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That Obscure Parallel to the Dialectic: Tangled Lines Between Bataille and
Kojve
Boris Belay

Online publication date: 26 April 2010

To cite this Article Belay, Boris(1997) 'That Obscure Parallel to the Dialectic: Tangled Lines Between Bataille and Kojve',

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To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13534645.1997.9522374

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That Obscure Parallel to the Dialectic:

Tangled Lines Between Bataille and Kojve
Boris Belay

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Hegel may have concluded that the form of thought was a circular one, some other
figures nonetheless insist in provoking, and even demanding reflection. Despite and
increasingly against Hegel, we should like to follow and respond to a parallel. Here is
the first meeting point of lines which run together further than the eye can see:
Bataille: One cannot say that Hegel failed to recognize the 'moment'
of sacrifice: this 'moment' is included, at work in the whole movement
of the Phenomenology [...] But not having realized that sacrifice in itself
contained the whole movement of death, the final experience - that
proper to the sage - described in the Preface to the Phenomenology of
Spirit was first initial and universal - he did not know how right he was,
how exactly he had described the movement of Negativity.1
Derrida: Is it possible, as Bataille claims, to understand the movement
of transgression under the Hegelian concept ofAufhebung, which as we
have seen stands for the victory of the slave and the constitution of
sense? Here we have to interpret Bataille against Bataille, or rather
one strata of his writing against another. By contesting what in this
note [from I'Erotisme] seems so evident, we might sharpen the figure
of the displacement to which the whole Hegelian discourse has been
subjected. In which Bataille is even less Hegelian tiian he believes.2
Hegel did not know how right he was; Bataille is less of a Hegelian than he believes.
These two lines might run in opposite directions, they are still enough of a mirror of
one another to make us diink about them together, to make us reflect, then, on and
from this figure of the parallel, of the reflecting mirror. And to make us wonder what
it is that they themselves reflect, whether between or beyond them, there isn't
something else here, unspoken, a third spectral image, the line of a shadow figure,
tying them as much as it divides them. And of course, there is: more dian one in fact.
But in die profusion of these phantom images, one stands out as more clearly missing
between die two, more absent, as it were: precisely the one which has been deemed
the eminence grise of the French philosophical scene between Bataille and Derrida tiiis short description is enough to make him discernible through the shadows: it is
Kojve, bien sur.

parallax 4 (february 1997): 55-70

If in Inner Experience Bataille can say about Hegel: "[n]obody has deepened die
possibilities of intelligence as much as him (no doctrine can be compared to his: it is
the peak of positive intelligence)."3 It is because of what he says about Kojve around
the same time:
[fj rom 33 (I think) to 39,1 attended the course which Alexandre Kojve
devoted to the explanation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (brilliant
explanation, on a par with the book: how many times did Queneau
and I leave the litde room astounded-astounded, stupefied).4

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This praise for the Commentator 5 is reflected again in the bibliography of Theory of
Religion:
[the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel\ is an explanation of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit. The ideas which I have expounded here are
contained in it in substance. There would remain to make clear the
connections between the Hegelian analysis and diis 'dieory of religion':
the differences between one and the other representation seem easy
enough to overcome. 6
But if Bataille is less of a Hegelian than he believes, it is again because of that middle
line in our opening parallel, which, it turns out also stands between the end points of
each of the two beginning lines: complexified structure of the phantom image,
whereby Kojve appears through Bataille and Derrida's reflecdons, but also in the
lines between Hegel and Bataille and between Bataille and Derrida. For Bataille,
Hegel did not know how right he was (how Bataillean he was), and for Derrida,
Bataille did not know how litde of a Hegelian he was (how right he was), because of
the semi-hidden intervention of the commentary. Kojve stands tall for Bataille in
relation to Hegel, but he also stands in between Bataille and Hegel, and he would
stand in the way if his presence were full, if his activity were not one of translucence:
diat of the commentary whose essence is a disappearance in its (self-)revealing. Already
in Theory of Religion, Bataille had sensed some of that:
Having had to acknowledge the work of Alexandre Kojve, I must
insist on one point: whatever opinion one might have about the
exactitude of his interpretation of Hegel (and I would care to give any
possible critiques on this point only a limited value), diis Introduction,
relatively accessible, is not only the primary instrument of selfconsciousness, but the only means to approach the various aspects of
human life - particularly the political aspects - otherwise than a child
approaches the acts of adults. No-one could pretend to culture today
without having assimilated its lessons.'

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Here again, Bataille is not parsimonious with his praise, but one must not be misled
about its object: it is clearly Kojve's book, and not Hegel's 'positive intelligence',
that is the necessary step for anybody's culture, for self-consciousness, for intellectual
maturity. Despite Bataille's refusal to question the exactitude of the Introduction as a
commentary on Hegel, he has marked the divide between the two. And in fact, as is
often the case with Bataille, one should pay close attention to the way diis refusal is
worded - for it is clearly just that: Bataille does not want to question the accuracy of
die commentary, he does not want to enter into this kind of questioning, in die end
he just does not care to do so: 'and I would care to give any possible critiques on diis
point only a limited value'. Whatever the critiques may be on die question of literality,
Bataille essentially wishes to pass over them. The important point is Kojve's book,
its primary place in the intelligence of humanity. And thus, we can also trust that he
weighed his praise too: Bataille is a man of words, but words as acdon - they each
have a weight, an effect, and diat is why a book such as Kojve's can have such an
importance. It too passes over the fancies of literal exactitude for the direct effects of
truth, and who deals with die effects of trudi has to confront direcdy die power of
rhetoric. If Bataille appreciates the book it is because Kojve appreciates diis fact,
and this in turn explains much of what behind the written words - between die lines
- des die two figures together.
If die connection between Bataille and Hegel is Kojve, the connection between
Bataille and Kojve deserves attention diat goes beyond die evidence of die printed
page, of literal precision and philosophical argumentation. Much of what is happening
between die two men happens behind die scenes, in semi-obscurity which is precisely
die point: die connecting line is diere, where it is difficult to discern what actually
happens, where the exact word may not be found. And it is diere diat one may come
to see that Derrida's line is wrong, but tiierefore right.
[Does this in turn mean it is irrelevant? But of course, it wouldn't be: even then,
exacdy dien. For die logic at stake begins exacdy where die tension between diese
terms is given the space to resonate, where diese opposites are given their value by
dieir very communication.]
Wrong because Bataille does not care to use even such a central Hegelian notion as
die Aujhebung with the necessary precision that would make die question of his
Hegelianism stick. This can be illustrated witii a passage in which Bataille, asked
about his influences, summarizes his early encounters widi Hegel in a telling way.
This short history tells much of the complications underlying die relationship:
The first {of two articles on Hegel}, written in collaboration with
Queneau, is very old (1931), and it predates my true encounter with
the work of Hegel, starting in 1933, when I followed the course by
Alexandre Kojve (until 1939). These lectures, partly published under
die tide: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, had for me die greatest

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importance. T h e second article is devoted to the Hegelian philosophy

of Kojve. [...] In a way Hegel's thought is the contrary of mine, but I
only find myself in it dialectically if I can say so, in a Hegelian way.8
Again, we find here the main elements: no real Hegel before Kojve ("my true
encounter with the work..."), even if he has written on Hegel, and read him relatively
extensively, it turns out, at least in the context of the French philosophical scene in
the twenties and early thirties. 9 But, as is clearly marked, it is then a matter of
"Kojve's Hegelian philosophy', not of Hegel himself anymore. Even though - further
turn - Bataille claims to be a Hegelian. This is where Derrida's question about his
Hegelianism applies, but only to be confronted with the twisted logic of Bataille's
own genealogy: Hegelian he is, despite the contrary positions he and Hegel hold,
precisely because of his use of the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung. Yet Bataille knew
better than to think one could extract the mechanism of the dialectic from its actual
forms (and Derrida is more than right to show how demanding Bataille's confrontation
with Hegel was, giving all its weight to the famous phrase from Guilty: "Often Hegel
seems to me obviously true [['evidence], but such obvious truth is hard to bear.'" 0 ). So,
Bataille knowingly uses an un-Hegelian move to apply a Hegelian concept to his unHegelian position to render it Hegelian. Thus, if Derrida is right to claim that
Bataillean transgression is not equivalent to the Hegelian Aufhebung, he is also wrong
in his claim that "Bataille is even less Hegelian than he believes". This, because it is
difficult to determine how much he believes himself to be Hegelian: that murky area
of shadows beneath what is said evidendy holds a secrecy which Derrida can hardly
pretend to possess securely (and it is not a matter of psychology against textuality,
either, as die secret is in the textual figure of Bataille, or rather 'Bataille', and 'Hegel',
'Kojve', 'Derrida', etc. - but Derrida knows this - and thus, Bataille might turn out
to be more of a Derridean than Derrida seems to think...). But clearly Bataille is less
Hegelian than he claims - in this Derrida is right - insofar as this Bataillean dialectic
between die Hegelian and the un-Hegelian is the furthest from die Hegelian spirit,
which would prefer to stick with only the Hegelian element. But if we are here back
on die terrain of will, it is the Bataillean spirit diat ends up being die right one - diat
spirit which claims that it is Hegelian and thereby, precisely, proves itself to be
Bataillean.

Does die complexity of die turns along the interwoven path between Hegel and
Bataille's lines render die question of Bataille's Hegelianism irrelevant? What we
have just said about Derrida's claim could imply so, but diat it is right and wrong
shows exactly the contrary - a Bataillean contrary which Derrida in die end accounts
for quite well:
Thus Bataille can only use the empty form of die Aufhebung, in an
analogical manner, in order to designate - it had never been done before - die
transgressive relationship which ties die world of sense to die world of
non-sense. This displacement is paradigmatic: an intra-philosophical

concept - the speculative concept par excellence - is forced in a writing

to designate a movement which properly constitutes the excess of any
possible philosopheme."
This is the real importance, the real necessity of Bataille's confrontation with Hegel:
in a relevance beyond right and wrong, beyond the relevance of such determinations.

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What of Kojve, then? What of his position in the midst of this tangled web of
dialectical and anti-dialectical turns? What of his role as commentator, shadow double
supposed to cast light and straighten convolutions? What becomes of this (Hegelian?)
opposition between clarity and obscurity - and what does Bataille make of it?
If there were such a close connection - indeed, friendship - between Bataille and
Kojve (and it lasted until Bataille's death), it is because of an essential similarity of
position in the antidiesis between light and dark, and this, despite the obvious
differences in their intellectual careers. Indeed, being a professor, a commentator,
and a public administrator were never options Bataille considered, except as examples
to define himself against. But if Kojve was all three at subsequent moments of his
life, that does not tell the whole story, and leaves obscured diat on which die friendship
was based. Going from professor, philosopher and commentator to administrator
does not mean, in Bataille's eyes, diat Kojve turned out like Hegel - as we will see,
there is a reserve in Kojve's appropriation of Hegel which prevents die completion
of the mimesis which die professional biography seems to imply. Never would Bataille
say of Kojve what he wrote of the Philosopher:
Hegel, during his life, achieved salvation, killed satisfaction, mutilated
himself. All that was left of him was a broomstick, a modern man. [...]
no doubt he touched on the extreme, knew supplication: his memory
leads him back to die abyss he approached, in order to nullify it'. T h e
system is the nullification.'Kojve was never the broomstick, die empty instrument of knowledge which seems
to be even more in die commentator's role, because of a reserve on his part, an area
of secrecy in his interpretation which, while preventing him from achieving the
recognition of his professorial peers, ' 3 is precisely what kept him closer to the Hegelian
abyss summoned back by Bataille (the return of Hegel's repressed memory!). Kojve's
secretive teaching of the secretive (what better place to hide the secret than in the
circularity of knowledge coming to know itself, in another figure, parallel to that
circle, precisely?) made him little of a professor, but neither did he mean to be more.
He had received the degree necessary to teach only mondis before beginning die
Hegel seminar, and that position itself was only achieved through the active
intervention of Koyr, his friend, near relative (Kojve had married Koyr's ex-step-

sister), and mentor in things academically French, who had begun the seminar series
on Hegel's philosophy of religion. And having finished his Reading of Hegel six
years later, he was not to teach again. His whole professorial output, then, this single
commentary of a single book,14 was even to be edited by somebody else: Queneau,
the assiduous student and otherwise post-surrealist author of humorous novels and,
of course, friend of Bataille. That this tenuous relationship to the professional aspects
of professorship played its role in the connection between Bataille and Kojve is
tellingly illustrated in the sketch diat leads to one of Bataille's laudatory descriptions
of the Seminar already quoted - it is worth citing in extenso:

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In my life, I have received only once a letter addressed - by error - to

Professor Doktor Georges Bataille: die result of studies on ancient
Indian coins...
Also, I remember that there was a dme when I was called without
humor a scholar. The field was Romanesque philology.
I forgot everydiing.
As far as philosophy, I went until the age of thirty without having
followed one course, Not even in high school (it was wartime, I learned
the bare necessities, quickly, from a textbook bound in green cloth).
Later, Chestov advised me to read Plato.
From 33 (I think) to 39,1 attended die course which Alexandre Kojve
devoted to the explanation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (brilliant
explanation, on a par with the book: how many dmes did Queneau
and I leave the little room astounded - astounded, stupefied).
Around the same urne, dirough numerous readings, I kept abreast of
movements in die sciences.
But Kojve's lectures broke me, ground me, killed me ten dmes. 15
Not a professor, not a scholar (he forgot everything!), not a philosopher - such is
Bataille's connection to Kojve: in a knowledge that breaks, grinds, kills you, a trudi
whose power is derived from its refusal to announce itself with ddes (the oh-so
German/Hegelian Professor Doktor, for instance), preferring rather the cover of
the commentary to deal underhandedly widi objects that resist posidve knowledge. '6
Whatever Kojve's official tides (and Bataille was a librarian, after all), the two men
share in an attraction for a knowledge which defies categorizations, whose resistance
to clarity (scholarly or otherwise) astounds the mind, stupefies the will-to-know. This
common fascination opens onto all the themes about which the two see eye to eye:
diere, where the visibility falters and the eye, losing its function, becomes no more and
no less than the metaphorical object of die most unsighdy, obscure desires - of pleasure

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and the death drive, both, indeterminacy." Thus, the shared sense of tragedy: in
Bataille's Kojvian reading of Hegel against Hegel, the Phenomenology becomes the
Romansbildungof knowledge coming to see what it cannot see, and that this will remain
hidden from it as the circle closes on itself. And this tragic fate of knowledge derives
from what Hegel had clearly seen before nullifying it: die power of Negativity as an
essential moment of the real becoming rational. This sense of the tragic, this
Negativity, are hallmarks of Kojve's reading of Hegel, defining characters of his
commentary that also define his ties to Bataille: in these, as in the other Kojvian
themes, Bataille will follow him so far as to go beyond him.

For Kojve, the human moment is die moment of Negativity: it is the opposition to
the natural, immediate moment, anthropogenesis happening when out of this
opposition arises human culture. For Bataille, diis negativity is the essence witiiout
essence of humanity, to die point that the moment of nature is essentially lost, and
culture becomes that essential loss: values - artistic, etilica], political - find their only
(lack of) ground in the abyss to easily patched over by the name 'Negativity'. In both
cases, Hegel's immense contribution has been to open positive knowledge to its
beyond, even as the negative moment of the dialectic was put to work in die service
of die positive. In the ties between Bataille and Kojve, Derrida has seized on die
right figure when he recalls die slavish character of Hegel's use of Negativity as diat
which does die work of transition between the unformed (immediate) diesis and die
sophisticated (mediated) synthesis, for the character of the slave is also, of course,
crucial. In Kojve's reading, die master-slave dialectic is precisely die andiropogenetic
passage: desire becomes human - in fact, becomes man - as it seizes onto itself,
comes to know itself in coming to desire desire: another as odier who will recognize
my sameness for me, tins essential negation of my immediacy. But between Bataille
and Kojve, the circle of desire is eidier too short or too long: if I desire recognition
all die way to my deadi, there is not enough self left to recognize, and if I keep my
desire too close to itself (and save my skin: die animal envelope diat will receive the
satisfaction), I close myself up into itself: become die tool of satisfaction. Yet die subject
of diat satisfaction, 'who' seeks it through diat tool, remains ambiguous: eidier natural
drives (they are not 'mine', as there is no 'me'), or andiropogenetic drives, where I
become the tool of another whose satisfaction is now mediated. Either an animal, or
a slave: diis is the unsatisfying result of the struggle for recognition, leading to the
consequence that only die slave can - eventually, mediately - rise above animaliry,
since the mediation of slavery in die circuit of the master's satisfaction is not enough
to alienate him from diat closed circle, and he remains a human animal whose
desires are his whole world. In this respect, Kojve emphasizes that it is death diat
separates the master from the slave, but not in any simple way: true, die master
triumphed because the slave shied away from death, but this is none of die master's
doing (and doing [tun] is Negativity, is human): he would have struggled until deadi
to achieve his desire, in other words, his desire ruled over him to his (still animal)

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death (which he did not fear, ie., understand humanly), such that it is only the slave's
fearful recognition that made him a Master. Paradoxically, then, it is in die slave's
recoiling from death that h u m a n i t y is b o r n , a n d so, Being-towards-death is
andiropogenetic only insofar as it means a fear of death, a grasp of something beyond
human life, an alienation from (self-)certainty, an ultimate stop to human desires.
This is the slave, who labors to overcome his desires because he knows diere is
something that can overcome them (him), labors then, on himself, and dius makes
himself as he alienates himself by internalizing a fear of somediing he has not known,
he cannot know.18 (This is die secret power of death.) Bataille only radicalizes this
role of anguish when he recognizes the slave as the instrument of culture because he
ushers in die era of perversion: death drive beyond die pleasure principle, unsadsfacrion
as the law of desire, struggle/erotism as die extreme of recognition/love. But diis
displacement of die original/animal object cathexis is precisely the movement of
humanity, tragic position where the labor of love is the work of mourning, as man
realizes his terrifying animal finitude exactly insofar as he puts an end to his animality.
T h e inspiration is clearly in Kojve:
The slave realizes and perfects his humanity by working in die service
of the master. But his servile or slavish Work only has an
andiropogenedc value insofar as it is born out of Anguish in front of
death and is followed by the consciousness of die essential finitude of
die one who serves by working.19
The slave is not an animal because he works, he works because he is afraid of death,
he is afraid of deadi because he knows he can die, he knows he can die because he is
human, and he is human because he is not an animal. The Kojvian circle of
humanity is dius closed, and widi it, die circle of self-certainty: anguish, struggle,
deadi are all put to work in the service of man's self-consciousness, and dius, more
grandly, of die real coming to know itself as rational. The circle is closed, die human
world is created, and we (humanity/universality/God) can see diat it is good: widi
die rise of discursive diought and die self-consciousness of the slave, circularity finally
rests only on itself, as even deadi has been put to work: to rest.
Man is die only being in die world who knows tiiat he must die, one
can say diat he is conscious of his deadi: the truly human existence is
an existing consciousness of deadi, or a death conscious of itself. Since
die perfection of man is the plenitude of self-consciousness, and since
Man is essentially finite in his very being, it is in conscious acceptance
of finitude that h u m a n existence culminates. And it is the full
(discursive) comprehension of the meaning of deadi which constitutes
this Hegelian W i s d o m , which ends History by giving M a n
Satisfaction.20

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But there remains to be seen who, of Hegel or death, is the broomstick of the other.
We already know Bataille's answer: Hegel "achieved salvation, killed satisfaction";
the tireless pursuer of truths (he must have them all), the philosophical Don Juan, 2 ' did
not go to the end of his role, shied away from the direct confrontation with the
Statue of the Commander. Of course, one knows the Statute will appear, and
knowledge is part and parcel of the drama, but this knowledge does not make the
drama in and of itself because it is knowledge of that which will happen diat makes the
tragedy, and thus the hero has to confront his fate to the end. But Hegel does not
care for tragedy here (it has its proper place in the system, where it rests and does its
job too), nor is he opera material: Bataille pictures him at work, professing, then at
home, playing cards, resting.
Hegel's desire is resolved in a knowledge which is absolute, which is
the suppression of the - relative - subject that knows. One does not exist
anymore in these condidons, history, first of all, is thought to be finished,
and similarly, the life of the individual subject must be. If one thinks
about it, never has anything been conceived that was more dead:
multiple life was the great game and the great error which the
completion of this death required. Toward the end of his life, Hegel
did not worry about the problem anymore: he repeated his lectures
and played cards.22
But if Bataille agrees (with Kojve) that in a sense the Negativity stops there, at the
end of History and in the closure of self-consciousness, tiiere nevertheless remains
for him an area of shadows, the ungraspable presence of a Negativity running parallel
to the Negativity which Hegel had enslaved (having recoiled from its abyssal
effectivity), something barely discernible through a blind spot in the System. With diis
blind spot, the metaphor of the eye returns, playing much the same phantasmatic role
of transition - communication, for Bataille - between two positively irreconcilable
spheres, while, more generally but underhandedly, announcing the main lines of
Bataille's very (impossible) project:
There is, in the understanding, a blind spot recalling the structure of
the eye. In the understanding as in the eye, it is difficult to detect. But
whereas the blind spot in the eye is of no consequence, the nature of
the understanding is such that the blind spot has more sense for it
than understanding itself. [...] To the extent that man itself is considered
in the understanding, I mean: an exploration of the possibility of being,
the spot captures the attention: it is not a matter of the spot being lost
in knowledge anymore, but of knowledge lost in it. In this way, existence
closes the circle, but it can only do so by including the night from
which it emerges only to return back to it.23

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Vision, as the sense of the eye, functions through the point of its blindness: the
condition of its possibility. While much die same is true of the understanding, the
organ of sense, die consequences are much deeper: it is sense itself mat is abyssally
questioned as it turns itself onto its own basis and asks the question of the sense of
sense. This summary of the Bataillean question, a secretive manifesto for those who
can read it, is nothing if not a radical reformulation of die humanizing power of
Negativity, as die power to question oneself, to ask what I is - in die end. Again,
Bataille begins with the Hegelian Negativity, and ends with it, for die Negativity at
stake is nothing - nodiing more than Negativity itself, die rest, after the end of the
story, of the negation of die negation. Predictably useless, the Mgativite sans emploi
that remains, if it is experienced as die Seducer confronts his end, does not rest, does
not allow for rest - not at the brink of deadi. This is made as clear as it can be in a
confrontation with Kojve, cast in the role of the intercessor:
I admit (as a believable supposition) that history has already ended
(except for the denouement). Still, I see things differendy than you do...
In any event, my experience, lived with much care, has led me to
diink tiiat I had nodiing more 'to do'. (I wasn't ready to accept it, and,
as you know, only resigned myself to it after having tried my best.)
If action (die 'doing') is - as Hegel says - negativity, die question remains
whedier die negativity widi 'nodiing left to do' disappears or subsists
as 'negativity without use' [Ngahvit sans emploi\ : personally, I can only
follow one path, being myself precisely this 'negativity widiout use' (I
couldn't define myself in a more precise fashion). I agree that Hegel
may have foreseen this possibility: at least he did not situate it as die
endoi the processes he described. I imagine that my life - or, better yet,
its abortion, the open wound diat is my life - in and of itself constitutes
die refutation of Hegel's closed system.
[...] I add diis last consideration: for phenomenology to have a sense,
Hegel also had to be recognized as its author (which probably only
takes place in a serious fashion in your work), and it is evident diat
Hegel, because he did not assume all die way his role as man of
'recognized negativity', did not risk anything: dius he still belonged,
in some sense, to the Tierreich.-*
Thus, if Bataille, aborted, facing die deathly negativity that rules over him and signifies
die essential finitude of his usefulness (to die system), sees himself (becomes conscious
of himself) as the gaping wound diat disproves Hegel, as die reverse stigmata on diis
Modern Christ, he does not preclude diat further prophets may appear after the
complete revelation of Truth. Indeed, Kojve is here portrayed as one such step
beyond die Master: slavish commentator that recognizes more than die master text
when it recognizes the Master as Master - and nothing more. Bataille, himself the

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further step that disproves the believing Thomases (including Aquinas, through his
Summa Alheologica) when he bares himself as wound, recognizes that the work of the
Slave does not end with the work for the Master, that the commentary adds another
parallel figure to the original one, and that this rest - what is left over after the
completion of the whole circle - disturbs the rest of the whole. Mastery (of the
(Hegelian) moment) is displaced by sovereignty (of the (Nietzschean) instant) when
the sleep of the Master becomes uneasy because of troubling dreams, phantom images,
recurring nightmares that linger on in the light of reason only long enough to prove
unseizeable by it. In the end, there remains something, besides playing cards: the
sovereign choice that comes after the end, when it has no more possible utility than
itself as itself: sovereignty as the simulacrum of Mastery.

Clearly, it is Kojve's Introduction - whatever the critiques may be about his reading of
Hegel - that is the 'primary instrument of self-consciousness', the mature step beyond
the childish (animal, Tierreickisch) conceptions of humanity. Bataille's 'true encounter
with the work of Hegel' then only takes place when he goes beyond it. With Kojve,
he discovered the importance of systematically coming to terms with systematicity,
while in terms of philosophical themes, the influence remained more limited. Indeed,
the Reading stresses man as essential Negativity, the necessity of a 'struggle for pure
prestige', the formative moment of the consciousness of death, and the determining
role of the slave, all hallmark Bataillean themes, but those had already been explicit
in articles published before Kojve's seminar began, most importandy in "The notion
of spending" in La Critique Sociale ofJanuary 1933. Bataille cleariy found strong echoes
of his major ideas in the lectures, developed in a different and no doubt more
philosophical setting, and thereby was able to appreciate the role Hegel could come
to play with respect to his work. But this role remains a negative one, in parallel to
the opposition of the slave to the Master. Acting as catalysts, Kojvian notions such
as the anthropogenetic rise out of animality or the End of History, only seem to have
precipitated a reinforcement of Bataille's position, and arguable even the 'ngativit
sans empio? however bound to the Hegelian discourse, was just another avatar of the
multiple formulations of the 'insufficiency of the classical principle of utility'.
Consequendy, by 1938, returning in the framework of the Collge de Sociologie to
the earlier influence of Freud and Mauss, Bataille still acknowledges the importance
of Kojve's Hegel, but the enthusiasm of the discovery has given way to a now
strangely flat critical position:

Hegelian p h e n o m e n o l o g y represents the mind as essentially

homogeneous. But the more recent results on which I rely agree in
their establishing a formal heterogeneity between the different regions
of the mind. It seems to me that the marked heterogeneity established
between the sacred and the profane by French sociology and between

15

the conscious and the unconscious by psychoanalysis, remains wholly

foreign to Hegel.

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Thus, there would be no use for us in repeating or interpreting the

Phenomenology of Spirit, as Kojve, in fact, does in a masterful way at the
[Ecole des] Hautes Etudes. Negativity, among other objects of the
Hegelian account, no doubt remains a representation that is rich,
violent, and imbued with a great descriptive value, but the negativity
of which I wish to speak is of a wholly different nature. 25
On the surface, the opposition is now very clearly marked: the negativity in question
is of 'a wholly different nature' than Hegel's Negativity. This is not so surprising in
this context though: even if the Collge proposes an active, even virulent sociology, it
still remains a mostly pedagogical organ, or at the very least, z public one. So, here
we return to a scene that is much more appropriate to Derrida's claim about Bataille's
Hegelianism, but this only happens at the expense of Kojve, relegated again to the
shadows of the commentary, the intermediary between the statement and its
dpassement. In this (open, public) scene, responding to a Hegel that remains Kojve's,
Bataille nevertheless passes over the commentator's role, leaving in obscurity that
which has 'no use'. But of course, by now, after so many turns and returns of this
tangled logic, we know better than to tiiink that Bataille is ever done dealing with
the useless and the obscure. If the scene and its logic are given to be so public, it is at
the very point were Bataille sinks more deeply into the secret elsewhere. [Where? elsewhere: the secret is always there.] And even as he passes over and goes beyond
the commentary in his response to Hegel (precisely as he passes over the question of
the exactitude of the commentary), Kojve is maintained in an unspoken but very
Bataillean dialectic: it is necessary and useful to respond to Hegel, but it is all the
more necessary to go beyond that utility and recover the essentially human element
of communication and friendship. The hidden role of commentator obscures but
does not foreclose the possibility of a relationship that cuts across systematic
determinations, and behind the veil of shadows, Bataille shares more with Kojve
than an explicit thematization reveals.

The story does not end then, not with Bataille's response to Hegel. For, if Bataille
has reversed the positions of the author, the commentator and the reader, giving a
positive-transgressive account of each step away from the original, Kojve's position
as the medium of this relation is more murkily complex than foreseen. Indeed, Kojve
goes beyond the words of the Master in several self-conscious ways (beginning with
the fact that his whole interpretation is explicitly premised on the revelation of what
Hegel himself kept secret, for instance, that Napoleon marked the End of History),
and considers "the question of whether Hegel actually says what I claim he says is a
childish one". 26 So the commentator explicitly goes beyond the Master, but he may

well go beyond his audience too - Bataille included - as the obscurity diat surrounds
his Reading spreads in one direction as much as the other. And so, it might well be
that the middle step gets the last word in the end - or at least one that goes as far
beyond positive knowledge as any other, in that undecidable shadow of Negativity,
in the never fully revealed secrecy beneath circularly explicit and self-conscious
knowledge.

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Even the revelations he makes when confronted direcdy cannot dispel these shadows:
I taught a course in philosophical andiropology using Hegelian texts,
but saying what I considered to be the truth, and dropping what seemed
to be, in Hegel, an error. Thus, for example, by giving up on Hegelian
monism, I knowingly strayed from this great philosopher. Moreover,
my lectures were essentially a work of propaganda, meant to be striking.
This is why I consciously stressed the role of die master-slave dialectic
[...] One small remark, though. The terms 'sentiment of self and
'self-consciousness' are diose of Hegel, who says explicidy that, unlike
man, the animal never moves beyond die 'sentiment of self. The
term 'struggle for pure prestige' indeed is not Hegel's, but I believe
diat this is only a matter of terminology, as all I say applies perfecdy to
what Hegel calls die 'struggle for recognition'. As for my theory of the
desire for desire, it is not to be found in Hegel either, and I am not
sure that he saw the matter very well. I introduced die notion because
I meant to do, radier than a commentary on the Phenomenology, an
interpretation of it; in odier words, I tried to find die buried premises
of the Hegelian doctrine, and to construct it by logical deduction from
these premises. T h e 'desire for desire' seems to me one such
fundamental premise.27

The last word then, for Kojve, in a "Preface to the work of Georges Bataille" diat is
as much an introduction as a conclusion:
In any event, die pages diat follow have their place beyond the Hegelian
circular discourse.
There remains to be seen whedier diey contain a discourse (which
would, in diis case, amount to a refutation), or whedier it is a verbal
form of contemplative Silence mat is to be found in diem. Yet, if there
is only one possible way to say die Truth, diere are innumerable ways
to leave it unspoken. 28
And, the figure of the parallel still insisting in the intimacy of die unspoken, Kojve
reaffirms the obscure possibility of a secret connection with Bataille: "I am more
and more inclined to think that the only possible attitude with regard to that of the
'Hegelians' is the 'silent' attitude which is yours." 29

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Notes
1
Georges BatailJe, "Hegel, death and sacrifice",
in CEuvres Compiila, voi XII(Paris: Gallimard, 19701988): 338-339 (hereafter, all references to Bataille's
w o r k will be given in t h e CEuvres Completes
pagination, as a R o m a n numeral for the volume
followed by an Arabic n u m b e r for t h e p a g e ;
throughout, all translations from French are my own).
- J a c q u e s Derrida, "From restricted to general
economy: a Hegelianism widiout reserve", in L'Are
"Georges BataiJJe", 32 (1967): 4 3 .
3
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience^: 128.
' Georges Bataille, notes to On Metzsche, VI: 416.
T h e laudatory terms are difficult to translate:
"...(explication geniale, la m e s u r e du livre:
combien de fois Qucneau et moi sortimes suffoqus
de la petite salle - suffoqus, clous)."
4
When 'the peak of positive intelligence' was
Aristotle, he was 'the Philosopher' according to
scholastic s h o r t h a n d , a n d A v e r r o e s , ' t h e
Commentator' - great figure in the shadows of the
former. It is very much the same place that Kojve
holds in our Hegelian context, clearly deserving
the distinction of the silent capital.
s
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, VII: 358.
;
Ibid., Bataille, Theory of Religion, VII: 358.
8
Bataille from an unpublished draft for a letter
from 1956, responding to a query by the editor of
a German book on contemporary literature (op.
cit., Bataille, VII: 615). T h e two articles mentioned
and sent with the response, are "Critique of the
foundations of the Hegelian dialectic", and "Hegel,
death, and sacrifice", the article on which much of
Derrida's argument is based.
9
O n that topic, the most direcdy telling source is
Queneau's article: "Premieres confrontations avec
Hegel", published in the memorial issue of Critique
devoted to Bataille (195-196 (August/September
1963)). Besides the article from 1932, "Critique of
the foundations of the Hegelian dialectic", we know
from the list of Bataille's b o r r o w i n g s at t h e
Bibliothque Nationale that he had some
acquaintance, as eariy as 1924, with Hegel's works,
including the Philosophy of Spirit, the Logic, and the
Lectures on the History of Philosophy (cf. op.cit., Bataille,
XII: 549-621). .And before Kojve's lectures, he had
followed some of t h e ones his p r e d e c e s s o r ,
.Alexandre Koyr, had taught in 1932-33 on
'Hegel's religious philosophy'.
10
George Bataille, Guilty, V: 3 5 1 .
" Op. cit., Derrida, "From restricted to general
economy", 44.
'- Op. cit., Bataille, Inner Experience, V: 56.

" And how many have since made their careers by

showing where Kojve missed the literal Hegelian
mark? However necessary a readjustment of the
r e c e p t i o n of Hegel in France after Kojve's
revelatory lectures may have been, it is probably
too great an honor for the C o m m e n t a t o r that
somediing like an academic specialty congealed
around disproving his Reading.
" T h e p o i n t h e r e has t o do w i t h Kojve's
p r o d u c t i o n while a professor: the list of his
p u b l i c a t i o n s d u r i n g this most intellectually
productive period of his life seems to imply his
professorship was entirely devoted to the (oral)
composition of the Reading- much as Hegel looked
at his own lectures as the actual exposition of the
System, to be collected and published as his Opus.
Between 1933 and 1939, besides various reviews
for Koyr's Recherches Philosophiques, Kojve only
published three articles: one on Bavink's philosophy
of science, a summary of his diesis on Soloviev's
religious philosophy (both in 1934), and the
commentary on the master-slave dialectic (1939),
later published as an introduction to the Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel.
15
O p . cit., Bataille, VI: 416. With respect to die
issue of e a c h c h a r a c t e r ' s r e l a t i o n s h i p to
professorship, it is worth mentioning here Derrida's
response to Bataille's own attitude (in this case,
t o w a r d H e i d e g g e r , "professor, v e r y serious
professor"): "I hope that my 'deconstruction' of
Heidegger's academic and political experience is
more effective than Bataille's, because I belong to
the Academy, because I am not in the situation of
the independent avant-garde which says; well, this
man is a professor... No, I think one must work
from widiin, up to a point. I am not seeking to
defend my profession against Bataille, whom I
admire of course. But on this very point, he did
not go far e n o u g h with H e i d e g g e r . . . " (from
conversations with Russian philosophers in Moscou
AIler-Retour (Paris; ed. de l'Aube, 1995): 139-140).
16

W h e n Bataille deems Hegel 'the peak of positive

intelligence', he means it forcefully and precisely,
but he does not mean diat the circle of knowledge
was closed with die Phenomenology, radier, the circle
may be closed - it had to be: 'the system is the
nullification' - but knowledge r e m a i n s open,
abyssally.
" T o use these categories for example; but as
Barthes has shown, the metaphor of the eye in
Bataille denies such classificatory schemes bv
gliding over and across them: the unconscious

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regains its rights - its rights beyond the Law - when

displacement, Freud's original insight into that
w h i c h c a n n o t be seen, over-rules t h e later
schematizations, when Bataille tells the story of the
eye that turns into a testicle, the o r b of light
becoming the bestial ball - a m o n g others (cf.
Roland Barthes, "La mtaphore de Tail", Crilioue
195-196 (August/September 1963)).
18
As the article on Soloviev shows, diis relationship
between work, the unknowable, humanity and
history was a persistent concern of Kojve's since
his Heidelberg years (studying widi Jaspers). His
analysis of Soloviev's religious thought centers on
humanity's becoming universal and Godly through
its historical work of overcoming the distance
between the dual aspects of the Divine: absolute
and changing. This connection with Kojve's later
Hegelianism is explored in Michael Roth's Knowing
and History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1988): ch. 4.

obsessions are composing, becoming die 'Tombeau

de Don J u a n ' . " (Op. cit., Bataille, I: 446. Here
'Tombeau' refers to a classical form of a musical
or poetic composition written in homage to a
deceased, as much as to die tomb itself.)
22
Georges Bataille, " D e l'existentialisme au primat
de l'vidence economie", XI: 282.
33
O p . cit., Inner Experience, V: 129.
21
Letter to Kojve of December 6, 1937, published
(except for the last paragraph) in op. cit., Guilt)/, V:
369-370, 564.
25
Conference of February 5, at die Collge de
Sociologie, op. cit., Bataille, II: 323-324. It is worth
noting in diis respect that Kojve did participate,
if less than Bataille wished, in the Collge de
Sociologie, giving a lecture on "Hegelian Notions"
on December 4 , 1937. It is in response to this
presentation that two days later, Bataille wrote die
letter on 'negativity without use'.
26

15

Alexandre Kojve, Introduction la Lecture de Hegel

(Paris: Gallimard, 1947): 571-572.
20
Ibid., Kojcve, Introduction, 571-2.
" I n Bataille's catalogue of eighteenth century
libertines, DonJuan is as important as any of Sade's
characters, and this because the Seducer and the
Sadean libertine play similar but reversed roles:
whereas die systematic, encyclopedic enterprise of
the Marquis drives him to a tragically impossible
closure, Don Juan embodies the figure of tragedy
from die beginning, which he then has to carry
systematically to its end: the diree resounding No!
in the very face of a death he defied knowing it
was beyond him. Besides die references to the
"Diary of the Seducer", Don Juan's importance in
Bataille's texts of the diirties is clearly marked in,
among others, the introductory text of Accphalc, "La
conjuration sacre", where the opposition to Hegel
is echoed again: "more than anything else, the
overture to Don Giovanni des what I a m given of
existence to a defiance that opens me to a rapture
beyond the self. At this instant, I see this acephalic
being, the intruder which two equally taken

As Kojve puts it blundy in a marginal comment

to an article attacking the literaiity of his reading
(cf. J e a n Michel Besnier, La Polique de l'Impossible
(Paris: La Dcouverte, 1988): 58).
2?

Letter of October 7, 1948 to Tran Due Thao,

who had reviewed the Introduction for Les Temps
Modernes (cited in Dominique Auffret: Alexandre
Kojve: La Philosophie, l'tat, la Faide l'Histoire (Paris:
Grasset, 1990)). O n e may wonder, in this flurry of
secrecy, irony and rhetoric, whether die distinction
Kojve makes here between interpretation and
commentary is itself any more than "a matter of
terminology", even when he explains it further
elsewhere as die move from the thought to the text
(interpretation) vs. that from the text to die diought
(commentary) - a distinction probably hard to
maintain for a trained dialectician (cf. op. cit., Rodi,
Knowing and History, 118).
28

Alexandre Kojve, from an unused "Preface

l'oeuvre de Georges Bataille", L'Arca (May 1950),
(Paris, 1971).
25

U t t e r to Bataille ofJuly 19, 1959, cited in Michel

Surya, Georges Bataille: la mori l'ceuvre (Paris:
Gallimard, 1992): 233.

A m o n g B o r i s B e l a y ' s m o r e d i u r n a l a c t i v i t i e s , o n e is p r e p a r i n g , a t S U N Y

Stony

Brook a n d at the U n i v e r s i t d e s S c i e n c e s H u m a i n e s d e S t r a s b o u r g , a thesis o n the

disquieting efFects of the secret in Bataille's politics.

parallax