Lecture: Kojeve Desoeuvrement

Kojève and Consequences

(Talk given at Chiao-tung University,

Hsin-chu, Taiwan: May, 2006)

Greetings from National Taipei University of Technology! I am very honored to be here at your prestigious university. I’m happy that Dr. Chu found me and asked me to speak on the topic of “desœvrement”, “inoperosità”, “inavouable”: ‘worklessness’, ‘un-working’ or ‘un-workable’, ‘inactive’, ‘useless’, ‘unavowable’, and so on—all related terms which derive from the debates of Alexandre Kojève, Raymond Queneau, and especially Georges Bataille in the late 1930s; debates which have influenced, among others, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Giorgio Agamben, and also—but let’s say with a different accent—Slavoj Zizek. (Certainly, my own notion of “radical passivity” finds its genesis within this intellectual genealogy, which is why Dr. Chu contacted me. And I am very happy to compare and contrast my understanding of this notion with that of his and his colleagues who, he tells me, have been studying Nancy and Agamben continuously for two years now.) It is a 70-year-old debate. It nonetheless continues to quite explicitly inspire thought as witness Giorgio Agamben’s book from 2002, L’aperto, [The Open: Man and Animal], which is basically no more than a meditation on aspects of the Kojève-Bataille debate; and also the 2004 conference (to which I was invited) entitled, “Figuren des Unvermögen”[‘Figures of Incapacity (or Inability)’], organized by Anselm Haverkampf, held at the Europa-Universität Viadrina (near Berlin). It is an issue that continues to inspire and is thus well worth examining and re-examining from the beginning. From the beginning because one simply cannot comprehend what happened to Western Thought without confronting a small constellation of thinkers: Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Alexandre Kojève, and Martin Heidegger.

Of these, Kojève may or may not be the most important—I won’t be arguing that point today—but he is the most fascinating. The most fascinating because 1) his monumental influence does not derive from a Work, an Opus, a Production, a Book but instead from a series of lectures given in Paris from 1933-39 and transcribed by the novelist Raymond Queneau (Kojève himself did not publish these lectures; he didn’t even prepare his lectures, that’s why we do not have his own notes to work from, only the transcription; Kojève was a teacher par excellence; he was the Master), and 2) he had nothing whatsoever fundamentally new to say. Georges Bataille felt that Kojève, and not Heidegger, was the philosopher of the 20th century, and this is so ironic because Kojève contributed nothing to philosophy. He merely repeated Hegel, he lectured on Hegel. Why did Kojève have nothing new to contribute? Because Philosophy was dead, finished, over with. Over with because Hegel had finished it with his system of philosophy, and because Hegel had the genius to realize that he was ‘the last philosopher’. Why did Hegel realize this? He realized it because he had the genius to see that History was dead, finished, over with. History ended with Napoleon, and it ended in a Work, a Production: In Hegel’s Book, Phänomenologie des Geistes, which was completed the night before the Battle of Jena as Hegel heard French cannon fire in the distance approaching his city. It was Kojève’s genius to be the first philosopher in history to be speechless, to have nothing to add, nothing to produce. Across six years of lectures, Kojève told the world—again, for a second time—what it could not accept the first time: History had ended. He knew that this was something “very funny”, which “no one will accept”, which “no one can stomach”, and which Kojève himself at first thought was “nonsense”, but which he eventually came to see as “brilliant” [cited in Roudinesco, 101]. It was this message that “staggered” Queneau and that left Bataille “shattered, overwhelmed, rooted to the spot” [cited in Roudinesco, 99].

In this talk I am going to try to weave together various 20th century thinkers, each of whom is indebted to Kojève and in particular to the “worklessness” issue. But, before I turn to Kojève, I want to begin with ‘the last philosopher’, Hegel, and in particular to that one small section from the Phenomenology which inspired so much: the famous “Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” (Master and Slave (or Bondsman)).



Herrschaft und Knechtschaft:

Kojève with Hegel

(or, The Phenomenology of Spirit without the Spirit)



But let’s begin with the title of the work from which the section comes: Phänomenolgie des Geistes. What or Who is Geist? The term is currently translated as ‘Spirit’, but it has been translated as ‘Mind’. More importantly, what does Hegel mean by Geist? I invite you to read “The Philosophy of Spirit” from Hegel’s Encyclopedia. There is no one clear definition. In one place we read: “Spirit came into being as the truth of nature which has translated and suspended itself” [Encyclopedia, #308] which means what? It means that Geist [Spirit], insofar as it is, is already a translation, or is an accidental by-product of translation (of nature which has translated itself). But from what? What is Geist originally? In another section we read that Geist is “the unity of the soul and consciousness” [Encyclopedia, #363], and in another place [#453] we learn that “the concept of Spirit has its reality in Spirit”. At no point does Hegel say that Geist is man, human being. At no point in the Phenomenology does Hegel unambiguously define Geist. All we can say definitively is: Geist is Geist. If you are Christian, Geist is God. But if you are Hegel, Christianity is only one chapter in History.

