#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)

[moriras-lejos]

“...en la relación entre el hombre y la mujer, por ejemplo, el Deseo sólo es humano si uno desea no el cuerpo, sino el Deseo del otro, sólo si quiere «poseer» o «asimilar» el Deseo considerado en tanto que Deseo, es decir, sólo si quiere ser «deseado» o «amado», o también «reconocido», en su valor humano, en su realidad de individuo humano. De igual modo, el Deseo que versa sobre un objeto natural no es humano más que en la medida en que está «mediado» por el Deseo de otro que versa sobre el mismo objeto: es humano desear cuanto los otros desean porque lo desean. Así, un objeto perfectamente inútil desde el punto de vista biológico (como un adorno o la bandera del enemigo) puede ser deseado porque constituye el objeto de otros deseos. Semejante Deseo no puede ser sino un Deseo humano, y la realidad humana, en tanto que diferente de la realidad animal, sólo se crea por medio de la acción que satisface esos Deseos: la historia humana es la historia de los Deseos deseados.”

- Alexandre Kojève.

[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.

[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,…

[omnipol]

The perennial discussion which announces an ‘end of history’ has, once again, been reignited. Francis Fukuyama is back on the scene with another rendition. With a dash of romantic irony, he wants to convince us that this time we are at the end of the end of history. However, the intellectual historian will perhaps be disappointed to find out that he has been beaten to the punch. In fact, at the same time that Fukuyama was writing his original version thirty years ago, Jean Baudrillard was already describing “a paradoxical process of reversal,” where history, having reached its limit, escapes its own end (11). For Baudrillard, the leap required to reach the end is likened to jumping over one’s shadow. 

That is to say, “the whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending” (110).  Strategically, in his Illusions of the End, Baudrillard refrains from mentioning the name of the author his own thesis means to refute. If we are unable to even speak of the end of history, then much like Foucault, he seems to think that we are better off forgetting Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève.

In his 1930s seminars which gave rise to his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève famously argued that we had already reached the end of history. His interpretation is based on the assumption that, as Pierre Macherey argues, “in the history of both the world and thought, Hegel represents the terminal moment in which the circle of human reality closes” (61). Indeed, countless statements can be found in Kojève’s seminars to support this. Most well-known is a footnote added to his Introduction—the same one that inspired Fukuyama’s “disconcerting and tardy by-product,” as Derrida put it—which argues that the end of history is concomitant with the disappearance of human discourse. The result of the latter is not only the endpoint of philosophy as the search for wisdom but, paradoxically, the dissolution of wisdom itself. But does this not immediately beg the question? If the end of history is, indeed, the end of discourse, philosophy and wisdom, then how exactly did Kojève think he could articulate this end?

What most accounts of Kojève tend to skip over is that in another, much less read, footnote we find an implicit acknowledgment of this paradox. Appended to his second lecture of the 1938 academic year entitled “Philosophy and Wisdom,” Kojève argues that the thesis that history has run its course depends upon being able to verify “the circularity of the [Hegelian] system in its entirety.” But it is precisely here that he says something unexpected. Instead of affirming its absolute closure, Kojève asserts that “the non-circularity of Hegel’s system is perfectly obvious,” while adding that he is only able to say so “in passing and without proof” (98). It is a startling declaration given his many other statements regarding the closure of the Hegelian circle as the definitive cessation of history. 

Indeed, it is not surprising that this other footnote has been passed over in silence since it presents us with a fundamental challenge to the way we usually read Kojève. Far from offering a theory of systematic completion, the fact that he can only gesture towards the lack of circularity in the Hegelian system—without providing any demonstration—is indicative of an alternative approach to his eschatology: neither within nor beyond philosophy, the end requires a paradoxical expression of the inexpressible.

Kyle Moore

https://www.jhiblog.org/2022/05/23/history-as-fragment-the-unworking-of-system/

[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

[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

[dannyfoley]

The Post-Human Animal

What’s behind the proliferation of animals in recent artworks?

