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Romantic Bureaucracy Alexander Kojève’S Post-Historical Wisdom

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Romantic Bureaucracy Alexander Kojève’S Post-Historical Wisdom Romantic bureaucracy Alexander Kojève’s post-historical wisdom Boris Groys Alexandre Kojève became famous primarily for ontologically different from the world and opposed his discourse on the end of history and the post- to the world, as Plato or Descartes believed it to historical condition – the discourse that he developed be. But Kojève develops his discourse in the post- in his seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit metaphysical, post-religious age. He wants to be at the École des Hautes Études in Paris between radically atheistic; and that means for him that under 1933 and 1939. This seminar was regularly attended ‘normal conditions’ man is a part of the world and by leading figures of French intellectual life at that human consciousness is completely captured by the time, such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, André world. ‘The subject’ does not have the ontological Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. status and resources of energy that are needed to The transcripts of Kojève’s lectures circulated in turn it from being immersed in the world to con- Parisian intellectual circles and were widely read templation of itself – to effectuate phenomenological there, by Sartre and Camus among others.1 The end epoché in the Husserlian sense. Self-consciousness of history as it is understood by Kojève is, of course, can emerge only when man finds himself opposed not the end of historical processes and events. Rather, to the world. And one is opposed to the world only if Kojève believed that history is not merely a chain one’s own life is put at risk – and is endangered by the of events but has a telos, and that this telos can be world. There must be a specific force that opposes the achieved, and actually is already achieved. According ‘human animal’ to the world and turns it against the to the Platonic–Hegelian tradition in which Kojève world by turning the world against it. It is, precisely, situated his discourse, this telos is wisdom. Kojève this force that produces the transition from nature to understands wisdom as perfect self-transparency, history. History opposes man to nature. So one needs self-knowledge. The Wise Man knows the reasons history to constitute the ‘self’ and at the same time for all his actions; he can explain them, translate to turn human beings’ attention to the self. Only a them into rational language. The emergence of the historical human is able to have self-consciousness Wise Man, of the Sage, is the telos of history. At the and that means to be human in the full sense of this moment at which the Sage emerges history ends. word. Here one can ask: but why is history needed for Indeed, Kojève begins his Introduction to the the Sage to emerge? Indeed, one can assume that Reading of Hegel with the following statement: ‘Man it is possible to become a Sage at any moment of is Self-Consciousness’. And then he writes that ‘it is history – it is enough to decide to practise introspec- in this that he is essentially different from animals, tion, self-reflection, self-analysis, instead of being which do not go beyond the level of simple Senti- exclusively interested in the outside world. From the ment of self’.2 However, this animalistic sentiment very earliest of times until now we have heard often of self is crucial for the development of human self- enough the requirement to initiate metanoia – to consciousness because it is precisely this sentiment turn our attention from dealing with the everyday that initially opposes man to the world and consti- world towards introspection. tutes it as an object of contemplation and knowledge: However, Kojève, following Hegel, does not believe The man who contemplates is ‘absorbed’ by what that such a shift is possible under ordinary circum- he contemplates; the ‘knowing subject’ ‘loses’ stances, that it can be effectuated by a simple decision himself in the object that is known… The man to switch one’s attention from the contemplation of who is ‘absorbed’ by the object that he is contem- the world to self-contemplation. Such a voluntary plating can be ‘brought back to himself’ only by a decision would be possible only if ‘the subject’ were Desire; by the desire to eat, for example…. Desire Further details of programmes and funding: www.kingston.ac.uk/crmep radicaL phiLosophy 196 (mar/apr 2016) 29 is what transforms Being, revealed to itself by itself one has to make transparent the totality of the in (true) knowledge… revealed to a ‘subject’… The society in which one lives – otherwise one cannot 3 (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire. know oneself because the object of this knowledge Desire turns man from contemplation to action. is desire for recognition (constituting my true I) and This action is always ‘negation’. I of Desire is empti- this desire is necessarily structured by the society