Samantha Hill has an essay in Aeon about the philosophical legacy of Kojeve. This is strange. Aspects of the EU may be said to be the legacy of Kojeve- who, after all, was a Eurocrat. Ordoliberalism could be said to be his legacy. Twenty years ago we might have mentioned some Neo-Cons (Leo Strauss rated Kojeve) or even the fatuous Fukuyama. But this is a political legacy which turned out to be shit.
Kojeve left no mark on philosophy- at least nothing Anglo-Saxons would understand by that term. Once we understand he was an emigre charlatan on the make, we may feel some sympathy for him. But sympathy is not respect. It is not 'recognition'. Indeed that supposed 'struggle' can have no other ending unless some STEM type advance, or inspiring act of Statesmanship or Soteriological revelation is involved.
Hill begins her well-written essay with two quotations.
It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s work.
– from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) by Alexandre Kojève
At the time was a far from foolish assertion. After all, a Third World War- once again turning on the pivot of Germany's political future- was all too possible. Thankfully, Germany was partitioned and its political thought was put under Super Power tutelage.
Over the succeeding decades, mathematical economics or game theory displaced 'political philosophy' of a belle lettristic type. A Category theory based Hegelianism- e.g that of Lawvere- could certainly have been formulated but nobody bothered. The Left was content to embrace the ghettos of Identity Politics while the Right turned either to the Church or to Cocaine or oscillated between the two.
Adorno, poor fellow, was merely pointless. Consider the following-
The incomprehensible in Hegel is the scar left by identity-thinking.
– from Hegel: Three Studies (1963) by Theodor Adorno
Adorno thought he understood music- he didn't- but never made any similar claim about math. Yet, Hegel knew calculus and shared a common 'long eighteenth century' intuition re. the 'completeness' of, and thus eventual comprehensibility, of mathematics as logic as Reality realizing itself. For someone like Kripke, the thing is still possible 'at the end of time'. It's just that logic will be less powerful- little would be deducible- or semantic comprehension would be much more 'restricted'. But that doesn't matter to us, if quantum computers are doing the heavy, and deeply boring, lifting.
Adorno, thinking what Hegel was doing was akin to musical composition, wrote-
Hegel's dialectical philosophy gets into a dialectic it cannot account for and whose solution is beyond its omnipotence.
This is false. To use a later idiom, Hegel thought there was a 'natural' deduction system whose 'logical atoms' were gradually becoming better and better specified. Reason was converging to 'naturality'. I think it was only in the early Seventies of the last century that most people realized that 'naturality' was incompatible with what Kunh called 'neutrality'- i.e. what was being optimized was arbitrary or a matter of coevolution on an uncertain, indeed unknowable, fitness landscape.
Within the system, and in terms of the laws of the system, the truth of the nonidentical manifests itself as error, as unresolved, in the other sense of being unmastered, as the untruth of the system;
No. There is a struggle of some sort and some give and take and then a 'synthesis' of a utile type. It is not the case that Hegel's dialectic is separate from the cosmic dialectic in which everything participates or Yoneda's lemma applies.
It is one thing to say that X and Y disagree. It is another thing to say that what all will inevitably agree to is that either X or Y were mere mirages or specters raised up by a Mage- like Novalis's magician- who comes to see he is himself unreal.
and nothing that is untrue can be understood.
Yet we understand such things all the time. Hegel wasn't crazy. He knew that we can learn and understand a completely false theory. If we are lawyers, it may be we can argue for for something we know to be false more convincingly than anybody else can argue for what is more likely to be true. Plato, after all, defined Philosophy as precisely this ability.
Thus the incomprehensible explodes the system.
No. Once everybody 'comprehends' that a system is stupid shit, then it is exploded. There was a time when people weren't sure whether Continental philosophy wasn't incomprehensible as opposed to puerile or paranoid shite. But, given that only the very very stupid studied that shite and became Professors of that shite, we are now certain it was indeed shit. Comprehending why it was shit simply involved spotting obvious errors of logic or premises of a deeply ignorant type. It isn't the case that you could crash financial markets by saying 'well, obviously, the Mochizuki proof of the abc theorem implies universal contango- i.e. a market crash'. The Mochizuki proof may be incomprehensible for most quants but 'universal contango' is gibberish. The financial system can't be brought down by pulling shite out of your arse.
Hill, to be fair, is not indulging in gibberish. Having done a book on Hannah's Aunt, she is banging on about Hitler- who, academics have discovered, wasn't a real nice guy.