In the late 1940s, the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève visited the USA. For Kojève – arguably the most influ­ential interpreter of Hegel in the 20th century, and one of the architects of the European Economic Community, a precursor to the EU – ‘history’ was predicated on political struggle. Like Hegel and Marx before him, Kojève believed that humanity would ultimately reach a consensus about its means of governance. This consensus (likely a mixed economy, or social democracy) would spell out the end-point of social evolution, what Hegel had called the ‘end of history’. This trip to the US, however, led Kojève to feel that any prospective future had already transpired. Upon observing the ‘eternal present’ of American society, Kojève claimed that ‘man’ had already disappeared, giving way to a creature that, though looking exactly like him, shared nothing of the human. The human, he argued, is predicated on a historical process, whereas this new being was one devoid of historicity and, therefore, humanity. For Kojève, this ‘post-historical Man’ had returned to an animal state, albeit retaining his civilized mores. Post-historical Man builds his edifices and works of art as ‘birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs’ and performs ‘musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas.’1

In 1959, Kojève took another trip, this time to Japan, where he underwent ‘a radical change of opinion’ on the subject of post-historical Man. He experienced how a society could live in a state of post-historical governance while retaining something of the human. Whilst the American lives in harmony with its inner animal, Japanese culture had given rise to mores that were fully formalized, where mannerisms and conventions override ‘content’ and are totally opposed to the ‘natural’ or the ‘animal’. The highly codified values of Japanese culture (for Kojève, a form of ‘snobbery’), the perfect expressions of which could be seen in Noh theatre or the traditions of tea ceremonies and Ikebana flower arrangement, had existed for centuries yet seemed strikingly postmodern. Japan was also the location for Pierre Huyghe’s most recent video, Human Mask (2014). The film’s exterior shots, showing a deserted and derelict town, were captured inside the Fukushima exclusion zone by a camera affixed to a drone. Indoors, the camera focuses on a strange creature wearing a Noh mask whose demeanor and gestures are uncannily human. Seemingly absorbed in self-contemplation, it runs its clawed fingers though a lock of long dark hair and softly touches the plastic wrap around a flower bouquet. In an evolutionary timeline, humanity usually stands between the animal and the android. In this light Huyghe’s creature, half ape, half cyborg, might be seen as the perfect embodiment of the warped tempo­rality Kojève ascribed to the ‘post-historical’ condition.

Animals, we are told, have no history. In Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), in which the artist shared a room with a coyote for eight hours a day, the animal appears as a heteronomous Other. Whereas humans never cease to reconfigure their societies and their identities within them, a coyote, it seems, is always a coyote. The animal is in this sense a limit, the outermost edge of the human, a figure problematized by Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I am (2008) and Giorgio Agamben’s The Open (2004). But ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are flexible concepts, able to connote the social as well as the biological. In 2005 Mircea Cantor brought a wolf into a gallery, this time paired with a deer. Both wolf and deer seem ill at ease, and whereas Beuys managed to finally embrace his coyote, in Cantor’s Deeparture there is no climax: wolf and deer remain eager to avoid each other. In 2003 Anri Sala filmed an emaciated horse standing by the roadside (Time After Time), seeming to bear the symbolic brunt of the collapsing Albanian state. ‘Every animal is a female artist,’ was Rosemarie Trockel’s 1993 response to Beuys’ ‘every man is an artist.’ Together with Carsten Höller, in 1997 Trockel built Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen (A House for Pigs and People) for that year’s documenta X. But it wasn’t until dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012 that the animal fully emerged as a multivalent concept for artistic speculation, which – drawing on Donna Haraway’s writings – was made to thoroughly renegotiate the human. For his 2014 projects Companion Species and The Companion Species Manifesto (after a 2003 book of Haraway’s), exhibited at dépendance in Brussels and Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Henrik Olesen sketched out the continuity between animal microchipping and human biometric IDs illustrated by a series of photographic collages displaying inter-species affection. Julieta Aranda’s Tools for Infinite Monkeys (open machine) (2014) uses the monkey – with reference to the ‘Infinite Monkey Theorem’ in probability – as a metaphor for the twin blades of randomness and probability. At the end of May the Fotomuseum Winterthur will open Beastly curated by Duncan Forbes, Matthias Gabi, Daniela Janser, Mallika Leuzinger and Marco de Mutiis; a month prior, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin will feature Ape Culture, an exhibition curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg (also heavily indebted to Haraway’s thinking) which will cast primates as the porous border between animal and human.

