The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  24.    See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 97–130.

  25.    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin, and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men, in The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 65–90.

  26.    See, for example, Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 157–188.

  8. ROADS OR RUINS?

    1.    As we know, Kojève freely admits this. See Kojève, “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” trans. Hilail Gildin, Interpretation 1, no. 1 (1970): 41. His argument is essentially that history must come to an end if it is to make sense, if it is to evince rationality by serving as the victory of rationality. Otherwise, history can be nothing more than a tale of endless conflict with no overarching course or shape. What he is less open about is that the consequence of the victory of rationality is either the extreme limitation of the vestiges of slave being—by curtailing the prevalence of self-interest or self-preservation in what we would call a totalitarian state—or their elimination. We might say that the limitation is the province of law and the elimination is the province of philosophy.

    2.    Kojève, Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 1:16. Hereafter abbreviated as EHPP.

    3.    In a 1961 letter to Leo Strauss, Kojève writes, “In the meantime I have completed my Ancient Philosophy. Over 1,000 pages. Taubes has had them photocopied. In my view it is by no means ‘ready for publication.’ But if Queneau insists, I will not refuse. (To refuse would, in this case, also amount to taking oneself seriously!)” See Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 304. Hereafter abbreviated as OT.

    4.    Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961), 1:17.

    5.    Kojève, “The Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing,” trans. James H. Nichols Jr., in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. Joseph Cropsey (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 95–113.

    6.    Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in OT, 153.

    7.    Stanley Rosen remarks, “I have come to the conclusion that my initial intuition, formed during the year of my study and weekly contact with him, was correct: Kojève’s system was unworthy of his intelligence and even of his illuminating commentaries on the Phenomenology. Not only this, but I believe that he knew its unworthiness, or at least suspected it, or knew it once but had allowed himself to forget it in the pleasures of his own success. See Rosen, “Kojève’s Paris,” in Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 277. Kojève, for his part, seems to have taken to Rosen, as evidenced by his comments to Leo Strauss. See OT, 305.

    8.    Certainly, in the limit case of a perfectly homogeneous society, in which all conflict among its members is excluded by definition, one would be able to do without Right. See Kojève, Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 182 (hereafter abbreviated as EPD); and Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 165 (hereafter OPR).

    9.    Kojève to Leo Strauss, September 19, 1950, in OT, 256. Kojève makes this same point elsewhere. See Kojève, review of G. R. G. Mure’s A Study of Hegel’s Logic, Critique 54 (1951): 1003.

  10.    Perry Anderson, “The Ends of History,” in A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992), 279–375.

  11.    EPD, 237–266; OPR, 205–231.

  12.    In addition to this, Robert Howse suggests that certain treatments of Kojève’s work suffer because they ignore this work. I have to agree with this assessment, since the vision of the final state provided in the Outline shows the extent to which the treatment of that state in the Hegel lectures is not itself conclusive.

  13.    EPD, 586; OPR, 479.

  14.    Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). This remarkable text, first published in 1938, provides an interpretation of the state projected by Hobbes that bears an astonishing resemblance to the universal superstate Kojève projects and which is anathema to Schmitt.

  15.    EPD, 22–25; OPR, 37–40.

  16.    In this case, the reliance on Schmitt is explicitly avowed by Kojève. See EPD, 144; OPR, 134.

  17.    EPD, 154; OPR, 143.

  18.    EPD, 258–266; 267–324; OPR, 225–231; 233–262.

  19.    EPD, 255; OPR, 222–224.

  20.    EPD, 253; OPR, 221.

  21.    EPD, 311; OPR, 265–266.

  22.    Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 143–144. Hereafter abbreviated as ILH.

  23.    Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 1:165.

  24.    Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83–222; and Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), 12.

  25.    The Kojève archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France shows the extent to which Kojève continued to write after the war.

  26.    The second excerpt covers the part of the introduction that follows the text published in 2007. See “Philosophy as the Striving for Complete Consciousness; That Is, Philosophy as the Way to Total Knowledge” (Философия как стремление к завершенной сознательности, т.е. философия как путь к совершенному знанию), Voprosy filosofii 12 (2014): 78–91.

  27.    Kojève, “Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia,” ed. A. M. Rutkevich, in Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Nauka, 2007), 307; autograph manuscript in Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 20).

  28.    Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 2007), 152, 154.

  29.    Kojève adduces an excellent example:

  This extraordinary wealth, not to say extravagance, of the “contents” of Notions referred to as “general” is at first unsettling. But it is not unique. One finds oneself in the presence of an analogous situation when one deals with the mathematical algorithms called “Tensors.”

