Fun with Hegel and Kojève: On Matthieu Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archives du Laboratoire de Mythologiques de la Modernité

 

Perhaps it is time to have fun with Hegel. In the past year I have now read two books that have taken up a relation to Hegel that could be referred to as playful, which is not to say that the stakes or questions of these books are not serious. The first was Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit, which posed the scandalous, and even heretical question, what if the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology was black. The second is Matthieu Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archives du Laboratoire de Mythologiques de la Modernité. Both books in different ways show how that Hegel's thought can be all the more productive,  and all the more interesting, if one changes from the question what did Hegel mean (admittedly not an easy question) to what does Hegel make it possible to say. (Also oddly enough, both books read Hegel's dialectic against the actual struggle of Frederick Douglass to liberate himself from his master). 

Renault's book is as much about Kojève as it is on Hegel, or more to the point, it begins with what Kojève did to Hegel. I have commented before on this blog and elsewhere of ambivalent I am about Kojève's take on Hegel. On the one hand, it is itself an incredibly productive reading of Hegel, which makes a few pages, six in some translations, not just a passage on self-consciousness, but on life, death, war, work, and desire, everything that makes us human, but it does so in a way that interrupts and in some sense misrepresents the trajectory of Hegel's thought, turning a moment in its development as it end point. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:

"[Kojève]'s powerful but interrupted reading of this passage is incredibly influential, defining a central passage in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Kojève’s interpretation shifts the passage from its place within the development of the Phenomenology to a set of questions about the role of desire, work, and death in the constitution of human existence and history. Kojève’s influential reading is interrupted because it more or less starts and begins with this passage, making provisional statements in a dialectical development of statements into independent theses and conclusions. The limitations of this anthropological reading must be traversed rather than avoided, since they are all drawn from the aspects that constitute so much of the passage’s appeal, and influence, for rethinking relations. The passage is situated between the anthropological invariants that illustrate it and the dialectical presentation that animates it."

Or, to put that same point in a more informal tone, suitable for a blog, Kojève always reminded me of a story from grad school. Once in a seminar on the Frankfurt School dedicated to discussing the introduction of Adorno's Negative Dialectics, a friend once insisted that we need to spend more time in class talking about the opening lines of the book, the lines "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried." After a long discussion of this passage, its invocation of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, and its conclusions about the soviet union, revolution, and the place of philosophy, etc, class was over. I turned to this friend and asked, "do you really think that the opening of that book is so important, more important than the rest of introduction?" They said, "I do not know; I only read the first page." Reading Kojève always feels like that, like he never quite got past the master and slave section of the Phenomenology so he decided to just spend his whole lecture talking about that. In doing so Kojève not only produced a new interpretation of Hegel, but he set down a strategy for future seminar students: when you haven't done all the reading just talk on and on about the part that you read, making it central.

Renault's book goes in a different direction, asking what if we took Kojève as not an interruption of Hegel and a partial reading of Phenomenology, but a production of a new myth, a myth of masters and slaves, struggle, work, revolution and recognition. It is this story that would be retold again in again, by Sartre, Fanon, de Beauvoir, etc., as a way of making sense not of Hegel but of the struggles that defined the twentieth century from anti-colonialism to feminism. Renault goes all in on this reading, on treating this story of masters and slaves as a modern myth. Here is how the book opens:

"Year 157 after the Mega tsunami which submerged 92% (approximately) of the inhabited land on our planet, eradicated almost all traces of civilization and generated chaos from which we are barely emerging. We, members of the brand new Mythological Analysis Laboratory of Modernity, are providing the public with an unprecedented archive of the world that existed before."

I have to admit that I did not expect such a beginning to a book on Hegel. I also admit that this is always my favorite part of any post-apocalytic story, the part where some relic form our world, the world that "existed before," is interpreted or misinterpreted. I would add that this is one way to write to the future, to assume that any reader that might exist will be looking at us from a different world. 

I do not want to suggest that Renault's book is a work of post-apocalytic science fiction, even if it borrows it as a framing device. It uses this lens for a rather creative interpretation  the master and slave is presented, as a myth, and as Lévi Strauss would remind us, myths are inseparable from their variations. The book treats many different authors from Francis Fukuyama to Axel Honneth, Sandra Harding to Angela Davis, as many variants on this fundamental myth.  This due to both its framing device, which is written in some distant future in which all these texts appear less as individual books written in particular places, as they do variations on the same theme, more like an oral tradition, like a folk tale. This conceit has its own methodological dimension as well. As Renault states in a closing section of book, a methodological section,  "A myth never exists as a monad; it subsists under the form of a multiplicity of parallel versions, often concurrent, sometimes contradictory, or even strictly opposite of each other, by virtue of a subtle variation of rules. We argue that the truth is not in myth but between them."

What makes Hegel/Kojève amendable to such a reading is not just the different variations of this story, but the fact that the story touches on what could be considered fundamentally mythic territory, that of the separation and constitution of humanity from the rest of the animals, what could be called, anthropogenesis. Moreover, in its various readings from Kojève to Fukuyama, it does not just engage with the beginning of history, with the origin of humanity, but its ending as well, the infamous end of history. Of course we could raise the question here that perhaps what lends itself to myth, these stories of origins and ends, are not really proper objects of philosophy, are questions that philosophy cannot actually answer. As Althusser argues the questions of the origin and end of the world are theological questions that philosophy inherited. In a more prosaic form, Stefano Geroulanos' book The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, poses the question what if we thought about society, humanity, etc. without resorting to some putative origin, some human nature, and instead recognized that we are always already in the midst of something which is as much a product of history as it is its precondition.

Of course Renault is not actually investigating the origin, or the end of history, but how these concepts are continually dialectically rewritten. As much as one might want to read the Master and Slave as an account of anthropogenesis, of the constitution of human desire in the desire for another's desire, for recognition, than one also has to consider that not every human in Hegel's story goes through this process of humanization. Many of the variations of Hegel's story consider the condition of non-recognition more rigorously than Hegel did. Such non-recognitions are split in two, race and gender, are two ways that humans are seen as less than human, as not only failed recognitions, but as refused the terms of recognition itself. Renault cites Fanon, on this anti-dialectic in which whiteness is the model for recognition that must be imitated but never duplicated. The history of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle suggests that the path to recognition, to full humanity, takes more complicated paths than a simple struggle for liberation.

The same could be said for gender. As Renault writes, "The dialectic of master and slave has always been doubled by another, the dialectic of man and woman." This dialectic is also a question of humanity, and its relation to its animal existence, and to dependence more broadly. It also has its own and different ideal of recognition, one found not through struggle but through love. Reading the different versions together, the way in which masters and slaves, recognition and non-recognition, has been used to make sense of not just slavery, but also colonialism, patriarchy, and racism, makes it possible to complicate the dialectic, adding multiple contradictions, or, more to the point, grasping that in actual human conflict there is always more than one contradiction at work. 

Renault is also the co-author of an interesting little book on DuBois' Double Consciousness

In the variations of the Master/Slave dialectic the failures are as interesting as the successes. One of the strange things about Kojève's interpretation is that it seems to posit and ending which does not take place. The slave arrives at self-consciousness through labor, through their transformation of the world, but this self-consciousness does not end at liberation, at overcoming the master. Instead we get Hegel's discussion of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness what Kojève calls ideologies, because they are in some sense justification of a revolutions failure.  The stoic is content to be internally free, and the skeptic and unhappy consciousness continue this move inward. If Hegel gives us a failed revolution, or an internalization of recognition, what would it take for this revolution to become real, become actual. This framed a question which animated Kojève and some of his immediate followers, what is a post revolutionary society. Is it a society of masters, or is it a society of slaves? These questions are made more pressing by the question of capitalism itself, which is hard to map onto a division between masters or slaves. As Renault writes, 

"It is true that the rights of the capitalist seem to construct an image of a synthesis between aristocratic law and bourgeois law: it admits that property can be acquired without work, in the manner of masters, and without struggle, in the manner of slaves. but it is a magic trick, an abstract synthesis, formal, and negative in the non-dialectical sense of the term, which assimilates the absence of struggle to a kind of work and the absence of work to a kind of struggle. Only the slaves without masters, the bourgeoisie, could invent something so twisted. No less tortured is the reconciliation between aristocratic property, the substrate of circulation, and property identified with its monetary value, its exchange value, in a constitutive confusion between circulating and fixed, (le meuble et l'immeuble), a pseudo-synthesis which has as its name "Capital."

If capital is unthinkable outside of the dialectic of master and slave, forcing us to entertain both the notion of a society of slaves, as every bourgeois serves capital, and a society of masters, in which everyone is recognized as a citizen, then we can ask the question is it truly our myth. One of the odd temporal displacements of Kojève is that coming after Marx (and Heidegger) he read Hegel in both a Marxist and Hegelian manner. As Renault puts it Hegel + Heidegger = Kojève, to which we could add Marx, or at least Marxism, as another factor of the equation (Hegel/Marx +Heidegger= Kojève). Which is not the same as reading Hegel as Marx did. It has always been my contention that Marx was not much interested in masters and slaves, finding it to be too conceptual, too abstract, for an understanding of labor as an actual relation. As Marx says of the Phenomenology, "The only labor which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labor." Some of the fascination of the master and slave in the twentieth century, fascination left in Kojève's wake, always seemed anachronistic, LARPing feudalism in the middle of capitalism. As Renault writes, "If Hegel had glimpsed the premises of the world to come, observed the first stages of capitalist production and even depicted in earlier texts a dialectic of technology and society, he proved incapable of grasping these transformations and had preferred taking refuge in idealism, the abstract work of the spirit." 

Renault's reading of the different figurations of master and slave is definitely provocative and interesting, but is it enough to answer the question of what makes this story our myth? What is about this story of conflict and recognition that makes it appear as the structure of our history and world? Althusser perhaps offers an answer in his discussion of Kojève and the turn to Hegel in the twentieth century. 

"But, little by little, new myths and masters emerged and gained prominence: they met the needs of a world plunged in crisis. Grosso modo, it can be said that the bourgeois philosophers changed masters when their world changed form, and that they made their transition from Kant to Hegel when capitalism made its from liberalism to imperialism...The philosophy of liberalism, which had, despite all, maintained a certain optimism and confidence in science and history, now began gradually to disappear: there sprang up philosophies of 'experience', 'action,' 'intuition', 'existence,' 'life', the 'hero' and, soon enough, of 'blood.' The world was emptied of its reason and peopled with these myths. 

Reading the master and slave as myth, as variations on the same theme, makes it possible to see the connections and deviations of the different readings, revealing to what extent it holds sway over our critical theories, but understanding why it is our myth, the myth of the modern world, requires a history of our present, not a look back from an imagined future. 

This makes it sound like a dislike the book, I do not. As much as I did not think it answered the question it posed, or our myth, it did propose a creative and fascinating version of scholarly research. I find myself drawn more and more to books that do not exactly do what is expected of a monograph or study, books that reveal the person as much as the scholar. I mentioned Gray and Johnson's book in this list. I would also add Leih Claire La Berge's Marx for Cats (which I have an actual review coming out soon).