Alexandre Kojve After Revolutionary Terror by Hager Weslati 4 June 2013 0 Comments Kojeve's theory of revolutionary action can

an provide us with a better perspective on the historical significance of the more recent revolutions across the 'middle-eastern' region of the 'Dernier monde nouveau'. The Russian book cover of Kojves Notion of Authority If the French and Rus-sian revolu-tions provided two mod-els of post-revolutionary polit-ics, neither of them led to the real-isa-tion of a uni-ver-sal and homo-gen-ous state, an empir-ical exist-ence where State, Right and Reli-gion would become obsol-ete. Kojves overlooked theory of revolutionary action describes a mode of existence ruled by the uni-ver-sal and homo-gen-ous author-ity of judges, lead-ers and mas-ters within the hori-zon of post-revolutionary ter-ror and the global par-tic-u-lar bour-geois state. Often described as the philo-sopher of the end of his-tory, Kojve mostly wrote about a form of mod-ern post-revolutionary existence where history becomes bad infinity. As Picassos Guernica comes to Tunis in the next two days, and on-going pop-u-lar protest is reclaiming public spaces around the world, Kojves theory of revolu-tion-ary action can provide us with a bet-ter per-spect-ive on the his-tor-ical significance of the more recent revolutions across the middle-eastern region of the Dernier monde nouveau. The most common misinterpretation of Alexandre Kojves philosophy has some-thing to do with a footnote on the post-historical condition which he added to the second edi-tion of his lec-tures on Hegel. A closer read-ing of his oeuvre attests to the fact that vir-tu-ally his life-time intel-lec-tual work was not about the end of his-tory but rather a ter-ri-fy-ing reflec-tion on how human his-tory is, in one of its chapters, noth-ing other than bad infin-ity within the ever reced-ing hori-zon of the post-revolutionary heterogeneous and particular bourgeois state. Since the mid 30s, Kojve scan-dal-ised the audi-ence of his lec-tures on Hegel with the lurid sub-sti-tu-tion of Napo-leon with Stalin. The former, he claimed, is the key to unlock-ing the mys-tery of the Phe-nomen-o-logy of Spirit, but in his view, Stalin is the man of action who inaugurated the era of the post-revolutionary state. Who is Kojves Stalin in the context of his philosophy of action, and more precisely revolutionary action within historical, that is to say, human time? What exactly hap-pens when the tyrant of the French revolution mutates into the tyrant of the Russian Revolution? What does Stalin mean in the context of the theme of Saint Russia, its princely myths and Orthodox Christianity, to Kojve who used to refer to God as my colleague?

Both the tragic Napoleon and the farcical Stalin as tyrants of the postrevolutionary state were in actual fact products of the same his-tor-ical con-di-tion and similar, in that respect, to other tyrants evoked in one of Kojves letters to Carl Schmitt. Amer-ican indus-tri-al-ist Henry Ford seems to have some-thing in com-mon with his polit-ical enemy, for-eign min-is-ter and devout Sta-lin-ist Viacheslav Molotov in a cow-boy hat. Even more disturbing, is the post-revolutionary tyrant evoked in Kojves 1942 manuscript on authority where he portrays Marchal Petain as a humi-li-ated father of Nazi-occupied France, and his project for a rvolution nationale as a simulacrum revolution. The Kojevean notion of author-ity rests on four irre-du-cible pil-lars: Judge, Mas-ter, Leader and Father. Inter-est-ingly, the author-ity of the father is iden-ti-fied as the weak-est link in the post-revolutionary state. Kojves astounding statement in La Quain-zaine littraire in 1968 when he claimed: I was a communist, I had no reason to leave Russia makes sense only in light of his interpretation of the postrevolutionary state as a uni-ver-sal con-di-tion with a uni-form type of author-ity where right, mas-tery or lead-er-ship rule supreme. Sym-bol-ic-ally, when Kojve left Moscow at the end of January in 1920, he has already lost his father in Tsarist Russias war with Japan, then his step-father between the two Rus-sian revolutions. The Kojevean fatherless modern world has come into being ex-nihilo through a revolu-tion-ary act (of abso-lute free-dom). In other words, everything we recog-nise today as modern is an ideological offspring of the French and Russian revolu-tions. So when Kojve iden-ti-fied Marx with Heide-g-ger as key ref-er-ences in any post-Hegelian future philo-soph-ical pro-ject, he was bring-ing together the philosophy of work and the philosophy of death as defining parameters of our mod-ern post-revolutionary world. First, there is revolu-tion-ary action which must be under-stood in its mod-ern dimen-sion as some-thing dif-fer-ent from ancient revolts. Then, there is the neces-sary moment of revolu-tion-ary ter-ror, a point where the abso-lute free-dom of revolu-tion-ary action is sup-pressed by an equally abso-lute form of freedom. The modern revolutionary, unlike his or her pagan counterpart, can no longer aspire to a sacred death nor to a symbolic burial. The casualties of modern revolu-tions died a death which must not be taken per-son-ally, so to speak and is no longer even a legal ques-tion for jur-idical author-ity. Con-sequently, the ana-chron-istic mar-tyrs and saints of the post-revolutionary world can only be rel-ics of a pre-modern consciousness, and the state which may arise from their ashes or on their mum-mi-fied corpse is a derel-ict mauso-leum for a deluded his-tor-ical consciousness. Both revolu-tion-ary action and revolu-tion-ary ter-ror are dia-lect-ic-ally sur-passed while being con-served in a post-revolutionary State dom-in-ated by work, and which Kojve pre-dicts will tend to be nation-al-ist first, then imper-ial and ulti-mately uni-ver-sal. The end or aim of the post-revolutionary mod-ern state is to become both uni-ver-sal and homo-gen-eous, a point at which it actu-ally dis-ap-pears as a polit-ical entity, because it will no longer have an enemy. 2

