The Artist / The Snob (Rising Above the Animal In The Post-Historical World)

"...as I said in the above Note, an animal that is in harmony with Nature or given 'Being' is a living being that is in no way human, To remain human, Man must remain a 'Subject opposed to the Object' even if Action negating the given and Error disappears. This means that while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detach 'form' from 'content,' doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure 'form' to himself and to others taken as 'content' of any sort. "

"...no animal can be a snob..."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them."

"Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

(Andy Warhol)

"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created technological innovation. Without the artist man merely adapts to his technologies and become their servo-mechanism."

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."

(Marshall McLuhan, Laws of Media)

American Communism (According to Alexandre Kojève and Andy Warhol)

"the Hegelian-Marxist end of History was not yet to come, but was already present, here and now ... in the North American extensions of Europe. One can even say that from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist 'communism,' seeing that, practically, all the members of a "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart desires."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

(Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol)

Mange ton Dasein!

But, as I have already said several times, the Wise man can speak of Science as his Science only to the extent that he can speak of death as his death. For, as he proceeds to the Logik, the Wise Man completely abolishes Time--that is, History--that is, his own truly and specifically human reality, which already in the Phenomenology is but a past reality: he definitively abandons his reality as a free and historical Individual, as Subject opposed to the Object, or as Man who is essentially something other than nature.

Hegel himself knows this full well. And he knew it at least as early as 1802. For his essay of 1802 entitled Glauben und Wissen, there is a passage in which he plainly says so, and which I would like to cite in ending my commentary on the Phenomenology.

In this passage we read the following (Volume I, pages 303f.):

The whole sphere of finiteness, of one's being something, of the sensual--is swallowed up in true-or-genuine Faith when confronted with the thought and intuition of the Eternal, [thought and intuition] here becoming one and the same thing. All gnats of Subjectivity are burned in this devouring flame, and the very consciousness of giving-of-oneself and of this annihilation is annihilated.

Hegel knows it and says it. But he also says, in one of his letters, that this knowledge cost him dearly. He speaks of a period of total depression that he lived through between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth years of his life: a "Hypochondria" that went "bis Erlähmung aller Kräfte," that was so severe as "to paralyze all his powers," and that came precisely from the fact that he could not accept the necessary abandonment of Individuality--that is, actually, of humanity--which the idea of absolute Knowledge demanded. But, finally, he surmounted this "Hypochondria." And becoming a Wise Man by that final acceptance of death, he published a few years later the First Part of the "System of Science," entitled "Science of the Phenomenology of the Spirit," in which he definitively reconciles himself with all that is and has been, by declaring that there will never more be anything new on earth.

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

Communism & the Psychoanalytic Cure

"...the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

'Das Kapital reveals the fact that capital, though organizing the world can never go beyond its own limit. It is a Kantian critique of the ill contained drive of capital/reason to self-realize beyond its limit."

(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)

"Lacan quips that the injunction of psychoanalysis is mange ton dasein!- eat your existence! He means that at the close of the analysis, the subject should come to internalise and so surpass the way that it has so far organised your life and relations to Others [for the bourgeois worker this is the fantasy projection of the self onto Private property/Capital]. ... Lacan's name for what occurs at the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in and responsibility for how s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is to re-avow subjective responsibility. To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorises, is to cease positing that the Other [read here: Capital] has taken the 'lost' object of desire."

(From the entry on Jacques Lacan in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)

"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world-historical' existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history."

(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

"Analysis can only have for its goal only the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject of his history in his relation to a future"

(Jacques Lacan, Écrits)

The Bourgeois and Christianity

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"Every enhancement in the type 'man' up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic society — and that’s how it will always be, over and over again: a society which believes in a long scale of rank ordering and differences in worth between man and man and which, in some sense or other, requires slavery."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"... Man was born and History began with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of Master and Slave. That is to say that Man -- at his origin -- is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can only exist where there is Master and Slave."

"Now, one can in fact overcome the contradiction of a given existence only by transforming modifying given existence, by transforming it through Action. But in the Slave's case, to transform existence is, again, to fight against the Master. Now, he does not want to do this. He tries, therefore, to justify by a new ideology this contradiction in skeptical existence, which is, all things considered, the Stoic -- i.e. slavish -- contradiction between the idea or the ideal of Freedom and the reality of Slavery. And this third and last Slave's-ideology is the Christian ideology."

