Stoekl, ''Round Dusk: Kojeve at "The End"', Postmodern Culture v5n1
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'Round Dusk: Kojeve at "The End"
by
Allan Stoekl
Departments of French and Comparative Literature
Pennsylvania State University
Postmodern Culture v.5 n.1 (September, 1994)
Copyright (c) 1994 by Allan Stoekl, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
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University Press.
[1] The postmodern moment has been characterized as one of the
loss of legitimacy of the master narratives--social,
historical, political; Hegelian, Marxist, Fascist--by which
lives were ordered and sacrificed throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.^1^
[2] The demise of the great story, which gave direction and
purpose to struggle and violence, has opened a space for a
proliferation of conflicting modes of interpreting and
speaking. Of course those modes can only be partial: they
can never aspire to the horrifying totalization promoted by
overarching certainties. And they will likely interfere
with each other, cross over, meld and (self) contradict,
because the possibility of their autonomy has been given
up; at best we can say that they are "language games" now,
rules for representation, argument, and analysis; no longer
are they the ground of teleology, satisfaction, and
self-certainty.
[3] But there is a problem with this kind of argument, as I
see it. It's not that I do not find it "true," because of
some kind of empirical counter-evidence, such as: the old
nationalist narratives still hold sway; history is still
slouching toward a goal; history isn't slouching toward a
goal, but it is nevertheless still slouching, etc. One can
probably develop all sorts of arguments based on empirical
observation concerning the postmodern. Or one can just as
easily "deconstruct" the master stories from within, by
taking them apart while still, necessarily, acting in full
complicity with them (for what "space" could be said to
open beyond their margins?). The problem, as I see it, is
that this kind of argument is closely tied to the "end of
history" arguments that were current in the immediate
postwar period, and that have recently had a renewed but
highly contested efflorescence.^2^ This is of course
immensely ironic, because philosophers such as
Lyotard--spokespersons of the postmodern--have informed us
that the possibility of a larger teleology is lost for
good, along with the knowledge that flowed from it. But
there still is a larger knowledge, after all--the one that
proclaims the death of the possibility of a larger
knowledge. Whether arrived at empirically or logically,
this awareness comes at the end of a series of historical
actions and tragedies, and the certainty associated with it
is no doubt due to lessons derived from those failures.
This history will still have the form of a narrative,
albeit one that lacks, perhaps, the power of retrospective
justification that characterized the Hegelian model. Its
lessons might be purely practical, or they might be derived
from a study of the incoherences or contradictions of the
earlier paradigms. The net result, whatever the means of
their determination, development and (self) cancelling,
will be a generally valid knowledge that mandates the end
of generally valid knowledges. The language games that
proliferate, then, in a postmodern epoch will be allowed
and encouraged to do so only because the way has been
opened by yet another master narrative: the narrative of
the end of narratives. The freedom to be enjoyed by the
games is the result of the master story's knowledge--but,
to be sure, the games' actions, their orientations, will
not be determined by it. They will be independent of
it--but the preservation of their semi-autonomous
functioning is nevertheless the goal of a postmodern
theoretical project (such as one that affirms adjudication
between different, conflicting, games). Further, it is
their guarantee that they will participate in a stable
postmodern order: without the postmodern narrative and its
powers of harmonization, they would risk falling into
particularist discourses into which "nationalist"
ideologies are prone.
[4] Is this postmodern version of things that different from a
theory of the "end of history" that envisages a State
founded on the mutual recognition of free subjects? On the
surface, yes: the postmodern view concerns itself not with
subjectivity, consciousness as productive labor, and the
like, but on the recognition of difference between partial
discourses and "constructed" cultures. The posthistorical
model seems almost quaint with its emphasis on codified law
and the State as guarantor of a freedom identifiable with
labor and construction. But beyond these evident
differences there may be a more fundamental similarity.
[5] Just as the postmodern presents language games as
independent of transcendent social reason, so too the
posthistorical imagines the moment of the ultimate end of
history as a kind of definitive break, after which life
will go on, but in which unidirectional history will be
supplanted by "playful" activities that may be enjoyable in
themselves, but that will by necessity not be recuperable
in any larger social or historical scheme. The State at the
end of history will be as unconcerned with these ludic
activities--sports, arts, love making, and so on--as the
postmodern regime will be with justifying the logic of the
language games of what we would call the cultures,
subcultures, and micro-cultures whose disputes would be
subject to its acts of arbitration.^3^
[6] On the surface of it at least, Alexandre Kojeve's
take on Hegel in his _Introduction to the Reading of Hegel_
can be seen as being not an attempt at the ultimate
vindication of a "grand" historical and philosophical
narrative--the triumph of the end of history and the
univocal (self) satisfaction of the entire population of
the earth--but instead the surprising mutation of that
certainty, that knowledge, into a postmodern generation of
discourses and styles.^4^ History as narrative triumphs,
but it also ends: its termination is the opening for the
proliferation of poses and play that is literally post
modern. Rather than contradicting Kojeve, then, or
demonstrating the extent to which a Hegelian modernism is
null and void, a rigorous postmodern might see itself as
deriving from a completion and fulfillment of a dialectical
project. It *might*.