In Kojves reading, neither universality nor homogeneity have been reached in the seem-ingly inter-min-able post-revolutionary state. We are indeed still liv-ing in the his-tor-ical after-math of revolu-tion-ary ter-ror, but in dif-fer-ent and seem-ingly opposite conditions in relation to the homogenous and the universal. In this spe-cific con-text of his philo-soph-ical reflec-tion on mod-ern revolu-tions, and around 1943, Kojve shifts gear from the phenomenology of spirit to a phenomenology of right. What this shift means in Kojves oeuvre is that he was effect-ively enga-ging with a philo-soph-ical pro-ject on post-revolutionary his-tory and the causes of its de-realisation rather than, as widely pop-ular-ised from Fukuyama to Agam-ben, indul-ging in a play-ful and cyn-ical reflec-tion on the end of his-tory and the begin-ning of animality. Whether sub-jects of the abso-lute hege-mony of bour-geois right, or as the nonparticular entit-ies of the total-it-arian state labour-ing under equal eco-nomic con-di-tions, we are all liv-ing under the uni-form his-tor-ical time of post-revolutionary ter-ror and abso-lute freedom. Think-ing this par-tic-u-lar post-revolutionary con-di-tion in those terms is the philosophical task recognised in Kojves work in the early 40s and which may also provide a bet-ter con-text to under-stand his Latin Empire or the Russian manu-script he left with Georges Bataille, a copy of which was allegedly dis-patched to Stalin in mys-ter-i-ous circumstances. In Kojves work after the lectures on Hegel, the scale of universality and homo-gen-eity are expli-citly pos-ited as the hypo-thet-ical frame which meas-ures to what extent the terrorist state born out of revolutionary action and revolutionary ter-ror, mean-ing the human (athe-ist) mod-ern world foun-ded by an act of abso-lute free-dom, have man-aged to sub-late these two mutu-ally anti-thet-ical forms of action. Kojve left us with a sin-is-ter con-clu-sion: neither the West-ern world cre-ated from the French Revolu-tion, nor the East-ern world which came out of the Rus-sian Revolu-tion man-aged to estab-lish a per-fect model of the uni-ver-sal and homo-gen-ous state. This is pre-cisely the world we all share today within the same tri-angle of a global author-ity sup-por-ted by judges, mas-ters and leaders. When Kojves life ended in Brus-sels on June 4th 1968 while arguing for European integ-ra-tion and the com-mon mar-ket, he may not have been, as his bio-grapher suggests, a renegade intellectual who confused Reason with Raison dtat. His transition from the Republic of Letters (a phrase he used disparagingly to describe the bour-geois intel-lec-tual of the post-revolutionary state), to the com-pany of inter-na-tional polit-ical eco-nom-ists is not con-tra-dict-ory in the con-text of his philo-sophy. Kojve, an accel-er-a-tion-ist avant la lettre, was per-haps work-ing under the uni-ver-sal author-ity of the par-tic-u-lar and het-ero-gen-eous empire, he astutely recog-nised as such, in order to unhinge it from its bad infin-ity and read-just its course in the orbit of its end. Hide Ref-er-ences 3

Alex-an-dre Kojve, Intro-duc-tion la lec-ture de Hegel. (Gal-li-mard, 1947), Esquisse dune phnomnologie du droit (Gallimard, 1981) Carl Schmitt Kojve Correspondence in Interpretation: a Journal of Political Philo-sophy Vol. 29, n. 1, Fall 2001; Extraits dun indit dAlexandre Kojve: Esquisse dune doctrine de la politique franaise (a version of which is popularised as the Latin Empire) in col-loques de la BNF : Hom-mage Alex-an-dre Kojve; The Notion of Author-ity (Verso, 2013) Bio-graph-ical sources: Domi-n-ique Auf-fret, Alex-an-dre Kojve: la philo-sophie, ltat, la fin de lHistoire (Grasset & Fasquelle, 1990), A revised intellectual biography focused on Kojves formative early 20s mid 40s was com-piled by Marco Filoni in Il filo-sofo della domen-ica. La vita e il pen-siero di Alex-an-dre Kojve (2008) Hager Weslati, King-ston Uni-ver-sity & the Lon-don Gradu-ate School