Paris, France, 1933. The French newspaper Le Figaro reads: ‘It’s a wick to a barrel of powder’ beneath the headline ‘Hitler Is the New Master of Germany’. Terror sets in. The far-Right is growing. The economy is suffering. There is mass unemployment. There are workers’ strikes. Fascism begins appealing to the middle classes. In Berlin, Stormtroopers are patrolling the streets. The Gestapo is detaining people and murdering them in cellars. Refugees from Germany arrive by train daily looking for asylum. Between 1933 and 1938, more than 80,000 politicians, philosophers, communists and liberals flee from Germany to France. There is anti-German sentiment. There are anti-immigrant protests.
But the French didn't rearm or formulate a credible offensive doctrine. It was obvious that, once Hindenburg got the power to rule by ordinance, War was inevitable. The French knew their Great War offensive doctrine of 'attaque a' outrance'- i.e. run screaming at the enemy whose artillery has a longer range and mows you down- was shit. They needed to 'frontload' pain on Germany. De Gaulle understood this. But Gamelin was saying he'd give the Germans a billion francs if only they'd do him the favor of attacking. This was crazy shit. You can't win unless you attack, occupy the enemy's territory and disarm the fuck out of him. That was the lesson Napoleon taught Europe.
But intellectual life is flourishing in the cafés, institutes and academies, as refugees forge community in exile.
France needed allies. Sadly, its 'intellectual life' was counterproductive. It created collaborationists.
And at the École Pratique des Hautes Études,
which had turned to shit in the one field that mattered- viz. military strategy. There is no fucking dialectic such that defense magically turns into attack. Invading enemy territory and laying waste to it is how you win. Kidding yourself that your attacker will concentrate on punching the wall behind which you are hiding and that he will surrender after his fists become bloody and broken is just wishful thinking.
one of France’s most prestigious research universities, Alexandre Kojève has taken over Alexandre Koyré’s
whom Hilbert told to fuck off and who thus had to settle for Husserl's soft-headed shite
seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G W F Hegel.
A response to Napoleon's offensive doctrine. But it was British commerce- the subsidies it could pay- which determined the outcome of that conflict. Also, don't fucking invade Russia in winter. Hitler repeated Napoleon's mistake but, thanks to De Gaulle, France secured an offensive doctrine based on nukes. Israel got in on that action.
Between 1933 and 1939, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Gaston Fessard, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Queneau, Emmanuel Levinas all come to hear his lectures.
Some of them could write well. But we now think of them as stupid and ignorant. By contrast, France did have some great mathematicians. Sadly, they didn't get that they had the tools to chase away the stupidity of their fellow-savants.
A collection of the most renowned thinkers of the day,
Good at writing, shit at thinking. Foucault had a good psychiatrist who contributed to the creation of anti-psychotic medication. The Maoists chased him out of his Professorship of Medicine. He got elected to the French Academy on the basis of his prose style.
who would come to lay the intellectual foundations for 20th-century philosophy, political thought, literature, criticism, psychology and history.
Nonsense! This was a French availability cascade which some silly Americans bought into. Actual 20th century philosophy was about mathematical logic and arcane Sciencey stuff to do with Quantum physics.
It is said that Kojève’s lectures were so intricate, so deft, that Arendt accused him of plagiarising.
Why? Kojeve's genius was to make 'the struggle for recognition' dramatic rather than deeply boring shite about how thymotic societies must give way to economic rationality and the Protestant work ethic.
Bataille fell asleep. Sartre couldn’t even remember being there.
Back then, Sartre thought Husserl was smart. It was a wonder he could remember his own name.
How is it that Kojève, this obscure figure of history, came to influence an entire generation of thinkers at this pivotal moment?
Husserl crashed and burned. Heidegger turned out to be on the wrong side of history. Communism- and thus the Young Hegelians- emerged victorious. There were huge French and Italian Communist parties. But something softer and more wooly than Stalinism was required. Kojeve could be said to represent what economists called the 'convergence' thesis- viz. the superpowers would become more and more like each other. Samuelson's mathematical economics wasn't so different from Kantorovich's.
How is it that his ideas continue to fuel political and cultural debates today around identity, individualism, liberal democracy and the end of history?
I don't think this is true. Strauss and the neo-cons turned the spotlight on Kojeve some twenty or thirty years ago. It was an alternative to the 'clash of civilizations' thesis which appears to have prevailed.
