Hegel in France: Alexandre Kojève

John Marks, Nottingham Trent University

The aim of this paper is to suggest some of the reasons for the importance of
Kojève’s reading of Hegel in twentieth-century French thought, and to situate this
reading, along with the so-called Hegel revival in general, in the wider context of
post-war thought in France. It will be argued that the answer to both questions
revolves around questions of history, ‘being-together’ – as Lyotard puts it – and the
event. Although the generation which emerges after Kojève, or more precisely after
Sartre, develops a radically new conception of the event, a broad continuity can be
traced through Kojève to later, ‘anti-Hegelian’ thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard.
As I have suggested, in order to understand why Kojève’s lectures in Paris in
the 1930s – and the Hegel ‘revival’ in general which began in the 1930s and gained
wider currency in the immediate post-war years – were so seminal in their impact, it is
necessary to consider the importance at that time of a form of philosophy that dealt
directly with the significance of history and events. As Michael S. Roth notes,
academic philosophy in France after World War I was dominated by the neo-
Kantianism of Leon Brunschvicg.1 History for this neo-Kantian approach meant the
march of scientific progress, and philosophy was essentially reduced to epistemology.
Althusser, writing in 1950 about the ‘bourgeois’ return to Hegel, claims that before
1930 Hegel was seen in France as the ‘bad German … of World War I, the spiritual
father of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm – might makes right, and so on.’ The dialectic
was seens as a form of irrationalism, whereas French philsophers had ‘Descartes and
self-evidence on their side, the simple fact of the lucid mind and “the great tradition of
French spiritualism”.’2 In contrast to this complacent academic rationalism, which
appeared to many students and young philosophers as irrelevant and out of touch, the
Hegel revival of the 1930s represented an engagement with the world. This new
interest in Hegel, read alongside Marx, had an energising effect on a philosophical
scene which now saw the possibility of coming to terms with history, with events in
the world. In the 1930s and 1940s, reading and interpreting Hegel is a pursuit that is
intimately linked to political actuality. Kojève, for example, writes in 1946:

Thus we can say that for the moment, any interpretation of Hegel, if it is more
than idle chatter, is but a programme of struggle of work (one of these
“programmes” being called Marxism). And that means that the work of an
interpreter of Hegel has the meaning of a work of political propgaganda.3

In general terms, French thinkers such as Kojève, Hyppolite and Merleau-

Ponty rejected the subjectivist idealism of the French academic rationalism which
dominated the early part of the century . They took from Hegel the notion that
consciousness is not given, but rather develops in the world. Of course, the
momentous and complex events which shook the world in the first part of the century,
culminating in the Second World War, had much to do with this shift. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, who had attended Kojève’s seminar and who was close to Hyppolite,
conveys the shock of the historical world impinging upon the French Cartesian
consciousness in his essay for the first issue of Les Temps modernes, ‘The War Has
Taken Place’, the title of which conveys the shock of a philosophical consciousness
plunged into history.4 The French were, he says ‘consciousnesses naked before the
world’, thinking freedom and peace ‘the natural lot of men’, rather than a specific set
of historical circumstances: ‘We did not know that this was what it was to live in
peace, in France, and in a certain world situation.’5 It is the war that has forced this
naked, naïve consciousness to confront the intentions behind, and consequences of,
actions, as well as the complex network of actors in the world. Merleau-Ponty
imagines the motives of one of the authors of the petition that all French professors
were asked to sign in 1944, entreating Petain to intervene in order to stop the war. It
would be too simplistic, he claims, to assume that such an individual would be a
traitor. It is rather the case that this imaginary French professor believes in abstract
and universal ideals, which ignore the necessity of action in a world situated within
the course of history:

For him, the passions of war do not exist: they gain their apparent strength
from men who are free at every moment. […] There are no empires, no
nations, no classes. On every side there are only men who are always everyday
for freedom and happiness, always able to attain them under any regime,
provided they take hold of themselves and recover the only freedom that
exists: their free judgement. There is only one evil, war itself, and only one
duty, refusing to believe in victories of right and civilization and putting an
end to war. So this solitary Cartesian thinks – but he does not see his shadow
behind him projected onto history as onto a wall, that meaning, that
appearance which his actions assume on the outside, that Objective Spirit
which is himself.6