But the flurry of interest in the animal and the revival of Haraway’s ‘post-human’ runs deeper than micro-trends in exhibition making. It seems to be motivated by the imbrication of political, economic and ecolo­gical crises of recent years and the awareness that these have failed to effect tangible political change. As Fredric Jameson put it in 2003, it is ‘easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end of capitalism’.2 The moment when nature is completely sublated into culture, what Hegel theorized as humankind’s destiny, has re-emerged under a more ominous heading, the Anthropocene, a geological epoch denoting the period from 1945, the year of the first nuclear detonation, and roughly coinciding with Kojève’s ‘end of history.’ Though political disaffection seems widespread, the theories that have emerged in recent years – speculative realism, Accelerationism and the notion of a ‘Post-Internet’ condition – fail to have an adequate grasp on the new social forms and categories that have resulted. As the privileged site where the distinction between the social and the political is contended, the animal in general, and the primate, in particular, has taken over the territory where battles over gender, race, sexuality and human rights are fought. The creature in Human Mask is a long tailed macaque called Fuku-chan who works as a waiter in a Tokyo restaurant.3 Though Fuku-chan is Japanese, the ‘masked-monkey’ act traditionally stems from Indonesia, where it is known locally as Topeng Monyet. Bred in captivity or captured as infants, the monkeys undergo a gruelling training process. To strengthen their hind legs they are often hung by the neck with both hands tied up for weeks on end, until they finally acquire a human-like posture, learning to handle props and perform human chores.4 In the exhibi­tion Ape Culture at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Human Mask will be shown along with Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy’s The Masked Monkeys (2013–14), a video-essay in which enslaved monkeys appear as an allegory for social hierarchies. What emerges out of Huyghe’s video, rather than a grim commentary on Kojève’s post-historical condition or on animal exploitation, is the performative dimension of the human: as much as ‘female’ and ‘woman’ do not necessarily overlap, ‘humanity’ can be seen as the effect of reiterated acting, which can be either coupled or decoupled from the concept of Homo sapiens.

In a somewhat unexpected pairing, Ape Culture also brings together Nagisa Oshima’s Max, Mon Amour (1986) with Primate (1974) by Frederick Wiseman, an unnerving documentary about animal research. In Oshima’s film, a bored upper-class housewife starts an affair with a chimpanzee named Max. The husband’s obsession with watching his wife have sex with Max mirrors the thorough descriptions of simian intercourse of the Yerkes laboratory scientists. But Max, who stands as a signifier for the bestial impulses hidden under the veneer of civility, is ultimately tamed and housebroken, whereas at the Yerkes labs the steely commitment to protocol trumps a moral dimension and potential empathy. In the ’70s scientific methodology began to approach Oshima’s satire. The chimpanzee Washoe (caught in 1966 at the age of ten months) was taught sign language by Beatrix and Allen Gardner. Washoe was followed by Nim (also known as Nim Chimpsy, a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist) who was raised by a human family, and subsequently by Koko the gorilla, who besides mastering human communication became known for keeping a kitten as a pet. The attempt to break the silence between species also extended to other animals, but all of these experiments, scientists and research assistants – invariably female and white – attempted to rehabilitate the wild animal into becoming human. Besides a hidden gender and racial dimension, interspecies communication was fraught with another bias: the human-animal relationship depending not on merit but rather on power. No matter how well the animals performed, they all ended up back in lab cages. In Beastly the human-animal encounter is shown to heal social rifts (as in the work of Marcus Coates); it is shown to have an erotic dimension or unbridled affection, as in Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses (1986), a photographic series with the artist and her cat Vesper. It can, alternately, take the form of antagonism or aggression, as in El Gringo (2003), a video in which Francis Alÿs taped himself being attacked by a pack of dogs or as display and spectacle, as in in Katja Novitskova’s animal cut-outs.

At times allegorical, at times raw matter, only seldom is the animal allowed to simply be an animal, like the cat in Fischli and Weiss’s Büsi (2001), Tue Greenfort’s sausage-eating fox (Daimlerstraße 38, 2001), or the dogs who sniff and snuffle through a church aisle in Bojan Šarcevic’s It Seems that an Animal Is in the World as Water in the Water (1999), inscrutable in their ‘dogness’. All examples from a pre-YouTube era, these works seem to anticipate viral videos such as ‘Russian fishermen feeding fox’ or ‘cat rides bus’ and the millions of other animal videos now online. It is easy to dismiss these clips as part of the increasing infantilization of everything or as symptom of our osten­sibly ‘post-critical’ condition. But our desire to watch animal videos might itself be more than a symptom of regression. For Beuys, art was work, and the proletariat the only universal class. With most of us barred from all but a consumptive relation to civil society, watching animal videos might also be construed as a form of pas­sive resistance. Whereas Kojève sought to oppose the ‘animal’ to the ‘construct’, in the diffuse world of Post-Fordian economies all these figures are up for grabs. If the question of political subjecthood can no longer be answered by recourse to ‘artist’ or ‘citizen’, whether we have all in fact become Kojève’s ‘Japanese’, ‘American’ or ‘post-human’ is hard to decide. Replacing an obsolete notion of the ‘human’, perhaps the animal has become the new face of humanity.

[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.”

[moriras-lejos]

Siete años después vuelvo a aquí. Este inicio a saber porque llevo releyendo algunos libros, básicamente casi todo el Escohotado más denso y luminoso, Caos y orden, Realidad y sustancia e Hitos del sentido, al terminar el recorrido quise retomar los estudios antropológicos/estéticos pero no pude, como una nota al pie recordé como conocí a Escohotado.

Recuerdo perfectamente cuando me había leído la nebulosa inteligencia francesa y saturado de tanta ambigüedad decidí ir al principio, aquel que oculto en la sombra referían los señoritos, aquellos seminarios donde se fumaba y se comía Gyros o Musaka y se hablaba alegremente del fin de la historia, en aquellos días que me adentraba detrás de la cortina buscaba en Youtube referencias sobre el Ruso y el único que en aquellos días hablaba de él, era Escohotado, quien más… ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUstOfr9mLw ) …y así conocí a Don Antonio Escohotado, recuerdo ver ese video más de 40 veces, la elocuencia, los elogios y la poquísima información que soltaba sobre el libro, me fascinaba.

Hoy acabo de terminar la relectura de este manual y ahora un poco mas asentado que en aquellos días de ideales y caprichos, me sigue pareciendo fascinante, terrible y genial, tan superior.

La síntesis tan "bruta" o "irreverente" que hace de Hegel, tan sublime, tan genial, tan luminosa, descarada, es brutal para quien no sepa leer, tanto para quien no ponga atención o para quien no haya experimentado la muerte, su muerte y siga dormido en el sueño lógico o en la alineación de su deseo. Dicho lo cual, queda muy poco que decir ante estos dos mastodontes. Pocas anotaciones con honradez y humildad las plasmo para quien busque referencia en esta densa luminosidad.

La explicación del deseo como motor civilizatorio, sintetizándola en la dialéctica del amo y el esclavo, dando cuenta que toda conciencia de si es mera lucha animal contra otro animal por simple reconocimiento superando el ser ahí o simple conciencia por simple orgullo para mover los engranes de la inteligencia.

La explicación del concepto y su relación con la realidad, osea con lo eterno, el tiempo, la eternidad y lo temporal. Lo eterno es lo plenamente racional y comprendido, lo que ya no necesita cambiar. El Concepto se desarrolla en el tiempo: su despliegue es histórico. Lo temporal es la conciencia de si que vive ese despliegue histórico. La eternidad no es la ausencia de tiempo, sino el final del tiempo histórico, ósea el fin de cada conciencia individual dando una universalidad al sentido, alcanzado por la conciencia de si en cada tiempo, una y otra vez, por toda conciencia que participe en el concurso histórico de la humanidad.

La explicación del sistema hegeliano es un totalidad y no una dialéctica. Dando cuenta que la naturaleza del animal es dialéctica y la conciencia es una accidente del ser ahí, superando este accidente, dejando la negatividad natural dada, el animal se despoja de la lucha y observa el devenir de la realidad.

La muerte en el pensamiento de Hegel Y cómo toda su filosofía es una observación del animal por el humano, la enfermedad mortal de la naturaleza y cómo el trabajo hace que la conciencia de si no sea un monstruosidad sino un regreso orgulloso a lo natural, civilización.

Estas son las pocas notas que dejo para quien extraviado o confundido pueda especular y encuentre reflexión y aliento, coraje y alegría, satisfacción en su curiosidad como Hegel, Kojeve y Escohotado regalaron a sus lectores. Espero ayuden en el árido camino del pensar.

[xfhrdyrrsgrthhjyk]

the notion of authority, 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…