Biographies of Kojève are scarce. Russian-born, aristocrat, nephew of the acclaimed artist Wassily Kandinsky, French civil servant, early architect of the European Union, philosophy professor, Vedanta scholar, polymath, French resistance fighter, Soviet spy? Kojève’s life is almost too cinematic to seem real, like someone from a John le Carré novel brought to life, or the embodiment of one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s characters.
Sounds like Hill is going to do a biography of Kojeve. Who will play him in the movie- Brad Pitt?
Born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov in Moscow in 1902, there is little question that Kojève is one of the most important thinkers for understanding our contemporary world.
Nonsense! Huntingdon turned out to be a true prophet. How would Kojeve explain Ukraine?
Most popular pieces written about him, which appear every few years as new details of his life emerge, begin the same way: it is difficult to overstate the legacy of Kojève’s work.
Only because everybody assumes there was none. But then Leo Strauss's star, too, has faded. Hannah's Aunt- because she lacked a penis- will always have a constituency though, to be frank, it was Ayn Rand who had an actual political impact.
But then, he disappears again, into the subterranean layers of popular consciousness, intellectual history, and those who study Hegel.
Not really. There is a category theory way of looking at Hegel. Koyre, but not Kojeve, could have some salience in that respect. I'm kidding. Nobody gives a shit about this. One may as well pretend Zizek is smart.
Fleeing the Soviet Union after the revolution in 1920 through Poland to Germany, Kojève lived in Berlin and then Heidelberg where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Karl Jaspers on the Russian philosopher, poet and theologian Vladimir Soloviev. (Soloviev, who had been influenced by Hegel, argued that all notions of thought could be contained in a transcendental whole.)
Solovyov is supposed to have inspired Doestoevsky's Karamazov brothers.
Kojève changed his name when he moved to Paris in 1926 where he continued his studies until 1929, when the stock market crash left him in financial ruin and looking for work. It was chance that Koyré invited him to take over the Hegel seminars in 1933, which were to run for one year only, and ended up lasting six. And in 1941, after the German invasion, Kojève fled to Marseilles where he lived until he was asked to join the French economic minister’s office, helping to shape economic policy as an adviser in the construction of the postwar French government.
No one is a more patriotic Frenchman than a Russian forced to relocate there. Kojeve was an economic nationalist but preferred a neutral policy between the two super-powers.
Conscripted into the French army, Kojève never fought in the war. One author writes: ‘[H]e mysteriously failed to join his regiment.’ Another claims he joined the French Resistance. And an article in Le Monde from 2000 citing a three-page memo asserted that he was a Soviet spy for the last 30 years of his life.
But he was probably serving France's national interests.
Kojève confessed to having read Hegel several times in his life without understanding a word
Because he was doing so in German. Hegel actually becomes clearer in English translation precisely because of the nature of English syntax.
Described by colleagues as charming, secretive and terrifying – was Kojève a protagonist or an antagonist? The record has not been settled. Was he a Soviet spy? Did he fight in the French Resistance? What did he mean when he wrote that he was ‘Stalin’s conscience’? Why was he sending letters to Stalin? Did philosophy really come to an end with Hegel? And why was it that, at this particular moment in history, against the backdrop of unfolding political catastrophe, everyone was reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit?
The answer is that the Great Depression showed there was something wrong with the 'invisible hand'. Was there a purely substantively rational method to solve the problem of scarcity? Recall that the 'Hossbach memo' of 1937 reflected Keynes's belief that Germany would starve unless it got colonies to its East. Indeed, Keynes was so fucking stupid, he said America was becoming a net food importer!
It wasn't till the early seventies that mathsy guys worked out why there can't be a 'substantively rational' plan which solves the economic problem. This had to do with Complexity, Concurrency, Computability and the fact that all crypto-Commies are cretinous cunts. Around this time, Lawvere sought to revive a category theory based Hegelianism. But why bother? German philosophy is known to be stupid shite. Indeed, all philosophy is now just an oubliette for 'Grievance studies' retards.
The French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir dedicated afternoons in the Bibliothéque Nationale (the French National Library) to reading the Phenomenology. She wrote in her diary:
I continued to read Hegel, whom I was beginning to understand. In the details, the richness of his thought overwhelmed me: but the system overall made me dizzy. Yes, it was tempting to cancel oneself out in favour of the Universal, to consider one’s own life from the End of History …
Hegel’s text was so popular that, had Beauvoir tried to check out the book a few months earlier, she would have found it in the hands of the 20th-century cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who was at work on his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.