The a-historical, universal Cartesian consciousness, given before it engages

with the world, is confroned with the complexity of historical events, and active
subjects. Undoubtedly, the necessity of rejecting this abstract version of subjectivity is
at the heart of Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.7 The Cartesian claim
that, ‘I am a thinking being’, does not, Kojève asserts, satisfy Hegel. Hegel is not only
a thinking being, but also the bearer of an absolute Knowledge, primarily because he
is able to think historically. He does not, unlike his philosophical contemporaries,
condemn Napoleon and his victory at Jena, but rather understands the historical
reality of this victory. Hegel understands that Napoleon perfects the ideal of the
French Revolution by realising it.8 Hegel thinks and acts in the world, not as a free-
floating Cartesian consciousness. He understands the events that are unfolding around
him as he hears from his study the noise of Napoleon’s victory:

To begin with, he is a man of flesh and blood, who knows that he is such.
Next, this man does not float in an empty space. He is seated on a chair, at a
table, writing with pen on paper. And he knows that all of these objects did not
fall from the sky; he knows that those things are the products of something
called human work. […] He knows that he is hearing shots from Napoleon’s
cannons at the Battle of Jena. Hence he knows that he lives in a World in
which Napoleon is acting.9

Michael S. Roth identifies the distinction between for us and in itself as the
major theme of French Hegelianism.10 The for us is the domain of history, and
historical development is inseparable from the development of conscousness. Eric
Weil, for example, proposes a Hegelian reading of philosophy as an effort to
legitimate a form of life by means of discursive reasoning. Philosophy must provide
truths which can be discursively legitimated in order to provide community with
meaning and direction, a sens.11 For Weil, narratives provide a way of reflexively
understanding our actions. We turn to history to provide narratives within which our
actions have meaning, and these narratives help us to achieve self-consciousness as
communities.
Similarly, the opening words of Kojève’s Introduction state, ‘Man is Self-
Consciousness’,12 but this conception of history is less tentative than Weil’s. Weil
emphasises that it is possible to know the direction in which the train of history is
travelling without boarding the train; and violence is not necessarily an integral part
of the direction of history, but may be an attempt to slow the train.13 In short, it is in
principle possible to discern the direction of history, but it is not yet over. For Kojève,
on the other hand, history really is at an end, and the ‘bloody battle’ for recogntion is
very much part of the hsitorical process that has brought us to the end. The motor for
the development of self-consciousness is human desire, which is essentially the desire
for recognition. Desire transforms Being, and moves man to action because it ‘dis-
quiets’, and all action is ‘negating’. In this way, Kojève famously ‘anthropologises’
Hegel; the negating action of every consciousness engages in a battle for recogntion
with other consciousnesses. The fact that certain individuals are prepared to risk death
leads to the emergence of the first social relations of master and slave in Antiquity.
The slave is the defeated adversary who has not been willing to risk his life: ‘He has
preferred slavery to death, and that is why, by remaining alive, he lives as a Slave.’14
The labour of the slaves transforms these social relations into the world of capital,
which is in turn overthrown by the victory of the workers over capital. The initial
Fight for recognition leads to a period of Work, which in turn leads to a a final Fight
which completes the liberation which is begun by the slaves Work:

It is in and by the final Fight, in which the working ex-slave acts as combatant
for the sake of glory alone, that the free citizen of the universal and
homogeneous State is created; being both Master and Slave, he is no longer
either the one or the other, but is the unique “synthetical” or “total” Man, in
whom the thesis of Mastery and the antithesis of Slavery are dialectically
“overcome” […].15