"Without Fighting, without effort, therefore, the Christian realizes the Slave's ideal: he obtains -- in and through (or for) God equality with the Master: inequality is but a mirage, like everything in this World of the senses in which Slavery and Mastery hold sway."

"Indeed, the Christian Slave can affirm his equality with the Master only by accepting the existence of an 'other world' and a transcendent God. Now, this God is necessarily a Master, and an absolute Master."

"[With adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire] we have found the solution to the problem that interests us: the Masters have accepted the ideology of their Slaves; the pagan Man of Mastery has become the Christian Man of Slavery; and all this without a Fight, without a Revolution properly so-called-because the Masters themselves have become Slaves. Or, more precisely, pseudo-Slaves, or, if you will, pseudo-Masters. For they are no longer real Masters, since they no longer risk their lives; but they are not real Slaves either, because they do not work in the service of another. They are, so to speak, Slaves without Masters, pseudo-Slaves. And by ceasing to be true Masters, they end in no longer having real Slaves: they free them, and thus the slaves themselves become slaves without Masters, pseudo-Masters. Therefore, the opposition of Mastery and Slavery is overcome. Not, however, because the Slaves have become true Masters. The unification is effected in pseudo-Mastery, which is--in fact--a pseudo-Slavery, a Slavery without Masters."

"This Slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner. It is by becoming a private property-owner that the Greek Master, a citizen of the city, becomes the peaceful Roman Bourgeois, a subject of the Emperor, who himself is but a Bourgeois, a private property-owner, whose Empire is his patrimony. And it is also in relation to private property that the freeing of the slaves is carried out; they become property-owners, Bourgeois, like their ex-masters."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,-- overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things--the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption--against Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all 'souls,' step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all that sort of thing became master of Rome..."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only for himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital."

"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.). However that may be, bourgeois existence presupposes, engenders, and nourishes Abnegation. Now it is precisely this Abnegation that reflects itself in the dualistic Christian ideology, while providing it with a new, specific, nonpagan content. It is the same Christian dualism that is found again in bourgeois existence: the opposition between the "legal Person," the private Property-owner, and the man of flesh and blood; the existence of an deal, transcendent World, represented in reality by Money, Capital, to which Man is supposed to devote his Actions, to sacrifice his sensual, biological Desires."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"And the same is true for nihilistic Skepticism: private property is its real basis and its social, historical reality. The nihilistic skepticism of the solipsistic Slave, who attributes a true value and a true being only to himself, is found again in the private property-owner, who subordinates everything, the State itself, to the absolute value of his own property."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all."

(Gilles Deleuze, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium")

"Suppose the oppressed, depressed, suffering, and unfree people, those ignorant of themselves and tired out, suppose they moralize: what will be the common feature of their moral estimates of value?... those characteristics will be pulled forward and flooded with light which serve to mitigate existence for those who suffer: here respect is given to pity, to the obliging hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness — for these are here the most useful characteristics and almost the only means to endure the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"It seems difficult for a philosophy of force or of the will to explain how the reactive forces, how the slaves, or the weak can win. If all that happens is that together they form a force greater than of the strong, it is hard to see what has changed and what a qualitative evaluation is based on. But in fact, the weak, the slaves, triumph not by adding up their forces but by subtracting those of the other: they separate the strong from what they can do. They triumph not because of the composition of their power but because of the power of their contagion. They bring about a becoming-reactive of all forces. That is what 'degeneration' means. Nietzsche shows early on that the criteria of the struggle for life, of natural selection, necessarily favor the weak and the sick, the "secondary ones" (by sick is meant a life reduced to its reactive processes). This is all the more true in the case of man, where the criteria of history favor the slaves as such. It is a becoming-sick of all life, a becoming slave of all men, that constitutes the victory of nihilism. We must again avoid misconceptions about the Nietzschean terms 'strong' and 'weak,' 'master' and 'slave': it is clear that the slave doesn't stop being a slave when he gets power, nor do the weak cease to be weak. Even when they win, reactive forces are still reactive. In everything, according to Nietzssche, what is at stake is a qualitative typology: a question of baseness and nobility. Our masters are slaves that have triumphed in a universal becoming-slave: European man, domesticated man, the buffoon. Nietzsche describes modern states as ant colonies, were the leaders and the powerful win through their baseness, through the contagion of this baseness and this buffoonery. What ever the complexity of Nietzsche's work, the reader can easily guess which category (that is, in which type) he would have placed the race of 'masters' conceived by the Nazis. When nihilism triumphs, then and only then does the will to power stop meaning 'to create' and start to signify instead 'to want power,' 'to want to dominate' (thus to attribute to oneself or to have other attribute to one established values: money, honors, power, and so on). Yet that kind of will to power is precisely that of the slave; it is the way in which the slave or the impotent concieves of power, the idea he has of it and that he applies when he triumphs. It can happen that a sick person says, Oh! if I were well, I would do this or that -- and maybe he will, but his plans and his thoughts are still those of a sick person, only a sick person. The same goes for the slave and his conception of mastery or power. The same goes for the reactive man and his conception of action. Values and evaluations are always being reversed, things are always seen from a petty angle, images are reversed as in a bull's eye. One of Nietzsche's greatest sayings is: 'We must always protect the strong from the weak.'"