Sadly, it turned out that though Philosophy had a history- one of stupidity- History lacked a Philosophy. It was 'Carmen solutum'- i.e. conformed to no pattern.
Kojève had discovered the work of Hegel in Germany during his student days with Jaspers, and like others was captivated by the impenetrability of the Phenomenology.
But the idea is attractive- viz. that Reason by itself can solve a problem which Reality is slowly, but blindly, solving. Hegel was too cautious to say this but Marx- who was supposed to have understood Econ- had opened new vistas. What if Bolshevik Russia really had become a Worker's paradise? Even if it hadn't, might not richer countries with a less fucking horrible history implement some highly rational, scientific plan- using Atomic power or something yet more advanced- which solved all Humanity's problems once and for all? Maybe, the day was nigh when everybody only worked when they felt like it and just gave away the product of their labor to anyone who wanted it. There would be no jealousy or envy or marriage or masturbation or people crying themselves to sleep every night because nobody liked their latest Sonnet or Sonata or whatever.
To be fair, Hegel’s work is notoriously opaque. His last words reportedly were: ‘Only one has understood me, and even he did not understand.’
Which was cool because the Universe- or Geist- embodied that understanding.
Theodor Adorno, a difficult writer himself, said: ‘Hegel is no doubt the only one with whom at times one literally does not know, and cannot conclusively determine, what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a judgment is even possible.’
Again, this is because he was reading the fool in German. In English, our task is easier. What surprises us is the defensive manner in which Hegel was writing. But then he was merely a civil servant.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked that Hegel was ‘the hardest to understand of the great philosophers’.
He said the man was a nutter who wrote nonsense. Well, he didn't use those words exactly because there was a British Hegelianism which was actually quite decent and nice albeit a bit Churchy.
And when Kojève agreed to take over Koyré’s seminar, he confessed himself to having read Hegel several times in his life without understanding a word.
French is a more lucid language than German but, alas, it too falls short of English in that it dazzles itself whereas German merely gropes in the dark.
But Hegel’s opacity has never stopped people
which people? Anybody sensible? Maybe, once upon a time, when half the world was Marxist. But not since then though, oddly, category theory has developed to a point where Hegelianism could be recast in its terms. But what would be the point? The owl of Minerva can't compete with the supersonic speed at which STEM subjects are progressing.
from interpreting his work, finding it insightful, inspiring and infuriating in equal measure. In one anecdote, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre remarked of the Phenomenology: ‘Hegel had the mental age of a seven-year-old.’
Because he didn't know Anglo Saxon Econ.
The literary critic Maurice Blanchot wrote: ‘One cannot “read” Hegel, except by not reading him.’
Or by just having a crafty wank. There was a theory that Michael Oakeshott was a Hegelian. The truth is he just thriftily recycled his lecture notes.
Meaning, even if you have never read Hegel, you’ve encountered his ideas recycled in the thinking of others; as impenetrable as Hegel might seem, his work has thoroughly penetrated collective consciousness.
Which is why the collective unconsciousness has Me Too'd Hegel for penetrating it in its no-no place.
The opacity of Hegel’s Phenomenology avails itself to promiscuous interpretation,
masturbation is not promiscuous. It is not the case that I've had sex with thousands of super-models.
but no reading has been so seductive as Kojève’s.
Coz nobody put out for Karl Marx- right?
We find his interpretation of Hegel reflected in the work of a diverse array of thinkers from Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama
that's not diversity. That's a bunch of guys from Chicago.
to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
who were influenced by people influenced by Kojeve's pre-war lectures
Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler.
who have shit for brains.
Reading Kojève reading Hegel has become an academic business in itself.
A bankrupt business- sure.
Indeed, Blanchot’s comment might be reworded to read: one cannot read Hegel today, except by reading Kojève.
Lawvere, maybe. After all, Hegel was a logician. That's mathsy stuff.
Why has Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology exerted such force of influence across disciplines and political lines?
It hasn't. When half the world was Marxist, it was natural to think of Hegel as a major thinker. It also made sense to make a small side bet on a soft and fuzzy 'humanistic' 'Left Hegelian' Marx. But Reagan and Thatcher showed there was no need to play nice with the Evil Empire. There's only one thing us proles hate more than furriners. It's pinko elitists wot talk posh.
