This paper was given at the international symposium, Russian Literature, Philosophy, and Religious Thought in a Time of Catastrophe, which took place at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, March 2023 by Jeff Love.
Alexandre Kojève writes in Atheism (1931) that the “human being in the world” is “given to herself as a potential suicide, and if she cannot kill the world (as a whole) by killing herself, she can kill the world for herself.” My paper investigates the connection between killing the world, negation and freedom with reference to Atheism and the Hegel lectures from the 1930s. Its primary aim is to examine the concept of active negation central not only to Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel but also more broadly to his thinking as a whole. I argue that “killing the world,” as Kojève puts it in Atheism, is a precursor to this concept of negation as the negation of the given, of what is static, in the Hegel lectures: such negation is in fact the creative engine of history understood precisely as the negation of the given terminating in liberation from the given (or the world) in a “tipping point,” the end of history. By emphasizing the connection of killing or, rather, “murder,” with negation, I seek to address the violence essential to Kojève’s thinking, a thinking of what I may call with some irony “productive criminality or terror” since it involves nothing less than the annihilation (anéantissement/уничтожение) of all barriers to the realization of itself, a “killing of the world” that frees us finally and definitively from being. Kojève’s active negation is both a culmination and sophisticated expression of the “nihilism” associated with Russian terrorism and, in particular, with Bakunin.
My essay takes up Kojève’s thinking first by connecting it to Bakunin and Bakunin’s Hegelianism which, I might add, is far more interesting than the critical reception has been willing to admit. I then provide a more detailed account of Kojève’s concept of negation, adding a few comments on its broader connection with freedom and delivery from the horrors of individualism, chief among which is death—as Kojève notes, death occurs only for individuals and one could usefully consider individuality as defined by death (thus putting the celebrated liberal praise of individuality in an unaccustomed light). I conclude with Kojeve’s discussion of political terror as a parody of θέωσις where terror forces citizens to decide their attitude towards individuality and incarnated being.
I.
Mikhail Bakunin is one of the many Russian thinkers who fell under the spell of Hegel in the 1840s. His most active engagement with Hegel’s thought seems to have been during the years 1838-1842. Bakunin’s development of Hegel’s thought deserves more than passing attention or the by now banal claim that Bakunin was a radical left Hegelian whose infatuation with Hegel was short lived. Some critics have thought in fact that Bakunin was initially a conservative or “right” Hegelian who became radicalized.
The talk of Bakunin’s “right” or “left” Hegelianism emerges from a basic ambiguity in Bakunin’s thinking itself that Kojève’s own thinking reflects as well. The basic issue at question is whether Bakunin’s Hegelianism was one of self-abnegation or self-assertion, the former broadly associated with the “right” orientation, the latter with the “left.” Bakunin’s intriguing approach to Hegel fuses both—there is no real Hegelianism of the left or right but rather both converge in self-abnegating self-assertion and self-asserting self-abnegation such that neither the one pole nor the other adequately describes the process of development in Hegel’s thought. In this specific sense, Bakunin is a Hegelian of left and right because he sees in both the selfsame movement, an authentically Hegelian attitude.
He does so based on a relatively simple premise: that each individual holds within herself the universal and comes to express herself most forcefully in the universal or as the universal comes to show itself in the individual. The process of self-assertion is one of universalization whereby the individual becomes universal and the universal becomes individual. The question often asked of whether Bakunin is more Fichtean or Hegelian dissolves when the will is shown not merely to be a forerunner of the will to power in Heidegger’s reading, a will to subjugate all things to a narrow (Cartesian) concept of the subject. To the contrary, the will is not one that subjugates the whole to a partial view (and we might indeed wonder how this is possible) but that strives to open up the individual to the whole by the individual’s acquiring knowledge of it and, at the same time, of herself. As before, the process is mutually sustaining, for grasping more about the whole is at once grasping more about the part and vice-versa, to use the language of whole and parts first rigorously provided to us by Euclid.
The crucial connection with Kojève is Bakunin’s concept of development towards the universal through negation, Bakunin’s Negieren. The Hegelian origins of the negative as the motor of conceptual development are obvious, for Hegel himself writes famously of the ungeheure Macht des Negativen in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. More interesting in Bakunin is his quite elegant simplification (or generalization) of the Hegelian negative: for Bakunin negation is above all the negation of attachment to closed individuality itself. If the foremost hindrance to discovery of universality is the stubborn attachment to the individual and the prerogatives of the body or incarnate existence that determine it, the way to break through this hindrance is progressively to reduce the primacy of individual existence, to negate our attachment to it. The various interested forms of thought one may assume on the way to the universal are each determined by a specific attitude to finite wants and fears.
There is of course nothing surprising from a Christian point of view to this notion of negation that frees us from limited perspectives by negating the needs of the body, its wants and fears, that hold us trapped or “closed up” (закупорен) within our finitude. There is nothing surprising from the Christian view as well in taking the purview of negation to a radical extreme where individuality as a form of closure is completely overcome. Yet, it is precisely at the limit of this overcoming that the questions arise. For Christianity, at least orthodox Christianity, does not sing the praises of suicide or literal physical self-destruction as the final moment of liberation. Instead, we are left with the vexed and inconsistent tradition of resurrection and the heresies that attend the question of what it truly means to be free of the finite being in God or to separate the two natures that are doctrinally unified in Christ, that is, unified by dogmatic Nicene fiat.
Bakunin is quite free of dogmatic cant as befits a revolutionary, and Bakunin’s negation seems to come perilously close to literal self-immolation as the highest and, indeed, most genuinely an-archic act. For freed from physical necessity, the ultimate ἀρχή, one can be finally free, like a god. The cost is ironically a rather great one for every commonsense point of view must look askance at freedom through suicide, though it is, plainly spoken, hard to imagine any other freedom that is not a creature of the imagination or wish fulfillment or infantile illusion. Bakunin should be taken much more seriously, and his Hegelianism is intimately connected to his anarchism if we consider that anarchism from this perspective.
So we come to terror and terrorism as modes of radical negation and liberation. For if the highest form of negation is self-negation, then such may be the proper end of a human life and, indeed, in the political context of other human lives that resist the great, terrible and noble truth of self-abnegation by sticking to their selfish interests which, by definition, eradicate, if only in potential, the interests of others. Yet, it is not merely this privileging of self over other that is problematic (as we say nowadays) but the mere notion of privileging—for as long as selfish interest may reign in any way, human beings are stuck in hierarchy and structure, in master and slave relations, in inequality and strife—in a word, they are all at war, a war that may be brought to an end only through terror, the ultimate terror of complete self-abnegation.
II.
Enter Kojève and active negation. But before I take a look at Kojève’s thinking about active negation in his famed Hegel lectures—and, specifically, the concept of terror he develops briefly in those lectures—I should like to consider a fecund passage from Atheism:
The human being… reminds us of a person in a swamp. She knows that the swamp as a whole can take her away, and if she could find something to hang onto, she would be completely safe. But she cannot. She tries to take hold of as much as possible, lays down boards, etc., but she never knows if she has taken enough. She stands on a small bit of land but does not know if she will hold it for long and fears remaining on it. She looks around, seeks another small bit of land (a closer one?), avoiding the slippery spots (but, perhaps, they are firmer?), jumps onto it and is afraid again, searches again, etc., without end or, more accurately, until the end: she will run until she drowns or for as long as she has not drowned, she will run— such a person is not serene and not secure; she is in terror.
The human being, given to herself in this way, is given to herself in the tonus of terror: she is in terror in the terrible world of killing and death. It is terrible for her to see the destruction of things (is it not terrifying in a fire?); it is terrible to see death and killing. But not only this; she is in terror where there was death, where what was is no longer (is it not terrifying in a “ghost town”?), where she sees the absence of whatever could have been (indeed, it is terrible in the desert where there is so much “unfilled” space), but especially where she sees nothing (how terrible at night!). She is in terror as well where there is no end, but there is finitude where there is still no death or killing, but where they can be (indeed, it is terrible to be around a terminally ill person or one condemned to death; and is it not terrible where it “smells of death”?). And what does it mean that for the “human being in the world” it is always and everywhere terrible or, at the least, that it can be terrible for her always and everywhere?
The givenness to the “human being in the world” of killing and death outside herself (i.e., in the world) is the givenness of the finitude of the world in itself, the givenness of the world in the tonus of terror.[1]
Terror is fundamental to Kojève’s understanding of living in the world. And, as we may surmise, there is more than merely a hint of gnostic disdain for the world in the notion of negation Kojève develops as a terroristic “remedy” to the oppressive terror of existence that is, as my account of Bakunin suggests, rooted in our rootedness in existential neediness from which we cannot free ourselves as long as we continue to live.
We are in Kojève’s words given to ourselves in the “tonus of terror.” Here Kojève adapts two basic concepts from Heidegger’s thought, that of Befindlichkeit or “orientation/situation” and that of terror or Angst.[2] Yet, I think Kojève broadens the hold that terror has upon us to move quite beyond Heidegger for whom Angst is primarily a mood (Stimmung/tonus) expressing ineluctable homelessness or Unheimlichkeit. While there is no doubt a similar aspect in Kojève what differs is Kojève’s remarkable focus not only on living in the world but on the fact that one dies in the world and may die violently. As Kojève notes, nobody dies a natural death. It is precisely this terrible fact, that we live not only in a world of living beings pursuing their lives but also of human beings killing and murdering other human beings, that in this world we are completely oppressed by our mortal need at every turn and the violence that must attend us either internally or externally—this fact extends Heidegger’s sense of the equation of Angst with nothingness, homelessness, a collapse of reality, to the pervasive terror before our mortal wants and fears and of other human beings as the agents of our termination. Terror describes our situatedness in the world, to be sure, in the broadest possible way for we would seem to fear dying in the world far more than living in it. Kojève is preoccupied with want, with fear, with death.
I turn now to two important moments in Kojève’s Hegel lectures that, taken together, connect Kojève’s notion of negation, so crucial to action in Kojève’s account of Hegel, with death. In doing so, I hope to be able to bring together the various strands of my account to align Bakunin with Kojève in a distinctive and provocative interpretation of Hegel but also of a central problem they all address, if in different ways: the mode of deification of a finite being, of what Sergei Bulgakov refers to as “conditional immortality.”[3]
The first moment:
Now, what is the I of Desire—the I of a hungry man, for example—but a void avid for content; a void that wants to be filled by what is full by voiding this fullness, to occupy with its fullness the void caused by overcoming the fullness that was not its own? Therefore, to speak generally: if the true (absolute) philosophy, unlike Kantian and pre-Kantian philosophy, is not a philosophy of Consciousness, but rather a philosophy of Self-Consciousness, a philosophy conscious of itself, taking account of itself, justifying itself, knowing itself to be absolute and revealed by itself to itself as such, then the Philosopher must—Man must—in the very foundation of his being not only be passive and positive contemplation, but also be active and negating Desire. Now, if he is to be so, he cannot be a Being that is, that is eternally identical to itself, that is self-sufficient. Man must be a void, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in Being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself.[4]
Human beings are to the extent they negate. In other words, the human aspect of human being is profoundly negative, a void (un vide) that should never fill itself with anything other than itself—that is, negation should continually express itself by negating whatever resists it until there is nothing left to resist it. Negation is a pure energy of movement, pure action, that cannot result in the construction of any positive “thing” as an end, for to do so would be to reify, and thus eradicate, the pure energy understood as negation. The crucial aspect to Kojève’s negation is that it is movement, destructive or transformative—but ultimately destructive—that cannot come to a halt. Anything that is static resists negation and thwarts it.
By destroying the given and therewith all restrictive ties to the given, negation liberates the void that is the human being from its “content,” that is, from the restrictions on its free movement. Like Bakunin’s liberation of the self from the ἀρχή of present wants and needs, Kojève’s negation attempts to liberate the void that is the human being from any and all content since content limits and ties the human being to conditioned mortal life—there can be no conditional immortality for the human being. To the extent nature retains its hold on us, to the extent nature dominates us through the terror we feel and perceive at the thought of our mortal dependence, the human being remains trapped in the cycle of want and fear, the cycle of nature. I use this term on purpose with its echo of the Buddhist samsāra because Kojève’s own clearest attempt to explain our servitude comes from his account of what is most dishonorable or deceptive about Buddhist ascetic practice—as long as we continue to eat, to affirm our attachment to this world, we are enslaved. The deceptively free ascetic is corrupt because he claims freedom while continuing to live in selfish servitude to the body.
The ascetic who does not go far enough is a deceiver. The undeceived is utterly free of fear, is no longer in terror, and rids herself of terror through the negation of the ties to the given that hold her in such terror. Rather than clinging to the boards floating in the swamp in the vain hope of temporary peace, the truly free human being gladly drowns having first freed itself of any need to hold onto any board or anything at all. Freedom and negation are like death—they are death.
The second moment:
That is to say that thought and speech, revealing the Real, are born from negating Action that realizes Nothingness (le Néant) in annihilating Being: the givenness of Man—in Struggle, and the givenness of Nature—through Work (that results, besides, from real contact with death in Struggle). That is to say, therefore, that human being is nothing more than this Action: it is death that lives a human life.[5]
The “death that lives a human life”—this is a phrase that hangs over all of Kojève’s work and gives a clear sense of the connection of active negation with death. The response to the terror of our existence in the world is action, negating action—terror—that aims to free us of the wretched terror of our existence, one marked, as Kojève notes, by the murder we call simply “natural.” We engage in terror, that is, the elimination of the attachments that cause us terror in the world as a way of liberation.
Is this way really one of terror? Is it terrorism to want to free us from the interest in existence that causes us such suffering in our lives? Kojève, supposedly so detached and ironical, shows his clear perception of our plight, murdered by human beings or nature, what matters the difference—we die always before our time. How do we miss this simple point: no one dies on time! We may say, for example, that someone dies well, and we may mean that because to continue living is only to suffer terribly. Death is, then, a comfort because life has become intolerable. But we would do better to ask why we have to endure such suffering? There is, plainly said, no way to die well, and Kojève is very clear—we live in terror so long as we live. This is the correlate to the freedom I mentioned above. The free human being is the one who no longer needs to eat or engage in any of the other basic bodily functions in order to continue living. As long as wants and fears prevail in our everyday existence, no matter how disguised or alleviated by illusion or palliative fiction, we live in terror and can only respond to such terror with terror—the willingness to negate our existence, rather to live in terror (and humiliation) in it.
In these moans there is expressed, first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not. There is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain; the consciousness that, despite all possible Wagenheims, you are wholly the slave of your teeth; that if someone wishes, your teeth will stop aching, and if not, they will go on aching for another three months; and that, finally, if you still do not agree, and protest even so, then the only consolation you have left is to whip yourself, or give your wall a painful beating with your fist, and decidedly nothing else.[6]
Is Kojève’s response truly “terror”? It is only terror if one remains within the very fears that perceive any rejection of the basic will to life, the tyrannical will to live, as terror—as disturbing. We are supposed to accept our lot as blessed are we not?
Kojève does address political terror, ominously in his Hegel lectures for 1936-37.
In the state of “absolute” Freedom, everyone wants to become dictator and impose his will on all others. Everyone then can be dictator; but he is then only a pseudo-dictator because the other wills remain particular and thus impenetrable to his. The idea of dictatorship is abstract. In order to realize it, one must actually suppress the particular wills: – by death (and Terror). Since there is no longer a universal will, there are only particular wills that one can only get to [atteindre] in their biological existence, not in their works, their actions, because they do nothing (they only oppose each other). Such a process could come to an end only through the extermination of all members of Society and through the suicide of the (pseudo) dictator. Terror is in fact nothing more than the suicide of Society itself.[7]
III.
Bakunin and Kojève affirm the rejection of existence as liberating—Freitod tut gut. One becomes like God by freeing oneself from the fear of death, from terror, and operates another terror on life by doing so. This divinity is scant comfort because it does not offer what the terrorized creature might truly want—immortality itself. Simple or Stoic indifference is not immortality—indifference can be felt only by a being for which indifference can matter—thus a being incapable of indifference. We cannot imagine immortality effectively as it is in itself because immortality is the creation of a mortal being—immortality is above all interested, it is the profound wish of the slave, the being subject to terror. A truly divine, unperturbed being, would presumably not have any of the concerns we do, it would not have any concerns at all.
Hence, Kojève’s politics is essentially insincere or skeptical. Politics for a truly divine being is a squared circle or mere nonsense—it must be. Hence, if Kojève talks a politics of liberation as a politics of liberation from terror requiring, as its basic condition of possibility, the liberation from the self, he means an all too finite solution (and what is an infinite solution?) to a problem that supposedly exceeds the finite being—or might do so. A finite solution to an infinite problem is a failure or an illusion. Does Kojève provide such an illusion?
We may speak of the end of history or the final state, the universal and homogeneous state, in this way. Yet, as should be obvious, genuine liberation requires no state. The state is rather the purgatorial realm of indecision between a conviction to remain with the flesh or to desert it. Here we come to the great question that lurks in all our discussions regarding the proper way of life for human beings—is it animal or material life, divine life or some combination of the two, the animal rationale or the being with two natures? Here we are quite obviously in the midst of the Christological question or the greatest question to afflict Christianity, source of many “heresies”—the question regarding the “true” nature of Christ as human or God or both or neither.
As we all know, there is no more vexed doctrinal question in Christian thought from Arius onward. What lies at the heart of this thinking, regardless of the endless complication or obfuscation of theological speculation, is a simple question: Are we an animal or a God or both, and, if both, which prevails or can prevail? For why should a God suffer as we do without salvation other than in an afterlife or in a realm of fancy from which no one has ever reported back to us accurately?
To close off my paper, I would like to open up the Christological debates reflected in it because they run—as a red thread—through much of Western thought and are particularly relevant to the remarkable possibilities made available to us by the current technological revolution.
Let us suppose (suitably enough) a triad implicit within the notion of two natures, which together create a third, the human being:
First, hell: the wholly animal or becoming animal, an attempt to consider ourselves as animals among other animals with no “spiritual” component, a form of materialism and hedonism and a variant of Epicureanism—in Kojève’s own words “bodies without spirits.”
Second, heaven: the wholly divine, a being freed entirely of limits understood as resulting from our rootedness in or dependence on a material world, i.e., in time and space.
Third, purgatory: the hybrid being, neither wholly animal, nor wholly “divine,” a being unable to balance itself or able to balance itself only by dogmatic fiat or metaphor, like the notion of θέωσις.
Kojève’s choice is to collapse the irresolvable tension inherent in the third option; he suggests thereby the impossibility of overcoming the hybrid being other than through its own elimination of itself. The proper aim of life is death.
Jeff Love is Research Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University. He is the author of The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (Columbia University Press, 2018), Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008), and The Overcoming of History in War and Peace (Brill, 2004). He has also published a translation of Alexandre Kojève’s Atheism (Columbia University Press, 2018), an annotated translation (with Johannes Schmidt) of F.W. J. Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (State University of New York Press, 2006), a co-edited volume, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and an edited volume, Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017). His most recent work is a translation of António Lobo Antunes’s novel Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water (Yale University Press, 2019).
Image: Karl Briullov, Last Day of Pompeii 1830-33
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[1] Alexandre Kojève, Atheism trans. Jeff Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 77.
[2] The term Befindlichkeit in English is rendered as either “state-of-mind” (Macquarrie and Robinson) or “attunement” (Stambaugh), neither of which is quite adequate to the German. Indeed, I am not sure an adequate translation is possible since Befindlichkeit suggests a basic orientation to the world, to one’s situation or situatedness in the world that is not merely cognitive but affective as well—indeed, the former is dependent in a determinative way on the latter. “State-of-mind” is probably too easily coopted as a “psychological” attitude and “attunement” is somewhat puzzling—both attempt to convey the underlying notion of Stimmung (mood/tuning) that Heidegger develops to define this basic orientation. And it is gently ironic that Heidegger’s term for orientation should in fact be disorienting to any intrepid translator.
[3] Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death tans. Roberto J. De La Noval (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2021), 40-75.
[4] Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 38.
[5] Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris : Gallimard, 1962), 550. See also, Alexandre Kojève, “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel” Interpretation vol. 3 2/3 Winter 1973: 133-134.
[6] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1994), 14-15.
[7] Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 143. My translation.