(Gilles Deleuze, "Nietzsche", Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life)

"Yet where arises the urgent cry for the overman? Why does prior humanity no longer suffice? Because Nietzsche recognizes the historic moment in which man takes it on himself to assume dominion over the earth as a whole. Nietzsche is the first thinker [ignoring Marx's entire critical project] to pose the decisive question concerning the phase of world history that is emerging only now, the first to think the question through in its metaphysical implications. The question asks: is man in his essence heretofore prepared to assume dominion over the earth? If not, what must happen with prior humanity in order that it may 'subjugate' the earth and thus fulfill the prophecy of an old testament. Must not prior man be conducted beyond himself, over his prior self, in order to meet this challenge? If so, then the 'over-man' properly thought, cannot be the product of an unbridled and degenerate fantasy that is plunging head long into the void. We can just as little uncover the nature of the over-man historically by virtue of the modern age. We do not seek the essential figure of the over-man in those personalities who, as major functionaries of a shallow, misguided will to power are swept to the pinnacles of that will's sundry organizational forms."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: volume 2)

"Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a 'transvaluation of all values,' a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of 'true' and 'not true.' The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy."

"By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation. The proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right in regard to the world which is coming into being as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people, as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property, the king merely proclaims that the private owner is king."

(Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

"The workers shall live one day as the bourgeoisie do now -- but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: thus poorer and simpler but in possession of power."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Making the Modern American Proletariat

"Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"A 2006 study by the department’s National Center for Education Statistics followed federal loan borrowers for 10 years, ending in 2003-4, and found that nearly 10 percent defaulted. (The average debt among the two-thirds of 2003-4 college graduates who use loans is about $20,000, according to the College Board.) And with more students borrowing, more students are potentially at risk."
"Garrett Mockler filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2004, after months of struggling to make payments on credit cards as well as on $40,000 in student loans. He was working multiple jobs as a teacher, dancer and choreographer in Los Angeles after earning a Master of Fine Arts in 2003."
"His lenders wanted more than $400 a month on top of credit card debt, Mr. Mockler said. 'All my bills started piling up,' he said. 'It was either pay one bill or pay another or not eat or not have a roof over my head.'"

(From "That Student Loan, So Hard to Shake", NY Times 8/24/08)

"...the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

(Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

"...[a] Slave without a Master, [a] Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner."

"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only for himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital."

"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all."

(Gilles Deleuze, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium")

"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture..."

(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

Notes on the World Historical Individual: Cartesian Subjects / Proletariat / Overmen

"Yet where arises the urgent cry for the overman? Why does prior humanity no longer suffice? Because Nietzsche recognizes the historic moment in which man takes it on himself to assume dominion over the earth as a whole. Nietzsche is the first thinker [ignoring Marx's entire critical project] to pose the decisive question concerning the phase of world history that is emerging only now, the first to think the question through in its metaphysical implications. The question asks: is man in his essence heretofore prepared to assume dominion over the earth? If not, what must happen with prior humanity in order that it may 'subjugate' the earth and thus fulfill the prophecy of an old testament. Must not prior man be conducted beyond himself, over his prior self, in order to meet this challenge? If so, then the 'over-man' properly thought, cannot be the product of an unbridled and degenerate fantasy that is plunging head long into the void. We can just as little uncover the nature of the over-man historically by virtue of the modern age. We do not seek the essential figure of the over-man in those personalities who, as major functionaries of a shallow, misguided will to power are swept to the pinnacles of that will's sundry organizational forms."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: volume 2)

"I teach you the over-man. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?"