[7] The postmodern, we could argue, has already come part of
the way. It has posited a knowledge--the authority of its
own text--that in spite of itself stands as a knowledge at
the end of a long history of illusions. It takes itself as
a stranger to, and grave digger for, the Hegelian
tradition. Kojeve, on the other hand, at least
recognizes the inescapability, the inevitability, of the
univocal truth of his own system. But he is blind to the
consequences of the termination of history: the
proliferation of signs and acts that, by their very nature
as partial constructions, challenge the totalizing power of
the Concept.
[8] To get any further we will have to look at certain key
passages of Kojeve's _Introduction_. Most often in
footnotes and asides, he grapples with the really crucial
questions: what does it mean for "Man" to "die"? What will
come "after" the end of history? If "Man" is dead, what
will remain of human labor? What will be the status of the
"Book" in which Knowledge resides? The answers to these
questions will enable us to consider in more detail the
problem of the relation been posthistory and the postmodern.
[9] According to most historians of French philosophy of the
twentieth century, it was Kojeve who single-handedly
popularized Hegel in France, through a brilliant series of
lectures in the 1930s. After decades of idealist
neo-Kantianism, the Hegel that Kojeve preferred was
a welcome change: History could now be seen as a
dialectical progression in which Man ineluctably moves
toward a social satisfaction in which the desire for
recognition--and the recognition of the other's desire for
recognition--is fulfilled. The posthistorical State alone
is capable of recognizing Man for what he is: beyond all
superstition, all theology, Man is the creative/destructive
agent whose labor ends in the recognition of all by all
through the mediation of the State. The labor of Hegel's
slave, its destructive and formative action, "transforms"
"natural given being": Man is the "Time that annihilates
[nature]" (158). But in the end all transformative labor
ceases. History comes to an end because, eventually at
least, the labor leading to full reciprocal recognition
will have been carried out: at the end of history, there
will be nothing new to accomplish.
[10] Now the end of history for Kojeve is the ultimate
ideological weapon because it justifies, retrospectively,
just about anything that went before that made its arrival
possible. Man for Kojeve is a type: the Master, the
Slave, the Philosopher, and, at the end, the impersonal
Hegel (and his reader, Kojeve), that is, the Wise
Man (%le Sage%). The negativity that made the arrival of
the end possible will, in retrospect, be judged moral, no
matter how it seemed at the time. And since Man himself is
defined as temporality and negation (IRH 160), even the
bloodiest violence or the grossest injustice, if necessary
for the eventual completion, will be (or will have been)
good.
The true moral judgments are those borne by the State
(moral=legal); States themselves are judged by universal
history. But for these judgments to have a meaning,
History must be completed. And Napoleon and Hegel end
history. That is why Hegel can judge States and
individuals. The "good" is everything that has made
possible Hegel, in other words the formation of the
universal Napoleonic Empire (it is 1807!) which is
"understood" by Hegel (in and through the
_Phenomenology_). What is good is what exists, the
extent that it exists. All action, since it negates
existing givens, is thus bad: a sin. But sin can be
pardoned. How? Through its success. Success absolves
crime, because success--is a new reality that *exists*.
But how to judge success? For that, History has to be
completed. Then one can see what is maintained in
existence: definitive reality. (ILH, 95)
[11] This is the "ruse of reason": reason acting in and through
History reaches its end in ways that might seem to have
nothing to do with accepted ("Christian") morality.
Certainly anyone attempting to judge the morality or
immorality of events before the end of history will be
incapable of it; only with Hegel (and Kojeve) will
the true value and morality of actions be evident. Not only
do the ends always justify the means, but they do so
retroactively, so that agents ("people") will never be
competent to judge the acceptability of their own behavior.
The "Owl of Minerva flies at dusk," to use a Hegelian
formulation: only when the outcome is final and its
corresponding overview are grasped can all preceding events
be fully *known*.^5^
[12] But in a way all this is irrelevant: since history for
Kojeve is already ended, everything that takes place
now is a purely technical "catching up" process. The end of
History was achieved at the battle of Jena: Napoleon's
conquering forces brought the egalitarian ideals of the
French revolution, codified and implemented by the State,
to others. From now on History will only be a series of
lesser battles of Jena, leading to the implementation
throughout the world, by bureaucratic governments, of
rights and liberties. What at first might seem to be the
ultimate 1930s justification of ruthlessness at any cost
(indeed Stalin comes to replace Napoleon for Kojeve
in the pre-World War II period) leads inevitably, in the
late 40s and 50s, to a recognition that the difference
between ideologies is largely irrelevant. How one arrives
at the "classless" society, the society of the mutual
recognition of the desire for recognition, is of no
interest to the "Wise Man": it is a purely *technical*
question. The seemingly great postwar problem of the
conflict of ideologies, or the question of the defense of
Soviet ideology in the face of American pressure
(Merleau-Ponty, _Humanisme et terreur_, Sartre, _Les
Communistes et la paix_) simply does not exist for
Kojeve. The end of history is the end of ideology.
In a "Note to the Second Edition" of the _Introduction to
the Reading of Hegel_, inserted in 1959, Kojeve
states: "One can even say that, from a certain point of
view, the United States has already attained the final
stage of Marxist "communism," seeing that, practically, all
the members of the "classless society" can from now on
appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to
them, without thereby working any more than their heart
dictates" (IRH, 161, note).
