Earle, Performance of Negation (2002)

Performance of Negation, Negation of Performance: Death and Desire in Kojve, Bataille andGirardAuthor(s): Bo EarleSource: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2002), pp. 48-67Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247327Accessed: 06/10/2010 08:51

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Performance of Negation, Negation of Performance: Death and Desire in

Kojve, Bataille and Girard

BO EARLE

Horatio, I am dead, Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied.

- Hamlet. V, ii.

If philosophies of modernity characteristically invoke themes of loss (of God, traditional social authorities, epistemological and discursive norms, etc.), much modern philosophy is distinguished by a kind of discursive

reflexivity, or poetic license, that allows such loss to be rhetorically re- hearsed, and its subtler implications probed, rather than merely lamented. Nietzsche's Frhliche Wissenschaft, to take a paradigmatic case, does not

simply proclaim the death of God, but puts the proclamation in the mouth of a "crazy man" who also, in snowballing self-contradictions, continues to "seek God" by the light of a lantern held out to illuminate "the bright early morning."1 To neglect such rhetorical texturing of doctrine is to overlook the distinctive elevation in significance philosophical discourse has won in the wake of modernity's loss of stable epistemological and moral norms. As Nietzsche's account of the "crazy man" attests, whatever may be the truth of the modern predicament, at stake in assessments of that truth is not only doctrinal validity, but also the practical and aesthetic sustainability of the kinds of discursive performance a given doctrine allows. Nietzsche's rhetorical account of the death of God suggests that the objective assertion of God's absence pales in significance relative to its implications for the subject who would make that assertion. Indeed, Nietzsche indicates that propounding that assertion only

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2002. Copyright 2002 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

48

DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 49

exacerbates the conflict it pretends to resolve: the mere "fact" of God's death is thus only the beginning of the problem, not the end.

According to the philosopher Robert Pippin, it was Hegel's conception of self-consciousness per se as a fundamental experience of insufficiency, or desire, that "virtually inaugurated," if not this theme of desire itself, then the distinctly literary modes of treating it that have come to characterize what is known as "Continental Philosophy."2 The turn to rhetorically inflected exposition is an appropriate response to HegePs concept of desire, since, if our self-relation is an expression of our innate insufficiency, then this is a relation that we can never unequivocally articulate, for any such articulation will always be more than what it says: while what it says may appear to constitute a coherent proposition, such coherence is in fact always also a response to insufficiency, and thus not coherence at all but precisely a want of coherence. In itself such desire cannot be defined without begging the question for whom? Whose desire, whose inadequacy, does this ostensibly "adequate" definition express? Philosophical exposition of self-consciousness as desire is by nature perpetually undermined by the fact that, as Hegel says, "in coming on the scene, it is not yet developed and unfolded in its truth."3 HegePs very formulation of the problem, however, implicitly transforms this conceptual paradox into a dramatic conflict: philosophy, in Hegels words, "tritt auf;" it literally takes to the stage. Hegel evokes philosophy itself as a dramatic character in strife, at odds with itself, not yet having achieved what it wants for itself (truth). But, as a dramatic performance, philosophy may indeed manage to significantly penetrate the paradox that so utterly defeats conceptual analysis. For, as such, philosophy does not pretend to objectively define the truth of self-consciousness, but to subjec- tively participate in the "development and unfolding" of that truth. The effect of HegePs original conception, then, is to transform the problem of defining desire into one of performing it. Rhetorical texturing is

philosophy's manner of "Auftreten," taking to the stage. In turn, as readers we may discern the discursive forms desire assumes without being se- duced into believing we have definitively and conclusively comprehended its content. Like Nietzsche's account of the death of God, such exposition deprives its readers of the satisfaction of knowing that they have reached the end of the story. In this way, such exposition confronts readers with their own desire, and thereby renders the truth of desire more

adequately than any ostensibly adequate definition. Both the discursive style and doctrine of Kojve's L! Introduction la

lecture de Hegel reflect a misreading of Hegel's conception of self-consciousness as desire; a misreading that in itself would not necessarily be

50 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

remarkable were it not, as I shall argue it is, symptomatic of Koj eve's resistance to the desire animating his own work, and, by extension, to the discursive performance of desire generally. By considering this work in juxtaposition to two texts of his onetime student, Bataille - L'Exprience intrieur and Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice - I hope to show that, in contrast to Nietzsche's account of the death of God, Kojve does not, as he claims, perform a "dismemberment" of the subject by desire, but rather reifies the act of dismemberment and of death itself, ultimately rendering desire definitively and conclusively knowable; which is to say that Kojve's text does not bring the truth of desire to the surface but represses it. Indeed, here the rhetoric of death and desire does not open upon a provocative incompleteness, but seductively coalesces into something deceptively conclusive. It is precisely defiance of the seduction of closure that defines Bataille's notion of "sovereignty," and that his writing in turn at- tempts to performatively enact. As illustrations of this notion I consider Shakespeare's true "dismemberment" of Hamlet and attendant incitement of the audience's own "desire" to discursive performance. Finally, by way of an examination of Girard's 1984 reading of Hamlet, I attempt to indi- cate the abiding relevance of these issues to contemporary literary theory.

NEGATION OF PERFORMANCE: KOJVE'S HELLENIZATION OF HEGEL AND BARBARIZATION OF HISTORY

In the appendix on "L'Ide de la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel," Kojve distinguishes Greek from Judo-Christian philosophical discourse according to the ontology to which each respectively is by nature committed: Greek philosophical discourse models being on knowledge and construes philosophy, discourse and man as passive mirrors of a static nature; Judeo-Christian philosophical discourse models being on free action and defines man essentially as freedom, and philosophy and discourse as the means by which his freedom is exercised.