The short answer is that Kojève made Hegel accessible by bringing to the surface one of the essential elements of his work: desire.
Coz the French are randy buggers. British Hegelians emphasized the Churchy aspect of Hegel. Indians gassed on about the mystical, Meister Eckhart type, element. The Kyoto School highlighted 'emptiness' while the Kansas school of Hegelianism emphasized the role of Toto the dog in the final overthrow of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Kojève did not deny he was providing a reading of Hegel that transformed the text. His interpretation has been described as ‘creative’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘violent’. The question Kojève placed at the centre of his lectures was: ‘What is the Hegelian person?’
A member of 'civil society'. He said that individuals 'have the duty to support themselves through labour which benefits the whole, while civil society as a whole owes each individual the opportunity to labour in a way which provides a secure, respected and self-fulfilling mode of life . This means that civil society is charged with the education of individuals for membership in it, and also collectively responsible for preventing them for falling into poverty, whether through their own improvidence or through the contingencies of the market system. The poor in civil society are victims not of some natural misfortune, but of a social wrong'.
The idea here is that the Hegelian individual, as part of Civil Society, can be part of a non-market, susbstantively rational solution to the problem of scarcity. This means the 'fitness landscape' no longer matters- history has ended in that exogenous events can have no hysteresis effects. Man would be making his own destiny in a purely rational manner. Reason would usurp Reality but, perhaps, that was what the Geist had already made inevitable.
And he answered this question through a discussion of human desire by centring a brief section in the Phenomenology titled ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’, which is popularly rendered as ‘the master/slave dialectic’. And by centring this nine-page section of a 640-page work, Kojève offered readers a way to grasp an otherwise elusive text.
He knew his audience. Russians may be into 'Sobornost' and a mystical Christ but the French are randy buggers. If they are not tying up each other up and giving each other golden showers they lose their appetite for frog's legs and the livers of force-fed geese.
Poetic in its opacity, perplexing in its terminology, Hegel’s work offers an understanding of the evolution of human consciousness where the finite mind can become a vehicle for the Absolute.
Kojeve was familiar with Sufi and Vedantic and other mystical schools of thought. Did he know of the love-dialectic between Mahmud and Ayaz in Ahmed Ghazzali? Perhaps. But Mahmud's Ayaz isn't so different from Dante's Beatrice- the object of desire becoming the psychopomp who leads one out of bondage to desire.
But what does that mean? Kojève took the lofty prose of Hegel down from the heavens and placed it in human hands, offering a translation: this is a book about human desire and self-consciousness. Or, as the philosopher Robert Pippin writes:
Kojève, who basically inflates this chapter to a free-standing, full-blown philosophical anthropology, made this point by claiming that for Hegel the distinctness of human desire is that it can take as its object something no other animal desire does: another’s desire.
This is fucked in the head. Cats and dogs desire us to desire and love them and vice versa. Indeed, a wolf may look after the infant of a species it habitually feeds on.
What was Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic?
In Kojève’s reading, human beings are defined by their desire for recognition, and it is a desire that can be satisfied only by another person who is one’s equal.
This is the Paris of Balzac. It isn't Russian. Think of the old man in War and Peace who tells Pierre 'if we cavil at sickness, God won't grant us death.' The zadig, or lamed wufnik, justifies Man to God but is unknown to his fellows. The Sufi 'Qutb' or Buddhist 'pratyeka Buddha' or Saivite 'jivanmukta' has this property. In England- where everybody is terribly self-effacing- Kojeve would have taken the churchy tone of the British Hegelians and gently reproved that old satyr, Bertrand Russell.
On this reading, Kojève unfolds a multi-step process: two people meet, there is a death-match, a contest of the wills between them, and whoever is willing to risk their life triumphs over the other, they become the master, the other becomes a slave, but the master is unable to satisfy his desire, because they’re recognised only by a slave, someone who is not their equal. And through the slave’s work to satisfy the master’s needs, coupled with the recognition of the master, ultimately the slave gains power.
This is foolish. A guy with a lot of slaves is recognized as an important man by other important men.
As Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence’
Which may sound cool in French coz frogs won't fuck their own wives because she is right there in bed with them. They aren't happy unless they are sticking their dick where it is most likely to get them a dose of the clap.
Had Kojeve landed in England- where he'd have got a well paid job as a Merchant Banker- he'd have clarified that only proles- and the more vulgar type of Jew- had desires. Gentlemen had obligations and very very fucking horrible halitosis.