  When one wishes to apply an Algorithm to whatever is in a geometric Space (or Space-time), one must introduce an appropriate “subject” with a “point of view”; and one does so in the middle of a System of coordinates. Just as in the World in which we live Things change aspect depending on the subject to which they reveal themselves (via perception) and depending on the point of view at which the former is placed, entities located in geometric Space (or, more generally, in nonphysical Space-time) change their “aspects” too as a function of changes in the Systems of coordinates. But just as Things in our world remain what they are in themselves despite changes in aspect, entities in geometric Space also have “invariant” constitutive elements. These are the elements that a Tensor expresses (= symbolizes). Now, the Tensor expresses not by “abstracting” from Systems of coordinates, that is, from geometrically possible “subjects” and “points of view” and, thus, from different “aspects” of the entity in question, but by implicating all at once. (Kojève, Le concept, le temps et le discours, ed. Bernard Hesbois [Paris: Gallimard, 1990], 113. Hereafter abbreviated as CTD.)

  30.    Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Pr
ess, 2012), 1.

  31.    This omission is unfortunately unavoidable within the confines of my study and of this final section, where I concentrate on Kojève’s elaboration of the temporalizing of the concept, first introduced in the final Hegel lectures from 1938–1939. This chapter as a whole pursues the continuation of the two basic narratives addressed in the Hegel lectures—the master and slave and the ascent to wisdom—the former finding completion in the Outline, the latter in the discussion of the crucial “subnarrative” (temporalizing of the concept) that is the backbone of Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy. This is a shame, because The Concept, Time, and Discourse is an important and distinctive work in its own right (and one that is slated to appear in English translation in January 2018).

  32.    See Bernard Hesbois’s introduction to CTD, 9. It should be noted that Kojève thought of Immanuel Kant as presenting an emblematically Christian philosophy, an attempt to reconcile reason and will that gave birth to the reconciliation offered by Hegel. See Kojève, Kant (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 54.

  33.    Dominique Pirotte provides a fine account of the Attempt in his excellent study of Kojève’s thought. Pirotte, Alexandre Kojève: un système anthropologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 111–161.

  34.    This admission of the possible impossibility of the project is very curious. It supports one of Stanley Rosen’s more withering comments, suggesting that Kojève was himself “at bottom a skeptic in the modern sense of the term, and very close to nihilism” (Rosen, “Kojève’s Paris,” 276). Rosen suggests that Kojève’s “System” is, if anything, insincere, the product of a skeptic (though, to be sure, a most unusual skeptic). This comment fits in the same genre of comments as those made by Leo Tolstoy about Fyodor Dostoevsky, that Dostoevsky’s novels were so strained because they are works of one who wanted to believe but could not. Yet I think it would be more accurate to view Kojève’s skepticism or nihilism, if these are properly attributable to him, as being of a totally different kind—that the end of his thinking is to free the world of the mistake that is the human being. In this respect, Kojève resembles Jonathan Swift, not Dostoevsky, and his “nihilism” is his conviction that the aim of human existence is self-extermination as a boon to nature, which, in the human being, has created a devastating viral mistake.

  35.    EHPP, 1:11.

  36.    EHPP, 1:11–12.

  37.    EHPP, 1:33–34.

  38.    Again Kojève asserts his basic dogma that a true account must be a final one. He thereby avoids the skeptical arguments of David Hume. But is this emphasis on the absolute not problematic? Why can we not claim that current knowledge is good until proven otherwise? This rather more pragmatic approach seems to permit the justification of an opinion at a given time, even if that opinion later turns out to be false. Kojève finds this vexing because it means that the same statement is at T 1 true and at T 2 false. Kojève develops the notion of a “parathesis” to deal with this problem, and he notes that a parathesis is a sort of “pseudo sense” during the time when it is held to be true.

  39.    EHPP, 1:33.

  40.    Kojève makes this point forcefully in his discussion of Kant as a theistic philosopher. In an extremely interesting discussion of Critique of Judgment, Kojève concludes, “And Kant has only camouflaged (yet very “cunningly”) this skeptical character of his Philosophy of the theoretically “infinite task” and of “moral” or “practical” “infinite progress” See Kojève, Kant, 92.

  41.    Kojève creates a rather complicated set of typographic differences to distinguish among the “notion” of the concept, its sense, and its morpheme. The Hegelian system of knowledge begins with a notion of the concept, a claim that the concept is, and then proceeds to fill out its sense—the history of its definition. The morpheme simply refers to the given word used in different languages, such as Begriff or понятие. See EHPP, 1:14.