In this way, Kojève synthesises Heidegger, who understands the importance of death
in Hegel’s philosophy, and Marx, who understood the dynamic of labour created by
the drive for recognition. To give an account of history, Kojève claims, is necessarily
to give an account of Man as a ‘free and historical being’.16 The dialectical movement
of man’s real existence is the movement by which being continues to be itself but
does not remain the same. Kojève summarises thus: ‘Freedom = Negativity = Action
= History.’17 Man is a historical being, who ‘mediates’ himself in and by his
existence.18
Kojève argues that this process of death, struggle and labour form a single
movement which leads humanity towards the end of history, and that Hegel correctly
identified the arrival of this end with Napoleon’s victory at Jena and the First Empire.
Napoleon’s victory represents the arrival of a ‘universal and homogeneous state’ in
which the opposition of master and slave is finally overcome. Two qualifications were
necessary for the notion of the end of history to be tenable. Firstly, it was necessary to
correct Hegel’s erroneous inclusion of nature in his dialectic. Secondly, Napoleon’s
victory only provides the seeds for the universal state, and this perfect state remained
to be accomplished. Until 1945, it seems that Kojève believed that Stalin was
effectively carrying out the project inaugurated by Napoleon, but by the end of the
war Kojève had apparently modified his historical schema. The shifts in opinion are
outlined in a now-famous footnote added to the second edition of the Introduction,
published shortly before Kojève’s death. 19 In 1948, Kojève writes in his footnote, he
realised that Hegel was in fact right to see in the battle of Jena the end of History:
‘What has happened since then was but an extension in space of the universal
revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon.’20 He now
considered that the United States represented the end of history, a return to satisfied
animality. Visits to the United States and the U.S.S.R. between 1948 and 1958
convinced him that the Americans were simply rich Sino-Soviets. Of course, as is
well-known, one more twist remains in the tale, and a trip to Japan in 1959 changes
his point of view again. Japanese snobbery – the pure formality of Noh Theatre, the
tea ceremony, and the art of flower arranging – indicates a future which will be
human rather than animal, a way for humans to be subjects opposed to the object. The
future – from the viewpoint of the 1960s – may well herald a ‘Japanisation’ of the
West, a formal continuation of humanity in a post-historical world.
I would suggest that Kojève’s Hegelian reading of history is thoroughy
marked by a particular notion of the event, which is underpinned by nothing less than
an obsession with death. This reading of events is nowhere better encapsualted than in
Kojève’s celebrated assessment of the events of May 1968: ‘Nobody died. Nothing
happened.’ Similarly, the hope for humanity that he finds in a ‘Japanisation’ of the
West is demonstrated in the fact that ‘every Japanese is in principle capable of
committing, from pure snobbery, a perfectly “gratuitous” suicide.’21 This is precisely
the kind of ‘historical’ reading of events that is challenged by thinkers like Lyotard or
Deleuze. In short, the event is essentially linked to the heroism of death. Blanchot’s
distinction between death as an event to which the ‘I’ has a personal relation, and
death as an inaccessible and impersonal event to which the ‘I’ can have no relation,
underpins this new reading of the event. Taking Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘untimely’
as a model, thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard emphasise that the meaning of
certain events – such as ‘1968’ – always remains to be determined and cannot be
contained within narrative. The untimely disrupts narrative and representation, and
philosophy’s task is no longer to understand the historical sense of the event, but in
some way to become ‘worthy’ of the event.
Gilles Deleuze, for example, develops the notion of the ‘pure’ event, drawing
in part on Stoic philosophy.22 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari suggest
that all historical events are divided between two planes, actual and virtual: ‘what
History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience,
but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing concept,
escapes History.’23 It is the virtual side of the event that interests Deleuze, the
‘enthusiasm’ – to borrow the Kanitian term – or the ‘becoming’ of the event, which is
not limited to its actualisation. In aesthetic terms, the most ordinary of events cast us
as visionaries, if we are aware of this ‘pure reserve’, the virtual plane that intersects
with the actualisation of the event. This visonary approach to the event is, for
Deleuze, at the heart of the films of Ozu and Antonioni.24 The ‘actor’ is replaced by a
‘seer’, a visionary.
Writing in 1989, Lyotard suggests that Kojève’s reading of Hegel and later
French thought, including French Nietzscheanism, share a certain continuity, despite
the divergent approaches outlined above. Essentially, he argues that French thought in
the twentieth century is preoccupied with a theme which dates back to the Revolution,
the ‘crisis of the people’.25 From the end of the 1920s, Lyotard claims, French
thinkers – this includes philosophers, writers and artists - engage in a reflection upon
the ‘profound transformations’ which affect the nature of community and ‘subject’
which is revealed by these transformations. In short, the subject is confronted with
events.
1
Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France
London: Cornell University Press), p. 8.
2
Louis Alhusser, ‘The Reurn to Hegel’ in L. Althusser, Early Writings: The Spectre of Hegel, edited
by F. Matheron, translated by G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), p. 173.
3
Aleaxndre Kojève, ‘Hegel, Marx et le christianisme’, Critique, no. 7 (décembre 1946), p. 336.
4
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
5
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, p. 140
6
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, pp. 145-6
7
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
8
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 34-5.
9
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 34.
10
Michael S. Roth, p. 22
11
See Eric Weil, ‘De l’intérêt que l’on prend à l’histoire’, Recherches philosophiques, no. 4 (1935),
reprinted in Essais et conférences, vol. 1 (Paris, 1970).
12
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 3.
13
Eric Weil, Hegel et l’état (Paris, 1950), p. 77.
14
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit,
edited by Allan Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols (London: Cornell University Press, 1969), p.
16.
15
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 231.
16
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 209
17
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 209
18
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 232.
19
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 159-62
20
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 160
21
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 162
22
For a useful summary of Deleuze’s notion of the ‘pure event’, which I draw on here, see Paul Patton,
Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 26-7
23
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), p. 156.
24
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), p. 160.
25
Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, translated by Bill Readings and Paul Geiman (UCL Press,
1993), p. 139.