What is essential for Kojève is that one risk their life for something that is not essential. The one who shrinks before the other in fear of death becomes the slave.
No. The reason there was a slave trade was so as to ensure slaves didn't run away to join their own people. Serfdom was fine coz if you run away to join Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, Maid Marion would have her wicked way with you. Seriously, Marion was originally a bawdy character associated with Friar Tuck. 'She is a trul of trust, to serue a frier at his lust/a prycker a prauncer a terer of shetes/a wagger of ballockes when other men slepes' as Mrs. Thatcher was wont to say.
The one willing to die – to face the inevitability of their own non-existence – becomes the master.
No he doesn't. Masters have to supply food to their slaves. The thing is economic. Also masters have to combine together to prevent an invasion and their own enslavement.
Hegel was trying to say that 'dialectical' processes- conflicts over being recognized as an equal- underlie the emergence of consciousness. But this view is foolish. The thing is mimetic. Babies aint slaves. They imitate Mummy and Daddy and start lecturing them about global warming and why they themselves need the latest i-pad to watch Teletubbies. No doubt, at the margin, some peeps have to struggle to be recognized as Miss Teen Tamil Nadu by other winners of that coveted title. However, as I have explained in Volume XLVIII of my Autobiography, there is IYENGAR CONSPIRACY against highly deserving and cute Iyers like myself.
In other words, desire is an exertion of the will over an other’s desire.
But it is no such thing. Masturbation does not involve exerting the will over anybody else- unless you have actually tied them up and are pointing a gun at their head and are saying 'when I shoot my load I'm gonna blow out your brains! You like that don't you, you little retard bitch!' I'm not saying that's the reason I quit Chartered Accountancy but I think it is well known that nobody makes Partner at a Big 8 firm without having to put up with a certain amount of kinky sexual torture at the hands of custodial staff.
Or, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would come to say: ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’s desire.’
Love- maybe. You do want wifey to love you rather than merely tolerate your presence. But lustful desire doesn't work that way. You pay a prostitute to leave.
It is not an attempt to possess the other person physically, but to force the other person in that moment of contest to make the other give, to bend their will, in order to achieve superiority.
This is some S&M shite such as would appeal to a Bataille, Foucault, De Sade or Giles de Retz. In England, at least back then, all concerned would apologize profusely if, by chance, they had bumped uglies- unless, obviously, they were the Queen-Empress in which case they would say 'We are so not amused'.
And in this moment, Kojève writes: ‘Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire.’
Sadly, all desire is biological. You want a sports car or to get your kid into Ivy League because of the Price equation- i.e. more numerous future progeny.
In order to gain recognition in this sense, one must be willing to risk everything – including their life. It is a struggle for mastery of the self.
Like the Seinfeld episode- 'the contest'- which was about who could avoid wanking longest thus being able to claim to be 'the master of my domain'
Instead of Hegel’s roundabout of self-consciousness that exists in itself and for itself but always and only in relation to another, Kojève gives us: self-consciousness is the I that desires, and desire implies and presupposes a self-consciousness.
So, Kojeve is appealing to Cartesian frogs all of whom were as kinky as fuck. Plenty of emigres have to adapt to the new market in which they find themselves. If you are in France, sell kinky sex and suppositories. If you are in England, promote Bovril because it will help rid you of dirty thoughts. Also, it tastes like shit.
Thinking about the relation between the finite mind and Absolute knowledge is opaque, but desire is human.
or canine or feline. As for parrots- don't get me started.
People know what it feels like to desire, to want, to crave to be seen, to feel understood. Desire is the hunger one feels to fill the absence inside themselves.
The French love suppositories.
Or, as Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence.'
And my presence is the desire for my absence- at least as far as the fair sex is concerned. Sad,
And it is not a consuming desire – it cannot consume the object of desire,
unless it is a fucking Japanese PhD student in Paris circa 1981.
because desire directed toward another person is a desire for recognition, and to consume them would be to negate, destroy, the possibility for that recognition. We need each other to go on existing. Or, as the author Simone Weil writes in Gravity and Grace (1947): ‘The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.’
That nutcase died of inanition.
Or, as the poet Anne Carson in ‘Tango XXIX’ (2001): ‘To say Beauty is Truth and stop. / Rather than to eat it. / Rather than to want to eat it.’