[13] Ideology, in the end, is thus utterly unimportant: it too
fades away once history is at an end. If it contributes or
has contributed to that end it is good, if not bad. Like
all means it is justified by the end, but *at* the end it
has no specificity other than its "success." From the
perspective of the end, all bloody action is over: it can
be judged, but it no longer is effective. In time and as
time Man is free to act, but he does not know; at the end
of Time, History is known, but Man can no longer act (he
has nothing more to do)--hence he no longer even exists. At
the end, there are no longer even any means to be
justified. History and its ideologies are a matter of utter
indifference.
[14] This leaves an enormous question, one typical of the
1950s. The completion of history is perfectly ahistorical,
but ahistory itself is a function of history. True, we are
now delivered from history, action, and all the hard--and
ambiguous--moral questions. The machine of history has
functioned so well that it has erased itself: its mechanism
was the unfolding of Truth, but now that we are in the
definitive era of Truth, History has ceased to exist, and
its moral conundrums are irrelevant. At the end of history,
ideology is finished, and so ceases to exist: but "Man"
therefore no longer exists either.
The %Selbst%--that is, Man properly so-called or the
free Individual, *is* Time and Time is History, and only
*History*. . . . And Man is essentially *Negativity*, for
Time is *Becoming*--that is, the *annihilation* of Being
or Space. Therefore Man is a Nothingness that nihilates
and that preserves itself in (spatial) Being only by
*negating* being, this Negation being Action Now, if Man
is Negativity,--that is, Time--he is not eternal. He is
born and he dies as Man. He is '%das Negativ seiner
selbst%,' Hegel says. And we know what that means: Man
overcomes himself as Action (or %Selbst%) by ceasing to
oppose himself to the World, after creating in it the
universal and homogeneous State; or to put it otherwise,
on the cognitive level: Man overcomes himself as *Error*
(or "Subject" opposed to the Object) after creating the
Truth of "Science" (IRH, 160; emphasis in original).
[15] Man dies at this strange juncture point between History
and the End (in both senses of the word) of History. In the
future, after the end, Kojeve tells us that "life is
purely biological" (ILH, 387). But this is a, and perhaps
the, crucial question for Kojeve: if history stops,
if Man and Time and negating labor is dead, how then is Man
any different from the animals? He had originally
constituted himself *against* Nature ("But Man, once
constituted in his human specificity, opposes himself to
Nature"); nature for Kojeve is timeless and can in
no way be incorporated in the dialectic. No "dialectics of
nature" can therefore be conceived within the
Kojevian reading of Hegel.^6^ But if man is an
animal, History itself is not so much completed as dead. It
will be--or is now, since History is *already* ended, in
principle at least--as if History had never existed.
[16] Kojeve presents two approaches to this problem in
the long footnote to his interpretation of Chapter VIII of
the _Phenomenology_ (IRH, 158-62), a passage of which I
have already cited. First he states that Man indeed is an
animal, but a happy one, "in *harmony* with Nature or given
Being." True, he no longer can engage in productive
Historical activity, "Action negating the given, . . . the
Subject *opposed* to the Object." But he has plenty of
other consolations: "art, love, play, etc. etc.--in short,
everything that makes man *happy*" (IRH, 159). This is a
"world of freedom" in which men "no longer fight, and work
as little as possible."
[17] It sounds almost too good to be true: the world itself is
transformed into a vast, postmodern Southern California,
its inhabitants concerned above all with training their
bodies and trading their automobiles and art objects. It is
here that one recognizes with a start the perfect
transformation of a Hegelian modernism into an
anti-Hegelian, but soft, postmodernism: at the End of
History History is replaced with a heterogeneous collection
of lifestyle choices. Indeed we learn, in the footnote
added to the second edition of 1959, that Kojeve had
earlier (in the immediate postwar period, "1948-58") seen
the "American way of life" as the true posthistorical
regime--although he also saw the Soviet Union and the
Chinese Communists as nothing other than "still poor
Americans" (IRH, 161). The only larger coherence is a
general lack of coherence: one is free to cultivate one's
own interests and ignore the larger movement by which all
personal activities are justified. The new human animals
will "recognize one another without reservation," but this
recognition will be of the right of each one to be
completely different, in what promise to be mainly physical
pursuits.
[18] In a second footnote added in 1959 (the first dates from
1946), Kojeve objects to his own theory. Reading his
earlier note quite literally, he argues that if all Action
is eliminated from Human life, Man will actually be not an
American, but an animal:
"If Man becomes an animal again, his acts, his loves,
and his play must also become purely 'natural' again.
Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end
of History, men would construct their edifices and
works of art as birds build their nests and spiders
spin their webs. . . . 'The *definitive annihilation*
of Man *properly so-called*' also means the definitive
disappearance of human Discourse (%Logos%) in the strict
sense. Animals of the species %Homo sapiens% would react
by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign
'language,' and thus their so-called 'discourses' would
be like what is supposed to be the 'language' of bees.
