#Alexandre Kojève

[godsopenwound]

Alexandre Kojève from the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

[nicklloydnow]

“There is no doubt that, on the one hand, every Authority tends to become total: the Authority of one given type tends to capture the Authorities of other types. On the other hand, the metaphysical structure of Authority is antithetical to its division: three modes of Time naturally constitute one bloc, and Eternity is real only in and through its union with Time. It therefore seems that analysis of the phenomenon of 'Authority’ prohibits any division of political Authority, and any 'separation of powers'. It is therefore useless to insist on all the arguments of a practical nature that have been set against the 'constitutional' theory and practice (see for example Rousseau). It seems that, generally speaking, the division of an entity weakens it: the sum total of the powers of separated parts is less than the power of the same undivided whole. In fact, the division is not real (it has a meaning and a raison d'être) only if the separated parts are inclined to enter into conflict with one another; or if a conflict (even a latent one) looks as if it must necessarily 'neutralise' a part of the powers that are in question, in such a way that this 'lost' part of the power constituted by the sum total of powers of the separated parts, taken in isolation, would need to be deducted. Thus it seems better to give a political Authority taken en bloc one and the same (collective or individual) 'support’.

But the arguments - of a practical nature - uttered in favour of the thesis of the separation of powers are also very strong. Besides, these arguments are also well known, and we need not elaborate on them. Let us just say that the metaphysical analysis itself can, in a certain sense, be cited in support of the thesis in question. In fact, if it is true that the three modes of Time form a unity, it is also true that there would be no Time at all if there were no separation between the three modes - that is to say, also some sort of 'tension' or 'conflict’ between them. Similarly, if Eternity, being the totality of the three modes of time, forms a unity with it, it is also opposed to it in so far as the totality (the whole) is something other than the sum total of the parts. It is simply that, in both cases, the opposition, or, if we like, the separation, does not mean isolation of the separated or the opposed. There is interaction - that is to say, separation, since there are two (or several) agents; but there is also union, since there is action of an agent on one or many others inseparable from the reaction.

It follows for the question that interests us that, even when we want to separate the Authorities that in their ensemble constitute political Authority, they must not be isolated from one another by having each one of them withdraw into itself. They have to be able to act and react on one another: their dynamic union must be preserved despite their static division. (For example, if we separate the - legislative - Authority of the Leader from the - political-judicial - Authority of the Judge, the latter must not be pinned down by a system of laws that are in principle immutable, or by a Constitution that is supposedly unchangeable. Conversely, we must not establish the Authority of an ‘irresponsible' Leader, as is the case with that of the Monarch - that is to say, diminish the action of the Authority of the Judge, and so on.)

But if the thesis of the ‘isolating' separation of Authorities is rejected, should the principle of separation itself be preserved?

In order to answer this question, let us make a remark that is generally overlooked: when one and the same (individual or collective) 'support' is used by several pure types of Authority, there is always a tendency to develop one of those types (the 'dominant' or 'primary' type) at the expense of the others: the 'derivative' types cannot manage to develop completely as such, and remain at an embryonic stage. If we wish the four 'pure' types of Authority to be perfectly and completely realised, it is therefore necessary to allocate independent 'supports' to each one of them - that is to say, to 'separate powers'.

Note: This is also true for the Authority of the Leader and the Authority of the Master, which nevertheless cannot be separated. But there is here no political hindrance, because we can show that with political progress the Authority of the Master must give way to that of the Leader - that is to say, it will 'degenerate'. It even seems that it must completely disappear in the 'ideal' State of the future. Generally speaking, the Authority of the Master presupposes the real possibility of war and bloody revolution, and it thus presupposes its own disappearance along with them.