Yes, yes. We get it. High achieving women have eating disorders. Nobody gives a fuck about elderly Tamil gentlemen who are attacked by racist chocolate eclairs. Seriously, every time I buy a box of the things so as to hand them round at work, they jump out at me and try to eat my face! I have to devour them in pure self-defense.
Perhaps most importantly, what Kojève understood was the extent to which we humans desire to exercise some control over how other people see us differently from the ways in which we see ourselves.
Wow! Kojeve was a friggin' genius. He worked out the reason we wear clothes rather than letting everybody get an eyeful of our ball sac which, in my case, dangles down to my knees. On the other hand, my pencil dick is hidden by vast folds of fat.
However tenuous or certain our sense of self-identity may seem, it is our very sense of self that we must risk when we appear in the world before others
not if we are properly dressed. In a three piece suit I merely look like a fat loser rather than a circus freak.
– our identity, desire, fear and shame.
This overstates things. The fact is, if other peeps can't see your dangly bits you don't need to feel fear and shame. Unless X-ray specs are a real thing.
There is no guarantee that we will be seen in the way we want to be seen, and feeling misrecognised hurts when it happens, because it wounds our sense of self.
So does being stabbed coz peeps think we are homicidal maniacs with exceptionally distended ball sacs.
But this risk is vital – it is part of what makes us human, it is part of our humanity.
No it isn't. The Hunter-gatherer communities from whom we are all descended had no such morbid or neurotic view of the world. Indeed, most people nowadays aren't quivering with fear and shame coz they think everybody else is pointing at them and making rude remarks about the size of their genitals.
And whereas Kojève’s reading drives toward an ideal of social equality that affirms one’s preexisting sense of self when confronted by an other, for Hegel, one must take the other’s perception of the self – whatever it may be – back into their own self-consciousness. In other words, whereas for Hegel freedom rested upon the ability to preserve difference, for Kojève it rested upon the ability to preserve one’s own identity at the expense of difference.
But everybody already has this ability! I don't turn into a juicy looking mouse when a cat looks at me. Nor does the cat turn into a tiger. Maybe it says miaow and I say miaow but the fact remains, at the end of the day, we go our separate ways.
In bringing the lofty language of Hegel down from the heavens,
where God keeps getting confused every time he bumps into Satan and then the Holy Ghost gets its own Netflix series where it battles shape shifting lizards from Planet X.
Kojève offered readers a secular understanding of human action,
Which they already had. When a human performs an action people understand that he was either drunk, or bored out of his gourd, or else there was some strategic reason why he dropped his trousers and stuck his buttocks out of the car window.
which requires each and every individual to reckon with the inevitability of their own death, their own undoing.
Coz lots of individuals are constantly jumping off the top of tall buildings in the belief that they are immortal.
And in doing so he shifted the focus toward the individual as the locus of social change,
the French individual was the locus of the social changes brought about by Hitler which were reversed by Eisenhower only in so far as French plants and French cows were the equal locus of that social change.
where history unfolds toward an aristocratic society of equals, where all difference is destroyed.
Coz women will have dicks which are of the same size and girth as that of even the best endowed males.
Influenced by Karl Marx’s account of class struggle as the engine of history,
though it turned out that history of the old fashioned eighteenth century sort was the only reason Stalin could liquidate vast classes of society. Or so it seemed. Class society is back with a vengeance in Putin's Russia.
and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-death,
as opposed to being-towards-eternal life which, after all, is what has motivated Christendom for thousands of years.
Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic presents another form of contest between oppressor and oppressed, where mastery over another in order to master oneself becomes the means to equality,
That is to say too much. Kojeve rejected Hegel's 'theological' time for actual historical time. But he agreed that labor is the means to self-mastery. The problem here is that Marx didn't have a theory of 'services'. Allocating resources is a 'service'. It gets very well rewarded one way or another. The Capitalist lived large but so did the Commissar. Kim Jong Il has a kick-ass life style.
and ultimately justice within society. Kojève adopted the master/slave dialectic in order to develop what Michael Roth called ‘a schema for organising change over time’, to think about the movement of history.
That thinking was useless. Kojeve should have got the fuck out of France when the going was good. Indeed, crossing the Atlantic was the smart move at that time.
And the master/slave dialectic unfolds at the level of the individual and the level of society,
but, in an even more radical sense, it infolds the Society of all levels as the hypostasis of its own being-towards-the-individual.
where the self gains recognition as a desiring subject through
pulling its dick out and gesturing at the desired other's being-towards-fellatio
the endless battle for recognition that is appearing in the world with others,
I can imagine Hill at a cocktail party endlessly battling for recognition of her Doctorate as being the equal of the sheepskin of a guy who can write you a prescription for Oxy.
and the level of society where all past historical movements will be judged within a framework of right, which is the end of history.