What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or
the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom
itself." (IRH, 159-60; emphasis in original)
[19] The posthistorical, in other words, must be saved from any
threat of animality--that is, of purely unreflected-upon
behavior. Kojeve does not really consider the
consequences of "art, love, play, etc. etc." because,
fortunately, he has another example of activity "after the
end of History." This is, surprisingly enough, Japan: the
"American way of life" is now replaced by a model of
Japanese culture that has been "at the End of History" "for
almost three centuries." While "American" posthistory is
associated with sheer animality, Japanese culture is seen
by Kojeve as a pure *formalism*. Unlike the animal,
Man continues to be a "Subject opposed to the Object,"
although "action" and "Time" have ceased. Forms are opposed
to one another, and values themselves come to be "totally
*formalized*"--the Japanese tea ceremony, Noh theatre, even
the suicide of the Kamikaze pilot represent an opposition
to the Object that, while empty, nevertheless continues to
be an opposition: Man is now a snob. It is as if the
armature of labor, negation and Historical activity
continues to function, but in a void, since there can no
longer be any negating or any History.
[20] In this model, "Opposition" continues, and so Man does
too. The difference between the two versions (that of '46
and that of '59) lies in the fact that while the first
proposes an activity that can be purely individual, so long
as it is in accord with nature, the second, "Japanese,"
entails a struggle for recognition, and therefore derives
its power from the earlier, and decisive, Master-Slave
dialectic. After all, the purpose of snobbery, of dandyism,
is to be recognized by the Other, even if that recognition
is totally meaningless. Thus a society is implied, and a
culture; this was not the case, finally, for the "animals,"
no matter what their "way of life" might have been.
[21] But the larger posthistorical culture--if such a thing can
even be written of--will be unthinkable because Absolute
Knowing will play no part in it. Kojeve inadvertently
indicates the irrelevance of the Wise Man--of reflexive
consciousness at the end of History--by choosing
the example of the Japanese: if they were carrying out
posthistorical acts one hundred years before the birth of
Hegel, Hegel and his book, and Kojeve in their wake,
need never have existed. History culminates in perfect
*indifference* to Wisdom. From the other side of the end of
History, it now appears clear that the _Phenomenology_ is
perfectly pointless. Purely formal activities therefore
will take place, and will have meanings, perhaps, within
certain posthistorical cultures; those cultures, however,
will exist in perfect isolation, without a larger Wisdom to
unify them and give them meaning. Here, then, is yet
another Kojevian postmodernism, this time one based
not on the particularity of desires but on the multiplicity
and radical non-congruence of separate cultures. Absolute
knowing finds its completion in a series of social
practices or lifestyles which are united only in the fact
that as formal activities each one is precisely a lack of
knowledge of the whole. The snob's gesture is a forgetting,
willful or not, of the larger significance--or
insignificance--of his or her act. Its success can be
judged only by its immediate impact: the dandy walking his
lobster on a leash can bask only in the recognition given
*here* and *now*. The act excludes any larger "meaning."
[22] How then, under these circumstances, can one say that
History is ended? It does not seem that, if the Japanese
(as represented by Kojeve) are to be our models,
there can be any history or historical consciousness at
all. Elsewhere--in passages and footnotes dating from the
original (1947) publication of _Introduction la lecture de
Hegel_--it seems that Kojeve himself recognized the
necessity of historical memory and historical text--and
thus of the writing of the _Phenomenology_ itself--for the
ultimate completion of History. A few pages after the
footnote that I have discussed, Kojeve writes: "It
is first necessary that *real* History be completed; next,
it must be *narrated* to Man; and only then can the
Philosopher, becoming a Wise Man, *understand* it by
reconstructing it %a priori% in the _Phenomenology_" (IRH,
166). Kojeve adds in a footnote appended to this
passage (more precisely, to the phrase that ends "narrated
to Man"): "Moreover, there is no real history without
historical memory--that is, without oral or written
Memoirs."
[23] Here we are back at our earlier problem: if the Japanese
constitute an ahistorical end of history, a posthistorical
moment that has nothing to do with history, how can *they*
be said to be Human? If Man is determined in and through
history, then it would seem that the Japanese, in their
sophisticated and useless labor, are no more Human than are
the bee-like posthistorical animals that Kojeve in
1959 saw as implicit in his earlier footnote (of 1946), and
rejected. The Natural--the realm of the inhuman that, for
Kojeve at least, simply had nothing to do with Human
activity, Time, or History--seems to triumph once again. In
the case of the simple human-animals we might say that the
Owl of Minerva flew, but that its flight seen from a
posthistorical perspective was the equivalent of the
movement of any other animal, the Owl of Minerva being no
different from any owl--no matter how endangered--in the
forest. For the Kojevian Japanese, however, and for
all the rest of us who will necessarily emulate them, the
Owl of Minerva need never have flown in the first place.
Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't; in any case it is now
stuffed and resides in a European museum, where it is
routinely photographed by hurried groups of Japanese
tourists.
[24] What, finally, is the status of the Book--the
_Phenomenology_ itself as a summation of History and
embodiment of Wisdom--at the end of History? This is
perhaps the most important question in Kojeve's
Hegelianism, and, characteristically, he never poses it
explicitly; instead, we must try to formulate an answer on
the basis of two elliptic and ironic footnotes. Yet, as we
will see, the status of "Self-Consciousness" *at* and
*after* the end of History will remain very much in
question.