  42.    See EHPP, 1:14–33; and CTD, 43–48. Kojève does not take an explicit position about the term “sense” in the context of the extensive literature on the subject in analytic philosophy. It is not clear that he was aware of Gottlob Frege’s distinction between “sense” and “reference.” This is hardly surprising, since Kojève’s approach is dialectical, not analytic, and as such forms part of the tradition of thought that the earliest analytic philosophers struggled against. Indeed, one of the intriguing lacunae in Kojève’s work is his lack of engagement with modern mathematical logic, a somewhat surprising lacuna, given Kojève’s extensive interest in mathematics, yet one likely justified, as I noted earlier, by Kojève’s rejection of nondialectical logic, or the kind of “logic” Kojève identifies in Spinoza as “acosmic.”

  43.    See CTD, 43–48.

  44.    EHPP, 1:28–31.

  45.    EHPP, 1:34–57. The term “antiphilosophy,” which would become so celebrated with Alain Badiou, seems to originate in Kojève’s treatise.

  46.    EHPP, 1:35.

  47.    The political analogy is almost irresistible here, given that the concern with a final discourse is almost exactly parallel to the kind of adjudicative system Kojève creates in the Outline.

  48.    EHPP, 1:44.

  49.    Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 38.

  50.    EHPP, 1:63.

  51.    See J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, 1797–1800, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 111–113.

  52.    Regarding the problem of limits, see Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), particularly chapters 7 and 8.

  53.    This is a very important—and somewhat surprising—move, given Kojève’s use of mathematical analogies throughout the Attempt. The basic point is clear: mathematics is not discourse. It is not discourse because it is abstract and partial; it avoids the dialectical interaction that is fundamental to discourse and the unfolding of experience precisely as the complete articulation of interaction in the concept. Still, Kojève’s resistance to mathematics is curious, given the important developments in mathematical logic bearing on the problems of the whole, which Kojève attempts to address. Paul Livingston puts the issue well with regard to Badiou’s mathematical discourse on totality in Being and Event, when he differentiates between Badiou’s solution to the paradoxes of the whole in favor of logical consistency and multiplicity (thus the absence of a final whole) and another approach that favors the whole over logical consistency. Kojève, surely against his own intention, and especially the notion of dialectical parathesis he invents, appears to end up in the latter group. Indeed, his entire approach to the completing history turns on the problem of completion understood as a problem of seamless or complete self-inclusion—the absolute. The paradoxes associated with self-inclusion make it impossible to preserve both completion and consistency at the same time, but only the one or the other, ostensibly cheating dialectical fusion or absolution. See Livingston, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (New York: Routledge, 2012), 56–58, 60. Also see, more generally, Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 102–140.

  54.    Allen Wood quips, with regard to the thesis–antithesis–synthesis terminology: “To use this jargon in expounding Hegel is almost always an unwitting confession that the expositor has little or no first-hand knowledge of Hegel.” See Wood, ed., introduction to G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xxxii. Terry Pinkard makes a similar comment at the beginning of his comprehensive biography of Hegel. See Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xi. There can be little doubt that Kojève’s use of this “arid f
ormula” that “misrepresents the structure of his [Hegel’s] thought,” as Pinkard puts it, is controversial and cannot but lead to accusations of excessive simplification.

  55.    EHPP, 1:59.

  56.    EHPP, 1:65.

  57.    EHPP, 1:55.

  58.    Pirotte, Alexandre Kojève, 112.

  59.    We recall here that Kojève identifies space with nature and the absence of time. Man is a “hole” in space but in effect first opens space through time, an interaction that is another way of describing the relation of the temporal to the eternal. See ILH, 364–380.

  60.    EHPP, 1:309–312.

  61.    EHPP, 1:308.

  62.    “Scientific experience is thus merely a pseudo-experience. And it can’t be otherwise, since vulgar science is in fact concerned not with the concretely real but an abstraction.” See ILH, 453–455.

  63.    ILH, 485.

  64.    This rejection is a prime example of Kojève’s divergence from Hegel, or of the Marxist current in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel. It is important to note that Kojève takes a stance on a venerable question in Marxism by emphasizing the power of subjective agency to complete a project of self-fulfillment. Kojève thereby challenges any deterministic network, the Marxian history of History. But this should already be evident in Kojève’s insistence on there being different roads to the same goal.