Hegelian philosophy is not a humanism and not a religion and it is not simply a philosophy. It is the last (idealistically systematic) philosophy. Hegelian philosophy is a system that accounts for everything of significance: Everything of significance constitutes ‘moments’ within the History of Geist. All can be accounted for except for Geist itself. (Kojève will find an ingenious—and decisively important for everything that would follow—way around this problem, which I will get to shortly.)



Das Selbstbewußtsein ist an und für sich, indem und dadurch, daß es für ein Anderes an und für sich ist; d. h. es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes. Der Begriff dieser seiner Einheit in seiner Verdopplung, der sich im Selbstbewußtsein realisierenden Unendlichkeit, ist eien vielseitige und vieldeutige Verschränkung, so daß die Momente derselben teils genau auseinandergehalten, teils in dieser Unterscheidung zugleich auch als nicht unterschieden oder immer in ihrer entgegengesetzen Beteutung genommen und erkannt werden müssen. Die Doppelsinnigkeit des Unterschiedenen liegt in dem Wesen des Selbstbewußtseins, unendlich oder unmittelbar das Gegenteil der Bestimmtheit, in der es gesetz ist, zu sein. Die Auseinanderlegung des Begriffs dieser geistigen Einheit in ihrer Verdopplung stellt uns die Bewegung des Anerkennens dar.

Es ist für das Selbstbewußtsein ein anderes Selbstbewußtsein; es ist außer sich gekommen. Dies hat die gedoppelte Bedeutung: erstlich, es hat sich selbst verloren, denn es findet sich als ein anderes Wesen; zweitens, es hat damit das Andere aufgehoben, denn es sieht auch nicht das Andere als Wesen, sondern sich selbst im Anderen.

Es muß dies sein Anderssein aufheben; dies ist das Aufheben der ersten Doppelsinnes und darum selbst ein zweiterDoppelsinn […]

--G. W. F. Hegel, “Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewußtseins; Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” vom Phänomenologie des Geistes [Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970] pp.145-6



Self-Consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. The Notion of this its unity in its duplication embraces many and varied meanings. Its moments then, must on the one hand be held strictly apart, and on the other hand must in this differentiation at the same time also be taken and known as not distinct, or in their opposite significance. The twofold significance of the distinct moments has in the nature of self-consciousness to be infinite, or directly the opposite of the determinateness in which it is posited. The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity [dieser geistigen Einheit] will present us with the process of Recognition.

Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superceded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being [my note: ‘als Wesen’ can mean “as essence”, “as substance”, as “being”, “as creature”], but in the other sees its own self.

It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is the supersession of the first ambiguity, and is therefore a second ambiguity.

--G. W. F. Hegel, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” from Phenomenology of Spirit [trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford Press, 1977] p.111



If you don’t understand what Hegel is talking about, if as you read page after page of Hegel you begin to feel a bit insane you are not alone. A good reader of Hegel must take his or her own incomprehension very seriously. Kojève and Bataille were two such readers. Kojève himself read the Phenomenology “straight through” four times and “didn’t understand a word” [cited in Roudinesco, p.100; my emphasis]. A year before his death, Bataille wrote the following to Kojève, his old teacher: “It is a question of situating at the very basis (or the end) of Hegelian thought an equivalence with madness” [cited in Surya, p.190].

The passage I have cited here is at the very beginning of the “Herrschaft” section and it begins by talking about Self-consciousness [Das Selbstbewußtsein]; the remainder of this celebrated section talks about the “movement” of self-consciousness through the Master/Slave dialectic, a dialectic that forms the basis for Kojève’s reading of Hegel. This section from Hegel is but one small section from the whole of the Phenomenology (itself but one book from the whole of his system, which includes a philosophy of nature from which human being is not essentially separated—because nature itself, for Hegel, is dialectical). The Phenomenology of Spirit begins with ‘Sense-Certainty’ and ends with ‘Absolute Knowing’ which is no other than the ‘Absolute Knowing’ of Geist [Spirit] that had “emptied itself into history” and then returned to itself as “Spirit that knows itself as Spirit” [p.590-91; trans. p.492-93]. Compare this to the passage from Kojève’s Introduction:

Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when—for the “first” time—he says “I”. To understand man by understanding his “origin” is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech.

--Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel [Ed. Allan Bloom; Trans. James H. Nichols.] Cornell University Press, 1969.



The final pages of Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel end with “Man’s definitive satisfaction, which completes History […] and that has been realized (by universal recognition of particularity)” [p.258].

