The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation)

126 Pages·2014·0.92 MB·English

by  Alexandre Kojève

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2014
Translation © Hager Weslati 2014
First published as La notion de l’autorité
© Éditions Gallimard 2004
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-095-7 (HBK)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-630-0 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-631-7 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kojève, Alexandre, 1902-1968.
[Notion de l’autorité. English]
The notion of authority : (a brief presentation) / Alexandre Kojève; edited and introduced by
François Terré; translated by Hager Weslati.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-095-7 (alk. paper)
1. Authority. 2. Law–Philosophy. I. Title.
BD209.K6513 2014
303.3’6--dc23
2013047896
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
Introduction to the French Edition by François Terré
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
A. Analyses
I. Phenomenological Analysis
II. Metaphysical Analysis
III. Ontological Analysis
B. Deductions
I. Political Applications
II. Ethical Applications
III. Psychological Applications
APPENDICES
1. An Analysis of the Marshal’s Authority
2. Remarks on the Révolution Nationale
Translator’s Note
The French edition of The Notion of Authority, a work that was never
made public in the author’s lifetime, reproduces a note from the
manuscript written at the bottom of the table of contents, omitted here
in the English translation. The note reads, ‘N.B. Key issues are discussed
in A, I and A, II. See also B, I.’ Strange as it sounds, this line of advice
opens a window onto the author’s intentions. Firstly, The Notion of
Authority was not intended for public consumption. It reads like a
memorandum to an addressee involved in the practical running of
government. The Notion can, therefore, be read as a policy paper. Since
the ‘man of action’ (a tyrant) is always in a hurry, it is important that the
philosopher’s counsel to the politician is precise and concise (see
‘L’action politique des philosophes’ in Critique, n. 41, 1950, pp. 46– and
n. 42, pp. 138–55). In Kojève’s lifetime, it is very likely that the
manuscript of The Notion was shared with his acquaintances in the
French government or read by some of his intellectual interlocutors. A
letter dated 9 July 1942 from Henri Moysset (senior minister in the
Vichy government but also close friends of Eric Weil’s family)
acknowledges receipt of The Notion. It is also known for instance that
Kojève dispatched a voluminous Russian manuscript to ‘Stalin and the
Russian people’ in 1941 via the Soviet embassy in Paris, and that in
1945 he prepared a memorandum to Jean Filippi on French foreign
policy, a version of which is best known as ‘The Latin Empire’.
Secondly, the note alerting the reader to what is interesting in the
‘book’ may also be interpreted from a philosophical angle. Since The
Notion focuses on the phenomenological analysis of authority, it is
nothing other than a fragment from a bigger project. Kojève’s
philosophical system consists of three planes: phenomenology,
energology, and ontology. He is alerting readers that his study is not
conclusive, because it does not cover all three planes of his system.
Kojève’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, namely his use of capitals and italics,
have been kept as found in the original French manuscript. All previous
editors of Kojève’s published work, Raymond Queneau or Raymond Aron
for Gallimard, Georges Bataille or Éric Weil in Critique, as well as his
North American translators; they all have respected Kojève’s stylistic
oddities. We saw no reason to deviate from that established tradition in
the present translation. It is very likely that the use of capitals, in
particular, has something to do with Kojève’s philosophical education in
German universities in the mid-1920s. It is, however, quite clear that
capitalized words such as ‘Authority’ or ‘State’ refer to concepts rather
than to abstract words or floating signifiers with changing meanings and
usage. Words like ‘Leader’, ‘Father’, ‘Judge’ or ‘Master’, do not refer to
actual persons in the flesh, but to phenomenological, ontological and
‘metaphysical’ notions, whose meaning can only be deduced from
Kojève’s philosophical system (Système du savoir).
More generally, I have supplied editorial notes throughout both the
introduction and main text. These notes are enclosed in square brackets
to indicate their provenance.