[25] The first question, which arises in Kojeve's
discussion of the third part of Chapter VIII of the
_Phenomenology_, is the role of the Wise Man, the
post-philosopher (or %Sage%), in the establishment of the
posthistorical regime. At one point Kojeve writes:
"One can say . . . that, in and by the Wise Man (who
produces absolute Science, the Science that entirely
reveals the totality of Being), Spirit 'attains or wins the
Concept'" (ILH, 413). He soon modifies this, though, in a
footnote (ILH, 414). If the Wise Man--Hegel, Kojeve,
the "authors" of the _Phenomenology_--are those who
"produce" Science, the true end of History and reign of
Self-Consciousness will be possible only when mediated by
the State. The State, in effect, will guarantee the
recognition of the freedom of all by all; the satisfaction
it provides will do away with all opposition between
Subject and Object, for-itself and in-itself. This clearly
implies more than the personal teaching of a single person:
rather what is at stake now is the universalization of a
definitive doctrine contained in a book. Kojeve
writes:
To turn out to be true, philosophy must be universally
recognized, in other words recognized finally by the
universal and homogeneous *State*. The
empirical-existence (%Dasein%) of Science--is thus
not the private *thought* of the Wise Man, but his
words [%sa parole%], universally recognized. And it is
obvious that this "recognition" can only be obtained
through the publication of a book. And by existing in
the form of a book, Science is effectively detached
from its author, in other words from the Wise Man or
from Man [%du Sage ou de l'Homme%]. (ILH, 414)
[26] This is a passage fraught with difficulties, but one that
is well worth considering. It is recognition, first of all,
that determines truth; the truth of the book is determined
by its recognition by the State. The book consists of the
words--or literally, the word--of the author, but the book
itself, on publication, is detached not only from the Wise
Man, but from Man himself. The detachment and recognition
of the book is the determination of its truth--which in
turn guarantees the universality and homogeneity of the
State. The book is detached from Man himself; presumably at
this point Man has nothing more to do, and passes from the
scene (as we will see in yet another footnote, discussed
below).
[27] But note that the "private thought" of the Wise Man is not
at stake here. Rather his words are recognized, and this
makes them "true"; the same gesture by the
State--recognition--*makes it a State*. Truth and Statehood
are generated reciprocally, at the same instant, by the
same act.
[28] Now if they are the result of the immediacy of what seems
to be a purely formal act, Truth and Statehood cannot be
generated out of reading. Kojeve never explicitly
poses the question, but it is in any case an obvious one:
does anybody *read* this book? Who? Are recognition and
reading the same thing? It does not seem likely: reading
here does not appear as a social or even
physical/psychological phenomenon: it is not a question of
the appropriation of the Wise Man's teaching, the reading
of the book on the highest levels of government, its
dissemination through the schools, etc. For that is an
interminable process: reading necessarily implies
interpretation, misinterpretation, questioning, rephrasing,
codification. There is none of that here: in a single
gesture, in one movement, the book and the State are
"recognized." Recognition, then, has nothing to do with
reading--and by reading I mean, on the simplest level, a
bare acquaintance with the contents of the book. The word
will be "recognized," it seems, without having to be
deciphered.
[29] My interpretation is borne out in another footnote that
comes some twenty-five pages before the one I have just
discussed. It explicitly links the death of Man to the book
as inanimate, and presumably unread, object. Once again
this note attempts to face the ultimate problem: the fate
of Man "after" the closing of History:
The fact that at the end of Time the Word-concept
(%Logos%) is *detached* from Man and
exists--empirically no longer in the form of a
human-reality, but as a Book--this fact reveals the
*essential finitude* of Man. It's not only a given
man who dies: Man dies as such. The end of History
is the *death* of Man properly speaking. There
remains after this death: 1) living bodies with a
human form, but deprived of Spirit, in other words
of Time or creative power; 2) a Spirit which
exists-empirically, but in the form of an inorganic
reality, not living: as a Book which, not even having
an animal life, no longer has anything to do with
Time. The relation between the Wise Man and his Book
is thus rigorously analogous to that of Man and his
*death*. My death is certainly mine; it is not the
death of an other. But it is mine only in the future;
for one can say: "I am going to die," but not: "I am
dead." It is the same for the Book. It is my work
[%mon oeuvre%], and not that of an other; and in it it
is a question of me and not of anything else. But I am
only in the Book, I am only this Book to the extent
that I write and publish it, in other words to the
extent that it is still a future (or a project). Once
the Book is published it is detached from me. It ceases
to be me, just as my body ceases to be mine after my
death. Death is just as impersonal and eternal, in
other words inhuman, as Spirit is impersonal, eternal
and inhuman when realized in and by the Book. (ILH,
387-88, footnote; Kojeve's emphasis)
[30] We see now posthistorical Man as an "animal," no longer
carrying out a task or striving toward self-Consciousness.
But "he" is not *just* an animal--a bee or beaver--because
he has the word, the Logos, which guarantees his movement
from the Human to a kind of higher-order animality. (This
difference is something that Kojeve seems to have
forgotten when he wrote the 1959 addendum to his long
footnote on "animality," discussed above.) But clearly the
Book is not something to be read: there can be no *labor*
of interpretation or inculcation. For that reason the book
is explicitly presented as dead, as "inorganic" (%i.e.%,
lifeless) material.
[31] The death of Man is not, strictly speaking, the death of
self-Consciousness. The latter is externalized, frozen on
the pages of a book. The message is absolute: as
Kojève states, "The Wise Man who reveals what is
through the Word [%Parole%] or Concept reveals it
definitively: for what is thus remains eternally identical
to itself, no longer modified by uneasiness [%inquietude%]
(%Unruhe%)" (ILH, 413). The dead message, moreover, is a
dead me (or a dead Man), because it is the highest Wisdom
of me (the Wise Man, Hegel, Kojeve), preserved
intact forever, apparently well beyond the labor of
interpretation. The connection between the Book and "my
death" is, then, not merely a metaphor: it is both "me" in
the sense that it consists of my remains, and at the same
time it is *not* me, or my living project. It is my dead
body. And the dead bodies of trees.
[32] If we can understand the role played by the Book in
Kojeve, we will be able to grasp both the status,
and the radical limitation, of Absolute Knowledge as it is
both the Book and the Book's *reading*.
[33] Time is circular, but it is not cyclical. Hegelian time,
according to Kojeve, can only be run through
(%parcouru%) once (ILH, 391). This is because the end is a
return to the state before which the Human commences: the
one in which an opposition between Man and his World does
not exist. That opposition, in and through which Man exists
(and creates himself) in Time and Action, is History. At
the end, the opposition between Man and World is overcome,
and ceases to exist: History ends and Man dies. The
difference between beginning and end is that at the end,
and after it, "Identity is revealed by the Concept. . . .
It is only at the end of History that the identity of Man
and World exists *for* Man, as revealed by human Discourse"
(ILH, 392).
[34] There is a certain irony in all this, upon which
Kojève does not dwell. The end is the "discursive
revelation of its beginning"--yet the higher knowledge that
is the end, the "comprehension of anthropogenic Desire, as
it is revealed in the _Phenomenology_" (ILH, 392), is a
human comprehension ("*for* Man") that nevertheless marks
the end of Man. In an impossible moment Man both
understands and ceases to exist. His understanding and
death would seem to have to be simultaneous, as well as
definitive. After the end, there is no Man left to whom
Discourse can reveal the unity of Man and World.
[35] Hence the strange status of the Book. The Book, we are
told, is the "empirical existence of Science" (ILH, 394).
Its return is also its definitive termination, because then
the "totality of Discourse is exhausted [%epuisee%]"
(ILH, 393). There can only be one book, then, that contains
the defunct but definitive Science. As we've already seen,
Kojeve compares this book to a dead body, separated
for ever from its consciousness/author.
[36] Discourse as well then returns to Nature; Man is dead,
Action is over, and the "empirical existence of Science is
not historical Man, but a Book made of paper, in other
words a *natural* entity" (ILH, 394).
[37] But if all this is the case, why would anyone *read* the
Book? If Historical Action is at an end, and if Man is
dead, there would be no point in doing so. Yet not to do so
would consign all of human History--and Absolute
Knowledge--to a kind of Absolute Forgetting. In that case
there would be a return to the origin not on the higher
level of comprehension, but on the lower level of simple
repetition.
[38] That clearly is not an option either, so the Book must be
read. The crucial question then is: what is reading?
Whatever it is, it will be the task of the posthistorical
animal/dandy. Reading is not Action or historically
significant labor of any sort--all that is over, ended. And
since the cycle only returns to its origin once, it cannot
be a reading that entails any individual interpretation or
thought: it can only be a sheer repetition of the one,
definitive, return of Science and Knowledge. Kojeve
writes:
Certainly, the Book must be read and understood by men,
in order to be a Book, in other words something other
than paper. But the man who reads it no longer creates
anything and he no longer changes himself: he is
therefore no longer Time with the primacy of the
Future or History; in other words he is not Man in the
strong sense of the word. This man is, himself, a
quasi-natural or cyclical being: he is a reasonable
*animal*, who changes and reproduces himself while
remaining eternally *identical* to himself. And it
is this "reasonable animal" who is the "absoluter Geist,"
*become* Spirit or completed-and-perfect
[%acheve-et-parfait%]; in other words, dead. (ILH, 394)
[39] The end of history, which had promised so much, with its
State as a kind of institutionalized utopia, mediating
through law the mutual recognition of the "anthropogenic"
Desire of all men, becomes a kind of necrotopia of reading.
The Book cannot not be read.*^7^ But what is commonly
understood by "reading"--a personal understanding and a
perhaps wayward interpretation that can, and does, discover
new things in the text--is out of the question here. The
Book cannot therefore be read, either--or we must totally
redefine reading. Reading in the Kojevian sense will
become an animalistic or dead repetition of Discourse, its
exact repetition by the dead. This is the strange end of
the Kojevian mock theology that would replace heaven
with the State,^8^ and of a mock existentialism that would
resituate the recognition and reign of death definitively
as satisfaction and stasis.*^9^
[40] Reading, then, becomes as "natural" as the Book--it is not
an Action in Time; it is not, on other words, a human
activity. The Book is an "objective reality," the only
possible realization of philosophy, which must be
recognized by all persons--%i.e.%, by the State--in order
to be true: mere intention is not enough (ILH, 414, note).
