle of Knowledge is a cycle that repeats eternally. There is a possibility of repetition of Knowledge, and this repetition is even necessary. Indeed, the content of knowledge relates only to itself: the Book is its own content.” ILH, 393.

  39.    ILH, 385. What the human achieves, the programmed human (animal) repeats (or that which remains beyond both in the post-historical—post-Book—“period”): “The time where the Man-reader-of-the-Book remains is thus the cyclical (or biological) Time of Aristotle, but not linear, historical, Hegelian Time.” Kojève is ambiguous: Is the post-historical being man, animal, or “something” else, like “bodies emptied of spirit”?

  40.    Of course, Kojève notes that thinking can never be “mine.” In his lectures on Pierre Bayle, from 1936–1937, Kojève writes, “Man is only man to the extent he thinks; his thinking is only thinking to the extent that it does not depend on the fact that it is he who thinks.” See Kojève, Identité et réalité dans le “Dictionnaire” de Pierre Bayle, ed. Marco Filoni (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 15–16. This trope becomes a central point in Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). With regard to language, Derrida makes a claim similar to Kojève’s, stating, “I have only one language; it is not mine” (1).

  41.    Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 36. One wonders to what extent Derrida’s Hegel is that of Kojève. Derrida himself is equivocal. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 70–75.

  42.    ILH, 529; IDH, 114.

  43.    Within Kojève’s own terms, his claim for the importance of the relation is fair because Kojève lines up with “substance” terms like “nature,” “master,” “eternity,” and “space,” as opposed to the operative vocabulary for the subjective, such as “man,” “slave,” “time,” and “negation.”

  44.    ILH, 535–536; IDH, 119–121.

  45.    ILH, 540, 548, 550, 554; IDH, 124, 132, 134, 137.

  46.    See Kojève, “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” 28.

  7. NOBODIES

    1.    See Bernard Hesbois, “Le livre et la mort: essai sur Kojève” (PhD diss., Catholic University of Louvain, 1985), 30, note 12. Hesbois’s unpublished dissertation is the best single work on Kojève’s later thought.

    2.    Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 38 (hereafter abbreviated as ILH). This very Hegelian conception of narrative has emerged recently in Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13–15.

    3.    Kojève, “Note inédite sur Hegel et Heidegger,” ed. Bernard Hesbois, Rue Descartes 7 (June 1993): 35.

    4.    It is important to keep in mind the ambivalent status of this overcoming, which I have discussed in the preceding chapters.

    5.    ILH, 550; Kojève, “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” trans. Joseph Carpino, Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (Winter 1973): 134 (hereafter abbreviated as IDH).

    6.    Again, Martin Heidegger is the significant opponent, whose Bremen lectures from 1949 attack this very notion of identity as, at base, differentiating among things only insofar as they take up different positions in a mathematized landscape. See, especially, Heidegger, “Positionality,” in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 23–43.

    7.    This is of course a key Heideggerian point. See also Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 55–81.

    8.    It is indeed hard to avoid the Nietzschean echo here. Like Kojève’s Hegel, the eternal return is the repetition of only one narrative arc. But if Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return is aimed at individual lives, Kojève’s account is aimed at the life of a collective: “ ‘Alles endliche ist dies, sich selbst aufzuheben’ [Everything finite is an overcoming/sublating of itself], says Hegel in the Encyclopedia. It is only finite Being that suppresses itself dialectically. If, then, the Concept is Time, that is, if conceptual-understanding is dialectical, the existence of the Concept—and consequently of Being revealed by the Concept—is essentially finite. Therefore History itself must be essentially finite; collective Man (humanity) must die just as the human individual dies; universal History must have a definitive end.” ILH, 380; Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 148 (hereafter abbreviated as IRH).

    9.    Kojève, Le concept, le temps et le discours, ed. Bernard Hesbois (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 54.

  10.    Kojève employs the French supprimer to translate Aufhebung. I translate that term here as “overcoming,” but supprimer typically means “eliminate,” “eradicate,” or “remove.” Kojève uses the term to indicate that what is partial in a view is overcome or eliminated in a new, more holistic view, and so on, until all partiality is ultimately eliminated. Conversely, Kojève insists that what is thereby preserved is the universality in any given view. See ILH, 457; IRH, 180.

  11.    A point made in Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2012), 147.

  12.    Kojève, Kant (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 47. Kojève translates wu-wei as “faire le non-faire” (to act not acting, or to do not doing). He interprets this notion in an unusual way, as a retreat from action, whereas a more conventional interpretation might apply the concept to action that is not planned but is “immediate” and “natural.” See Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  13.    Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, trans. Thomas Ford (London: Verso, 2010).

  14.    ILH, 554; IRH, 137.

  15.    ILH, 275; IRH, 80.

  16.    ILH, 32; IRH, 28.

  17.    F. M. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 25, 35.

  18.    This is a major point in Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy: history either never starts, or it starts and never stops, or it starts and stops (history as a completed “circle”). For Kojève, only the third variant has any coherence, the first being silence and the second endless chatter, since, without a final picture of the whole, o
ne never knows whether what one knows is what one claims to know—the exact predicament of the underground man subject to infinity.

  19.    This note has been the object of considerable discussion. For three examples, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 70–75; James H. Nichols, Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 83–89; and Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 93.

  20.    ILH, 28, 34; IRH, 23, 27.

  21.    Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5.

  22.    ILH, 436–437; IRH, 161–162.

  23.    ILH, 385. Kojève refers to the time experienced by the readers of the Book as being equivalent to Aristotelian “biological” (and cyclical) time as opposed to the Hegelian linear time. The basic distinction seems to be between the initial course of history and subsequent repetition, the initial course being a linear “first run” and the repetition cyclical “copies.” Giorgio Agamben perceives this distinction somewhat ambiguously based on the manifest tensions in Kojève’s work. Agamben views Kojève as creating an “anthropophorous” notion of animality whereby the animal “carries” the human as the human comes to eliminate or “transcend” it. Thus, Agamben sees also no biopolitical concern in Kojève (other than to reject the premises of biopolitics as an attitude toward nature and the body that pursues cultivation of both for certain purposes), and he questions what becomes of animality in the post-historical state. He writes suggestively in this respect: “Perhaps the body of the anthropophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought.” See Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12.