Political evolution goes from the unity of political 'power' to the separation of 'powers'. But what we have just said 'justifies' this state of things: in order for each 'pure’ type to reach the plenitude of its development, it has to be separated from the others. But this does not mean that Authorities must remain 'divided' even after they have realised all their implicit possibilities. It seems, on the contrary, that they will have to reunite again. Political evolution would therefore start from the non-differentiated unity (the unity of the embryonic form), and go through a period of division and development of the separated elements, finally leading to totality - that is to say, to differentiated unity (the unity of the adult organism).” (pages 80 - 83)

[grandhotelabyss]

—Samantha Rose Hill, "The Scar of Identity"

Existentialism and poststructuralism, the postwar aesthetic avant-garde, the late 20th-century variants of Marxism and feminism, and the neolib-neocon versions of liberalism—in other words, the whole political spectrum from Allan Bloom to Judith Butler and most anti-bourgeois aesthetics premised on negation and privation—all stem from a productive misreading of Hegel as more individualist than he really was. Or so says the essay above.

From this, I extrapolate, flows the left's inability to back away from identity politics, the right's unwillingness to question the market, and the counterculture's romance with its own marginality.

What to do instead? Back, yet again, to Hegel? Hill quotes and explicates Blanchot:

The literary critic Maurice Blanchot wrote: ‘One cannot “read” Hegel, except by not reading him.’ 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.

Thus, unlike Kojève, who said he read Hegel without understanding him, I have understood Hegel without reading him. I've actually read a fair amount, as you may assess here, though not, I will concede, the whole of the Phenomenology. The lectures on aesthetics, allowing for the problem of their provenance in student notes, aren't really that hard to read, and much of what he says there is even sensible.

For example, there's a scandalous passage in the aesthetics that's probably truer than we want to deal with, where he claims that narratives of social victimization aren't tragic and aren't even very interesting. Prejudice and oppression are contingent, merely factitious; stories about them, therefore, never touch the existential dimension. This goes too far, I'm sure, but the standard it proposes does suggest why some narratives of social victimization are generally regarded as better than others: why, e.g., Invisible Man is superior to Native Son.

Anyway, Hegel himself recommended, as meditations on freedom, Antigone and Macbeth, with the implication in each case that freedom is inherently tragic, a conflict of incommensurates, the will vs. the world, though is for that reason also splendid. Perhaps predictably, I would skip the philosophers and start there.

[moriras-lejos]

Aquel que está ubicado en su propia perspectiva, que se solidariza con ella, sin duda ve no una perspectiva, sino una visión total de la realidad. Cree que lo que posee es la "Ciencia". Y decirlo significa en realidad decir que posee una "ideología". Ya que tener una ideo­logía, es afirmar que el Mundo (natural y social) es efectivamente tal como aparece a partir de un punto de vista particular, sin que sea ese punto de vista la totalidad de todos los puntos de vista posibles.

- Alexandre Kojève

[bagnabraghe]

Di certo la personalità di Kojève è tale da non lasciare indifferenti

La vita quanto meno avventurosa di Kojève si intreccia con la stesura di scritti importanti e di eventi storici significativi: dall’infanzia e adolescenza trascorse a Mosca, dove nasce nel 1902 e rimane fino al 1920, all’esilio in Germania prima a Berlino e poi ad Heidelberg, dove segue le lezioni di Karl Jaspers, con cui si laurea in filosofia con una tesi sulla metafisica del russo Solov’ëv,…

[adrianomaini]

Di certo la personalità di Kojève è tale da non lasciare indifferenti

La vita quanto meno avventurosa di Kojève si intreccia con la stesura di scritti importanti e di eventi storici significativi: dall’infanzia e adolescenza trascorse a Mosca, dove nasce nel 1902 e rimane fino al 1920, all’esilio in Germania prima a Berlino e poi ad Heidelberg, dove segue le lezioni di Karl Jaspers, con cui si laurea in filosofia con una tesi sulla metafisica del russo Solov’ëv,…

[applestorms]

truly, never underestimate my ability to make every little fucking thing about light yagami right now. to present a quote from my reading for tonight:

Animal Desire-- hunger, for example-- and the action that flows from it, negate, destroy the natural given. By negating it, modifying it, making it its own, the animal raises itself above this given. According to Hegel, the animal realizes and reveals its superiority to the plants by eating them. But by feeding on plants, the animal depends on them and hence does not manage to truly go beyond them. Generally speaking, the greedy emptiness-- or the I-- that is revealed by biological Desire is filled-- by the biological action that flows from it-- only with a natural, biological content. Therefore, the I, or the pseudo-I, realized by the active satisfaction of this Desire, is just as natural, biological, material, as that toward which the Desire and Action are directed. The Animal raises itself above the nature that is negated in its animal Desire only to fall back into it immediately by the satisfaction of this Desire. Accordingly, the Animal attains only Selbst-gefühl, Sentiment of self, but not Selbst-bewusstsein, Self-Consciousness-- that is, it cannot speak of itself, it cannot say "I..." And this is so because the Animal does not really transcend itself as given-- i.e., as body; it does not rise above itself in order to come back toward itself; it has no distance with respect to itself in order to contemplate itself.

(from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, ch.2, bold added)

oh, the humanity.

[milksockets]

In general terms, the I of desire is an absence.

Alexandre Kojève

[blackswaneuroparedux]

His [Foucault's] vision of European culture as the institutionalised form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it. Only in France is he widely regarded as a fraud.

- Roger Scruton on Michel Foucault

During student protests in Paris in 1968, Roger Scruton, a francophile, watched students overturn cars to erect barricades and tear up cobblestones to throw at police. It was at that moment he realised he was a conservative.

For Scruton, he didn’t think much of Jean Paul Satre, the father of existentialism, who cobbled together the essence of his philosophy from Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel in his famous seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the 1930s. His listeners included Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. Each of them drew something different from him. For Sartre, the idea of the self-created individual with radical freedom. Expressed very early on in La nausée, this freedom is a source of anguish for a consciousness which not only considers that the surrounding world has no meaning other than that which it can possibly confer on it, but which experiences itself as a kind of nothingness.

How, starting from such a philosophy, does Sartre arrive at the idea of commitment to revolution and socialism? It is a mystery. Scruton wrote, "According to the metaphysics enunciated in Being and Nothingness, the correct answer to the question "To what shall I commit myself?" should be: What does it matter, as long as you can want it as a law for yourself." "But this is not the answer offered by Sartre, whose commitment is to an ideal that is at odds with his own philosophy.”

With his theory of episteme, Foucault gives us a new version of the Marxist concept of ideology.

Despite what some might think, Scruton wasn’t entirely dismissive of Foucault whose thought was more subtle and interesting than Sartre’s. Scruton confesses a certain tenderness for Michel Foucault's style, for his flamboyant imagination. But Scruton does not see his archaeology of knowledge as a great innovation. According to a habit shared by many French left-wing intellectuals, like Sartre himself, Foucault intended to tear away the veils behind which the relations of domination are hidden, to unmask the deceptions of others. With Sartre, it was in the name of a vague nostalgia for personal authenticity. Foucault, on the other hand, looked for the secret structures of power behind all institutions - and even at work in language.

But the historical horizon on which Foucault projected this quest, which postulated a rupture between the "classical age" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the bourgeois world that would follow the French Revolution, showed that, despite his claims, Foucault had remained a prisoner of Marxism. Moreover, as Scruton would write, “his theory of episteme is a rehash of the Marxist theory of ideology. Moreover, he considers power only from the perspective of domination. “

But the main criticism that Scruton finds fault with Foucault is the one found in the post-enlightenment thinkers: relativism. If each era generates the discursive formations that correspond to its system of power, including the sciences, then truth does not exist. Everything is discourse...

Photo: Jean-Paul Satre and Michel Foucault take a stand during the Paris Student Riots, May 1968.

[claudehenrion]

La mondialisation heureuse ou la fin d'un mythe...

Pour bien comprendre le sens de l'évolution du monde actuel, que certains qualifient de ''moderne'' (en perdant de vue que la modernité, dit Larousse, est un concept désignant l’idée d'agir en conformité avec son temps et non plus en fonction de valeurs, considérées de facto comme ''dépassées''), il faut remonter à Napoléon Ier. Même si cela peut paraître étrange à certains, cet immense génie, aujourd'hui décrié, vilipendé et ostracisé par une Gauche qui a entre temps perdu son âme, toute justification, et sa raison d'être (ceci expliquant sans doute cela !), fut en son temps assimilé au libérateur de toute humanité...

Un vent de liberté avait alors soufflé de France, et le monde entier allait en profiter –naissance de dangereux thème du ''paradis sur terre'', laïcisé par les Lumières : à la seule annonce de la bonne nouvelle, les armées s'effondreraient, les rois s'enfuiraient, les sociétés se déliteraient, les vieux interdits sauteraient à la grande satisfaction des opprimés, les religions disparaîtraient.. Hegel, reflet de son temps, dira que ''devant l'entreprise napoléonienne, il savait qu'il assistait à la fin de l'Histoire'', raconte Alexandre Kojève, spécialiste de ce philosophe : il voyait là l'unification des peuples et 'entrée du monde dans une paix perpétuelle... Et lorsqu'il a entendu les sabots du cheval de l'Empereur en route pour Iéna (où la Prusse allait être écrasée) frapper le sol devant sa maison, il a écrit ''la Phénoménologie de l'esprit'' (1807) : le monde, l'humanité, l'esprit et l'Histoire prenaient enfin un sens, leur sens. Cette idée du ''sens de l'histoire'' va ruiner les 250 ans suivants.

Dans cet ouvrage qui l'a rendu célèbre, il développe une théorie de l'histoire universelle qui trouve sa réalisation objective dans l'État, qu'il voit comme une organisation juridique capable de réaliser la liberté qui est son essence, c'est-à-dire : dans ce qu'elle était déjà, en germe. ''Ce qui est rationnel est réel, et ce qui est réel est rationnel'', explique Hegel dans ''Principes de la philosophie du droit'', 1820), formule qui condense l'audace philosophique de cet homme dont l'ambition aura été de surmonter la déchirure entre l'esprit et le monde et de réconcilier définitivement la raison et le réel. En ce sens, on peut voir en lui un père historique de toute ''mondialisation''.Le vecteur indirect qu'était le triomphe napoléonien de la Révolution française, outre rendre leur sens à l'Histoire et à la Liberté, allait tout rendre clair et possible : c'était la fin des conflits, la fin de la dialectique, Napoléon était ''l'âme du monde'' qui allait enfin se réaliser, sous les drapeaux de sa victoire... (NDLR - On retrouve là des intonations du début de l'Ouverture ''1812'' de Tchaïkowski, avant l'effondrement final). Après la fin catastrophique de l'aventure napoléonienne, Hegel admit s'être trompé mais n'abandonna pas pour autant sa foi dans une Raison qui gouvernerait l'Histoire (les majuscules sont de lui).

Dans les années 1970, il aurait fini par déchanter devant l'échec incompréhensible (et retentissant) de l'Occident cultivé à faire advenir le règne de la raison, la fin de la barbarie et le temps de la paix... alors que De Gaulle, Schuman, Adenauer, Spaak et de Gasperi tentaient de démontrer le contraire, grâce à une paix et une harmonie qui durent depuis bientôt 80 ans, mais uniquement à cause de la menace nucléaire qui établit une ligne rouge à ce jour infranchissable, même dans l'imbroglio russo-ukrainien.

D'ailleurs, souvenez-vous : lorsque le mur de Berlin est tombé, entraînant l'enfer communiste dans sa géhenne, le monde s'est remis à croire aux chimères, et Francis Fukuyama a écrit en 1992, à l'antipode des analyses marxistes, un des livres marquants du XXème siècle, ''La fin de l'Histoire'' : le communisme mort, plus rien ne ralentirait la marche du monde vers la paix, et tous les peuples ''sous développés'', Chine en tête, allaient enfin devenir ''des américains comme les autres'', des démocrates, des capitalistes... et que sais-je, encore ! Tiens : des mondialistes heureux, peut-être ? 

C'était trop beau ! Dès 1996, un autre livre marquant du XX ème siècle, ''Le Choc des Civilisations'', de Samuel Huntington, remettait à nouveau en question le mythe mortifère de la ''Mondialisation heureuse'', et le 11 septembre 2001 ouvrait grands les yeux des derniers rêveurs : ''Le choc des civilisations'' était la seule réalité palpable ! Le monde se réveille trop lentement de ce long cauchemar : la soi-disant ''mondialisation heureuse'' --qui sert encore de drogue à toute la génération qui s'est installée aux commandes pour notre malheur, dont notre Président, ce ''progressiste-rétrograde'' bon teint--, était une vue de l'esprit et, pire encore, vraiment pas souhaitable : les faux ''artisans de la Paix'' n'étaient que des esprits pervers, des faiseurs de mythes, des prêcheurs de vent, des prophètes de malheur... et de piètres ''leaders''.

Aujourd'hui, l'Occident déchante : il s'est trompé sur à peu près tout –ou... on l'a trompé : les ''valeurs'' qu'on lui a imposées n'en étaient pas, et il n'était ''un modèle'' pour personne ! Comme chaque année, avant la réunion des puissants de la planète à Davos pour fabriquer d'autres non-solutions épouvantables, le World Economic Forum vient de publier son Global Risk Report 2024, et la conclusion des 1 500 experts (?) internationaux interrogés est inquiétante : "Les perspectives mondiales se dégradent", et 30% du panel s’attend à "une catastrophe mondiale" dans les 2 ans --53% dans les 10 ans. Ambiance ! Et nos paysans qui, histoire d'enfoncer encore plus le clou, confirment que nos ''intelligences'' stupides avaient tout faux !

Parallèlement, le baromètre annuel d’Ipsos : "Prédictions dans 33 pays de l’OCDE'' nous apprend que ''les français (restent) plus pessimistes que les autres''. Il faut dire que nos dirigeants, confits dans leur absurde dévotion pour une Europe qui n'existera jamais telle qu'ils la fantasment (et c'est tant mieux) se propulsent systématiquement aux avant-postes de... tout ce qu'il ne faut surtout pas faire... Depuis le temps qu'on l'annonçait, le monde des fous est parmi nous !

Nous avons laissé être construit ou plutôt dé-construit autour de nous un enfer qui ressemble plus à une dystopie inventée par des ''cavaliers de l'apocalypse'' mandatés par les puissances infernales, qu'à un pas de plus vers le Paradis, quel qu'il soit. On doit le regretter... mais on ne peut pas rester ''les deux pieds dans le même sabot'', car il est temps, encore, de sortir de ce piège diabolique dans lequel nos gouvernants et une ''l'intelligentzia'' bête à en pleurer et indignes de leurs missions, voulaient nous enfermer, dans un grand plongeon dans le néant qu'ils nous ont préparé... sans voir que c'est devant eux, qu'ils l'ouvraient, ces cons !

Le résultat est là : la coupe est pleine, partout, pour tous, dans tous les pays, et il va falloir ''replier la voilure'' dans l'improvisation... car dans leur certitude d'avoir raison à quelques uns contre le monde entier... ils n'ont pas de ''Plan B''. Tant pis : mieux vaut une improvisation que le cul-de-sac mortel auquel la poursuite des errements actuels nous condamnait... L'immense majorité des européens se réveille ? Juste avant les élections, c'est bon signe : ''la mondialisation heureuse'' était un mensonge. Comme tout le reste. Nous le répétons presque chaque jour depuis 10 ans !

H-Cl.

[luxe-pauvre]

As I’ve tried to answer the question of why we seek out the likes and replies and approval of strangers, and why this so often drives both ordinary and celebrated people toward breakdowns, I’ve found myself returning to the work of a Russian émigré philosopher named Alexandre Kojève, whose writing I first encountered as an undergraduate. In 1933, Kojève took over the teaching of a seminar on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in Paris. Though Kojève would live his life in relative obscurity, ultimately becoming a civil servant in the French trade ministry and helping to construct the architecture for a common Europe, his seminar on Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” was almost certainly the most influential philosophy class of the twentieth century. A Who’s Who of Continental thinkers, from Sartre to Lacan, passed through, and Kojève’s grand intellectual synthesis would deeply influence their work. In his lectures, Kojève takes up Hegel’s famous meditation on the master-slave relationship, recasting it in terms of what Kojève sees as the fundamental human drive: the desire for recognition—to be seen, in other words, as human by other humans. “Man can appear on earth only within a herd,” Kojve writes. “That is why the human reality can only be social.” Understanding the centrality of the desire for recognition is quite helpful in understanding the power and ubiquity of social media. We have developed a technology that can create a synthetic version of our most fundamental desire. Why did the Russian couple post those wedding photos? Why do any of us post anything? Because we want other humans to see us, to recognize us. But We Who Post are trapped in the same paradox that Kojève identifies in Hegel’s treatment of the Master and Slave. The Master desires recognition from the Slave, but because he does not recognize the Slave’s humanity, he cannot actually have it. “And this is what is insufficient—what is tragic—in his situation,” Kojève writes. “For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.”

Chris Hayes, On the internet, we’re always famous

[some-velvet-morning]

the notion of authority, alexandre kojève

[nicklloydnow]

“But intellectual life is flourishing in the cafés, institutes and academies, as refugees forge community in exile. And at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, one of France’s most prestigious research universities, Alexandre Kojève has taken over Alexandre Koyré’s seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G W F Hegel. 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. A collection of the most renowned thinkers of the day, who would come to lay the intellectual foundations for 20th-century philosophy, political thought, literature, criticism, psychology and history. It is said that Kojève’s lectures were so intricate, so deft, that Arendt accused him of plagiarising. Bataille fell asleep. Sartre couldn’t even remember being there.

(…)

The short answer is that Kojève made Hegel accessible by bringing to the surface one of the essential elements of his work: desire. 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?’ 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. The one willing to die – to face the inevitability of their own non-existence – becomes the master. In other words, desire is an exertion of the will over an other’s desire. Or, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would come to say: ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’s desire.’ 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. And in this moment, Kojève writes: ‘Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire.’ 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.

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. Thinking about the relation between the finite mind and Absolute knowledge is opaque, but desire is human. 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. Or, as Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence.’

(…)

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. 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 – our identity, desire, fear and shame. 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. But this risk is vital – it is part of what makes us human, it is part of our humanity. 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.

In bringing the lofty language of Hegel down from the heavens, Kojève offered readers a secular understanding of human action, which requires each and every individual to reckon with the inevitability of their own death, their own undoing. And in doing so he shifted the focus toward the individual as the locus of social change, where history unfolds toward an aristocratic society of equals, where all difference is destroyed. Influenced by Karl Marx’s account of class struggle as the engine of history, and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-death, 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, 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. And the master/slave dialectic unfolds at the level of the individual and the level of society, where the self gains recognition as a desiring subject through the endless battle for recognition that is appearing in the world with others, and the level of society where all past historical movements will be judged within a framework of right, which is the end of history.

This has been in part the legacy of Kojève. Influenced by Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic, Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1943) that man’s freedom is found in negation. 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. Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’ follows Kojève’s reading of Hegel to understand the role of desire as a lack in the formation of human subjectivity. Bataille turned to Kojève to argue that one could experience full self-sovereignty only in a moment of pure negation. For Foucault, it led to the belief that there is no desire free from power-relations – 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.”

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Kojeve?

I couldn't really say more than what's in my commentary on Fukuyama, where the explication of Hegel comes I believe straight from Kojève, though I know him more through writers he's influenced or who have commented on him than through direct reading, not myself being a political scientist or philosopher.

[moriras-lejos]

…el snobismo es la negatividad gratuita. En el mundo de la Historia, la Historia misma se ocupa de engendrar el modo de la negatividad que es esencial a lo humano. Si la Historia ya no habla, se fabrica ella misma la negatividad.

El snobismo puede llegar muy lejos. Se puede morir por snobismo, como los kamikazes.

- Alexandre Kojève

[dominousworld]

L'impero latino: il conservatorismo europeo di Alexandre Kojève

L'impero latino: il conservatorismo europeo di Alexandre Kojève

di Jonathan Culbreath La sua filosofia della storia era senza dubbio rivoluzionaria, ma Kojève era un conservatore. L’essenza della sua ricetta per l’Europa rimane rilevante per le odierne lotte geopolitiche, economiche e culturali. Forse il più famoso espositore e divulgatore della filosofia hegeliana nel XX secolo è stato il filosofo francese nato in Russia, Alexandre Kojève. La sua…