It is when Kojeve considers the "objective" existence
of the Work that we see the problem in his conception
of reading, for he can only see publication as subjecting
the Work, the Book, to the "danger [that it will be]
changed and perverted" (ILH, 414, note). Kojeve sees this
risk of "perversion"--of interpretation, in other words--as
a regrettable consequence of the necessity of the Work to
be "the objectively-real that maintains itself"--%i.e.%,
to be a Work that is published and circulated as a real,
solid object--rather than a "pure intention" that "fades
away [%s'evanouit%]"--%i.e.%, that is an idea beyond
appropriation by all of society, or by the State
(ILH, 414, note). Kojeve, in other words, can only see
reading as a function of the passive reproduction of what
is "objectively-real"; all deviation from an imagined
definitive meaning (or Absolute Knowledge) can only be
"perversion."
[41] In light of this it is hard to see why Kojeve makes
a strong distinction between the book as mere paper and the
act of reading. Reading as the pure repetition of a dead,
frozen state will be as "material" as the thudding pileup
in a warehouse of the unread copies of a book. Hermeneutics
becomes hermetics: the act of reading now is the automatic
reproduction of a hermetically sealed text, and of a
"Knowledge" so remote that there is no place in it, or
around it, for human action: thinking, rethinking,
questioning. Cultural reproduction made possible by this
reading will be the mere repetition %ad infinitum% of the
assent of the dead, of animals. So much for the paradise on
earth that Kojeve saw as replacing the bad-faith
paradise of all organized religion.
[42] We see here a complete reversal from the position at the
outset of history, when man confronted nature and
transformed it through his labor. That view presented a
radical duality between a dialectical Man and inert
nature.^10^ Now it is Nature--as the material Book, and as
the dead reading of the Book--that has become dialectical,
or at least post-dialectical, whereas Man is simply dead.
Nature has triumphed, but its triumph is of no concern to
the "human animals"--the Americans or Japanese, bees or
dandys, it hardly matters--who engage in their fragmentary
and formal activities which are of no relevance whatever to
the genesis, triumph, or demise of Man.
[43] It is here that we can draw some conclusions about the
radical--and significant--difference between the
posthistorical and the postmodern. The posthistorical, as
we've just seen, posits a radical break, an unbridgeable
gap, between definitive Knowledge and the freeplay of
posthistorical action. The Book can contain nothing of
interest to say about the residual uses to which leftover
negativity, in the form of human action, will be put
"after" the end of History. In other words it has nothing
at all to say about the present or the future. Indeed the
few pronouncements Kojeve makes on this subject are
all in footnotes, as if they were tangential to the main
body of the text. The postmodern, on the other hand, puts
forward a "knowledge" that arrives at its end by
*recognizing* the necessity of the proliferation of what we
might call "unbound" discourses and language games. It
recognizes its death as definitive knowledge in and of the
proliferation of partial knowledges, activities, and
languages. Rather than being essentially closed to them, as
indifferent as mere paper or rote reading, it is open to
and dependent on them: it is the very knowledge of their
incompletion that makes its completion--a provisional
completion, to be sure, but a completion--possible.
[44] Posthistorical Knowledge always comes too soon--the Owl of
Minerva always takes off well before dusk--because it
closes off the possibility of, and is blind to, human
activity, even though activity will obviously continue,
albeit without benefit of Wise Man or Book. Postmodern
knowledge, on the other hand, comes too soon as well, but
for the opposite reason: because its larger truth must be
ignored by the very activities that justify it. If
posthistorical Knowledge knows too little, postmodern
knowledge knows too much. The postmodern is always already
in advance of the partial activities it defines: if those
activities were themselves to recognize fully the
postmodern, they would simply fall under its aegis: they
would be coherent parts of a larger narrative, and thus
fully modern, and ultimately posthistorical. And yet these
activities, these games, are thoroughly dependent on a
postmodern knowledge *which they must not know*: without
the overarching knowledge of the postmodern, they would be
indistinguishable from any other human narratives,
"primitive" or "modern," which have nothing whatsoever to
do with the postmodern. And without their *definitive*
blindness, at the end of modernity which is the postmodern,
they would only be components of a higher Knowledge, fully
recuperated by it. They, in other words, in order to be
postmodern, must in some sense be as blind to postmodern
knowledge as posthistorical Knowledge would be to them.
[45] And yet the Kojevian posthistorical might be more
postmodern than the postmodern. It, after all, is ignorant,
locked in its perfect, one-time circularity. It does not,
and must not, concern itself with, or know, that which
comes after it, in an inevitable but supplementary
relation. It is the sheer performance, in other words, of
the blindness of partial knowledges and practices that the
postmodern can only *know*. The posthistorical is therefore
the *enactment* of the postmodern in and through its
absolutely necessary lack of awareness of itself as
postmodern; this lack is nothing more than the %a priori%
failure and completion of postmodern knowledge. The
posthistorical will always again come *after* the
postmodern, supplementing it with its radical not-knowing.
The posthistorical Owl also always flies too late--well
after dusk.
NOTES:
^1^ See section 9, entitled "Narratives of the Legitimation of
Knowledge," of Jean-Francois Lyotard's _The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge_, trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), pp. 31-37.
