Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: A synopsis
Human being is conscious of himself, of his reality, dignity and freedom. In this he differs from the animal who has only a sentiment of self. Man is conscious of himself in the “I” of speech; the origin of the “I” is the subject of the lectures. Self-consciousness is essentially different from Cartesian Subjectivity or consciousness in general, which merely contemplates an object. The man who contemplates is absorbed by what he contemplates. He is passive, a spectator who at best wishes to uncover the rule by which and through which consciousness is able to be conscious of something or other. Right away Kojève shifts away from philosophies of subjectivity and epistemology. For, to return to himself and become conscious of himself Man must Desire. Man is not merely someone who knows. He also eats, for example. He eats, he desires to eat and he is conscious of this desire. In desire, “I want…” . In desire Man is brought out of his contemplative attitude and can return to himself. It is Desire that reveals an object to a subject, not knowledge. (This is Hegel’s “advance” beyond Kant and beyond all “scientific” attitudes.) Desire dis-quiets the contemplative attitude, interrupts it. But what is specifically human Desire?
Man, the self-conscious being, presupposes desire. Desire is born and is maintained within a natural being, within an animal, biological reality. But animal desire is not sufficient for Self-consciousness; it is merely necessary. Desire is the action of the I, not the animal. “I want to eat that”, so I eat it; I act; I make it possible to eat more of that, and I eat more. That is, I destroy the given reality, or transform it into what it was not, into crops, into amino acids, into calories. All true action negates. (For Maurice Blanchot, the artist also negates: He or she transforms the given reality into words, images, temples—but for Blanchot, the appearance of the artwork is only a simulacrum of actual (Hegelian) negation and a stubborn ‘remainder’ appears that is, he says, “too weak” to be negated. This is the origin of Blanchotian ‘fascination’ and my own “radical passivity”.)
Human being transforms, alienates, assimilates another reality. Essentially, desire is an emptiness that reveals itself as real in the act of negation, transformation, assimilation. But if desire is directed at a natural not-I then the I of desire would also be natural. An animal eats, and eats, and eats—then, it itself is eaten by another animal. Animal desire remains within nature. It is merely living. For there to be Self-consciousness animal desire must be directed toward a non-natural object. That which is par excellence non-natural is the Other’s Desire. Human Desire is directed toward another Human Desire. I desire to eat that because the other man desires to eat that. Man appears on the earth as a herd animal with multiple desires. But for the herd to become a society, multiple desires are not sufficient. Animal desire is directed toward an object, Human Desire toward another Desire—i.e. not an object, a nothingness: Desire itself. Something must redirect the herd’s multiple Desires away from things and toward each other. Humans must Desire each other, not as objects, however. Humans must Desire each other’s Desire. Human Desire desires Desire. An enemy’s flag has value not in its materiality but in the fact that it is desirable to the enemy. In love I do not Desire the other person as a body, I Desire that she Desire me. I Desire her Desire and I Desire that she Desire my Desire. Human history in short is the history of desired Desires.
To be truly human, human Desire must win out over animal desire. Desire is always desire for a value. To the animal the value is life, but not to man. Man comes to be Man when he risks his animal life for a non-vital end. Human being comes to be Human in risking life. Now, to desire the Desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I myself am or that I represent is the value desired by the Other: I want him to recognize my value as his value. Thus the truly human Desire that generates Self-consciousness is a function of the Desire for recognition: Specifically, to be recognized as he who is willing to risk life in order to be recognized. This is what is truly Human Desire. Human Desire is only realized in the purely gratuitous fight to the death. To each, the life of the other has no more, or less, value than his own. Man separates himself from the herd in this fight and becomes truly human and at the same moment History is born, but on one very important condition.
The fight to the death cannot end in death. If both die, there is no consciousness at all. If one dies there is no one left to recognize the Other’s value; there is only a corpse and a survivor. So, during the battle one side surrenders. One side realizes mortal fear and decides to stay alive. He becomes a Slave. The winner becomes the Master. Both adversaries remain alive but one fears the other, gives in, and recognizes him as superior, as truly human, as Master. Further, the loser recognizes himself as inferior, animal, dependent, a mere creature who values his life. In this nascent state, man is no longer herd animal, he is either Master or Slave. The Slave who has proven that he is still animal that still values life is forbidden to subsist as an animal because the Master recognizes him as an inferior, not even as an animal; if you like, as ‘bare life’, and thus the Master’s victory becomes abstract.
Now, perhaps surprisingly, Kojève will demonstrate that the true victor is the slave. Why? Because the slave will achieve concrete negativity at the end of history. He will ultimately master the master and become truly free.
1. The master is recognized by the slave as the truly human being. The slave is still contaminated by the animal desire merely to stay alive. No one resists the master. He is feared as death itself is feared. The master consumes the slaves’ freedom. The master enjoys himself. He consumes what the slave works for. The master does not work—why should he? He does not fear death, he does not merely want to stay alive. He terrifies other ‘half humans’ who do want to stay alive. The master’s abstract negativity depends on the slave’s concrete negativity, the slave’s labor. The slave negates the given reality and builds the palace for the master who uses it, consumes it, enjoys it. The work of the slave is the concrete truth of the master’s enjoyment. Moreover, the slave is still tied to nature: He works in it, transforming it for the master, and he fears death and thus retains his animal desire. Hence, the master cannot recognize the slave as an equally human being. The slave has proven in his cowardice that he is still part animal. This part human creature recognizes the master as master, but, all in all, the slave is a mere thing, not even animal. That which the fight was all about, the fight for pure prestige, was a fight to be recognized by another human Desire. That’s why it must be a fight to the death. But the result is that the master is now only recognized by a mere thing. Poor master. The master certainly has achieved freedom from his animal desire, but there is no one to recognize this hence he remains only subjectively free.
2. The slave does become truly conscious of his own freedom, however. He does not fear the master per se: He fears himself, his own death. In surrendering to the master, he alienates his freedom. In the master, the slave recognizes his own freedom. Afraid of his own freedom to die (that was what the fight was all about: The desire to be recognized as free to die by another whom the first recognizes as free to die), the slave freely decides not to be free. Not this master, but death itself is the Absolute Master. This master is a free, human desire only because the slave has surrendered his own freedom to him. Servitude is always voluntary. You cannot subjugate someone who does not fear death. The slave decides to be a slave, consciously. He freely negates his own freedom and becomes conscious of it thereby. The master is the slave’s negation which the slave recognizes. In the master is the slave’s own death living a human life. But he is only a master, not The Master. The slave did not fear him, but death itself. Further, the slave alienates abstract desire and hence his own humanity which he too recognizes in the master. That is, the slave lives and experiences his own death and his own humanity—which he freely surrendered—in the master whom he serves. In the master he sees his own humanity outside himself. The dialectic has worked. The master was willing to die but did not die, did not confront death, because the slave gave up too soon. The master now depends upon the slave for his enjoyment. The master is only apparently free. The slave really is free, but apparently un-free.
3. The master is the for-itself of consciousness but his truth is outside-itself in the slave. The slave has alienated his for-itself to the master. But now the slave begins to recognize himself as the true victor, because he works. Kojève returns to basic Hegel. The slave transforms the given reality into a subjective reality. True, he does not own what he makes, but he does transform the given reality nonetheless, and he knows this. What was wood is now someone’s table, a human reality, a subjective-object. It is the product. The transformation of nature into products is history. Because of the slave, nature becomes history and the slave, in transforming nature also transforms himself. The natural world is slowly transformed into the human world in which the slave sees himself and in which the slave knows himself. The slave lives in the very world that he himself has transformed, built, made. Not just a pyramid being finished but, the whole world is transformed in the course of history. The slave educates himself in this way. Furthermore, originally afraid of his own death, his own nature, the slave has now completely transformed natural being and dominates it. It is via work that the slave lives and thence overcomes his own fear of death. The trick that the slave performs on the master is this: Yes he alienates his own desire in the original confrontation, but he does not completely abandon the desire. He represses his desire. The slave still desires what the master desired: to be fully human, but the slave is willing to wait. It is precisely in work that “desire is held in check”.
That is, in work, not the confrontation, desire is transformed into truly human desire. The slave has capitalized on repression. He is the man of repression. Work requires the sublimation of desire. (The artist is satisfied in work, in repression. The artist enjoys repression of desire. In Hegelainese, this is the aufhebung.) The worker who enjoys work also enjoys himself because he has alienated his desire in work. For the slave, the concrete world that he himself builds is the realization of himself/his desire.
The world itself is, in the end, entirely transformed. The whole of given reality is now essentially for-man, for-the-human, because of the work of the slave. History has hence ended. There is no new given reality left to transform. The slave is now equal to the master because the slave is master of the world that the master must live in. The slave comes to know that he never feared the master himself but only feared his own death—a fear he has transformed into human history—the history of the transformation of given reality into human reality. Nothing fundamentally new can happen. Therefore, philosophy is over: there is nothing fundamentally new to think. That which caused the Slave to fear, his animal or given nature, has now been completely transformed. The Slave has Mastered Nature itself not by consuming it, but by transforming it into human reality. And each Slave recognizes in each other Slave the same transformative power as essentially equally valuable. Thus there is nothing to fight for. Terror (of death) was the origin of wisdom, of History, which the Slave realizes and the Master never does.
There is a little problem, however. There is nothing fundamentally left to do. Human being, human desire is “out of a job”. What happens then? Kojève was not sure about this. He was convinced that human history had ended. The world would be transformed into a world of liberal democracies that were production oriented. Essentially, the world we live in now. And what do we do at the end of history? We become American. We play golf, watch TV, eat the foods we like, enjoy—life! In short, we become animal again, but now in a reality no longer “given”, no longer natural. Georges Bataille prodded his teacher on this question. He asked simply: what happens to abstract negativity? Does it just “go away”? Even if I have nothing fundamentally left to do, I still, on the basic definition of human desire, desire nothing (I Desire Desire, I Desire to desire)—which is not exactly to be satisfied and not exactly animal. Is it possible to envision a purely gratuitous desire? Kojève eventually decided that it was and that at the end of history we become, not American, but Japanese. We live a purely human life of pure prestige that he finds examples of in Japanese gardens, flower arranging, and ritual suicide [Introduction 161-62]. We become snobs and Kojève never could decide if the snob is really human or not (on this point see Agamben [The Open §3] according to whom the snob is formally human, and that is the genius of Japanese culture). At the end of history the essence of Desire is revealed: It is still to Desire when there is nothing to left to Desire.
This brings us to Georges Bataille and the beginnings of the debate on ‘desœvrement’ (worklessness) and some consequences of Kojève’s lectures.
Georges Bataille's Response: The “Letter to X”
“If action (“doing”) [l’action (le ‘faire’)] is—as Hegel says—negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity.’ Personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed negativity [négativité sans emploi],’ (I would not be able to define myself more precisely.) I don’t mind Hegel’s having foreseen this possibility; at least he didn’t situate it at the conclusion of the process he described. I imagine that my life—or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life—constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system.
[…]
That doesn’t bother me and I see no reason to take any pride in it. But I would be no longer human if I put up with it without a fight (by accepting that I would seriously chance becoming not just comically insignificant but bitter and vindictive: then I would have to find my negativity again.)
[…] In effect, the man of ‘unemployed negativity [négativité sans emploi],’ not finding in the work of art an answer to the question that he himself is, can only become the man of ‘recognized negativity [négativité reconnue].’ He has recognized that his need to act no longer has any use [n’avait plus d’emploi].”
--Georges Bataille. “Letter to X,” in The College of Sociology [Ed. Denis Hollier.] Minnesota, 1988. pp. 89-93.
Kojève’s lectures concerned the end of history. (Like the ‘end of Art’ in Hegel, the end of history does not mean that, from now on things and events will cease to occur. However, we already know where these things and events lead; we know how things will end. In short, nothing essentially new can happen. Everything essential has already happened and has been realized in Napoleon and it has all been completely understood by Hegel.) Unlike Sartre (and Rene Girard), Bataille acknowledges his enormous debt to Kojève. As I have said, he considered Kojève to be much more important that Heidegger (whom he derisively considered to be no more than a bookish little philosopher-scholar who would not allow himself to be ravished by his own insights. Where Heidegger would contemplate and bring out the ontological significance of a glass of wine, Bataille will get drunk on it.)
Bataille accepts that history has come to an end. Whether with Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin makes little difference. His disagreement with Kojève concerns the consequences. In Kojève man—that is to say, negativity—disappears. Why? Because the slave recognizes himself in his work, in his products. He recognizes himself—and others—in productivity, and they recognize him. Human desire has been fully satisfied. True action ceases. Man is happy. No more wars; no more revolutions; no more essential change. Instead, he plays, loves, even makes art—but no longer to satisfy some essential urge to be human. This must be what life is like at the end of history, Bataille and Queneau decide: its boring! I have nothing to do anymore but pass the time away like Americans. I get married, play golf on Sunday, take trips to the countryside… The trouble is, Bataille is not satisfied by this American Way of Life. Bataille’s own life and its dissatisfaction is in itself a refutation of Hegel. But Bataille is not Kiekegaard. This is not the ironic protest of the concrete individual against the abstract system, a protest that ends in religious conversion, a ‘leap of faith’. There is more to it. Bataille fully accepts Kojèvean-Hegelian logic; he agrees with it completely. He wants to critique the whole structure on its own terms. Bataille poses hyper-Hegelian questions. If history is over and done with then why am I not happy? Because there is a kind of negativity that cannot be sublated. It is that negativity that can only appear after the end of history: Unemployed Negativity.
Bataille himself, in his person, is unemployed negativity. This negativity is a remainder of the system as a whole. Even if Bataille himself is the only example of it; it must be taken into account. In Kojève’s terms, this is abstract negativity: that which only consumes, does not work productively. But, unlike the negativity within history, this negativity is radically unproductive. It is absolutely without any purpose, because history is over and done with. (By the way, Kojève’s response to Bataille’s letter was to say that Bataille was correct but that on his own logic he should “silence the angelic part of his discourse” since everything Bataille wants to say or do has no purpose.) Bataille decides to call this unprecedented negativity Sovereign Negativity. All aspects of human life that serve no purpose, no end, are sovereign. For Bataille, kings, pharaohs, emperors are in fact degraded forms of true sovereignty since they wish to remain in power and hence subordinate their sovereign power to itself, to self-preservation. Those who are radically sovereign are not interested in superiority but are radically insubordinate. True sovereignty is a means without an end in view. It is pure expenditure, like laughter.
Hegel never took laughter, erotic love, or childishness into account. Because these are not serious they have no purpose. But this is just the point for Bataille in a truly brilliant Kojèvean inspiration: the non-serious = the gratuitous = sovereignty. And these are affirmed up to the point of death, in fact, the truth of sovereignty is death; but not as in a fight to the death: Instead in a play to the death. Play: bullfights, smoking cigarettes, human sacrifice, perverse sexuality, gambling, Russian roulette, etc. The only “proof” of radical purposelessness is the purposelessness of death. Bataille’s table of “remainders” to Kojève’s lectures can be summarized below:
Work Play, art, passionate love, laughter,
sacrifice, expenditure
Profane Sacred
Means in view of ends Endlessness
Usefulness Uselessness
Meaning Senselessness
Projects Chance, luck
Possible Impossible
Concrete negativity Useless negativity
Sobriety Intoxication
Satisfaction, or at least contentment Dissatisfaction, restlessness
Thus the end of history had revealed something Hegel could not have anticipated: Georges Bataille’s sovereign dissatisfaction with it all. Purely by chance, Bataille was born at the end of history. Hegel had not anticipated this. But what to do with this “discovery”? First, there is Bataille’s own case: “the open wound that is [his] life”. Bataille will not try to prove that his own life is not negligible; on the contrary, he emphasizes his own insignificance (that is also why he does not mount his own philosophy, that is why he ‘caves in’ and says to Kojève: Yes Master, you are absolutely correct…and yet). True Sovereignty can only be insignificant, meaningless. To the truly Sovereign being History-as-a-whole does not make sense (there is only sense in history). The entirety of the struggle was pointless. History vanishes into night just as the truly Sovereign being vanishes into insignificance, laughter, intoxication, delirium. Bataille sees this with utmost lucidity, and thus humiliates himself before Kojève in the letter. The more humiliated he is, the more Sovereign he is.
After History as a whole was finished, there remained, for Bataille, Queneau, and a few others the possibility of a community of Sovereign subjects: A-cephalic and profoundly ‘secret’, but a community nonetheless. Other work on the possibilities of a post-Historic community have been written about by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben.
For his part, after fighting in the resistance during WW II, Kojève, with perfect intellectual consistency, resigned his post in philosophy and became involved in the formation of the Common Market. He played a decisive role in its constitution and also helped to design the Marshall Plan. His advice on political matters was sought out and he became a sort of philosopher-advisor to powerful leaders. He ultimately sought to have established a “universal state”. At a European meeting in Brussels in 1968 he was stricken by a heart attack and died. On his death bed he is asked about the events of May in Paris. He replied that they were “insignificant” because no blood had been spilled. These were his final words.
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