What has happened? Geist has vanished. Spirit is gone. In fact, Kojève’s answer to the question ‘What or Who is Spirit’ is disarmingly simple: Nothing, Nobody. There is no Geist, there never was. It is not necessary to determine the identity of Spirit. All of Hegel can be read as an allegory of human history. Das Selbstbewußtsein [Self-consciousness] is man, human being. What matters is the system and the fact that it really can (for Kojève, anyway) account for everything of significance. Geist, however, signifies nothing. Geist is an empty signifier. Kojève may have had nothing to add to philosophy, but he did have something to subtract. (Via a small detour through Saussure and his notion of language as essentially systematic we can understand much of the work of Jacques Lacan. Geist (after Kojève) is merely a formal term that, empty in itself, guarantees the integrity of the system. Geist is the Master Signfier, the signifier which signifies significance in general but which itself refers to nothing, no-thing. It is the Empty Signifier, or, what Lacan will re-name: The Phallus, the guarantor of the Symbolic System, the Big Other, which is very prominent in the early Lacan)

By spiriting away Spirit (if you will forgive the word-play), Kojève brought the old Idealist Hegel “down to earth”, and that is what so electrified a generation that had been slogging their way through neo-Kantism and Cartesian-epistemological problems while the ideal of historical progressivism had already been shattered at Verdun in WW I, and the Europe these young artists and intellectuals lived in everyday was in incomprehensible thrall to fascism, war, and revolution.

Now, before I turn to Kojève’s reading more carefully I want to stay with Hegel’s text a moment longer because it contains an element that is critical to Lacan (his notion of a split subject) and also to the current work of Slavoj Zizek (and his Hegelian notion of “tarrying with the negative”). In the passage we see that Self-consciousness is only insofar as it is divided between itself and another self-consciousness. It is only unified insofar as it is “duplicated” (hence, not unified), insofar as it is a self-contradiction. This of course is strictly unthinkable, illogical, insane, but it is “in the nature of self-consciousness” to be “infinite”. In Infinite Mind (or Spirit) such contradictions or ambiguities (or Doppelsinnes) can be comprehended (at the end of history, when Geist knows itself as itself). However, to get to the end, when all will be well, self-consciousness must pass through contradiction after contradiction after contradiction: In short it must “Tarry” with its being-torn. Hegelian Self-consciousness is rent, ripped: It is itself only outside of itself in that other self-consciousness that faces it, that is its double, its twin. The being of self-consciousness is divided-being. All its reality is always outside itself in that other self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is destitute, impoverished of (its own) being. This dilemma, in all its negativity, is also important to Lacan of the Imaginary, the “Mirror Stage” and especially of “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis”. For, this destitution is the origin of human hatred. This rending of Self-consciousness (or, for Lacan in his linguistic phase: The split (or barred) Subject) must not be underestimated. Likewise, any reading of Zizek on the question of enjoyment-as-political-factor becomes clear when we realize that that which the other (the foreigner, the neighbor) enjoys is indeed my enjoyment, the same as my enjoyment (life, family, pleasure, Nike shoes, whatever), but the other appears to enjoy it more than me. That is to say, for Zizek, the origin of racial hatred is the fantasy that the other has stolen my pleasure, or, what amounts to the same thing, has stolen my being.

(This brief weaving together of Hegel, Kojève, Lacan, and Zizek is merely to scratch the surface of the richness and power of Hegel’s philosophy—even from just this one small section—which repays study many times over, and which continues to guide contemporary thinking. For a few pages now I will summarize Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel, which were attended assiduously by Queneau, Bataille, Lévinas, Breton, Klossowski, Leiris, Callois, de Rougement, Paulhan—basically everybody important in France except Sartre and also Blanchot (but who learned in detail of the talks through his friend, Bataille).)





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. (Here, remember the Lacanian dictum that Zizek is fond of repeating ad infinitum: Never surrender your Desire!) 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 action. “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 amino acids in my stomach, 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 as an animal, if you like, as ‘bare life’. (Giorgio Agamben’s work on la vita nuda [bare, or naked, life] and Foucault’s work on ‘biopolitics’ originate in this essentially Hegelio-Kojèvean schema.)



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 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 work, abstract desire achieves 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 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 the 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’ and some consequences of Kojève’s lectures.



Georges Bataille:

“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. “Lettre A X”, en Le Collège de Sociologie [Ed. Denis Hollier.] Gallimard, 1979. pp.170-77; “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. (Agamben’s book Means Without End is an echo of this.) 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: 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, just as Geist is unaccountable for from within the system and is ultimately an empty signifier. (There is only sense in history.) The entire 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 the possibility of a community of Sovereign subjects: A-cephalic and profoundly ‘secret’, but a community nonetheless. (Jean-Luc Nancy would return to this possibility in his “community” book about which I will speak in a moment. But first I want to discuss that fabulous contemporary of Kojève’s and Bataille’s: Jacques Lacan.)