The Black Circle
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65. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 50, §78 [English text]; G. W. F. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Heinrich Clairmont and Hans-Friedrich Wessels (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988), 61 [German text].
66. It is no coincidence that this question bears more than a passing relation to an ancient metaphysical question—What is the relation of the one to the many?—a question that has occasioned an enormous and still unfinished literature, that is indeed a philosophical literature unto itself, stretching from Plato’s Parmenides to Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. Of course, mediation is central to Hegel’s account of experience in The Phenomenology of Spirit, for the experience of consciousness is largely one of progressive differential unification that proceeds to a higher level with self-consciousness and, finally, the ascent to absolute knowledge.
67. EHPP 1:304.
68. See EHPP 2:64–110.
69. EHPP 1:303.
70. EHPP 3:425.
71. Kojève, Kant, 9. This short book is an absorbing work in its own right. I cannot even begin to do justice to it here.
72. ILH, 40.
73. I will discuss this issue at greater length in chapter 9. For the moment, I suggest that his proposition is perhaps questionable. Both Albrecht Dihle and Hannah Arendt attribute the discovery of the modern notion of will to Augustine in his de libero arbitrio. For Augustine will—voluntas—describes the capacity to disobey God. Is this capacity to disobey, however, the same as the will Kojève associates with Kant? In both cases, will is negation, in the one instance, of God’s will or of God himself. In the case of Kant, it is the assumption of a Godlike position in relation to the world, achieved by negating limitation (a move which itself suggests the difference between the human and the divine). Still, the similarities outweigh the differences and suggest that Augustine and Kant are closer than Kojève admits. In the absence of Kojève’s history of Christian philosophy, however, the question is moot. See Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 123; and Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace 1977), 2:87.
74. Kojève, Kant, 95–99.
75. EPD, 182; OPR, 165.
76. The comparison may seem fanciful, though it must be admitted that Samuel Beckett, too, was preoccupied with the more-or-less purgatorial state to which Kojève seems to fall prey. The fact that both were in Paris and may have passed within similar circles has given rise to speculation, especially since Kojève’s influence in the immediate postwar period was so pervasive. See Richard Halpern, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 227–230.
77. The contrast with Georg Lukács is instructive. And one may sympathize with Stefanos Geroulanos’s suspicions about Kojève’s Marxism. While the issue is far too complicated to address adequately here, I think it may suffice to assert that Kojève’s reading of Hegel is very much in accord with Karl Marx’s view, as expressed in the 1844 manuscripts, though with an end result that, if not equivocal about the end state, is then potentially corrosive to the Marxist objective. But to suggest that Kojève is a reactionary or a “Marxist of the right” is quite problematic, given the underlying radicality of Kojève’s position, which does nothing to flatter self-interest, nationalism, or systemic inequality, as the right is wont to do. Moreover, the 1940–1941 manuscript in Russian openly praises the Marxist end state with no hint of irony or retraction from the goal of realization of such a state under Stalin’s leadership. 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).
78. “The suppression of Man (that is, of Time, that is, of Action) in favor of static-Being (that is, Space, that is, Nature) is thus the suppression of Error in favor of Truth. And if History is certainly the history of human errors, Man himself is perhaps only an error of Nature that ‘by chance’ (freedom?) was not immediately eliminated.” ILH, 432; Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr., 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 156.
9. WHY FINALITY?
1. The creation of a revolutionary collective subject is a crucial aspect of Alain Badiou’s thought. See, for example, Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 391–409. I borrow the term “aleatory rationalism” from the editors’ postface to a collection of essays by Badiou. See Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), 253. See also Ed Pluth, “Alain Badiou, Kojève, and the Return of the Human Exception,” Filozofski Vestnik 30, no. 2 (2009): 197–205.
2. One has only to consider the dire predictions regarding the progress of artificial intelligence and the possibility of so-called superintelligence dwarfing human capabilities. See James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015).
3. This is a view popular among critics of Straussian inclination.
4. The most important philosophical exploration of this issue is F. W. J. Schelling’s 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
5. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 40. Hereafter abbreviated as ILH.
6. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993).
7. Lactantius, De ira dei, in Patrologia latina, cursus completus, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: 1844), 7:121. My translation.
8. Augustine, City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 484 (book 11, chap. 26).
9. ILH, 419.
10. There is a considerable debate on this issue. While both Albrecht Dihle and Hannah Arendt—to name but two important figures—argue that Augustine’s notion of will, and the notion of freedom that flows from it, are innovations, Michael Frede takes a different view, suggesting that a notion of will was evident already in Stoic texts. I follow Dihle and Arendt, since it seems to me that the notion of will emergent in Augustine has a great deal to do with excusing the Christian God from responsibility for evil, a context that is absent in Pagan antiquity. See Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 123–144; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1977), 2:84–110; and Michael Frede, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, ed. A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 1–18.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1973), 401–402; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 133. Blumenberg states, “The problem of the justification of God has become overwhelming, and that justification is accomplished at the expense of man, to whom a new concept of freedom is ascribed expressly in order to let the whole of an enormous responsibility and guilt be imputed to it.”
12. ILH, 327.
13. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 150.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 11–12. I have substantially modified the translation.
15. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 252.
&n
bsp; 16. See J. Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 72–81.
17. Heidegger, “Essence of Truth,” 145.
18. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:88.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Towards a Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swenson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 14–18.
20. Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority, trans. Hager Weslati (London: Verso, 2014), 2.
21. Georg Lukács is the pioneer here, his concept of reification exercising enormous influence (perhaps even on Heidegger, as Lucien Goldmann suggests). See Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83–222; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 40; and Frederic Jameson’s comments on this section of Adorno’s text, in Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 21–22.
22. The 1844 manuscripts suggest that the Marxist utopia may require the overcoming of material need as a condition of possibility. In this respect, Kojève’s reading of Marx, slight as it is, may be plausible. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 81–93. Also see Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 112–130.
23. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” in Pathmarks, 239; Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 188–189.
24. F. M. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 28–29.
25. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 5, 356–358; Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Pathmarks, 93.
26. See, for example, Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
27. Heidegger’s comments, found in the latest of the so-called Black Notebooks, are extreme and include Russia as part of the coming “greater Fascism” (der Großfaschismus). See Heidegger, Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), 249.
EPILOGUE
1. F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 246–264. See Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l’état, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1990), 183, 255. Auffret, of course, appreciates the immense influence of Dostoevsky on Kojève and that Kojève himself mentioned this famous episode in Dostoevsky’s fiction as “a classic to become acquainted with.”
2. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 252.
3. “Accordingly, Hegelian absolute Knowledge or Wisdom and the conscious acceptance of death, understood as complete and definitive annihilation, are but one and the same thing.” Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 540.
4. The phrase “time is no more” may be interpreted as referring to the elimination of death. Kojève’s equation of the concept with time suggests that the end of the one signals the end of the other—or that the fusion of concept and time is the end of consciousness, the end of time, and thus the end of death.
5. See Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Akron: Ohio University Press, 1985), 83–84.
6. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1977), 1:88. Kojève addresses the comic nature of this insistence on making and unmaking by placing it close to contradiction, as when someone asks a waiter to “bring and not bring me a beer.” But contradiction depends on simultaneity, whereas Arendt’s comment allows for the activity by giving a discrete temporal sequence to the two opposed actions. Still, it is not hard to argue that the making and unmaking of a thing, as a serial occurrence, achieves the same blockage of an action as does contradiction because it repeats a process of position and negation of that action as a whole.
7. Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 154–155. See also 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), 100–101.
8. Kojève, L’athéisme, trans. Nina Ivanoff (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 162. This remarkable unfinished work rehearses many of the themes of the Hegel lectures. For an account that does justice to the work, see Dominique Pirotte, Alexandre Kojève: un système anthropologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 31–53.
9. Perhaps there is a parodic echo of Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism (no. 157) from Beyond Good and Evil: “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: it helps us through many a bad night.” See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 70.
10. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in The Plays and Fragments, ed. Sir Richard C. Jebb (reprint, Amsterdam: Servio, 1963), 192–194. This is my rather free translation of lines 1220–1225 in the Greek.
11. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), 33.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY KOJÈVE
Ateizm. Edited by А. M. Rutkevich. Moscow: Praxis, 2007.
Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Essaie d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1968–1973.
“Filosofia kak stremlenie k zavershennoi soznatel’nosti, t.e. filosofia kak put’ k sovershennomu znaniu.” Voprosy filosofii 12 (2014): 78–91.
“Hegel, Marx and Christianity.” Translated by Hilail Gildin. Interpretation 1, no. 1 (1970): 21–42.
“Hegel, Marx et le Christianisme.” Critique 2 (1946): 339–366.
“The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel.” Translated by Joseph Carpino. Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (Winter 1973): 114–156.
Identité et realité dans le “Dictonnaire” de Pierre Bayle. Edited by Marco Filoni. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.
Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Edited by Raymond Queneau. 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Edited by Allan Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.
Kant. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
Kolonialismus in europäischer Sicht. Schmittiana, vol. 6, 125–140.
L’athéisme. Translated by Nina Ivanoff. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
L’empereur Julien et son art d’écrire. Paris: Fourbis, 1990.
“L’empire latin: Esquisse d’une doctrine de la politique française.” La Règle du Jeu (1990).
L’idée du déterminisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne. Edited by Dominique Auffret. Paris: Librairie générale francaise, 1990.
“L’origine chrétienne da la science moderne.” In Mélanges Alexandre Koyré, vol. 2, 295–306. Paris: Hermann, 1964.
“La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev.” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 14 (1934): 534–554.
“La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev.” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 15 (1935): 110–152.
La notion de l’autorité. Edited by François Terré. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
Le concept, le temps et le discours. Edited by Bernard H
esbois. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
“Le dernier monde nouveau.” Critique 111/112 (1956): 702–708.
“Les peintures concrètes de Kandinsky.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1985): 149–171.
“Les romans de la sagesse.” Critique 60 (1952): 387–397.
“Note inédite sur Hegel et Heidegger.” Edited by Bernard Hesbois. Rue Descartes 7 (June 1993): 35–46.
Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. Translated by Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Review of G. R. G. Mure’s A Study of Hegel’s Logic. Critique 54 (1951): 1003–1007.
“Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia.” [Excerpt 1.] Edited by A. M. Rutkevich. In Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik, 271–324. Moscow: Nauka, 2007. Autograph manuscript in Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 20).
“Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia.” [Excerpt 2.] Edited by A. M. Rutkevich. In Voprosy filosofii 12 (2014): 78–91. Autograph manuscript in Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 20).
“Tyranny and Wisdom.” In Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth, 135–176. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
WORKS ON KOJÈVE
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Anderson, Perry. “The Ends of History.” In A Zone of Engagement, 279–375. London: Verso, 1992.
Auffret, Dominique. Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l’état, la fin de l’histoire. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1990.
Burns, Timothy W., and Bryan-Paul Frost. Philosophy, History and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate Between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016.
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Cooper, Barry. The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.