in ness that negates and destroys everything ‘external’, which the subject desires to be desired. everything ‘given’. But the Self-Sentiment is not yet Self-Consciousness. Self-Consciousness is produced Soloviev and Stalin by a specific type of desire: the ‘anthropogenetic’ It is frequently pointed out that Kojève was influ- desire that is desire not of particular things but the enced by Heidegger, in his conviction that it is ‘being desire of desire of the other: ‘Thus, in the relationship towards death’ that makes humans self-conscious. In between man and woman, for example, Desire is Being and Time Heidegger associates authentic exist- human only if the one desires, not the body, but the ence (that is, actually, self-consciousness, because in Desire of the other.’ It is this anthropogenetic desire this mode the human being does not lose itself in that initiates and moves history: ‘human history is the external world) with the anticipation of death: the history of desired Desires’; ‘the Desire that gen- the possibility of impossibility, the disappearance erates Self-Consciousness, the human reality … is, of everything, of pure nothingness. However, in his finally, a function of Desire for “recognition”’.4 manuscript, Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia (Sophia, Here, Kojève refers to an initial battle of Self- Philo-sophy and Phenomeno-logy), Kojève criticizes Consciounesses that is described by Hegel. Two Self- Heidegger for failing to indicate how the discovery Consciounesses battle (they are actually constituted of being towards death actually happens.6 Kojève as Self-Consciousnesses through that battle) – and writes that Heidegger is the only important bour- one of them wins the battle. Then the other Self- geois philosopher of his time because he thematized Consciousness has a choice: to die or to survive and the death and finality of human existence.7 However, work to satisfy the desire of the winner. Thus we according to Kojève, Heidegger ignores the phenom- see two types of human emerge: masters and slaves. enological horizon in which the subject opens itself Masters prefer to die rather than work for other to the possibility of its own death being understood masters; slaves accept work as their fate. At first as total disappearance of everything. Of course, glance, Kojève prefers (in Nietzschean spirit) the Heidegger practised the phenomenological analysis dying master who sacrifices his life to glory to the of the opening to the possibility of radical noth- working slave. He describes history as moved by the ingness through the experience of anxiety or, later, heroes pushed to self-sacrifice by this one specifically radical boredom.8 But, speaking about phenomenol- human desire, the desire for recognition. ogy, Kojève means Hegelian and not the Husserlian Kojève writes: ‘Without this fight to the death for type of phenomenological analysis. Accordingly, pure prestige, there would never have been human he believes that death shows itself as a possibility beings on earth.’5 The animal self-sentiment reveals of human existence through the experience of the itself as nothingness, emptiness. But this nothingness revolutionary struggle alone – the struggle for life or remains infected by being because it wills something death. In (for him, typically) an ironical way, Kojève ‘real’. However, the desire that wins recognition from writes that Heidegger took from Hegel death without another desire is completely liberated from anything revolutionary struggle; while Western Marxism took ‘real’: here emptiness desires another emptiness, the idea of struggle without death. nothingness desires another nothingness. Thus However, to a far greater extent than he was ‘the subject’ becomes constituted. This subject is influenced by Heidegger, Kojève was influenced by not ‘natural’ because it is ready to sacrifice all its Soloviev. In fact, Kojève started his philosophical natural needs and even its ‘natural’ existence for an career by writing a dissertation on the work of abstract idea of recognition. But being non-natural Vladimir Soloviev, who was the most prominent and this subject remains historical. It remains historical influential Russian religious philosopher at the end of in so far as it is constituted by the desire of historical the nineteenth century. Kojève wrote this dissertation recognition; and so is dependent on the historical (in German) at the University of Heidelberg in 1926, conditions of this recognition. That means that the under the title ‘Die religiöse Philosophie Vladimir project of Wisdom becomes a historical project: to Solowjeffs’, signed in his original name Alexander know oneself one has to know history and its forces, Kozhevnikoff. This dissertation, supervised by Karl 30 Jaspers, was published in a very limited edition in by the emergence of the figure of Napoleon. Napo- Germany in the 1930s, and was later translated with leon is a self-made individual, but at the same time some minor changes into French in 1934, in the Revue he is universally recognized.
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