In Koj eve's account, Hegel's is the first anthropological philosophy, above all due to its adequate representation of the finite, temporal existence such action presupposes: unlike philosophers in the Greek tradition, Hegel recognizes human reality as actively made rather than passively found, but also unlike his philosophical predecessors in the Judeo-Chris- tian tradition (Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Fichte), he resolves its con- tradictory postulate of a being at once, on the one hand, infinite and immortal (and thus identical and static), and, on the other hand, cre- ative, active, dynamic (and thus historically situated and mortal). Hegel

DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 5 1

manages this by replacing God with philosophical discourse itself, the medium through which man recognizes himself as historically situated, finite "Geist" [Spirit].4 HegeFs achievement, according to Kojve, is to have rendered being per se synonymous with discursive action. After Hegel, "to be" is "to say," which is to say that meaning is conferred to our lives no longer in virtue of entities thought to exist independently of our discursive practices, but in virtue of those practices themselves.

In turn, Kojve claims, by freeing philosophy from any reliance upon external sources of meaning, Hegel opens the possibility for an absolutely conclusive accounting of the meaning of human existence: "cette

philosophie doit avant tout rendre, philosophiquement, compte d'elle- mme comme d'un Discours rvlant d'une manire complte et adquate la totalit de PEtre, et du Rel. Elle y parvient en expliquant comment et

pourquoi PHomme arrive parler d'une faon cohrente de soi-mme et du Monde o il vit et qu'il cre" (539). But, since the world man creates is fundamentally predicated on man's historical determinacy and mortal'

ity as a discursive agent, such a philosophy can achieve complete ad'

equacy and coherence only to the extent it articulates a thoroughgoing recognition of the significance of death itself: "L'acceptation sans rserves du fait de la mort [. . .] est la source dernire de toute la pense hglienne, qui ne fait que tirer toutes les consquences, mme les plus lointaines, de l'existence de ce fait. [. . .] c'est en se rsignant la mort, en la rvlant

par son discours, que l'Homme parvient finalement au Savoir absolu ou la Sagesse, en achevant ainsi l'Histoire" (540).

Sentences like this last one, I want to suggest, characterize the essence of Kojve's text which is a seduction at once philosophical and discursive. By glossing over the distinction between "se rsignant la mort" and "la rvlant par son discours," Kojve's conception of the Sage obscures what he himself presents as the crucial distinction between on*

tology based upon free action and one based upon knowledge. For, ac-

cording to that distinction, acting (or philosophizing) "in the face of death" is clearly incommensurable with any kind of definitive revelation or disclosure of death per se. If what is human is action, and if acting is

predicated on living, then death, whatever it may be in itself, cannot

figure positively for a human existence. Kojve's notion of the Sage presents an ineluctable paradox since, as the culmination of history and satisfaction of desire, it effectively transcends the temporality and finitude

upon which Kojve's emphatically anthropological philosophy is based. It is precisely in virtue of this paradox, however, that death may serve its seductive function in Kojve's text, insinuating the possibility of the very transcendence it explicitly renounces.5


Kojve denies that the finite and infinite are conflated in the person of the Sage by arguing that complete "circularity" is the inevitable end- point of finite discursive practice itself, since it is in and through the development of that practice that human existence has become what it is (287). Kojve, like Hegel, construes that development, which is nothing other than history itself, according to the dialectic of master and slave. History does not simply happen but is the result of work, and the condition of all work is slavery. Historical progress, however, is a function of the progressive freedom and rationality achieved by the slave through its work, which in turn win the slave recognition and consequently its own form of mastery. This comes about as follows. To be self- conscious is to be conscious of a difference between how the world is for oneself and how it may be in- itself, independent of one's perspective on it; it is thus to be conscious of a disunity in oneself, a lack of self-sufficiency. Therefore to be self-conscious is to desire. In hopes of seeing itself reflected in the eyes of another as the unity it cannot achieve alone, one self-consciousness appeals to another. But of course the other desires the same from the first, which makes the two at once absolutely incommensurable and absolutely interdependent, an intolerable predicament that can be resolved only by a fight to the death. But at some point the fear of death overrules the desire for recognition, and the slave is the first to forfeit the fight for satisfaction in order to preserve its life; the slave's desire is "gehemmt" [restrained] and death "aufgehalten" [suspended] (135), in Hegel's words, for the sake of a life devoted to the work of sat- isfying the master. The master, however, can never be satisfied, for he demands of the slave's work something it cannot provide - a reflection of his (the master's) own particular identity. What that work in fact reflects is not fear of the actual master but fear of what Hegel called that "furchtbare Unwirklichkeit" [most dreadful non-actuality] of death. Pre- cisely because his work is beholden to no one in particular but only to this fear of losing life generally, the particular way in which his work accomodates this fear genuinely reflects the slave's own particular approach to living and thus to his true freedom. The slave can ultimately achieve satisfaction while the master cannot because the slave's self-recognition is mediated by its work and thus tangible and concrete: unlike the master who defines his desires abstractly and is thus perpetually dis- satisfied by the real world, the slave desires only recognition of the freedom expressed concretely in the form of his work. Consequently, while the unmediated, abstract recognition required by the master is by nature exclusive and absolute, the slave's mediated recognition is inclusive and progressive, and expands as more and more slaves engage in discursive


practices aimed toward what comes to be understood as the shared purpose of rationalization and liberation.

This sums up Hegel's account of the master-slave dialectic. But

Kojve's conception of a definitive revelation of the significance of death

hinges on a crucial additional point concerning the consummation of satisfaction and of work per se; i.e., no longer concerning the operation or

performance of the master-slave dialectic - or of a particular Aufhebung that remains internal to it - but rather the very completion and ultimate

supersession of the dialectic as such. The slave's work is complete when it is finally recognized as constitutive of human reality as a whole, of the sum of human history, the entire intelligible world. Thus the reality constitutive of the particular slave himself is recognized to be indistinguish- able from that of human reality generally, effectively releasing him from the dialectic and reconstituting him as a fully autonomous "Sage" who neither desires nor works. The Sage's satisfaction consists not simply in the achieved circularity of its oeuvre and the world it inhabits, but in his

recognition of that circularity as such. It is only from a perspective external to the dialectic as a completed unity that the Sage can assure itself that its work is finished and its satisfaction complete. For, in becoming the Sage, what the slave recognizes is not simply that the truth of his work is the suspension of death; rather, he apprehends the scope and limits of all possible suspension of death. And it is only in virtue of tak-

ing that apprehension for the definitive revelation of absolute truth - rec-

ognizes it as the revealed circular essence of life and death - that the slave achieves definitive satisfaction and becomes the Sage.

In consequence, however, the absolute enlightenment of the Sage necessarily casts an equally absolute shadow upon the sum of the work of the dialectic itself. Indeed, Kojve's theory of the consummation of his-

tory effectively obviates the progressive character of the Hegelian dialectic. For, if the end of history is marked by the revelation of the truth of

negativity, it is equally marked by the revelation of the untruth of all

previous understandings of it. Thus Kojve's theory of the Sage intro- duces a positively anti-Hegelian account of normative truth. Kojve aban- dons Hegel's conception of truth as a function of the mutual recognition achieved through determinate discursive practices, and replaces it with the fully consummated normative ideal of the person of the Sage himself. For, although the Sage has claim to universal recognition, he can recognize only those who emulate himself. In those who do not merely reflect the Sage back to himself, the Sage, in contrast to Hegel, cannot recognize a positive moment in the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Rather the Sage sees only the work and dissatisfaction of those still blind to the actual


truth of their own negativity: of those whose existence is devoted to, in Kojve's formulation, the "lutte la mort de pur prestige" (14), and who are so devoted precisely because they have yet to comprehend it as such. There can be no positive, progressive movement toward the truth of absolute negativity because the truth of such negativity is precisely its ab- soluteness: everything short of the truth of absolute negativity is equally untrue. The wisdom of the Sage is its insight into the nullity of human existence generally, but its satisfaction is a function of its deliverance from the fight for recognition in which everyone who is not a Sage is by definition equally absolutely implicated. The absolute satisfaction of the Sage mirrors the absolute dissatisfaction of everyone else. But the fact that such satisfaction is a function of achieved revelation, and such dis* satisfaction a function of ongoing dialectical struggle, means that the Sage's satisfaction has in fact lost all reference to the actual, historically situated discursive performance of desire that supposedly defines it.

Kojve argues that the discourse of the Sage remains true to human finitude, because, unlike that of the theologian, it satisfies desire in a way that does not depend upon any artificial distinction of the sacred and profane, the infinite and finite, but obtains solely by virtue of the sheer internal coherence and universal recognition of a discourse that has assimilated to itself the accumulated wisdom and experience of all human history. A humanly as opposed to divinely created existence must ultimately submit itself entirely to human understanding; but this circle is completed only when this existence has itself achieved the rational form proper to its finitude and temporality; i.e., only when it has assumed the form of what Kojve calls the "universal, homogeneous state" (284f). There seems to be no escaping the fact, however, that a discourse in which such circularity is recognized as such has, on Kojve's own terms, implicitly shifted from the Judeo-Christian to the Greek mode. For what is circularity to an ontology based in action rather than on knowing? It is nothing beyond the movement along the circle. The figure ultimately described by that movement may indeed form an object of abstract specu- lation to the human existence describing it, but only at the cost of ob- scuring the true temporal being of that existence which consists in the actual performance of such description itself.

It is this distinction that clearly informs both the philosophical and discursive departure from Hegel of Kojve's Sage. For, in Kojve's account, what the Sage is ultimately recognized for is not in fact his labor; it is not his wisdom per se as a normative medium in and through which genuinely mutual recognition can take place. Rather, the Sage is recognized simply as the normative ideal of an entirely self-contained state of


achieved satisfaction. Thus, genuinely mutual recognition never happens in Kojve; sharing in the Sage's satisfaction is purely a matter of one individual replicating the thoroughly self-enclosed Selbstbefriedigung of another. As Kojve himself puts it, the Sage's satisfaction is nothing other than his "personal pride" (551) at knowing himself to have definitively won the fight for pure prestige. Kojve's circle, in clear contrast to Hegel's, is an achieved, narcissistic, and even secretive state rather than an ongoing social project open to public recognition.6

If Hegel's conception of self-consciousness as desire brings philosophy sur la scne, how does Kojve bring the drama of philosophical desire to a close? Why were Kojve and his many followers so persuaded that this performance should resolve itself in the Sage's triumphantly smug "personal pride?" A case may be made that, faced with the profound instability and disorientation of the interwar period, the image of the Kojvian Sage was uniquely seductive because it actually offered a wel- come return to the severe but unambiguous authoritarianism of a feudal ideology disguised as an unflinching doctrine of radical freedom. Kojve's account of the Sage can be seen to accomplish this by appealing to certain rhetorical tropes of cultural nostalgia evoking death and desire as integral to the glory and satisfaction - the self-sufficiency - of a lost nobility. Animated by persistent revolutionary aspirations, on the one hand, and imminent threat of global war, on the other, Kojve at once depicts desire as pursuit of aristocratic, military valor ("noblesse d'pe") and ex- hibits a Christian insistence that peaceable coexistence can be possible only under the ministrations of a homogeneous world state (^noblesse de robe"). Nostalgia for these two forms of nobility conforms with what

Stanley Hoffmann describes as the dual tendencies of political authority in modern France generally: to violent, revolutionary action, on the one hand, and to anonymous, bureaucratic centralization on the other.

French history and the divergences among Frenchmen concern-

ing political legitimacy have introduced features [of authority] that are peculiar to the political sphere. The most obvious is addiction not merely to revolutionary talk, but to violence. In other words, the degree of willingness to observe the rules of the game when the results fail to give satisfaction is low. Also, the centralizing efforts of the ancien rgime, the work and ideology of the Revolu- tion, and the mistakes made by the post- 1815 monarchies injected into the whole political sphere a special kind of equalitarianism. [. . . A]uthority patterns in the political sphere are distinguished by national equalitarianism, that is, an insistence by most of the


population on, and the superior authority's somewhat grudging ac-

ceptance of, the dogma of equality before the law, irrespective of social privileges.7

In the work of Kojve, then, subjective performance of the development of self-consciousness in fact gives way, under specific historical exi-

gencies, to what Hegel called the "unhappy consciousness;" i.e., to implicit reification of self-consciousness according to certain culturally privileged figures; it covers over the perpetually recurrent incompleteness of discourse in a manner I have likened to a seduction. Koj eve's text fails to become conscious of itself as an instance of the desire it describes; con-

trary to Hegel's injunction such desire is not brought sur la scne, is not

performatively enacted, but, on the contrary, is seductively covered over

by culturally specific rhetoric nostalgically evoking the satisfactions of a lost nobility. This nostalgic rhetoric depicts such nobility precisely in terms of its lack of self-conscious desire and, in turn, provides Kojve a

persuasive means of figuring the structure of consummation of self-conscious desire per se.8 The unsettling truth of discourse as a perpetually unfolding performance of desire is obscured by rhetorical evocation of conclusive fulfillment; yet such desire is not thereby sated, but only reas-

suringly repressed.

PERFORMANCE OF NEGATION: BATAILLE, HAMLET AND DISCURSIVE ENDURANCE OF DEATH

To fully elucidate this problem we must ask what it would mean for discourse to "endure death" rather than succumbing to the comforting illusion of accessing death's deep truth; to perform the work of confronting the idea of the negation of temporal existence and desire, rather than

dodging the task by seductively repackaging that idea as the consummation of that existence and fulfillment of that desire. First of all, as Bataille never tires of insisting, it would mean something at once necessary and

impossible: necessary because, as we have seen, death is the ultimate referent of discursive negation per se, but impossible because it is that referent only in virtue of negating discourse itself. Death stabilizes discourse insofar as it provides discourse with a referent of negativity in and for itself, but death "dismembers" discourse insofar as it necessarily also de- fies discursive negation: it dismembers discourse by confronting it with a

negation that discourse cannot negate, by confronting discourse with, in


other words, the lie or fiction of its own negation. Proper discursive confrontation with death, Bataille insists, always returns to its own insufficiency: the seductive illusion of closure must perpetually be disclosed as such. In its attempt to delimit or define death, discursive negation becomes a "simulacrum" of negation. According to Bataille, it is precisely this subterfuge of discourse - its pretense to negate what in fact negates it - that marks the distinctively human essence of discourse. In turn, it is

by laying the performance of this subterfuge bare that death is confronted in a distinctively human manner: not by transcending the limits of discourse, but as a profound penetration of discursive limitation itself. Sac- rificial ritual, Bataille writes,

Serait [. . .] une comdie si quelque autre mthode existait qui rvlt au vivant l'envahissement de la mort: cet achvement de Ptre fini, qu'accomplit seul et peut seul accomplir sa Ngativit, qui le tue, le finit et dfinitivement le supprime. [. . .] Ainsi faudrait- il, tout prix, que l'homme vive au moment o il meurt vraiment, ou qu'il vive avec l'impression de mourir vraiment. Cette difficult annonce la ncessit du spectacle , ou gnralement de la

reprsentation, sans la rptition desquels nous pourrions, vis--vis de la mort, demeurer trangers, ignorants, comme apparemment le sont les btes. Rien n'est moins animal en effet que la fiction, plus ou moins loigne du rel, de la mort.9

Discourse per se is discourse of death. While both Kojve and Bataille link the essence of discourse and human existence generally with the confrontation with death, however, Bataille's insistence on the necessar-

ily and manifestly inadequate nature of discursive representation of that confrontation is the more consistent to the notion of death as absolute

negativity. If death defines the limit of the knowledge of an inherently acting and therefore living existence, discourse cannot pretend to access the truth of death without in fact pushing that truth further away. The

paradoxical essence of the truth of death is that it is the negation of

meaning and thus of truth generally; "je dois donner un sens ce qui n'en a pas," Bataille writes, concluding that "l'tre la fin nous est donn comme impossible!"10

The truth of this impossibility can be approached discursively only by reiterating, or, as in Nietzsche's account of God's death, rhetorically rehearsing, an analogous paradox. Thus, the representation of death is most adequate that somehow testifies to its own inadequacy; that confronts us not with death per se but precisely with a simulacrum of death;


death explicitly recognized not as such but as a paradoxical representation of something unrepresentable. It could be said that it is just such a

representation that Nietzsche's "crazy man" seeks to illuminate by the

light of his lantern in "the bright early morning." The most obvious way of describing such a representation is as a

ghost: a speculative evocation of death that nonetheless appears, impos- sibly, to "live." Indeed, Bataille's view is well illustrated by the Western Tradition's perhaps most cultivated ghost story, Shakespeare's Hamlet. For Hamlet, as for both Kojve and Bataille, death constitutes, in Hegel's phrase, the "absolute Herr" [absolute master] (134) because it is perpetually against the infinite and unfathomable horizon of "this dreadful non- actuality" that the actions of life must be carried out. The implications of death are unknowable, yet no freely self-determining agent can fail to account for them without succumbing to self-delusion. If, as per Hamlet's resolution, "to be" is "to act," however, then the negation of being cannot simply be nothing, a simple absence of being, but rather must be a kind of action from which the "life" has somehow been removed. Thus, as Hamlet puts it, it is not in fear of "sleep" that we act, but of "what dreams may come:"

To sleep perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, [. . .] Must give us pause - there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life.11

In turn, it is not against death in itself that Hamlet's fear of death and resolve to be are tested. Rather it is against a positive - that is, tangibly mediated - representation of the kind of life death might entail; i.e. of a ghost; indeed, of an all too concretely specific ghost, whose form and message, although profoundly destabilizing to Hamlet's understanding of the world, are disruptive precisely because they are not universal but particular in nature. Hamlet's dilemma is defined by the fact that the implications of the king's ghost are not immediately apparent; Hamlet is confronted with the necessity of making coherent sense of the appari- tion, and, in the course of the play, eventually with the impossibility of doing so conclusively. Hamlet struggles with this necessary impossibility and in doing so struggles with the dilemma of discursive performance generally: it is a dilemma to which no merely revealed meaning, but only determinate discursive action, can adequately respond, if not conclusively resolve. The representation of death against which Hamlet is tested is implicitly incommensurable with any such "revelation," and it is precisely


this incommensurability that ultimately tests him the most. Just as Ham- let determines that it is only a "play," a determinately situated discursive performance, that can adequately test Claudius, it is likewise the determinate performance of the ghost of his father that tests Hamlet. But, as Hamlet learns to his dismay - a dismay that precipitates the play's cli- max - merely to be assured in the knowledge that Claudius lied and the

ghost did not is not in the least to respond to that test, since, as I exam- ine in detail below, the discursive action which that test demands is defined precisely in opposition to assurances of this kind.