Fuck judging shit. If history has ended we need fear no exogenous shocks- e.g COVID, war in Ukraine, a meteor strike, Global fucking Warming.
This has been in part the legacy of Kojève.
It failed. The EU has proved useless in the face of COVID. Still, under the French, it may get its own Army and seal its borders. But that's Huntingdon's prediction, not Kojeve's.
Influenced by Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic, Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1943) that man’s freedom is found in
plagiarizing Heidi
negation.
Just as your car keys are found in negation- if you never owned a fucking car coz you never had a pot to piss in.
In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir turned to Kojève to think about women’s oppression in relation to man and the need for intersubjective recognition.
French women had only got the vote four years previously. They promptly outlawed brothels. France began to turn a corner.
Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’
was plagiarized from some other dude in the same line of work
follows Kojève’s reading of Hegel to understand the role of desire as a lack in the formation of human subjectivity.
But it is no such thing. Desires are supervenient on brain states not on any sort of lack or absence. They are positive and objective. It is another thing to say that 'in such and such discourse, desire is only for things which are missing or lacking even though, in ordinary language, you can desire what you have. Consider the Hindi word 'Chaah' which means 'want' or 'desire' or 'love'. You can want your Mummy or Wifey of kiddy even though they are right next to you.' Equally you could say 'everything is unreal.' Nothingness is all. Desire is delusive etc.' But this is within a particular discourse. It isn't the 'natural' way to put things.
Bataille turned to Kojève to argue that one could experience full self-sovereignty only in a moment of pure negation.
For example when you are copulating with the empty eye sockets of your best friend whom you decapitated while the rest of the faculty looked on approvingly.
For Foucault, it led to the belief that there is no desire free from power-relations
and bondage and taking it up the ass in a San Fran bathhouse- right?
– his central theme. And for Fukuyama, this historical contest of wills evolving along a linear temporal plane toward an equal and just society has become the much-mocked ‘end of history’ thesis – the idea that Western liberal democracy has evolved as the final form of human government in the postwar world. The postwar world Kojève himself helped to shape, before his untimely death in 1968. Ultimately, Fukuyama’s thesis captures the difference between Hegel and Kojève’s Hegel: for Kojève, the ideal of universal equality won through an endless battle for recognition was always an individualist notion that required domination when confronted by otherness. But for Hegel, human freedom could be won only through collectivity by embracing the opacity of otherness that we are constantly confronted with in ourselves, and in the world with others. It is an acceptance of that fact that self-mastery will always remain an illusion.
So Hegel was a good little Prussian while Kojeve was an emigre on the make whose undoubted talent was recognized by the French Economics Ministry. But, it must be said, French economists have bizarre views. One guy at CNRS- who used to gas on about Quantum Macro-econ- didn't get that if you work and earn money and buy stuff with that money then no theft has occurred. He thought you should get to keep your money as well as the stuff you bought coz only labor has value right?
When Kojève was 15 years old, he was arrested and condemned to death for selling soap on the black market in Moscow. But, like Dostoyevsky, at the last possible moment, he was spared by the firing squad, because his uncle, a personal physician to Lenin, intervened at the request of his mother. Marched out to face death, one can only try to imagine what happens to a man in that moment, when he is tied to a post and the guns are raised. The story almost feels apocryphal, as though written to convey the intensity with which Kojève understood the battle between two wills in a contest for power to the death. Perhaps less quixotically, it illustrates what lies at the heart of Kojève’s work – one can never really know in advance how history will unfold, if it unfolds at all, and all we human, desiring subjects have is our ability to act within some historical context.
Hill writes well. Her book on Kojeve might well be a page-turned provided she grasps that he was a charlatan on the make- like Bruno Betthelheim or Paul de Man. In poetry, old Ez said, only the charlatan is genuine. In Philosophy- if it aint about an open problem in Math- it is bullshit. Still a charlatan can often write more grippingly- think of Wagner's philosophical bilge- than the genuine article.
Germany had Gossen and Grassmann. It could have developed a mathematical econ tradition. There was something approaching our modern idea of 'co-evolution' in Hegel. Come to think of it the Germans did have Gentzen. But the nutter was a Nazi. Sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment