Allan Stoekl

Departments of French
and Comparative Literature
Pennsylvania State University

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

On the surface of it at least, Alexandre Kojève’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 Kojève, 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.

 

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. Kojève, 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.

 

To get any further we will have to look at certain key passages of Kojève’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.

 

According to most historians of French philosophy of the twentieth century, it was Kojève 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 Kojève 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.

 

Now the end of history for Kojève is the ultimate ideological weapon because it justifies, retrospectively, just about anything that went before that made its arrival possible. Man for Kojève is a type: the Master, the Slave, the Philosopher, and, at the end, the impersonal Hegel (and his reader, Kojève), 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)

 

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 Kojève) 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

 

But in a way all this is irrelevant: since history for Kojève 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 Kojève 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 Kojève. 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, Kojève 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).

 

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.

 

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).

 

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, Kojève tells us that “life is purely biological” (ILH, 387). But this is a, and perhaps the, crucial question for Kojève: 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 Kojève is timeless and can in no way be incorporated in the dialectic. No “dialectics of nature” can therefore be conceived within the Kojèvian 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.

 

Kojève 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.”

 

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 Kojève 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.

 

In a second footnote added in 1959 (the first dates from 1946), Kojève 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)

 

The posthistorical, in other words, must be saved from any threat of animality–that is, of purely unreflected-upon behavior. Kojève 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 Kojève 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.

 

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.

 

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. Kojève 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 Kojève 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 Kojèvian 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.”

 

How then, under these circumstances, can one say that History is ended? It does not seem that, if the Japanese (as represented by Kojève) 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 Kojève 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, Kojève 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). Kojève 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.”

 

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 Kojève in 1959 saw as implicit in his earlier footnote (of 1946), and rejected. The Natural–the realm of the inhuman that, for Kojève 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 Kojèvian 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.

 

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 Kojève’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.

 

The first question, which arises in Kojève’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 Kojève 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, Kojève, 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. Kojève 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)

 

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).

 

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.

 

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. Kojève 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.

 

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; Kojève’s emphasis)

 

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 Kojève 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.

 

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, Kojève), 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.

 

If we can understand the role played by the Book in Kojève, 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.

 

Time is circular, but it is not cyclical. Hegelian time, according to Kojève, 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).

 

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.

 

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 [épuisee]” (ILH, 393). There can only be one book, then, that contains the defunct but definitive Science. As we’ve already seen, Kojève compares this book to a dead body, separated for ever from its consciousness/author.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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. Kojève 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 [achevé-et-parfait]; in other words, dead. (ILH, 394)

 

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 Kojèvian sense will become an animalistic or dead repetition of Discourse, its exact repetition by the dead. This is the strange end of the Kojèvian 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

 

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 Kojève 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). Kojève 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). Kojève, 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.”

 

In light of this it is hard to see why Kojève 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 Kojève saw as replacing the bad-faith paradise of all organized religion.

 

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.

 

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 Kojève 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.

 

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.

 

And yet the Kojèvian 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-Kojèvian 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: Galilée, 1993), pp. 112-20. Derrida, at the end of the same chapter (“Conjurer–le marxisme,” pp. 120-27) also considers some of the Kojèvian footnotes that I discuss in this article. I would argue that one could extend Derrida’s critique of Fukuyama to Kojève himself: for Kojève 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 Kojève 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 Kojève’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.Kojève could never admit that a dialectics of nature was conceivable. Prior to human desire, there is simple identity. Judith Butler writes: “Kojève 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 Kojève’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.” Kojève 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), Kojève’s stress on finitude and mortality establishes his Hegelianism as a revisionary Heideggerianism. See “Actualit de Hegel”–a review of Kojève’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.