Bataille 's and Hamlet's common concern with discursive action rather than discursive meaning indicates what Kojve would call their Judeo- Christian rather than Greek orientation. If it is in the representation of

paradox and incongruity - rather than circularity, supreme coherence -

that Bataille and Hamlet confront the truth of finite existence, both re-

spond to that truth, not by simply articulating it, but by translating it into analogously paradoxical action. In Bataille this action takes the form of a dynamic juxtaposition of what Derrida terms "major" and "minor"

writing.12 While "minor" writing provides discourse an articulateness and

perspicacity that are necessary, "major" writing disrupts, destabilizes discourse with a silence that, in remove from such determinate meaning, would in itself be impossible: it "rintroduit] - en un point - le souverain silence qu'interrompt le langage articul" (5: 196). It is the absolute sov-

ereignty of this silence - its infinite refusal to signify anything, to serve discourse, to even represent itself, render itself identifiable as such - that articulate discourse exists to hide. "Ce qui n'est pas servile est inavouable: une raison de rire, de [. . .] il en est de mme de l'extase. Ce qui n'est pas utile doit se cacher (sous un masque)" (5: 196). Bataille's sovereign, like

Hegel's master, does not in fact negate anything at all. But whereas the master does not negate anything because its negativity, or freedom, is

purely abstract, the truth of the sovereign cannot be traced back to the work of the slave. The sovereign knows neither the dissatisfactions of the master nor the satisfactions of the slave, for sovereignty consists in

simply exceeding the articulate truth, the meaningful existence accord-

ing to which Hegelian satisfaction is defined. It is subject neither to the inane rivalry of the Kojvian dialectic nor to the pride of his Sage. The

sovereign is such in virtue of resisting the seduction of conclusive, com-

prehensive significance; or, more precisely, in virtue of not resisting the

disconcerting, perpetual incompleteness of an existence that consists in discursive performance. Thus sovereignty does not, like the circle of

Kojve's Sage, represent the revealed truth of death, but rather effects the enactment of that truth. It effects the eruption of a major writing


within a minor in the sense that it destabilizes such revealed truth to the

point that the ultimate, effective significance of death for a finite, discursive existence - its profound indeterminacy, its unsettling lack of determinate significance - is brought to bear upon such an existence in a way that such revelation by nature preempts. It is in this sense that Derrida describes sovereignty as a major laughter erupting from within a minor

laugher, destabilizing the destabilization of laughter itself, in virtue of

preempting the solace, or satisfaction, of knowing such destabilization as such.

By definition, then, Bataille cannot define this eruption without thereby negating it himself, making it 'serve' the meaning he ascribes it. This is the conundrum at the heart of Bataille's own discursive performance, determining both its form and content. Bataille's text resists ex-

plaining this eruption otherwise than in terms of its sheer inexplicability: it is an "arbitrary sliding" that Bataille likens to a single wildflower that

happens to escape the all-consuming harvest of reason's craven subjection to meaningfulness.13 For Bataille as for Hegel the movement of self- consciousness as an action - as opposed to a state - cannot represent itself but in the form of such movement. But it is the nature of this form to render its content indeterminate: against a static, atemporal horizon, such movement cannot appear but as, in Hegel's words, a "verwundersame Akzidentelle" [astounding accident] (25f).

But even to identify it as arbitrary is to identify and thus negate it. It is at the level of discursive form, where discourse first becomes recognizable as action, that this serendipity is encountered. Hence Bataille's "principe de l'exprience intrieure: sortir par un projet du domaine du

projet" (5: 60). H The accidental dismemberment of significance cannot occur but from within the context of the comprehensible, purposive "projet." Thus Bataille essentially concurs with Hegel that it is only by bearing the "poids" of significative discourse that one encounters the sov-

ereign accident that dismembers it. Bataille's objection to Hegel is that he then only "lets [that weight and, thereby, sovereignty itself] go," by construing that dismemberment not as "un hasard, une malchance, qui seraient dpourvus de sens," but as "plein de sens," as the ultimate confir- mation of the Sage's "pleine autonomie" (12: 344): the satisfaction of its desire, as "ipse>" "de soumettre le monde son autonomie" (5: 101). The

Sage thus passes "d'une humanit qu'humilia la grandeur divine celle du Sage divinis [. . .] gonflant sa grandeur partir de la vanit humaine" (12: 330). In light of the distinction I have attempted to draw, however - between the tangibly mediated, social character of Hegelian Spirit and the unmediated, narcissistic character of the Kojvian Sage - this

DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 6 1

objection can be seen to apply far more appropriately to Kojve than Hegel. It is only in the guise of Koj eve's Sage that Hegel can remotely appear to divinize rather than deconstruct the self-certainty of Bataille's "ipse." In "recommencing" Hegel's Phenomenology Bataille does not, as he claims, simultaneously "undo" the Phenomenology itself so much as Kojve's reading of it.15

The significance of discursive action for the distinction between Bataille's Sovereign and Kojve's Sage is interestingly elucidated by Shakespeare's presentation of the duel of Hamlet and Laertes. The first

thing to notice about this duel is that for neither Hamlet nor Laertes is it really a "fight to the death for pure prestige." For Laertes this is because he believes his and Claudius' surreptitious machinations have precluded his own death and insured that of Hamlet. Laertes thus embodies the Hegelian master whose confrontation with death is preempted by his appearing to have already won the prestige for which he was to fight. To Laertes' mind his own mastery depends only upon "the voice" of "some elder masters of known honour" (V, ii), and of this Laertes is assured in advance by King Claudius' own complicity in the scheme to kill Hamlet. Laertes' mastery derives from that of Claudius; thus it does not depend on any fight to the death, but only on the success of the scheme to defeat Hamlet's threat to Claudius' power. So, for Laertes, the duel, while no

fight to the death, is still understood in the context of a universal struggle for recognition, only now by means of duplicitous stratagems rather than

outright violence: politics as war by other means. Laertes' strategic perspective on the duel also essentially describes his behavior throughout the play, and that of Claudius, Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well. The regime of Claudius is one in which the struggle for power is absolute and universal - in which family and friends persistently betray one another's trust - and reflects perfectly the depravity of the Kojvian world before the advent of the "universal, homogeneous state."

Girard's assessment of the play takes the Kojvian precept of universal rivalry to its full logical conclusion by construing Hamlet himself as essentially implicated in, rather than opposed to, Claudius' strategic du-

plicity.

Not Hamlet alone but the time is out of joint. And when Hamlet describes his revenge as "sick," or "dull," he speaks for the whole

community. In order to appreciate the nature and extent of the disease, we must realize that all behavior we tend to read as strate-

gic or conspiratorial in that play can also be read as symptomatic of "sick revenge."16


If, on Girard's account, Hamlet along with the rest of the cast is consumed by the pursuit of "sick revenge" - revenge that no longer has the stomach to be "to the death" - then so are we, the audience, who persist until today in valorizing Hamlet's existential dilemma. Girard confirms the essentially Kojvian character of his exegesis by juxtapos- ing this scene of inane, universal rivalry (the play now merely reflecting the truth of the world at large), to the person of the Sage himself - in this case Shakespeare - to whom the profound meaninglessness of such a world has been revealed. The dilemma posed by the futility of an existence devoted to inane rivalry has not changed from Shakespeare's time to our own, Girard writes, "it has only assumed more extreme and spec- tacular forms that should make its perception and definition easier for us than for Shakespeare but, curiously, Shakespeare is still ahead of us as a 'dmystifier'" (286). But in Girard as in Kojve there can really be only one true Sage; thus Shakespeare demystifies only by virtue of reflecting the truth of Jesus.17 On Girard's consummately Kojvian account, then, one either enters entirely the realm of light or remains utterly benighted; there's no alternative or middle ground. Writing in the context of the cold war, Girard finds it ironic that Hamlet's "sick revenge" should con- tinue to be valorized, since that context should finally have made ines- capable the sheer, pointless destructiveness (negativity) at the heart of rivalrous existence. For Girard as for Kojve, man's sole hope of emerg- ing from a life governed by inane rivalry consists in the establishment of some form of "universal, homogeneous state" based on the truth revealed in the person of the redeemer, be it Hegel or Jesus.

This Kojvian insistence on the distinction between the absolute truth and grace revealed by the light of Jesus, and the benighted violence that governs everything outside the light, in fact blinds Girard himself to a crucial aspect of Hamlet's character and, according Hegel and particu- larly Bataille, of discursively mediated existence generally. What Girard characterizes as an incapacitated, "sick revenge" would be better described in positive terms as an acceptance of contingency and repudiation of the "servile" need to know oneself vindicated. For, what is the duel to Ham- let? What does he avenge? When the universality of mimetic rivalry is presumed from the outset, it is not difficult to interpret anything at all as a manifestation of it. In light of what Hamlet actually says and does, rather than of an intuition obscurely projected onto his author, however, Hamlet's entry into the duel appears rather unambiguously to reflect an emphatic resignation to the whims of fate, to the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow" (V, ii). Hamlet's action is determined not by a degraded or "sick" vengeance, but a renunciation of any claim to "know"


that his action is justified. The action undertaken by Hamlet at the end of the play is distinguished from that which precedes it above all for fore' going the assurance of knowledge: it is born of a recognition that "to act" and thus "to be" demands something knowledge alone cannot supply. Thus Hamlet enters into the duel as a result precisely of having renounced the ratiocinations that in Girard's account symptomize Hamlet's incapacitated vengeance. It cannot be said that the logic of vengeance as- serts itself conclusively, for Hamlet has renounced the coherence of purpose, the autonomy, which that logic demands.

Shakespeare does indeed conclude the play with a scene of rampant, senseless destruction; but this is not to convey some profound message to the audience, some truth that, had Hamlet only been possessed of it, could have saved the day. Again, by attending to what is actually said in this scene, rather than an obscure hermeneutics of authorial intension, its implications are not difficult to discern, for Shakespeare rather ex-

plicitly emphasizes precisely that no fundamental truths of life or death per se are revealed therein. What the conclusion confronts us with is not the underlying truth of death but precisely its inscrutability. Shakespeare highlights this inscrutability in several ways: by the resignation rather than self-assertion that characterizes Hamlet's entry into the duel, by Hamlet's own characterization of the tragic end as mere "chance," by Hamlet's emphatic "silence" as to the meaning of his death, and above all

by his explicit appeal to Horatio, and by extension to the audience of the

play, to provide an explanation themselves:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time - as this fell sergeant, Death, Is strict in his arrest - O, I could tell you -

But let it be. Horatio, I am dead, Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied.

V,ii.

Shakespeare emphatically does not provide us the truth of death or of satisfaction, but rather reminds us where we stood to begin with: faced with our own mortality, with death, as with an inscrutable abstraction, the infinite negation of everything conceivable, which we must account for somehow but can do so only in a tangibly mediated, finite, and thus

by definition inadequate way. In Hamlet's injunction to Horatio to "tell

my story" Shakespeare presents Horatio, and through him the audience


at large, precisely with a necessary impossibility: the necessary impossibility, Bataille would say, of the discourse generally.

It is this injunction to provide a tangibly mediated account that Girard's exegesis cannot accommodate without arbitrarily construing the appeal for speech as a disguised appeal for silence. For Girard as for Kojve there can be only the light of revealed truth and the night of inane rivalry. But perpetuating ghost stories can only affirm our investment in the night. Shakespeare's injunction betrays Girard because it does not enjoin us to turn our back on the night of the play and simply witness the light of truth, but precisely the contrary: to engage the play, to discuss it, interpret it, to "tell its story." For Shakespeare as for Bataille, the truth of the night consists not in itself but in its discursively mediated representation/or us.

Thus, ironically, it is the ostensibly anthropological Kojvian text that is haunted by truly otherworldly phantoms - whether that of the Sage, Shakespeare, or Jesus - in the light of which the supposed truth of the absolute negativity of the real world is exposed.18 But Shakespeare's play itself testifies to the fact that our failure to bear witness to this otherworldly light need not merely reflect our own "sick" negativity, as Girard would have it. For Shakespeare's injunction is not necessarily to valorize Hamlet, but simply to "report [him] and [his] cause." But to do so is necessarily to address precisely Hamlet's death and lack of coherent cause, which, in turn, is to confront our own mortality, finitude, subjection to desire and to chance. The truth of death is not reassuringly revealed but disconcertingly problematized and given to us to sort out. We are given not an ostensible truth that pretends to bring an end to discursive performance, but a desire for truth that incites such performance. To confront such desire is to assume precisely what Bataille calls the "poids" of discourse itself. That is, it is not a matter of renouncing signification in the name of unrestrained "play;" on the contrary, as we have seen, Bataille fundamentally concurs with Hegel that it is only by assuming the burden precisely of significative discourse that one encounters the sovereign accident that dismembers it. In turn, like Nietzsche's account of the death of God, Shakespeare's account of Hamlet's death suggests that the significance of the sheer fact of that death is out-shadowed by that of its implications for us who bear witness to that fact and are now confronted with our own desire to make sense of it, to "report its cause [. . .] to the unsatisfied." It is precisely by exposing a desire that was formally, in one way or another, repressed, that Shakespeare's play "catches the conscience" of its audience just as Hamlet's play catches that of the King Claudius.


For Shakespeare, Hegel, Nietzsche and Bataille alike, death is the beginning, not the end of the problem of discourse and desire.

If Kojve and Girard pretend to bear witness to a truth that resolves that problem, it is, I have argued, by simultaneously performing and sub-

mitting to a discursive seduction. Here the topic of death and desire is broached not to open discourse to a provocative incompleteness, but to offer the illusory solace of discursive satiation. Such an offer can be made

only by repressing the same desire it is intended to seduce; in this case by assimilating that desire to conventionally valorized literary tropes respond- ing to cultural nostalgia for nobility, whether in the form of military valor or ecclesiastical authority.

This analysis of Kojve 's legacy suggests that one aspect of Bataille's historical significance consists in an attempt to liberate the Hegelian drama of philosophical desire from the tropes of military and ecclesiastical nobility through which Kojve brought that drama to an end wel- comed by many French intellectuals during the profound instability of the 1930s, and by which Girardian criticism would still have the self- conscious performance of intellectual life determined - or, more precisely, terminated - today.

University of Chicago

Notes

I am indebted to all of the participants in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's excellent Kojve seminar, Spring, 2000, at the University of Washington, for originally stimulating my interest in the issues addressed here.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe , 15 vols., eds. Georgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Frankfurt a.M.: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988) 3: 125.

2. Robert Pippin. "You Can't Get There From Here," The Cambridge Companion to

Hegel Frederick Beiser (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993) 60. 3. G.W.F. Hegel. Phnomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988) 60; trans. Phe-

nomenology of Spirit A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 48. 4. "L'esprit hglien [. . .] est humain en ce sens qu'il est un Discours qui est imma-

nent au Monde naturel et qui a pour 'support' un tre naturel limit dans son existence

par le temps et l'espace." Alexandre Kojve, L'Introduction la lecture de Hegel, (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) 539.

5. My use of the term "seduction" here draws directly from Jonathan Lear, Happi- ness, Death and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 20-25. Kojve's notion of death, I am suggesting, serves what Lear describes as the seductive function of an "enigmatic signifier."


6. On this point discursive and overtly political "performance" of philosophy are brought together in a way that is too rich to explore in detail but too important and interesting to overlook. On the surface, Kojve's singularly extraordinary career, which eventually managed to combine the roles of intellectual revolutionary, professional aca- demic, high-level functionary in the French Ministry of Economical Affairs, architect of the nascent EU bureaucracy, and, finally, Soviet spy, can easily be seen as a series of negations by way of which the Sage's (Kojve's) wisdom, and the world state that ex- presses it, are perpetually concealed from the actual discursive practices that the Sage may at any given time engage. Indeed, while Kojve called bureaucracy a "superior game" to philosophy, his doctrine, as well as the actual duplicity of his engagement of the bureaucratic game, suggest a deeper logic according to which superior truths are always pitted against the recognizable meaning and purpose of discursive practices (Cf. "La DST avait identifi plusiers agents du KGB parmi lesquels le philosophe Alexandre Kojve," Le monde, Sept. 16, 1999). This logic is perhaps best epitomized by Kojve's remark that nothing meaningful happened in the events of May, 1968 because no one died. Had anyone died, however, the meaning thereby accomplished would presumably have been simply that of death itself, and thus would not be more than "enigmatically" or secretly available to the discourse of the living (Cf. Vincent Descombes Mme et Vautre, Paris: Minuit, 1979 [25]). In respect to Kojve's purely philosophical inherit- ance, Heidegger's conception of the degraded character of post-Socratic spatio-temporal experience generally relative to that of pre-Socratics like Anaximander (which is necessarily only obliquely, fragmentary available to us now) is clearly reflected in Kojve's anti-Hegelian contempt for actual, recognizable meaning, and reverence for that which would defy such recognition (Cf. Martin Heidegger "Der Spruch des Anaximander," Holzwege [Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1977]. In turn, what I am suggesting may constitute the philosophical underpinnings of Kojve's Soviet alliance significantly correspond to Heidegger's own philosophically motivated ambition to pro- mote the Nazi "revolution." The categorical imperative to controvert the actual is at bottom an endorsement of political revolution per se (whether Communist or National- Socialist is secondary). It is also, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, entirely continuous with the "pense louche" [skewed thinking] that characterizes Heideggerian philosophizing, and that is equally characteristic of what I am calling the "seductively paradoxical" discourse of Kojve (L'Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger [Paris: Minuit, 1988]).

7. Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France Since the J93O's (New York: Viking, 1974) 73.

8. Judith Butler's assessment of Kojvian Hegel reception in France reaches a similar conclusion from an inverse premise. Butler argues that Kojve's mobilization of desire as the basis for a radical critique of the metaphysics of identity (carried out in turn by Hyppolite and Sartre) only ends in a crude essentialization or mystification of desire, because it neglects Hegel's original conception of desire as the performance of self- conscious reflection per se, and thus as coextensive with rather than inimical to significative practices and mutual recognition. However, she views this Kojvian essentialization as born of a clear-eyed appreciation for the disorienting empirical conditions of life encountered in 1930s France, rather than, as I have presented it, as symptomatic of a desire precisely to obfuscate such disorientation: "In their readings and overbadings of Hegel, Kojve and Hyppolite question whether the metaphysically en- sconced Hegelian subject is still supportable on the basis of a contemporary historical experience everywhere characterized by dislocation, metaphysical rupture, and the ontological isolation of the human subject." Subjects of Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 6. But it is precisely the suppression of such experience that most characterizes the Kojvian text.

9. Georges Bataille, "Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice," Oeuvres Compltes 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) 12: 336f.


10. Georges Bataille, "Mthode de mditation," Oeuvres Compltes 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 5: 199.

11. William Shakespeare. "Hamlet," Complete Works, (New York: Oxford UP) III, i. Emphasis added.

12. Jacques Derrida. "De l'conomie restreinte l'conomie gnrale," L'Ecriture et la diffrence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967) 385. An analogous characterization is applied to Marx and Hamlet in Spectres de Marx (Paris: ditions de Galile, 1993). Ultimately, however, deconstruction's narrowly textual approach limits its applicability to the issues of self-conscious desire raised in Hegel, Bataille, and Shakespeare's play. If, as Fredric Jameson says in his review of Spectres, the "consecrated form" of deconstruction consists in "augustly parasitical [. . .] explication de texte" that "need no longer articulate its own presuppositions, nor even the results of its own textual critique of the various thinkers thereby glossed and architectonically undone" since "they deconstruct themselves," then deconstruction effects a dissolution rather than confrontation of the problem of self-conscious desire outlined at the outset; a dissolution that apparently frees subjective self-consciousness from the text that is shown to be self-deconstructing ("Marx's Purloined Letter," New Left Review 209 [1995]: 82). The claim to what de Man called the "philosophical rigor" of deconstruction thus appears as only another form of pretence to self-conscious satisfaction, which, in turn, like the Kojvian Sage's self-satisfaction, is defined in opposition to the irreducible ambiguity and false consciousness of discursively committed existence (Allegories of Reading [New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.J118).

13. "Ce sacrifice de la raison est en apparence imaginaire, il n'a ni suite sanglante, ni rien d'analogue. Il diffre nanmoins de la posie en ce qu'il est total, ne rserve pas de jouissance, sinon par glissement arbitraire, qu'on ne peut maintenir, ou par rire abandonn. S'il laisse une survie de hasard, c'est oublie d'elle-mme, comme aprs la moisson la fleur des champs" (Bataille, 5: 178).

14. Also, cf. "La connaissance est l'accs de l'inconnu" (5: 119). 15. "...mes efforts recommencent et dfont la Phnomnologie de Hegel" (5: 96). 16. Ren Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, (New York: Oxford UP, 1991 )

284. 17. "the passion of Jesus must be read [. . .] as a revelation of human violence. [. . . A]

victim perfectly nonviolent and just will make the revelation of violence complete not only in his words, but through the hostile polarization of the threatened human community. This victim's death reveals not only the violence and injustice of all sacrificial cults, but the nonviolence and justice of the divinity whose will is thus fully accomplished for the first and only time in history" (282).

18. Tellingly, it is precisely in his critique of Spinozistic theism that one of Hegel's clearest avant la lettre indictments of Kojvian and Girardian anthropology appears: "This negative self-conscious moment, the movement of knowledge... is lacking in the content of Spinoza's philosophy. [. . . T]he negation is only present as Nothing. [. . . W]e do not find its movement, its Becoming and Being. [. . .] Self-consciousness is born into this ocean, dripping with the water thereof, i.e., never coming to absolute selfhood." In Spinoza, as in Kojve and Girard, the self-conscious performance (or "movement") of negation is assimilated to an ontological determination ("Nothing"); but the possibility of such a determination rests in the concealment (or negation) of the perpetual incompleteness upon which this "movement" of "absolute selfhood" is predicated. Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities P, 1974) 3: 289.

Article Contentsp. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67

Issue Table of ContentsComparative Literature Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2002), pp. 1-91Front MatterStalled Flight: Horatian Remains in Baudelaire's "Le Cygne" [pp. 1-17]Influence or Confluence: Joyce, Eliot, Cohen and the Case for Comparative Studies [pp. 18-47]Performance of Negation, Negation of Performance: Death and Desire in Kojve, Bataille and Girard [pp. 48-67]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 68-74]Review: untitled [pp. 74-78]Review: untitled [pp. 78-81]Review: untitled [pp. 82-87]Review: untitled [pp. 87-91]

Back Matter

Documents

Earle, Performance of Negation (2002)