Introduction to the French Edition
François Terré
Alexandre Kojève exerted a major influence on philosophical thought,
and his is a fascinating career. Originally from Russia, born in 1902, he
left the land of the Soviets in 1919 or 1920 for the Berlin of Brecht and
expressionism. In 1926, as things started taking a turn for the worse in
the Weimar Republic, he settled in the Paris of the roaring twenties. The
1929 economic crisis, coming on top of previous bad investments, left
him bankrupt. He decided to take up philosophy for a living. In the
meantime, he had studied ‘the ultimate ends of the ethics of Christianity
and Buddhism’ and published in 1931 an essay on ‘atheism’.1 The lure of
oriental philosophies led him to learn Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. He
defended his dissertation on Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) at
Heidelberg in 1926.
Strains on his financial means, and a good word from his friend
Alexandre Koyré, whom he later succeeded in his teaching post, led to
Kojève finding himself running a seminar at the École Pratique des
Hautes Études in Paris. Last but not least of the many philosopher–
educators before him, he undertook a paragraph-by-paragraph
commentary on The Phenomenology of Spirit. While access to the seminar
was initially limited, it subsequently attracted a number of fascinated
listeners as diverse as the directions their respective careers would later
take: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Éric Weil, Robert Marjolin, Gaston
Fessard, Raymond Aron, Raymond Polin, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty … even Raymond Queneau. It was under the aegis of the
latter that Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, a text based on lecture notes
taken during Kojève’s seminar,2 was published in 1948. Kojève’s
teaching was an ongoing flirtation with spectacle and play. In Raymond
Aron’s Memoirs, Kojève’s ‘talent’ and ‘dialectical virtuosity’ are explicitly
acknowledged, but ‘there still remains a question that [Aron] cannot
evade. When [Kojève] described himself as a “strictly observant
Stalinist” in 1938 or 1939, was he serious, or more precisely, in which
sense was he serious?’3 Aron, however, insists right away that in private
conversation Kojève did not deny the fact that Russia was governed by
brutes. ‘I’m still wondering’, adds Raymond Aron, ‘which side of Kojève
was mere intellectual or existential play.’4
Kojève’s thought was a decisive stage in the return to Hegel which,
since 1945, marked ‘most of the protagonists of the three-H generation
named after Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger’. This was paralleled, in the
same vein of ‘the humanisation of nothingness’, by a ‘revolt against neo-
Kantianism’ and the ‘eclipse of Bergsonism’.5 It matters little that
subsequently we have witnessed the ebb and flow of this line of thought.
This sequence still shows the extent to which Hegel’s thought remained
an obligatory route even for those who sought to shield themselves from
it. In this respect, whether faithful to Hegel or not – but what does such
faithfulness mean? – Kojève’s influence was capital in terms of the
expansion of the realm of reason. This is excellently formulated by
Vincent Descombes in the following terms:
any thinking which aspires to be dialectical must, by definition,
induce in reason a movement towards what is entirely foreign to it,
towards the other. The whole issue now rests upon whether the
other has been returned to the same in the course of this movement,
or whether (so as to embrace rational and irrational, the same and
the other at once) reason will have to transform itself, losing its
initial identity, ceasing to be the same and becoming other with the
other.6
Hence reason’s obligatory passage via excess or aberration on its path
towards wisdom; and via cynicism, violence or terror where, according
to Kojève, both the philosopher and the tyrant act similarly, or at times
even together. From Hegel, Kojève borrows an immanent teleology that
guides the dialectical movement of negativity, the very force of
ideologies of progress;7 but its essential contribution rests on the idea
that there comes a moment, with the contradictions of history ultimately
resolved, when this teleology itself comes to an end. The end-of-history
thesis is added to the famous Hegelian master–slave dialectic; the one
and the other are knit together.
Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, the year following
Napoleon’s victory at Jena. Shaped by the turbulent history of his time,
Hegel discerned a movement based on definitive achievements which, in
the opinion of many, could trigger the perpetual movement of a system
capable of verifying its own totality. Hegel’s 1821 Principles of the
Philosophy of Right was his last philosophical work published before his
death. When, 122 years later, Kojève finished his Esquisse d’une
phénoménologie du droit, this was in the midst of the Second World War.
No sooner had he been naturalized as a French citizen than he was
called up to take part in the ‘phony war’, but in 1940, like many others,
he lost his regiment. In 1941 he settled in the so-called zone libre, where
Nina Ivanoff8 managed to reach him, even though she did not have a
French passport. They lived in Marseille, where they were joined by
Léon Poliakov, a Jew of Russian origin, childhood friend of Nina Ivanoff,
and organiser of resistance movements in coordination with the
clandestine resistance group led by Jean Cassou.9 Kojève participated
actively in the Resistance. He had long known what the risk of death
meant in theory, and when one day this risk materialised, the well-
understood and well-practiced master–slave dialectic helped save lives.10
When Kojève went to visit Éric Weil’s family in Gramat, a small village
in Lot, in the Midi Pyrenees region of France, he settled in a small hotel
with Nina Ivanoff during the summer of 1943. There he wrote his
Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit, which would be published
posthumously, thirteen years after his death.11 Received with immense
interest by many legal scholars and philosophers, the Esquisse is an
essential contribution to contemporary philosophy precisely in so far as
it is an informed treatment of the question of right. Overcoming the
enigma that has long been inherent in the definition of right, Kojève
undoubtedly brought to this subject a groundbreaking perspective, re-
contextualising and then surpassing both the exclusive focus on values
and the contemplation of a formal construction claiming that its origin,
nature, and justification are to be found nowhere outside itself. More
than twenty years after its publication, the Esquisse has remained intact
in the face of the excesses of analytic philosophy, probably in part
because it assumes and transcends the ambivalence of right in its
relations with practical facts. It also identifies a circular movement –
from the real to the rational and from the rational to the real – inherent
in the very essence of right.
Kojève questioned the definition of right, and how it is to be grasped,
identified, and recognised – most vexing questions whose ambiguities
have been noted by legal scholars for centuries. According to Kojève, the
juridical phenomenon necessarily implies, during the interaction
between two human beings, the intervention of an impartial and
disinterested third party. This third party is, in its diverse functions,
legislator, judge, or law officer; but it is mainly in so far as the third
party intervenes as judge that the juridical, as such, is revealed.
Moreover, this third party necessarily exists because there is in Man a
desire to realise justice and even a pleasure in pronouncing judgements
as particular as sexual or aesthetic pleasure. There is a specifically
juridical interest proper to Man, and inspired by the idea of justice.
According to Kojève, as for Hegel, work presupposes the idea of the
other, since economic man is always coupled with a conceited man who
aspires to recognition, the very condition of self-consciousness – starting
with the consciousness of pronouncing a judgement and proceeding to
the consciousness of being judged. From this there follow essential
distinctions between the juridical, on the one hand, and the religious,
moral, economic, and political, on the other. In other words, if it is still
the development of the idea that lies at the heart of Kojève’s philosophy
of right, it is henceforth the idea of justice that is at stake and no longer
the Hegelian idea of freedom.
The question of authority is not overlooked in the Esquisse. Evidently,
Kojève looks at the question of authority in the context of his analysis of
‘Right in the familial society’. A footnote on page 411 reads: ‘See my
“Brief Article on Authority” (which needs to be completed in its
application to the familial sphere) (In the State, the Authority of the
Master seems to prevail above all in foreign policy, in relations with the
Enemy; that of the Leader in domestic policy, in relations among
Friends).’12 The body of the text contains an important passage marking
the link in Kojève’s thought between the phenomenology of right and
Authority, or more precisely with regard to its diverse types: ‘It is still
the Authority of being and not action to which one will have to resort in
the Family’. Kojève then adds:
Now, the Authority of being is the Authority of the ‘Father’ type: