Descombes - Modern French Philosophy

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MODERN FRENCHPHILOSOPHY

VincentJ?escoll besTranslated by o t ~ and J M Harding

C MBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS


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PUBLISHED B THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGETh e Pin Build ing, T rumpington Street , Cambridge CB2 1Rp , United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU , UK http: / / www.cup.cam.ac.uk40 West 20th Street, New York , NY 10011-4211, USA ht tp; / /ww w.cup .org

10 Stamford R oad , Oaklcigh , Melbourn e 3166, AustraliaOr iginally published in French as Mime er L Alitre

by Lcs Editions de Minu it, Paris, 1979 and Lcs Editions de Minuit 1979

This book is in copyright. Subject to statuto ry exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reprod uction of any part may take place withoutthe wr itten permission of Cambridge Un iversity Press.

First published in English by the Cambri dgeUnivers ity Press 1980 as Modem French PhilosophyEnglish translation Cambridge University Press 1980

Re printed 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988 twice), 1989, 1992, 1993 ,1994, 1996, 1998

Type set in BcmboA ataloJl.le recordfo r this book is availablefrom the British Library

Libraryof Congress CataloJl.Iling-n-PIlbli ation Data is availableISBN 0-521-29672-2 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 200I


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ontents

Foreword by Alan Montefiore vuNote on abbreviations and translation IXIntroduction: Philosophy in France 11 The humanisation of nothingness Kojeve 9The interpretation of Hegel 9The search for a concrete philosophy 16The objection of solipsism 20The origin of negation The end of history 27Negativity 32Identity and difference 36The q u s ~ o n of enunciation 39

APPENDIX: Nothingness in eing and othingnessJean-Paul Sartre 48

The human origin of truth Merleau-Ponty 55The soul and the body 57The earth does not revolve 59Does the dark side of the moon exist? 62The phenomenon 65The phenomenology of history 69

3 emiology 75The intellectual scene in 1960 75Structuralis m 77What is a structural analysis? Serres 82Communication 92


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VI

Structures 100The humanist controversy 103 he critique of history Foucault, Althusser 110Nihi lism 110Marxism in peril 117

Superstructures 126In troduction to the problem of power 131

5 ifference Derrida, Deleuz e 136The radicalisation of phenomenology 136 differ nu 142Originary delay 145The search for a transcendental empiricism 152Critique of the dialectic 156

s he end of time Deleuze , Klossowski, Lyotard 168Authority 168The fin-de-siecle disorder 173The tale of the end of the tale of the end of history 180Final remark s 186Index 191


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orewor

A generation ago few students or even professors) of philosophyon either side of the English Channel knew very much about thephilosophy that was being produced, studied and debated on theother side . Nor for the most part had they any interest in seekingto find out . Indeed, they felt in general fully justified in theirignorance by a settled conviction of the frivolity, superficialityand lack of any rigorous intellectual value of that of which theywere accordingly more than content to remain ignorant.Now - happily - times seem to be changing. On both sides ofthe same Channel signs are multiplying of a serious desire to learnabout what has been and is going on on the other side, and even toparticipate in it; and, beyond the often still persisting incomprehension, there is an increasing return to the goodwill of mutualrecognition and respect .

would be wrong to exaggerate. It takes more than the fewproverbial swallows to make a summer; and reciprocal ignorance,fortified by all the weight of recent tradition and the inertialpower of institutions such as the academic syllabus, is still formidable enough. Moreover, in a situation in which ignorance has beenfor so long so entrenched it becomes genuinely difficult for anyone, however inquiring and however open-minded , to knowexactly how to set about remedying his situation. One needs aguide - if at all possible, a native guide, one with expert knowledge of his own terrain, but yet capable of real communicationwith the strangers whom he leads into and through it.Vincent Descombes sets out in this book to act as just such aguide through the territory of contemporary French philosophy .


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VU) FOREWOR

No one could be better equipped for such a task. He has taught inCanada, travelled in the United States and even paid more thanone visit to Oxford. He is also, and above all, a leading member ofthe new generation not indeed of new philosophers but, quitesimply, of French philosophers as such . For the past few years hehas been teaching at the University of Nice and is now movingback to the University of Paris; he has already two books to hiscredit before this one; he is a member of the editorial committeeof the monthly rev iew Critique; and this, his third book, althoughwritten on the commission of the Cambridge University Pressand directed explicitly towards the English-speaking reader, hasalready proved a philosophical best-seller in its original Frenchversion, published in natural slight advance of the necessaryEnglish translation .

As Descombes himself would be, and indeed is, the first tostress, his is to be taken simply as one man s view of the terrain .Not only is there and could there be no such thing as the one trueand definitive view; not only might other French philosopherstake other and equally legitimate views of the context withinwhich they fmd themselves; Descombes himself for differentpurposes, or even for the same purposes fifteen years back orfifteen years hence, might view or have viewed his terraindifferently , paying more attention to some philosophers and lessto others than he has done from his perspective at this particularmoment .It should go without saying , but may be said nevertheless , thatif this book is already to be read more as a guide than as anintroduction to a certain central range of contemporary Frenchphilosophy , it in no way sets out to function as an introduction tophilosophy as such. Its tacit presuppositions are not very exorbitant ; simpl y - so to speak - a certain limited knowledge of thehistory of philosophy and of its dominant themes as they haveappeared, above all, in the writings of the ancient Greeks and inthose of the principal philosophers of the period delimited by thenames of Descartes and Kant, Clearly, a certain knowledge ofHegel would also be of considerable help; but by those with thenecessary basic grasp of the preceding period, the essentials of

platonisme (Pui s, P.U .F.. 1971); L inconstientmalgri lui (Par is, LesEditions de Minuit, 1977).I By Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1979.


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FOR WOR IX

what is here relevant can for the most part be gleaned from thetext itself

The nature of these dominant themes may be recalled throughthe re-posing of certain familiar questions. What, if to speak in thistraditional way may be accepted as intelligible, is the nature ofBeing? Is it all - that is to say, the universe, the complete orincompletable totality of things actual and possible - of one kind,of two kinds, or more? If it is of one kind alone, does that meanthat consciousness must in the last resort recognise itself to be allthat there is? If so, who or what could the owner or the subject) ofsuch a consciousness be taken to be? Or is consciousness able oreven bound to consider itself as no more than a derivative specialinstance of something that, as such, is not conscious at all? If, onthe other hand, Being is of two kinds or more), how can consciousness coherently represent itself as being aware of somethingaltogether outside - other than - itself? Yet how, without reference of some sort to this essentially other than itself, can consciousness come to be self-aware of its own identity assuch, letalone aware of its continuing identity through different momentsof historical) time? And how, without the peculiar negatingability of consciousness to distinguish between what sand whatmight have been but is in fact ot the case, could the objectiveworld be conceived of as having any particular or recognisablecharacter at all?Put now in these terms, these may be recognised as questionsand themes n ot only of ancient, but also of classical Cartesian andKantian preoccupation. What Descombes manages to show withadmirable economy and verve is how a certain pursuit of thesevery same themes, handed on and received through the modulations of a further, and double, German heritage , has remainedcharacteristic of the peculiar modern French branch of the greatwestern tradition of philosophical thinking, a pursuit which hasbeen accompanied by a perhaps more idiosyncratically persistenttendency to seek immediate translation of all positions of debatein terms of very contemporary politics .

This does not pretend to be a book that those to whom it isaddressed should expect to read with instantly effortless ease. Ifsuch a book were to be written, it could scarcely claim to be takenwith any seriousness. But nor, in another sense, is it a book thatresists its reader. It is, on the contrary, witty, incisive and, in the


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x FOR WORdeepest sense remarkably clear. will almost certainly proveinfinitely clearer to the uninitiated and even perhaps to many ofthe initiated than many. if not most of the texts with which itdeals. repays in any case much more than one reading not onlyfor its information and its intellectual stimulus but also for thesheer pleasure to be derived from it. is moreover not only aguide to contemporary French philosophy but at the same time acommentary on and a highly personal contribution to it. is acontribution that in its particular manner and perhaps even con-tent could only have been made in this way by way that is tosay. of primary address to an audience wholly outside and otherthan that to which French philosophy normally and paradig-matically addresses itselfAnd this too may provide much food for further thought. alliol College OxfordApril 98

Alan Montefiore


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XII NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSLATION

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1947); trans . James H Nicholls Jr, ed. Allan Bloom,Introductionto the Reading of Hegel New York, BasicBooks, 1969)Althusser, Balibar, Establet, Macherey, Ranciere, LireleCapital, vols. I and 11 Maspero, 1965) 2nd edn. Althusser and Balibar, Lire le Capital, trans. Ben Brewster,Reading Capital , London, New Left Books, 1970)Deleuze, Logique du sens Minuit, 1969)Derrida, Margesde la philosophic Minuit, 1972)Foucault, Les mots et les choses Gallimard, 1966); trans.A. Sheridan Smith, The Order of Things New York,Random House, 1973; London, Tavistock , 1974)Deleuze , Nietzsche et la philosophie P. V.F., 1962)Husserl, L origine de lageometrie, translation and introduction by Derrida P. V .F., 1962); Derrida, EdmundHusserl s Origin of Geometry . An Introduction, trans.John P. Leavey Boulder, Col., Great Eastern, 1978)Althusser, Pour Marx Maspero, 1965); trans. BenBrewster, ForMarx London, New Left Books , 1969)Merleau-Ponty, Phinominologie de la perception Gallimard, 1945); trans. Colin Smith, Phenomenology ofPerception London, New York, Humanities, 1962)Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement P.V .F.,1942); trans. Alden Fisher, The Structure of Behaviour Boston, Beacon, 1963)Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens Nagel, 1948); trans.Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus, Sense and Non-sense Evanston, Ill., Northwestern V.P., 1964)Derrida, La voix et le phenomene P.V.F., 1967); trans.David B. Allison, Speech and Phenomena: And OtherEssays on Husserl s Theory of Signs Evanston, Ill.,Northwestern V.P., 1973)

Throughout the present work, the word l itant, itself a rendering of theHeideggerian Das Seiende, has been translated as the) be-ing .In Chapter I, Section 8, The Question of Enunciation , the wordenondatton has been translated as enunciation , and the word enonce asstatement . The verb enoncer has been translated as to state or toenunciate , according to which of the two cognates enonce,enonciation)itdistinguishes . Where th is distinction is not in play, enonceand inoncerhavesometimes been rendered as utterance and to utter .In general, where the word ois not preceded by the definite article, ithas been translated as myself . Le moi, however, has been translated asthe self or as the Freudian ego .The translators wish to thank the author for his clarification of numerous points , and also E. McArdle for help and suggestions throughout.


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Introduction: Philosophy in France

Can the colour of time be described? Who could say what theatmosphere of a period was?At the outset of this survey I should define its inevitable limits.French philosophy is the philosophy which is articulated inFrench, even when it is to state Greek, Latin, English or Germanthoughts in this language. French philosophy was born when

Descartes undertook to reply, French, to Montaigne s Essayswith his Discourseon Method followed by three Essayswith thismethod But it was more than French philosophy that appearedwith Descartes s challenge to Montaigne . According to the mostconsiderable authorities, for once in agreement - Hegel andHeidegger for example - the pursuit of a truth that has thecharacter of absolute certainty marks the inauguration of modernphilosophy.The following pages are intended to be an introductionocontem-porary Frenchphilosophy A survey of French philosophy as awhole would start with Descartes replying to Montaigne). Asurvey of modern philosophy would begin in the same way. Thetitle of the study whose first page you are reading now proposes amore modest undertaking: to acquaint a reader whom I assume,for the sake of hypothesis , to be as exterior as possible to Frenchphilosophical traditions and modes, with the language and issuesof what is known as philosophical debate in France today.

Contemporary French philosophy cannot be identified with aphilosophical periodor with a school It is coincident with the sumof the discourses elaborated in France and considered by thepublic of today as philosophical. These are the circumstances


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2 INTRODUCTION place, dates) which limit the substance of my exposition . It willseem at first that such circumstances are external to philosophyproper. It will perhaps be objected that philosophy, once imbuedwith the atmosphere of a period, might thereby be reduced tomere opinIonThe public is not necessarily the best judge. Its very definition isthat it cannot be infallible - a point which should be stressed,inasmuch as our programme undertakes to introduce the reader tothat which was spoken about in a given territory and during a givenperiod, or, when all is said and done, to retain only what created astir among the widest possible audience. This clamorous approachto philosophy is necessarily unjust, since it leaves aside whateverthough sometimes worthy of attention - has gone ignored by thepublic, or has not received attention to a sufficient degree. It mustbe understood that the texts with which I shall be dealing are notnecessarily the most interesting ones to have been publishedduring the contemporary period . It is not even certain that all ofthem are interesting. For the entire bibliography to be consideredfalls into four groups: Those texts which everybody quotes and which everybodyholds to be worthy of quotation.

11. Those texts which everybody quotes and which some judgeto be insignificant .

ll Those texts which are quoted by a few, or by only oneperson, but which these persons hold to be superior to texts inboth the preceding categories .

IV . Those texts unknown to everybody except their respectiveauthors.It goes without saying that these divisions would have no sense

in an introduction to philosophy ingeneral where the only standardfor the appreciation of a text s philosophical value, irrespective ofits audience , would lie in its exposition of the philosophical issue .But in an introduction to the French philosophy of today we mayinclude only writings from groups I and 11. In setting groups IIIand IV to one side, we must be aware of the fact that we areeliminating not only the mediocre and the insignificant, but alsotexts which have a genuine public, at least outside France; andthose whose time is, or may be, still to come.Finally, and as a last limitation, the happily) restricted space atmy disposal doe s not permit me to refer to all the names and titles


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PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE 3that have been discussed by the public . This work does notpurport to be the Who s Who of French philosophy, nor even itsGotha Almanac I shall therefore make no attempt to render certainnuances, or the occasional small divergence within a school, andshall offer only one version of each philosopheme. Here again, itwill be the version to have received the greatest acclaim, and notnecessarily the most ingenious one . Needless to say, I shall refrainfrom naming those who in my own personal view deservedgreater recognition, who will no doubt obtain this recognition inthe near future, or should do so some day. The rhetorical criterionin philosophy is undeniably sound and fury .It remains to state, however briefly, the circumstances of timeand place .How far does what we take to be our present extend back intime? In many respects , we would be justified in beginning with

the French Revolution , or even with Descartes. Thus we may aswell start with the present day The great undertaking of eachgeneration is to set tle the debts handed down by the precedingone . The sins ofthefathers are visited upon the sons In so doing, eachgeneration calls into existence the obstacles that are to confront itsdescendants. So to situate what is for us the present requires thatwe take two generations into account: the contemporary one,demonstrably active today , and also its direct predecessor.In the recent evolution of philosophy in France we can trace thepassage frornjhe generation known after 1945as that of the threeH s to the generat ion known since 1960 as that of the three asters of su spicion : the three H s being Hegel, Husserl and

Heidegge r, and the three masters of suspicion Marx, Nietzscheand Freud. This is not to say that the Hegelians or the Husserliansvanished abruptly from the scene in 1960. But those who persistedin invoking the thr ee H s , or anyone of them , after that date,would have been the first to admit that their position was nolonger dominant . In argument, they were thus obliged to take thecommon doxa into account, and to defend themselves in advanceagainst the objection s likely to be raised in the name of the newtrinity . Our object , then, will be to account for this change . Whywere the tutelary figures who had reigned from 1930 to 1 0simultaneously deposed dur ing the 1 Os to make way for thenew arrivals? It should be noted that the grouping of authoritiesinto successive triads is a rhetor ical fact. The objections which the


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4 INTRODUCTIONconscientious historian of philosophy may raise to such patternsdo not alter the fact that an entire generation drew the sameconclusions from its reading of He gel, Husserl and Heidegger, forexample . is also significant that the texts most quoted after 1930were often difficult of access, either because they had not beentranslated by that date the PhenomenologyoJMind was translatedin 1947and Beingand Time is still untranslated in 1978), or becausethey had not even been published thus, with Husserl, the texts toreceive the greatest acclaim were precisely the inidits or unpublished manuscripts , at Louvain) . Such circumstances are particularly conducive to productive transformation of the quotedthought by the reader, a transformation that is always manifestlyat work in the making of an authority. should not be believedthat the authority a work may carry is the result of its having beenread, studied and finally judged convincing. The reverse is true:reading derives from a prior conviction. Works are preceded byrumour. As Maurice Blanchot wrote, public opinion is never morepurely opinion than where rumour is concerned; opinion is, forinstance, what can be read in the newspapers, but never in this orthat one in particular ; such is precisely the essence of rumour,since what I learn from rumour, I have necessarily heardalready . 1 By a kind of Platonic recollection, the text with whichwefall in love will be the one wherein what we know already canbe learned and relearned. Merleau-Ponty recognised this :

We shall find in ourselves and nowhere else the unity andtrue meaning of phenomenology . is less a question ofcounting up quotations than of determining anaexpressing in concrete form this phenomenologyJorourselveswhich has given a number of present-day readersthe impression, on reading Husserl or Heidegger, not somuch of encountering a new philosophy as of recognisingwhat they had been waiting for. 2

It is not our business here to inquire whether or not the interpretations which will be given of Hegel, Husserl, then of Mar x orNietzsche are faithful to the thought they seek to render. Clearly1 L entretien infini Gallimard, 1969),p. 26. PP, p. 11.


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PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE 5they betray it, but perhaps this betrayal is only a way of highlighting what Heidegger called the not-thought inherent in thatthought . .A final word on the characteristics of the domain in whichphilosophical utterancecirculates.

This space has proved remarkably stable, at least until recentlywhen some creakings became audible, induced by the advent ofpowerful mass media television, etc.) to add to the networks ofcommunication already established since the end of the last century.

The university site of philosophy is marked by its concentric,highly centralised formation. The lyeeesprovide the universitieswith the bulk of their audience in the form of future secondaryschool teachers. These lyeee teachers are, in theory, recruited bythe State by means of a competitive examination system. Giventhat the content of these examinations agregation,CAPES) is afunction of the sixth form classede philosophie syllabus, theteaching of philosophy in France is more or less determined by thenature and function of that syllabus. Officially, the Syllabus, thismasterpiece of rigour and coherence, is fixed by unanimous consent. In reality, it is the outcome of a compromise between thevarious prevailing tendencies, and this is why the much celebratedMasterpiece is so frequently overhauled. Charged by some withpropagating a reactionary ideology, by others with eliminatingwhatever still.remained of authentic philosophy in the precedingsyllabus, successive versions reflect the momentary balance ofpoliticalforces,not only within the teaching body itself, but also inthe country at large .

Few people claim to be satisfied with the syllabus as it stands,and many call for its reform . Nobody, however, questions theneed for a syllabus of some sort . This cult of the Syllabus, whichnever fails to astonish foreigners, is explained by the Frenchveneration for the institution of the baccalaureat,hat incarnationof the egalitarian ideal. As regards philosophy, to sit the bac-calaureat consists in the following: on the same day, at the samehour and for the same length of time, all candidates are required tocommit similarly worded answers to identical sheets of paper inresponse - until quite recently - to a single question drawn fromthe Syllabus . These uniform products are then corrected by theteaching body in compliance with express directives unfailingly


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6 INTRODUCTIONprovided by the ministry for the occasion . The impartiality ofcorrection is ensured by organising a rota of examiners fromtown to town, so that no candidate may be known in personby his examiner . Hence the necessity for a single Syllabus, thesame for all French [yeeeson the planet Earth and others too, ifneed be.The recruitment of teachers, which I cannot go into in detailhere, works - needless to say - on similar principles . The concoursdagregationis a veritable initiation rite, severing candidates fromeverything vaguely deemed to be evil the provinces, the soil ,local particularisms) to turn them into civic-minded Statemissionar ies. In this respect , the predominant role of the presidentof thejury dagregationis worth stressing. Directly nominated bythe minister, he selects the other members of the board, presidesover the deliberations, and decides on the subjects for examination taken from the Syllabus of the classede philosophie ; thesesubje cts in turn will determine the syllabus in philosophy departments preparing students for the examination. The very style ofFrench philosophy is perpetually being affected by this chain ofevent s. At the time when neo-Kantianisrn, in the person of LeonBrun schvicg, presided over the jury d agregation, the immensemajority of students applied themselves to assimilating thethoughts of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, read in that order, as theprogression of consciousness towards Mind . But as regards thoseauthors whom neo-Kantianism rejects , such as Aristotle or Hegel,no more than a sum mary refutation was required.

Teachers of philosophy being civil servants in France, it followsth at the discipline has inevitable political repercussions . These arenegligible in periods of national stability, but become determinantwh en the State appears threatened . At the beginning of the ThirdRepublic, university philosophy was entrusted with a mission bythe State - to impress upon students the legitimacy of the newRepubl ican institutions. Two doctrines contended for this role:Durkheirrr s sociological positivism, and neo-Kantian rationalismderiving from Renouvier, later personified in Brunschvicg). Thesecond was to prevail in the end. Although opposed to each other,both these doctrines teach that mankind, from its distant originsonward s, has not ceased to progress towards the agreement of allhuman beings upon certain reasonable principles - precisely thoseon wh ich Republican institutions are based. We shall see how, for


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PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE the generation of 1930, the starting point was a desire to escapefrom this optimistic view of history .

But it is, of course, in the extra-university domain newspapers,reviews, mass media) that philosophies are immediately calledupon to divulge their political significance . In France, thedevelopment of a political position remains the decisive test,disclosing as it does the definitive meaning of a mode of thought.It is as if the heart of the matter had not been reached until, fromsuppositions about the One and the Many , or about the nature ofknowledge, the subject shifted to the issue of the next elections orthe attitude of the Communist Party . Especially surprising here isthe abruptness of the leap from the Idea of good to palpable good .In fact, despite heavy over-investment in the political dimensionof philosophical debate, almost no important political thinking assuch can be seen to thrive within it . The major works of politicalphilosophy in French can be counted on the fingers of one hand .Thus the existentialists, for example, have made innumerablepolitical declarations and taken innumerable political stances ; yettheir writings are innocent of the least theory of the state, or of anyreflection on modern forms of warfare . t is as though this or thatphilosophical statement might be instantly attributed to this orthat political party. Curious reputations are made and unmade .Until 1968, epistemology was broadly to the left, and metaphysics to the right; but with the present emergence of ecologicalpreoccupations, epistemology appears reactionary, whereasmetaphysics takes on a subversive aspect .Such reversals of political values on the opinions market dolittle to clarify discussion . However , the undeniable evidence hereis that the relation of philosophy to opinion, in France, is a relationprimarily to political opinion, and secondly to literaryopinion, orto literary groups for example the nouveau roman,or Te Que .Since, for their part, these groups also advertise their politicalpositions, the various relations of alliance and opposition intersect. At a certain period, the Tel Que group , for instance , advocated support for the Communist Party , and the reader whoshared its views on modern literature would be pro-Communistat the same time . But the same reader would either have torenounce this literary doctrine, or else break with support for theP.C.F . when at a later date Te Que became pro-Chinese, Andaccording to whether the reader bought the magazine Te Que at


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8 INTRODUCTIONone or other of these periods he would or would not find in itarticles by Jacques Derrida

This surve y will therefore be obl iged to take occasional accountof the political context although needless to add only wherephilosoph ical discourse itself has chosen to connect with such acontext


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1The humanisation of nothingness

The generation of the three H s was the first generation of thetwentieth century . Chronology shows that the spokesmen of thisgeneration were born at the beginning of the century Sartre in1905, Merleau-Ponty in 1908) and that they made themselvesknown during the years immediately preceding the SecondWorld War. Older writers, already established by this date,belong to the nineteenth century; this applies to the Bergsoniangeneration Bergson himself was born in 1858, and had publishedhis doctoral thesis in 1889).

The nterpretationof egelIt may well be that the future of the world , and thus thesense of the present and the significance of the past , willdepend in the last analysis on contemporaryinterpretations of Hegel s works. Alexandre Kojeve)

There is no clearer sign of the changes in mentality - the revoltagainst neo-Kantianism, the decline of Bergsonianism - than thetriumphal return of Hegel. Banished by the neo-Kantians, hecuriously, and suddenly, became a vanguard writer, quoted withrespect in leading circles. Two reasons seem chiefly to account forthis resurgence. One was the renewal of interest in Marxism thatoccurred in the wake of the Russian Revolution - part of theprestige surrounding the Bolshevik leaders reflected back uponHegel, in so far as Lenin, for instance, had actively recommended


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10 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESShim for study. Th e other was the influence of the course given byAlexandr e Kojeve at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes,beginn ing in 1933 and lasting until 1939. The text of this course,which w as followed by most of the protagonists of the generationof the thr ee H s, wa s published in 1947 under the editorship ofRaymo nd Qu eneau .Nothing could be more characteristic than the change in connotation undergone by the word dialectic.Before 1930 it was understoo d pejorativel y; for a neo-Kantian the dialectic was the logic ofappearances , wherea s for a Bergsonian it could engender nothingbut a purel y verbal philosophy . After 1930, on the contrary, theword w as alm os t always used in a eulogistic sense . t was nowthou ght prop er to transcend analytical reason the KantianVerstand or again m ech an ism , by means of the dialectic . TheDialectic became such a lofty concept that it would have beenoffensive to request a definition. For thirty years it was almost theGod of negative theology - beyond formulation, it could only beap proa ched through the explanation of what it was not. ThusSartre w as t write in 1960, after so many years of dialecticalth inking :

Th e dialectic itself ... could never be the object ofconcepts, since its movement engenders and dissolvesthem all. 2

Ce rtainly a disappointing assertion, when it is found in a volumeof close on eight hundred pages devoted , if the title is to bebelieved, to ex p lain in g precisely in what the dialectical mode ofth inking might consist .

This prestige attaching to the dialectic only began to fade withthe advent of a second generation after 1960). Burning the idolvenerate d until now, this generation denounced the dialectic asthe supreme illusion , from which it sought to free itself throughrecourse, this time, to Nietzsche.

~ u n ~ u evokes this period in his article in homage to Georges Bataille :Prem ieres confrontations avec iHegel , Critique nos . 195-6. Aug.-Sept .1963. Among the list of those who regularly attended the cou rse givenby Kojeve or Kotjenikov) the names of Raymond Aron, GeorgesBataille, Alexandre Koyre, Pierre Klossowsk i, Jacques Lacan, MauriceMerleau-Pomy , Er ic Weil and Father Fessard are to be found and alsoless frequemly, that of Andre Breton. , CRD , p. 106.


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THE INTERPRETATION OF HEGEL 11In the report which he had drafted for the congress on Hegel in1930, concerning the stateof Hegelianstudiesin France ,Alexandre

Koyre began by confessing to the slenderness of his survey . Heapologised for having so little to say: in France, there was noHegelian school. During the ten years which followed, theposition altered so greatly that , by 1946, Merleau-Ponty was ableto write in the Hegelian terms which surprise us once moretoday:All the great philosophical ideas of the past century - thephilosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology,German existentialism, and psychoanalysis - had theirbeginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt toexplore the irrational and integrate it into an expandedreason , which remains the task of our century .. . If we donot despair of a truth above and beyond divergent pointsof view, if we remain dedicated to a new classicism, anorganic civilisation, while maintaining the sharpest senseof subjectivity, then no task in the cultural order is moreurgent than re-establishing the connection between, onthe one hand, the thankless doctrines which try to forgettheir Hegelian or igin and, on the other , that origin itself

In writing this, Merleau-Ponty had undoubtedly not the leastintention of paradox, but only of expressing the common view ofa well-established fact. By virtue of what secret genealogy isHegel at the origin of such thankless doctrines as psychoanalysisor the thought ofNietzsche? Merleau-Ponty did not specify at thetime. But, however ambitious the aims of this appraisal mayseem, it is of great interest to us. It points to the place where themultiple references of the period converged; it reveals the desirefor a commonlanguage,which it seemed at the time would have tobe Hegelian .

Republished in his Etudesd histoirede lapensiphilosophique(ArmandColin, 1 1), pp. 205-30 ; in his postscript of 1 I, Koyrc observes thatHegel s position in France has changed beyond recognition . SNS , pp. 109-10 . Such truths die hard . At the Colloqu y on Bataille organised by TelQutl at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1972, Sellers could still declare that N ietzsche,Bataille, Lacan and Mar xism-Len inism were to be understood as theeffects of the explosion of the HegeJian system (Batail/e, 10118,UnionGcnerale d dit ions, 1973, p. 36).


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12 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSIn 1930 Hegel was a Romantic philosopher who had beenrefuted long ago by scientific progress this was Brunschvicg s

view, which Koyre did not omit to quote in his Report . By 1945Hegel had become the apex of classical philosophy and the originof all the most modern achievements in the field . Then the wheelrevolved again . The thesis of Gilles Deleuze, published in 1968,begins by evok ing the atmosphere of the period ; in it we find theHe ideggerian ontological difference , structuralism , the nouveauroman, etc. He goes on to say that

all these signs may be attributed to a generalisedanti-Hegelianisrn. Difference and repetition have replacedthe ident ical and the negative, identity and contradiction.

Foucault too, in his inaugural address at the College de France in1970, ob serves that

wh ether through logic or epistemology, whether throughMarx or N ietzsche, our entire epoch struggles todisengage itself from Hegel. 7

In 1945, then, all that wa s modern sprang from Hegel, and theonly way to reconcile the contradictory demands of modernitywas to advan ce an interpretation of Hegel. In 1968, all that wasmodern - that is, Marx , Freud etc ., as before - was hostile toH egel. The difference separating the two generations lies in theinve rsion of the sign that marked the relationship to Hegel:everywhere a minus was substituted for the plus. The referencepoint itself remained the same, but in the one case the concern wasw ith drawing towards it returning , like the prodigal son, to theHegelian hearth), whereas in the other it was with drawing awayputting an end to the tyranny of Hegelianism).

T hose who see in Hegel s work a monument of rationalism willno doubt be surp rised at the respect accorded to Hegel by thefuture Fren ch existentialists . If existence is wholly absurd andunju stifiable, how can the notion that all that is real is rational

DR, p. 1, L ordre du discours Gallimard, 1971), p 74.


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THE INTERPRETATION OF HEGEL have been accommodated? Merleau-Ponty s diagnosis, quotedabove, offers a good explanation of this state of affairs. Theexpansion of reason may be understood in two ways. It is tenable,certainly, that reason enlarges its empire, and gains sway in areashitherto foreign to it history and its violence, existence and itscontingency, the unconscious and its stratagems). But equally wemight respond to the critique of reason-as-it-exists implicit in thephrase to expand reason , and see in this expansion much morethan a mere extension - rather a thorough metamorphosis ofthought . The ambiguity encountered here is the essentialdifficulty which the interpretation of Hegel must confront - aninterpretation very much in demand, first in a positive sense Hegel will draw us together ), then in a critical sense Deliver usfrom Hegelianism ). Non-dialectical thinking would hold to theopposition between the rational and the irrational, but any thinking which aspires to be dialectical must, by definition, induce inreason a movement towards what is entirely foreign to it, towardsthe other The whole issue now rests upon whether the other hasbeen returned to the same in the course of this movement, orwhether so as to embrace rational and irrational, the same and theother at once) reason will have had to transform itself, losing itsinitial identity, ceasingtobethesameand becomingotherwith theotherFor the other of reason is unreason , or madness. Thus the problemis raised of the passage of reason through madnessor aberration,a passage which would precede all access to an authenticwisdomKojeve , who preferred to speak of wisdom rather than ofrationality, inclined towards the last hypothesis . According tohim, Hegel came very close to madness at the moment of attaining to absolute knowledge . And, in general terms , far fromemphasising the reasonable and conciliatory side of Hegel sthought, his reading dwells on its paradoxical, excessive, violentand, above all, sanguinary features. In the face of the events of1968, Kojeve is reported to have said that, since there had been nobloodshed, nothing had happened . .. His commentary on thePhmomenology of Mind presents it as an account of universal history in which bloody strife - and not reason - is responsible forthe progress of events towards the happy conclusion. He loses noopportunity of recalling the cannon fire that Hegel is supposed tohave heard as he ended his manuscript atJena . This explains why


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16 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESScan success be estimated? Before this can be done, Historymust have come to an end . 13

This is the; reason why revolutions are necessarily bloody .

The Searchfor a ConcretePhilosophyThe generation of 1930 has several times given an account of itsapprent iceship. In revolt against academic idealism, it demanded,as it said, a concrete philosophy , 14 which later acquired the nameof existentialism. Idealism , however, may be understood eitherin the popular or in the metaphysical sense .A man is an idealist, in the popular sense of the word, when heassumes as his guide in life an idea or an ideal . By idea wemean a mental vision , one which does not originate in sight,therefore , and cannot be reduced to any lesson of experience . It iswell known that the lessons of experience are bitter, and lead morereadily to realism , or to cynicism than to idealism. The error ofthe idealist, if indeed it is wrong to be one, is that he takes noaccount of what life might teach him, and behaves as if thingsoccurred in reality just as they ought to occur according to the ideathat he entertains of an ideal world . The idealist s error is knownas abstraction He begins by ignoring the irreducible differencebetween the reasonable world, commensurate with the good, ofwhi ch he speaks, and the unsettled world, impervious to reason,of wh ich he speaks much less. The world he talks of is one inwhi ch people talk; in it, words are exchanged , not blows orcannon fire. Hence the demand for aconcretephilosophy to abolishthe lie of idealism.

The limitations of such a critique of idealism are immediatelyapparent . The idealist is accused of acting as if the world as itshould be, regulated and reasonable, were already here now . Hemust then be an ingenuous dreamer, ifhe is not a cunning conser-vative, or a professor in the throes of academic dotage. It is not hisideal with which he is reproached . Far from being consideredstupid or extravagant, it is accepted as the accurate definition ofgood . What he is reproached with is his belief, exempting him

.. lntr Htgtl p. 95. eRD p. 23


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THE SEARCH FOR A CONCRETE PHILOSOPHY 17from all action, that this idea has already been accomplished in thepresent.

The result is that the victory of concrete philosophy overabstraction amounts to a chronological adjustment. Since thegood has yet to be achieved , the idealist, for whom we have notime today, will be right tomorrow . The erroroftodaywill becomethe truth of tomorrow- a dialectical tourdeforce to be accomplishedby action, or praxis to use a would-be Marxist term . Indeed, thisword praxis was to be one of the key words of the years 1950-60.Use of the word praxis where previously the word action hadserved arose incontestably from assiduous study, during thisper iod, of the writings of the young Marx. It is Merleau-Ponty sconstant theme in speaking of Marx: praxis is the locus of meaning , and this was Marx s immense discovery.

What Marx calls praxis is the meaning which appearsspontaneously at the intersection of the actions by whichman organises his relationship with nature and withothers . 15

In his enthusiasm for praxis Sartre even wrote :All that is real is praxis and all that is praxis is real. l

After 1965, so as to take their distance from this existential version of Marxism, people no longer said praxis but practice .Writing, for instance, became signify ing practice and philosophy a theo retical practice .

At the end of the day , that is, at the endofh istory idealism wouldbe the true philosophy . In the meantime , th is philosophy was falseand misleading, since it discouraged action . To act, in this case,could only mean one thing : to oppose whatever impeded the realfrom being the ideal, in other words , to attack the realityof therealIn its critique of idealism, concrete ph ilosophy arrives at anactivist position . Philosophy, as revolt against the very reality ofthe real, fuses with a practical programme of opposition . Indeed,opposition is an understatement - we should speak of an oppositionwithin the opposition For the opposition to which the existentialistbelonged was marked out for him by all that he opposed, by the

l o g ~ la philosophie Gallirnard, 1953). p. 69; In Praise of Philosophytrans , James E. Edie and John Wild Evanston, Ill. Northwestern U .P.1963).

Quoted by Merleau-Ponty in AD. p. 179.


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18 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSreality which he abhorred: bourgeoisie, family, institutions etc . Ifthe established order led him to think that its most dangerousenemy was the P.C.F . or the U.S.S .R., then the existentialistsatisfied the imperative of betrayal by making known his sympathy for communism . He could not, however, carry this as far asmembership of the party, for such an initiative would haveamounted to sanctioning the measure of reality which existed incommunist organisations, or in socialist countries. This is why hecreated an opposition within the opposition, so as always toawaken its destructive potential. Yet it was enough that the existentialist s enemy namely his own person as he detested it in theform of his class background and way of life) should fix onanother privileged adversary for existentialist politics to be turnedupside down . He would condemn the organisations that he hadhitherto defended, reproaching them for their betrayal, discovering his sympathy with others which, henceforth, were to embodyfor him the purity of negation. In this way, the hopes of existentialist commitment migrated from the U.S.S.R. to China, fromproletarian internationalism to the nationalism of the ex-colonies,from Algeria to Cuba or vice versa, from workers to students,from men to women ete. All these successive positions, contradictor y yet always peremptory, made a weather vane of existentialistpolit ics, susceptible to the least breath of wind. Such a fundamental lack of resolution at the heart of the resolve thought of ascom mitment was well explained by Merleau-Ponty s formula in umanisme et terreur the communists have values in spite ofthem selves, this is why we support them. In other words, thegrounds of approbation , and eventually of condemnation, areexternal to what constitutes the object of these successive judgment s. After 1968, for example, Sartre levelled the charge ofbureaucracy against Soviet socialism. But it had been no lessbureaucratic when he was undertaking its defence during the1950s, under Stalin . What had changed in the meantime was notthe U .S.S.R., nor even Sartre, but world politics the transitionfrom the Cold War to peaceful co-existence) .By virtu e of its very principle, the doctrine of praxis lacks allmeans of orienting or of judging action . It maintains that theidealist s ideal is a mystification now, but that it will have ameaning in the future . Meanwhile, then, a morality of realism ,drawn from experience , will have to suffice as grounds for action.


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THE SEARCH FOR A CONCRETE PHILOSOPHY 19t will not, therefore, be possible to look to philosophy for a ruleof action . No idea can direct the philosopher of praxis in hisactions, except the idea that he must act. Action becomes completely indeterminate. The revolt against idealist abstraction givesrise only to an abstract apologia for action and violence . Theresolution is there to act against ills in general, but in a specificsituation - and all situations are specific - the same set of premisescan justify any decision whatsoever . Sartre s drama, as well as hispolit ical articles, provides ample illustration of this difficulty . Thenumerous disputes within the editorship of the magazine, LesTemps Modernes, have always been of a pol itical rather than aphilosophical order . Although thought should , in theory, commititself in a concrete situation and arrive at a political position, thisparticular way of thinking actually rema ined abstract, since it wasable to prove both the for and the againstof any position withoutthe least modification of its premises .

Taken in the metaphysical sense of the term, idealism is thename of the doctrine which holds beingand being-known as equivalent . Th is is the defmit ion offered by Brunschvicg, in Lalande sVocabulairede la Philosophie, under idealisme :

Idealism maintain s that metaphysics may be reduced totheory of knowledge . The affirmation of being rests uponthe determination of being as being -known ; an admirablylucid thesis pending further analysis of the word known)in contrast with realism, which rests upon the intuition ofbeing as such .

Since idealism equates being and being-known, it is possible todetect the first signs of the existential revolt against abstraction inKant s critique of the ontological proof of the existence of God .His analysis of the example of the hundred thalers is well known.In the hundred real (wirklich)thalers, there is nothing more than inthe hundred possible thalers . The amount is the same in each case.Consequently, the real holds no more than the merely possible .Yes, but we must be specific: no more , that is, from the point ofview of the concept, oflogic. The hundred thalers that I speak of,when for instance I lament their absence, are of course the same

This Vocabulai re Presses Un iversitaires de France), rev ised and re-editedseveral times, const itutes an invaluable document on the state oflanguage and mentality before the existent ialist irruption.


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20 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESShundred thalers whose presence in my pocket is desirable. Thebeing knownof the hundred thalers is the same in both cases. Nowshould these hundred thalers eventually reach my pocket, theywill be the very ones whose presence I desired. The conceptremains unaltered, then, by the passage from the possible concept) to the real existence); and yet my wealth is thereby altered.Their being is therefore not the same. And being is therefore notidentical to being known. In terms of the Kantian definition ofexistence - unanimously and uncritically adopted by the existentialist generation - existence is not a predicate of the thing. Iteludes the concept, and passes into the realm of the inconceivable,whence the complicity of existence with all forms of the inconceivable: contingency, chance, the unjustifiable, the unforeseen.And since the most thorough distinction must be made betweenhaving and not having the hundred thalers, between presence andabsence, it follows that the concept is indifferent to the mostfundamental of differences. The same concept will hold for thething, whether absent or present, ignoring this othemess It wastherefore necessary to abandon the concept in order to state thedefinitive issue - existence or non-existence, being or non-being .Th is wa s the reason for the extensive use of literary fictional)forms of discourse - drama, confessional autobiography, novelsetc. - as oppo sed to theoretical forms.

The Objection of SolipsismIf being bein g- kno w n , it must be ascertained by whom thisbeing is known . Is it myself, a specific individual, distinct frommy fellow men? Can it be anybody? Thus idealism comes upagainst the problem of solipsism. It is accused of having to admitthe absurd thesis whereby whoever pronounces thecogito can onlyconclude, My existence is certain, yours is much less so. And,more radically, I am, therefore you are not.

At a session of the French Society of Philosophy, during whichBrun schvicg had developed the arguments of the idealist position,one of the participants, Andre Cresson, put to him the questionof existence of others . Ifbeing may be asserted only in so faras IS known , what is the being of others? For the knowingsubject, Brunschvicg for example, what is the existence thatshould be attributed to others, for example to Andre Cresson? In


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THE OBJECTION OF SOLIPSISM 21the minutes of the session, the following exchange ISrecorded :

BRUN SCHVICG : The idea that I have of his consciousness isa component in the system of my judgments aboutexistence.CRESS ON: I cannot accept that I might be reduced to ajudgment in Mr Brunschvicg s consciousness, and I doubtwhether those present , for their part, would be preparedto accept this either . Moreover, to be consistent, MrBrunschv icg ought to declare that his is the onlyconsciousness , and that the sole aim of knowledge is todraw up a harmonious table of its representations for thepurposes of his solitary ego . 18

If the plurality of consciousnesses , as it was known , may beposed as an objection to idealist metaphysics, this is clearlybecause the nature of the knowing subject , raised to the status ofarbiter of being by means of the equation of being and beingknown , has not been sufficiently determined. Brunschvicg wasfond of saying that the history of Egypt was actually the history ofEgyptology. The Egyptians would ultimately owe their existence, then , to the Egyptologists. And, quite generally, the weakness of neo-Kantianisrn may have been to invoke some nebulousM ind , represented more or less as a community of men ofgoodwill , wi th no further definition of what was, after all, tobecome the mainstay of the world. Did the knowing subjectresemble a learned society , or the League of Nations? Might it beenvisaged as some kind of association of candidates for the NobelPrize? Would such a world-principle be adequate to the responsibility involved?IfBrunschvicg s work-table or his pen - objects whose status inhis doctrine is, equally, that of phenomena integral to the sum ofhis judgments concerning existence - could talk, they would nodoubt protest with the same vigour as Andre Cresson againsttheir reduction to such a purely intentional status. The onlyprivilege remaining to the interlocutor is therefore to voice hisdisagreement , in words, with the idealist philosopher. Thephenomenon protests against synthetic a priori judgments The

.. Bulletin dt 10Sociiti ro fOist dt philosophie (1921), p. 51.


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THE HUMANISA nON OF NOTHINGNESSidea of his own person which the interlocutor harbours is in noway consonant with the version proposed by t.he i ~ e l i s t ~existence of a second consciousness thus calls the Idealist equationinto question, as it becomes impossible to say whether the beingknown of that second consciousness is its otherness as perceivedby the first, or the knowledge that it has of itselfThe problem of the other , which furnished the writings ofFrench l-henomenology with their principal subject matter, isessentially only one particular instance of the reduction of being torepresentat ion. The esse of others becomes reduced, like everyother esse to the percipi. The difficulty arises from the fact that,inasmuch as he endorses the idealist theory, the other will claimfor himself the privileges of the percipiens and will demand to berecognised, not only as the logical subject of ajudgment concerning existence in any given consc iousness , but also as the subject ofthe very con sciousness within which this judgment is beingarticulated. Cl early then, the objection of solipsism may be raisedwith one of two contrary purposes: either to contest the premisesof idealism by demonstrating the absurdity of its end-result,or to con test the idealist s optimism by demanding that heaccommodate this dramatic end-result within his doctrine .The second possibility defines the concrete philosophy of the1930s.

T he conflict of consciousness exists in embryonic form withinthe Cartesian cogito. For what was known as the philosophy ofconsciousness , that is, for the Cartesian tradition, the I think, Iam , was at once the origin and the rule of all truth. It is the firsttrut h, the truth which inaugurates all others; it is the exemplarytrut h. Th e ego as it is given in egocogito egosum is the absolute towhich all else is relative;its truth , independent of any other, is thecondition of all others . The word absolute , destined for a brilliant career in modern philosophy, is the one used by Descartes inthe Regulae addirectionemingenii. Now there can never be severalsimultaneous absolutes. A second absolute an other) is necessarily a rival of the first myself, ego . The movement from thecogitoto the cogitamusis not at all the same as the movement fromthe I in solitary meditation to the we of the Republic of minds.In the plural, absolutes are no more than pretendersto the absolute .competitor s clawing over one another for the throne .

The limit to the ambitions of concrete philosophy is alread-


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THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION 23apparent. By describing itself in such a way it certainly revealedthe modesty of its revolt against its forerunners since it assumedthe essential feature of their teaching namely the cogito the so-called inevitable departure point of all philosophy . For what is aconcrete philosophy but an abstract philosophy completed bythe very thing of which it had made abstraction? Academicidealism had failed to take into account the rivalry inherent in thevery notion of the subject Henceforth the status of the subjectappeared to be threatened forever on the point of being overcomeby a new arrival and having to be defended against all intruders .As a new version of the story ofCrusoe s encounter with Fridaythe phenomenology of the other constantly presents multiplefacets of contradiction: the other is a phenomenon for me but I amno less a phenomenonfor him; manifestly one of us will have torenounce the role of subject and content himself with beingforhimself what he isfor the other In such circumstances it is easy tounderstand the success of the Hegelian dialectic of Master andSlave which the generation of 1930 never tired of quoting andwhich Kojeve had made the key to his interpretation of thePhenomenology of Mind

The Origin of NegationIn a concrete philosophy consciousness may no longer bedescr ibed as a sequence of representat ions accompanied by asKant said an I think . Consciousness is no longer the simplerepresentation of oneself but rather the representation of the selfas a being confronted by the outside world whose identityis precarious and which must struggle in order to exist . Theother endangers the same The new status of consciousnessmay be summar ised in one word : negativity The being of con-sciousness was said henceforth to be conceived as a dialecticalbeing.The question of the negative is very characteristic of the evolu-tion of French philosophy . It is worth indicating the various waysin which it has been posed in the course of the twentieth century .No one denies that the negative appears in judgment and in theform of the negation no t . The difficulty is to ascertain fromwhere this negation not could possibly have sprung. Considerthe statement lane is not there . In what does the possibility of


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26 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSdisappeared regret) or has not yet arrived hope). Negation isthus a precaution against self-deception; it is also, in its way, apoint of access to the real.For the Kantians as for Bergson, the origin of nothingness isnegation; but what is the origin of negation? The Bergsonianexplanation has all the characteristics of a conjuring trick in whichthe negative is not eliminated, as was promised, but simplypalmed . First, the absenceof something is transformed into anegative judgment concerning the affirmation of its presence The table is not white = You would be mistaken in calling itwhite ), and then the negativity of this negation is transformed intothe positivity of a desire which is responsible for such apparentlynegative modes as disappointed expectation, nostalgia, error, etc.The question here is to know whether this desire can be calledpositive, and to what degree nothingness, far from being generated, has not quite simply become humanised Ifindeed desire wereonly the mask of nothing ness, then negation itself, supposedly thegenerator of nothingness, would be its derivation.

Desire as positive or negative? Such is the ground on whichDeleuze takes issue with the dialectic. The philosophy of desire ,as it was known after 1970, whose classic work is The Anti-Oedipus claims its descent from Nietzsche, and adopts one ofhis directives: th e overthrow of Platonism . Deleuze opposesthe affirmative notion of a productive , creative desire to thePlatonist , then Christian interpretation of desire as lack,distress, suffering. However, the debate about the nature ofdesire is more a settling of accounts between Deleuze, as discipleofBergson, and the Hegelians primarily Sartre and Lacan), than aconflict between Nietzsche and Plato. We know that in Platodesire is presented as a composite: though Eros is the child ofPenia or Lack, his father is Poros the Happy Mean. Eros is thus alack here engendered by a presence elsewhere For Hegel, desire isnot like this. The term is used, in Kojeve s commentaries, totranslate the word Begierde as it figures in chapter IV of thePhenomenology And since chapter IV is, in Kojeve s view, the keyto the whole work, dialectical philosophy can now be defined asthe thinking which identifies desire with pure negativity, and seesin it not only a negation, but a negation of the negation.


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THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESS 27The End of History

Alexandre Kojeve was a very talented story-teller. In his commentaries, the austere Hegelian Phenomenolog) urns into a kind ofserialised philosophical novel , where one dramatic scene followsanother; picturesque characters come face to face, reversals ofsituation keep up the suspense, and the reader, avid to know theend of the story lafin de l histoire),clamours for more .In a general sense, Kojeve provided an anthropologicalversionofHegelian philosophy . This was at the time a novel approach forthe French , acquainted as they were with the absolute idealism and panlogism of Hegel, but scarcely with left-Hegelianism ,The final scene in this humanist version of the Hegelian dialecticprovides us also with its principle. The last episode in the narrativeof the story is understood as corresponding to a final stage inhuman history itself, beyond which there are to be no furtherdevelopments. Kojeve never failed to insist, provocativelyenough, on the startling consequences of this thesis. History is atan end , we enter now into its aftermath :

In point of fact, the end of human Time, or History - thatis, the definitive annihilation of Man properly speaking,or of the free and historical Individual - means quitesimply the cessation of Action in the full sense of theterm . Practically, this means the disappearance of warsand bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance ofPhilosophy; for since Man himself no longer changesessentially, there is no longer any reason to change the true) principles which are at the basis of hisunderstanding of the world and of himself But all the restcan be preserved indefinitely ; art, love, play, etc; in shorteverything that makes man happy. 10

The end of history is none other than the translat ion intofigural and narrative language of what in the language of philosophy is known as absolute knowledge . Absolute knowledge isthe science of the identity of subject and object or of thought andbeing). This metaphysical thesis, undeniably obscure and incontestably idealist , was suddenly given a ready meaning , with a lntr , Htgtl , p. 435 in the note) .


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28 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSrealistic even a materialist look to it. The identity of subject andobject , in the unravelling of this tale, meant that man subject)would encounter nothing outside of himself in the object) toimpede the realisation of his projects . In other words, naturewould be mastered and society appeased. Living in the world as ifin a garden offlowers, finding a friend in everyone, man would gointo retirement , throw over the work of history and become anEpicurean sage, given up to ev er yt hin g that makes man happy

play, love, art, etc.) , The end of history would be the end ofadversity the term wh ich adequately translates Hegel s Gegen-stdndlichkeit The proposition stating the id en t it y of subject andobject wh ich had hitherto been regarded as ideological

my sti ficat ory) would become true :. .. Absolute knowledge, that is, Wisdom, presupposes thetot al success of Man s Negative Action . This Knowledgeis possible only 1) within a homogeneousand universal Statewhere no man is exterior to another, where there is nosocial oppositionwhich is not suppressed, and 2) in themidst of a Nature that has been tamed by the labour ofMan , and which, no longer opposingMan, ceases to bealien to him. 2 1

I do not propose to discuss whether, in this narrative translationof the Phenomenology Kojeve deforms Hegel s thought , or bringsits most profound sense to light . His interpretation claims to behumanist in that it designates human history as the space withinwhich everything that has meaning must resolve itself There isno truth except in history . There are therefore no eternal truths,since the world undergoes cont inual modification in the course ofhistor y. But there are errors which have the provisional appearance of truth , and those which, dialectically, become truths . Forexample , the Master in an ancient city state who averred. In everycity, there are Masters and Slaves , seemed to be telling the truth.since his st atement was verifiable throughout the ancient world.But he was to be refuted as slaves became free in the course ofhuman history ; whereas the Slave - a Stoic slave - who in anancient cit y state declared, I am a free man , appeared to bemaking a false judgment , but owing to history, his error was to

11 lntr Hegtl p. 301.


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THE END OF HISTORY 29become a truth. tis therefore action which determines the true andthe false. This is why the dialectic - in the classical sense, thedevelopment of true into false, and false into true - is consideredhenceforth to be the feature most proper to any conception ofhistory or of action .

Action, not being, supplies the law of truth . This activism maybe distinguished from a simple historicism , since a historicalrelativism is content to immerse truths within history and therebyabolish any criterion of truth . But for Kojeve, the criterion exists.That which succeed s is true, that which fails is false. Such acriterion is interior to history. tis imm anent and not transcendent , as it was said at the time . For this reason, Kojeve called histhesis an atheism and defined it as the precise antithesis ofChristian theology. tis important to grasp that, for Hegel ,

all that Christ ian theology says is absolutely true ,provided it is applied not to a transcendental andimaginary God, but to Man himself, living in the world .The theologian imagines that theological discourse is one inwhich man subject) speaks of God object), whereas it is a discourse in which God speaks of himself, that is, of man but withoutknowing it. The ultimate significance of an absolute selfconsciousness, or wisdom , is that the author of theological discourse discovers the Other of which he was speaking, to be thesame as himself, the speaker . He recognises himself in that whichhe had taken for other, and thereby puts an end to alienationClassical atheism rejected the notion of divine attributes, pronouncing them inconceivable because infinite, or incompatibleamong themselves . Humanist atheism reclaims them for thehuma n subject , who in this way becomes the true God. It isprecisely this substitution, whereby everywhere the word Man is written in to replace the word God , which defines humanismAnd it is in exactly this sense that the title of humanist wasadopted by Sartre and his companions after 1945. Existentialism isa humanism, as he said at a conference published under the sametitle, which popularised the themes of Being and Nothingnes s

For atheist humanism to be atheist, in the sense that it claimsdivine status for man, means that it is an inverted theology . WeIS ln tr . Htgtl p. 571.


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30 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSeven know which theology was requisitioned by humanism inthe interests of human beings: Cartesian theology, as Sartrereveals in his preface to a selection of texts by Descartes, explaining that Descartes s genius was to have posited God as the creatorof eternal truths. Divine freedom, far from being preceded by aneternal order of truths which define it and thus limit it, is itselfthe inalienable foundation of being, truth and goodness .Descartes s one weakness was to have ascribed to God a powerof creation which, according to Sartre, belongs by rights toourselves:

t was to take two centuries of crisis - a crisis in Faith andin Science - for man to recover the creative freedom thatDescartes had placed in God, and for this truth, theessent ial basis of humanism, to be glimpsed : man is thebeing whose appearance brings the world into existence. 23

The distinctive feature of humanism is this will to recovery andreappro priation of divine attributes, among them the mostprecious of all, the power to create and to bring the world intoexistence . In what sense can human activity be called creative?Th is is the question that leads us to the core of the speculationupon negat ivity. Before moving on from the term humanism, wemust however mention the two setbacks which it subsequentlyencountered : Heidegger s clarification in 1947, and the structuralist debate.In his Letter on Humanism written in response to the questionsput t him by Jean Beau fret, Heidegger explains that there is norelation between his own thought and the humanism of Sartre .His Letter points out that this atheist existentialism , this humanism , are not at all what they purport to be, namely the conclusionof a phenomenological ontology the subtitle of Being and

U La liberte cartesienne , Situations I Gallimard, 1947), p. 334... Written in 1946 and publ ished in German in 1947, Heidegger s Letter wastranslated into French in 1953. A fragment had already appeared inFrench, in the journal, Fontaine no. 63, November 1947 prefaced byBeaufrer s article, M . Heidegger et le problerne de la verite nowavailable in his book, Introduction oux philosophies de l existenceD e n o e l G o n t h i ~ r 1971). This article put an end to the misapprehensionswhich had facilitated the existentialist m isuse of Heidegger. It was alsothe first, and for a long time the only readable text in French about theauthor of Being and Time .


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THE END OF HISTORY 31Nothingness . For a phenomenological ontology , if the expression means anything at all, would be a doctrine of being whichreposes -exclusively upon a faithful description of appearances,whereas Sartre s atheistic existent ialism, his humanism , are whatthey would disclaim at any cost, namely a simple revival of themost traditional metaphysics for the benefit of a man who hadasked for nothing of the kind - a metaphysics which saw increative causality the divine attribute parexcellence After Heidegger s intervention, the word h um an ism ceased to be the flagwhich it had been such a point of honour to defend. Soon after, asa delayed and unexpected consequence of the Letter the debate onhumanism erupted in France 1965-6) . Marxists condemning thebourgeois ideology of Man ; N ietzscheans despising the doctrine of resentment born in the spent intelligence of the lastman ; structuralists of a purist persuasion announcing with LeviStrauss the programme of the dissolution of man 25 - all thesecontended with one another in their anti-humanism . Humanistbecame a term of ridicule, an abusive epithet, to be enteredamong the collection of der ided -isms vitalism, spiritualism,etc.).It is worth noting that the slogan of the 60s - the death of man_ was prefigured in Kojeve s lectures , where it also appeared as theultimate consequence of the death of God . Kojeve said :

The end of History is the deathof Man as such. 28-In a philosophy of action, or of history, man is defined by the factthat he acts and changes the course of things. Ifhistory is at an end,nothing remains to be done . But an idle man is no longer a man.As the threshold of post-history is crossed, humanity disappearswhile at the same time the reign of frivolity begins, the reign ofplay, of derision for henceforth nothing that might be donewould have the slightest meaning). It would have been futile tochallenge Kojeve with the objection that wars and violent revolutions by no means ceased after 1807,any more than they did from1934 to 1939. He would have replied that history was only concluded in theory, as an idea, with precisely the idea remaining to

SI La pensi sauvage Pion, 1962), pp . 326-7 , trans , as The Savage MindLondon, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).11 lnt r. Hegtl p. 388 in the not e).


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32 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSbe achieved, most likely with terrorist methods) of a homogeneous State - an expression which for him could apply as much toHegel s reasonable State as to Marx s classless society . In order forthis idea to become a global reality, a little more time wasrequired, just long enough in which to act - an action whichwould correspond to the wars and revolutions in which we weremobilised.

eg tivityThe leading role in Kojeve s narrative is played by the concept ofnegativity. Two routes lead to the understanding of this notion,the first anthropological, the second metaphysical. I will takethem in that order.In a philosophy where success evinces the truth of the discourseof the happy winner, action is all-decisive . The idle have no futurein this kind of thinking. is on the terrain of human action,envisaged as equivalent to that of history - by virtue of Vice smaxim , Men make history - that the recovery of divine predicates will be achieved, and in particular the power to create, oragain, as Sartre has sometimes called it, creativity . 27 But in whatsense is human action at all creative?

Kojeve often makes his concept of action explicit by the juxtaposition of labour and struggle . Labour being understood as astruggle which does violence to nature, both modes of action havethis bellicose characteristic. All action , then, is opposition to anadversary . And action , by definition, produces some kind ofeffect. The state of the world, after action, is no longer the same.Since no innovation in the world can take place without an actionto introduce it, and since all action is opposition, it follows thatoppos ition (or negation , contradiction) is responsible for introducing the new into the old.

For Kojeve , negativity thus understood is the very essence offreedom. The productive power of negation is liberating. Anyother definition would be naturalist , and would overlook thedifference between the free being of man and the determinedbeing of the animal:

CRD. p. 68.