^2^ See, in this context, Francis Fukuyama's
neo-Kojevian celebration of the _New World Order,
The End of History and the Last Man_ (New York: The Free
Press, 1992). Jacques Derrida has recently criticized
Fukuyama for the incoherence of his approach: either the
end of history is a kind of eschatology, a pure logical
necessity beyond empirical proof, or it is empirically
verifiable, in which case it loses the attributes that give
it its necessity, and also its attractiveness. One cannot,
however, demonstrate the logically necessary (or the
"messianic") by invoking empirical observations. See
Derrida, _Spectres de Marx_ (Paris: Galilee, 1993),
pp. 112-20. Derrida, at the end of the same chapter
("%Conjurer--le marxisme%," pp. 120-27) also considers some
of the Kojevian footnotes that I discuss in this
article. I would argue that one could extend Derrida's
critique of Fukuyama to Kojeve himself: for
Kojeve too history is ended because it is a logical
necessity that it end: therefore he is largely indifferent
to what comes next. Yet at the same time Kojeve
points to empirical evidence--America, the Soviet Union,
Japan, the defeat of the Nazis--to back up his thesis.
^3^ On the postmodern and adjudication between language games
in conflict, see Lyotard's _The Differend: Phrases in
Dispute_, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
^4^ _The Introduction to the Reading of Hegel_ (New York:
Basic Books, 1969) is an English translation (by James H.
Nichols, Jr.) of certain sections of Kojeve's
_Introduction la lecture de Hegel_ (Paris: Gallimard,
Collection "Tel," 1980). The editor of the English edition,
Allan Bloom, has omitted much of the material of the
1938-39 lectures. When possible, then, I quote from the
official English translation, giving page numbers from it,
following the letters "IRH." When a citation is not found
in the English edition, I provide my own translation and
cite the page number of the French edition, following the
letters "ILH." The reader will note that the pagination of
the now widely available French edition from which I quote
is different from that of the original French edition
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
^5^ "One more word about teaching what the world ought to be:
philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching
. . . the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk
begins to fall" (Hegel, _Preface to the Philosophy of
Right_).
^6^ Kojeve could never admit that a dialectics of nature
was conceivable. Prior to human desire, there is simple
identity. Judith Butler writes: "Kojeve views nature
as a set of brutally given facts, governed by the principle
of simple identity, displaying no dialectical
possibilities, and, hence, in stark contrast to the life of
consciousness" (_Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections
in Twentieth Century France_ [New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987], p. 67). Maurice Blanchot rewrites this
unreadability in his 1948 novel, _Le Tres-Haut_. In this
fiction the Book becomes the journal of a perfect civil
servant of a posthistorical State, a civil servant who is
at the same time a subversive challenging the State through
the very act of writing. The Book for Blanchot becomes an
allegory of the collapse of political allegory, since all
writing on the State is both fully recuperable by it, and
is also its death, its extinction. Meaning itself is in a
twilight zone of perfect representation of the State--so
perfect it's inhuman, or posthuman--but is also, by the
very fact that it is a written representation, the death of
that State, but a never dying death. (The curse of death is
that it cannot die.) Such a text is perfectly circular, but
also unreadable: nothing can ever happen in this State, and
there is nothing more to be said, and certainly nothing
more to read--but this nothing, this self-cancelling law,
will be repeated endlessly, in exactly the same form. See
my preface to the translation I have done of this novel,
entitled _The Most High_, forthcoming from the University
of Nebraska Press.
^7^ This is a gambit that comes out quite clearly in
Kojeve's article "Hegel, Marx, et le Christianisme"
(_Critique_, 1, 3-4 (1946): 339-66. See, for example, p.
358: "Thus--a supremely curious thing [%chose curieuse
entre toutes%]--man is completed and perfected, in other
words he attains supreme satisfaction, by becoming
conscious, in the person of the Wise Man, of his essential
finitude." Kojeve thus links the most profound
desire of religion (as he sees it)--to guarantee man
perfection and satisfaction--to that which religion most
abhors: mortality.
^8^ As Mikkel Dufrenne notes (p. 397), Kojeve's stress
on finitude and mortality establishes his Hegelianism as a
revisionary Heideggerianism. See "Actualit de Hegel"--a
review of Kojeve's _Introduction_ and Jean
Hyppolite's "Genese et structure de la Phenomenologie de
l'esprit chez Hegel"--in _Esprit_, 16, 9 (1948): 396-408.
^9^ See note 5, above. Dufrenne for his part sees this duality
between a nondialectical nature (the "%en-soi%") and
dialectical Man the "%pour-soi%") as a key inheritance from
existentialism--one which poses plenty of problems for
philosophers such as Sartre, in _Being and Nothingness_.
How indeed does the "%pour-soi%" arise if the "%en-soi%" is
closed? How can the two be reconciled beyond a mere "as
if"? For Dufrenne, this is the origin of the thematics of
failure (échec), anguish and despair in Sartre: "A
linear series of failures cannot be taken for a dialectic"
(Dufrenne, 401-03).
^10^ This statement should not be taken as a "criticism" of the
postmodern, or an attempt to condemn it by "associating" it
with the posthistorical. As is made clear in Blanchot's
novel (see footnote 7, above) there is no logical space
outside of the postmodern--or the posthistorical, for that
matter--from which such a "criticism" could be carried out.
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