-
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:
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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,
what- ever 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 sug- gests that the
objective assertion of God's absence pales in significance relative
to its implications for the subject who would make that asser-
tion. 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
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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
concep- tion of self-consciousness per se as a fundamental
experience of insuffi- ciency, 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 ar- ticulate, 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 per- petually 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 concep- tual
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, philoso- phy may indeed manage to
significantly penetrate the paradox that so utterly defeats
conceptual analysis. For, as such, philosophy does not pre- tend 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 read- ers 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 exposi- tion deprives its readers of the
satisfaction of knowing that they have reached the end of the
story. In this way, such exposition confronts read- ers 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-con- sciousness as desire; a misreading that in itself would
not necessarily be
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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 de- fines 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 com- mitted: 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 dis- course 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 exist- ence such action presupposes: unlike
philosophers in the Greek tradi- tion, 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
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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 es- sence 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 pre- sents an ineluctable paradox since, as the culmination of
history and sat- isfaction 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
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52 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
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 noth- ing 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 func- tion of
the progressive freedom and rationality achieved by the slave
through its work, which in turn win the slave recognition and
conse- quently 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-suffi- ciency. Therefore
to be self-conscious is to desire. In hopes of seeing it- self
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 incom- mensurable 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 ap- proach to living and thus to his true freedom. The
slave can ultimately achieve satisfaction while the master cannot
because the slave's self-rec- ognition 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 free- dom
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
-
DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 53
practices aimed toward what comes to be understood as the shared
pur- pose 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 sat- isfaction 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 con- stitutive 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 exter- nal 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 dia- lectic. 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 recog- nize 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
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54 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
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 ab- solute 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, implic- itly shifted from the
Judeo-Christian to the Greek mode. For what is cir- cularity 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 ac- count, 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 recog- nized simply as the
normative ideal of an entirely self-contained state of
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DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 55
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 on-
going social project open to public recognition.6
If Hegel's conception of self-consciousness as desire brings
philoso- phy 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 in- stability 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
cer- tain rhetorical tropes of cultural nostalgia evoking death and
desire as integral to the glory and satisfaction - the
self-sufficiency - of a lost no- bility. 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
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56 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
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
develop- ment 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 dis- course 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-con- scious 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 dis- course to "endure death" rather than succumbing to the
comforting illu- sion 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
consumma- tion 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 ref- erent of discursive negation per se, but impossible
because it is that refer- ent 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
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DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 57
other words, the lie or fiction of its own negation. Proper
discursive con- frontation with death, Bataille insists, always
returns to its own insuffi- ciency: the seductive illusion of
closure must perpetually be disclosed as such. In its attempt to
delimit or define death, discursive negation be- comes 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 dis- course, 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 con- fronts us not with death per se but
precisely with a simulacrum of death;
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58 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
death explicitly recognized not as such but as a paradoxical
representa- tion 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 perpetu- ally 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 can- not
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 par-
ticular in nature. Hamlet's dilemma is defined by the fact that the
impli- cations 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
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DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 59
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 deter- minate 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 de- fined 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 dis- course 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
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60 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
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, discur- sive existence - its profound indeterminacy, its
unsettling lack of deter- minate 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 perfor- mance, 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
subjec- tion 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 recogniz- able 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, how- ever - between the tangibly mediated,
social character of Hegelian Spirit and the unmediated,
narcissistic character of the Kojvian Sage - this
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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 per- spective 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
univer- sal 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
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62 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
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 exist-
ence 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
de- graded or "sick" vengeance, but a renunciation of any claim to
"know"
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DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 63
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 inca- pacitated 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
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64 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
at large, precisely with a necessary impossibility: the
necessary impossi- bility, 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 ri- valry. 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 representa- tion/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 perfor- mance, but a desire
for truth that incites such performance. To confront such desire is
to assume precisely what Bataille calls the "poids" of dis- course
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 ac- cident that dismembers it. In turn,
like Nietzsche's account of the death of God, Shakespeare's account
of Hamlet's death suggests that the sig- nificance 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.
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DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 65
For Shakespeare, Hegel, Nietzsche and Bataille alike, death is
the begin- ning, 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 ecclesiasti- cal 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."
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66 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
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-tempo- ral 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
sug- gesting may constitute the philosophical underpinnings of
Kojve's Soviet alliance sig- nificantly 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 signifi- cative practices and mutual recognition.
However, she views this Kojvian essentialization as born of a
clear-eyed appreciation for the disorienting empirical con- ditions
of life encountered in 1930s France, rather than, as I have
presented it, as symp- tomatic 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 on- tological 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.
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DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJVE, BATAILLE, AND GIRARD 67
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 is- sues 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 con- sists 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 them- selves," then deconstruction
effects a dissolution rather than confrontation of the prob- lem 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 con- sciousness
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 com- munity. 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 accom- plished 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
possi- bility 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