The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève by Jeff Love

Author:Jeff Love [Love, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Philosophy, History
ISBN: 9780231546706
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-07-09T23:00:00+00:00

III

THE LATER WRITINGS

7

NOBODIES

Taken in itself, negation is pure nothingness: it is not, it does not exist, it does not appear. It is only as negation of identity, that is, only as Difference. It can thus exist only as a real negation of Nature.

—Alexandre Kojève

Kojève’s equation of time and concept, arguably the guiding equation of his thought, leads to seemingly insuperable difficulties.1 One may be pardoned for assuming that the pattern of self-immolation asserted so regularly in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel has general application, possessing the authority of an irreducible truth. Kojève does nothing to dispel this identification. And yet, if we take the connection between time and concept seriously, the notion of truth as we understand it—as a fixed standard having application to various “cases”—can no longer be sustained, at least as a transcendent truth applicable to all possible worlds and not just to our own, unless of course our own contains all possible worlds.

To get a sense of the difference of Kojève’s thought, we have to come to terms with the fact that the identification of time and concept suggests not only that the concept is narrative but also that this narrative relates only to itself. The narrative cannot have “general” application as a truth outside of itself, for the atemporal or eternal dimension in which that truth resides is denied from the outset by the equation of time and concept. Simply put, the truth achieved by equating concept and time can only relate to that equation itself immanently; thus, it cannot be said to be a general or eternal truth applying to all possible narratives in the traditional sense. On the contrary, the holism of this equation can result only from its comprehensiveness—all possible narratives play but a part in this greater, singular narrative, the “Book,” the final end of which is to liberate them from their particularity by demonstrating their subservient role in the construction of precisely this final narrative and no other, since at the end of history no other is possible: “Absolute philosophy has no object that might be exterior to it.”2

“The truth is the whole”—yet again. This famous Hegelian phrase seems also to govern Kojève’s work. But we might just as well reformulate this phrase as “The truth is death.” For the progress of truth toward itself is a process of universalization that undermines the particular in its inexorable movement to completion. Indeed, universalization may be described as a process of negation of all attachments to a particular context, and all attachments are particular attachments, even to the extent that they are abstract.

Kojève explicitly connects this movement to negation and death in his comparison of G. W. F. Hegel with Martin Heidegger, which appeared in a book review from 1936 that remained unpublished during Kojève’s lifetime.3 There, Kojève quotes Hegel as affirming the proposition that negation in its complete or absolute form is death: “The absolute of negation, pure freedom, is—in its appearance (Erscheinung)—death.” This may seem to be logical enough; surely

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