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But if Freedom is ontologically Negativity, it is becauseFreedom can be and exist only as negation. Now in order tonegate, there must be something to negate: an existinggiven : . .. Freedom does not consist in choicebetween twogivens: it is the negationof the given, both of the givenwhich one is oneself (as animal or as incarnatedtradition ) and of the given which one is not (the naturaland social World . . . . The freedom which is realised andmanifested as dialectical or negatingAction is therebyessentially a creation.For to negate the given withoutending in nothingness is to produce something that didnot yet exist ; now this is precisely what is calledcreating i

NEGATIVITY 33

However, nowhere does Kojeve question the legitimacy ofdefining a concept, in this case that of action, by the conjunction oftwo others (labour and war) . is quite obvious that this union iswhat generates the paradoxical notion of a fruitful negation, sincelabour accounts for the element of production, the transformationof the state of affairs, and war supplies the element of negation, theconfrontation with an adversary whose overthrow is a matter oflife and death . Only the fable of the Master and Slave couldprovide for this association of the two forms of action . The Slaveis primarily a warr ior who has been defeated in a fight forrecognition . He is secondarily a worker serving aMaster who hasspared his life, and has reserved all enjoyment jouissance forhimself This union none the less remains ajuxtaposition, unableto found a genuine concept. War is destruction pure and simple,and as such it produces nothing at all (if there is a Slave, it isbecause the victor has concluded the war and spared the life of thevanquished). At the very best it may entail a transference ofwealth through pillage. Labour, for its part, is certainly produc-tive but it involves no radical negation. Usifullabour is always theutilisation of existing resources, a transformation of the field inaccordance with a preconceived idea (i.e. given prior to action); itis never an annihilation .Are things any clearer from the metaphysical angle?The humanisation of nothingness implies that there is nothingnegative in the world outside of human action. Nature, or that

so nlrHegel, p. 492 .


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34 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESSwhich produces without man having to act, is wholly positive.Natural being is defined by identity in the ordinary and nondialectical sense of the term) . The thing in nature - dog, stone - iswhat it is and nothing other than what its nature its identity)prescribes. Hence Kojeve s doctrine that history is dialectical andnature is not. This permits him to make a concession to theneo-Kantians for whom, as we know, the original sin of theHegelian system was to include a Romantic philosophy of nature,which claims to surpass Newtonian Mechanics . Kojeve grantsthe point: Naturphilosophie is a monster that must be jettisoned.

Kojeve calls his position a dualist ontology. The word beingcannot have the same sense in the case of man and in the case of thething in nature. The thing in nature, whether it is a stone or a firtree, is content to be what it is; its ambitions extend no furtherthan the simple perpetuation of itself the Spinozist conatus . Manhimself, if he behaves as a simple living being , cannot be said toact; he reproduces. So it can be argued that nature has no history .By this we should understand that the natural process is definedby the fact of things remaining the same at the end as they were atthe beginning, all else being equal. Nothing has really happened:nothing has been lost in transit, nothing has been created, exceptperhaps the chicken hatching from an egg, laying another egg inits turn, and so on.

The ability to maintain relations with nothingnessis the distinctive attribute of human action, which inherits the divine privilegefrom Christian theology. introduces innovation into the world .This innovation, if it is to be genuinely new, must be differentfrom anything seen before . After an authentic action, it should bepossible to say, Nothing will be the same again . The property ofaction is thus that it inserts a nothing between the initial and thefmal state of affairs. The result can therefore be said to be created,produced ex nihilo ; and consequently, the protagonist, as soon ashe acts, is manifesting not his will to being to conserve his being),but his will to not-being his spleen with being as he is, his desireto be another). The philosophy of action sees the protagonist as akind of dandy for whom the supreme rationale of a gesture is theelegant absence of all natural reason .

Thus, being has two senses:1. Natural being . Here, to be means to remam the same, topreserve identity .


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NEGATIVITY 352. Historical being or historicity ). To be is here defined by

negativity. The being of the protagonist consists in not remainingthesame in will to difference. And difference does not only meanto be different in the sense that an apple is different from a pear);difference always involves an activity of pushing aside, of tamper-ing . The world as the totality of that which is) falls into twoport ions. In the natural portion, things are as they are, and be-coming is cyclical. In the historical or human portion, noth ingremains as it is, no identity is preserved .

Kojeve illustrates his dualist ontology with an image frequentlyrevived by Sartre in Being andNothingness The world, he says, iscomparable to a gold ring :

Let us consider a gold ring . There is a hole and this hole isjust as essential to the ring as the gold is; without thegold, the hole which, moreover, would not exist)would not be a ring, but without the hole, the gold which would none the less exist) would not be a ringeither. But if one has found atoms in the gold, it is not atall necessary to look for them in the hole. And nothingindicates that the gold and the hole are in one and thesame manner of course , what is involved is the hole ashole , and not the air which is in the hole ). The hole is anothingness that subsists as the presence of an absence)thank s,to the gold which surrounds it. Likewise , Manwho is Action could be a nothingness that nih ilates inbeing , thanks to the being which it negates .29

We should not be dazzled by this brilliant image into forgettingthe equivocal nature of the expression dualist ontology . Ontol-ogy means the doctrine of being . Dualist ontology should there-fore be a doctrine which recognises two senses in the words tobe . We think we have understood : there is the first way of being ,being in the sense of identity, proper to nature , and there is thesecond , being in the sense of negativity, proper to man . But theimage of the ring does not tell us this. According to this gildedfable there are not two senses to being. There is, on the one hand ,being gold) and, on the other, nothingness hole). As for the dialec-tic, that is, the inclusion of nothingness within being, or of

u lntr Htgtl p. 8 in the note).


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difference within identity, it is to be found in the conjunction ofthe two . The gold being) has certainly no need of the hole inorder to be, but the gold ring the world) would not be what it is, agold ring, without the hole.And thus dualist ontology is no longer dualist at all. It is at lastpermissible to hold that being should be defined by identity .

36 THE HUMANISATION OF NOTHINGNESS

Identity and DifferenceNow we are getting very warm, as they say in the game ofHunt-the-thimble . We are nearing the heart of the questionwhich for Kojeve s interpretation - and also for contemporaryFrench philosophy as a whole - is decisive.

The dialectic has already ceased to be the ineffable notion thatSartre had claimed was undefinable. We are encountering thedialectic in the modern sense of the word . In its modern orpost-Kantian sense, the dialectic is an interpretation of the sensepertain ing to the copula is in a categorical judgment , e.g . S isP .o Modern dialectics inherits the Kantian debate on the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments . is opposed tothe analytic interpretation of the copula according to which theword is would signify the identity of the predicate P and thesubj ect S. With a gesture whose significance must be clarified, itintroduces differenceinto the very definition of identity. But thisdifference is expressed by a negative judgment, A is not B Thedialectical interpretation of being thus makes manifest a certainnot being interior to being wh ich formal logic finds difficult toaccommodate . Kojeve summarised it humorously enough :

Parmenides was right in saying that Being is and thatNothingness is not; but he forgot to add that there is adifference between Nothingness and Being, a differencewhich to a certain extent is as much as Being itself is sincewithout it, if there were no differencebetween Being andNothingness , Being itself would not be. SI

In this text, as indeed in all the texts of the period , Being mustalway s be understood as that whichis be ing. In Latin, ens and notesse. Kojeve sjoke therefore means that difference, although it is a10 C f Hegel s theory of the philoso phical proposit ion ... lnt r. Hegel. p. 491 in the note).


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IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 37form of nothingness - since to differ from something is not to belike it - is a part of that which is. This is necessarily the case, forthat which is not a part of what is (the ens returns to the not-being, and thus into nothingness . So that a certain inclusion (whichremains to be defined) of nothingness within be-ing is inevitable ifwe would have a difference between them.

It could equally well be concluded, we should observe in passing, that the difference between something and nothing is not, atleast in the sense that to be means to be something . Because ifthe difference between something and nothing were itself something, we would require a new difference in order to distinguishthat difference, i.e. something, from nothing. As a result, we mustsay that to be need not necessarily mean to be something (thatis, to be identical with itself ). And this development of theargument is ignored by Kojeve and his disciples.In his attempt to give a human face to the negative, Kojeve is ledto distribute identity and difference among the portions of theuniverse . This is where the difficulties begin .

Everything seems very clear in the port ion of the universelabelled Nature , where things are what they are and are contentto be so. They do not desire to change their identity and so they donot desire at all . . . Hence, for a thing in nature, to be and to beitself are equivalent . Being has the analyt ic sense of identity ,meaning that to be implies to bethesame, always, everywhere, andin every case: . The day that the identical ceases be itself, itvanishes. It is no more, as they say of the dead.

In the portion of the world labelled History , negativity rules.Or, if we prefer, difference . To act in history is to work at notbeingwhat one is. In short, being signifies identity in nature, anddifference in history . The thing in nature is, in that it is identical.The historical protagonist is in so far as he acts, and he acts in so faras he is always being different. So we arrive at this trivi al andscarce y dialect ical result : in nature, identity is identity ,whereas in history, difference is difference . The followingconsequence, well k

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Descombes - Modern French Philosophy