"All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the over-man: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

"... Man was born and History began with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of Master and Slave. That is to say that Man -- at his origin -- is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can only exist where there is Master and Slave."

"...[a] Slave without a Master, [a] Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner."

"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only for himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital."

"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"...Capital, though organizing the world can never go beyond its own limit."

(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)

"The thesis [Man] and antitheses [Capital] and their proofs therefore represent nothing but the opposite assertions, that a limit is, and that the limit is equally only a sublated one; that the limit has a beyond with which however it stands in relation, and beyond which it must pass, but in doing so there arises another limit, which is no limit. The solution of these antinomies ... is transcendental, that is."

(Hegel, Science of Logic)

"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world-historical' existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.'

(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

"Marx’s definition of the proletariat as Subjektivitaet (substanceless subjectivity) recovers, as many present day thinkers do not, the meaning of the subject in the Greek term hypokeimenon. ... Marx doesn’t mean that the subject is ‘substanceless’ in the same way that idealist notions of the ‘self’ are substanceless (i.e. cut off from the original greek meaning of the term and based upon reflection), nor that the subject is foundationless per se (as anti-Aristotelian notions of the subject would have it). It plays instead on a double meaning of the word as not only ‘substanceless’ in the political sense (i.e. the proletariat is united in a set of egalitarian economic aims and not selfish individual ‘interests’) but also in the sense of without (possessing) substance, i.e. without property..."

(Nina Power, Philosophy's Subjects)

"The workers shall live one day as the bourgeoisie do now -- but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: thus poorer and simpler but in possession of power."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Empire

“The Era where all of humanity together will be a political reality still remains in the distant future. The period of national political realities is over. This is the epoch of Empires, which is to say of transnational political unities, but formed by affiliated nations.”

(Alexandre Kojève, from a memorandum of advice to Charles de Gaulle written in 1945 at the end of the Second World War)

'We should emphasize that we use ‘‘Empire’’ here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.'

(Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire)

Notes towards a re-reading of Capital

"This slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner. It is by becoming a private property-owner that the Greek Master, a citizen of the City, becomes a peaceful Roman Bourgeois, a subject of the Emperor, who himself is but a Bourgeois, a private property-owner, whose Empire is his patrimony. And it is also in relation to private property that the freeing of the Slaves is carried out; the become property-owners, Bourgeois, like their ex-masters.

"Now in the Hegelian conception of work can truly be Work, a specifically human Action, only on the condition that it be carried out in relation to an idea (a 'project')--that is, in relation to something other than the given, and in particular, other than the given that the worker himself is.

"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital.

"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"...the essence of [Capital] is by no means anything [Capitalistic]. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of [Capital] so long as we merely conceive and push forward [Capitalism], put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to [Capital], whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of [Capital]."

"In what follows we shall be questioning concerning [Capital]. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning [Capital], and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of [Capital]."

(Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)

Alexandre Kojève reading Hegel : The Word Virus is the Source of Humanity

'Desire is human--or, more exactly, "humanizing," "anthropogenetic-- only provided that it is directed toward another Desire and an other Desire.'

'The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right... to that thing, to make another recognize him as owner of the thing.'

'Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire. And Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting his life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital--i.e. the being that cannot risk its life in a fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige--is not a truly human being.'

'"The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called" also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign "language" of bees. What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself. For in these post historical animals, there would no longer be any "[discursive] understanding of the World and of self."'

'To remain human, Man must remain a "Subject opposed to the Object," even if "Action negating the given and Error" disappears. This means that, while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detatch "form" from "content," doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure "form" to himself and to others taken as "content" of any sort.' [Heidegger would say that, to remain human, post-historical Man must become the preserver of the "clearing", the process that allows him to detach "form" from "content", "beings" from "being"--he must become the preserver of the Word Virus.]

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

On History and Tradition

He who cannot draw on 3000 years of history is living merely from hand to mouth.
Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

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It is by History which is created, lived, and really remembered as "tradition" that Man realized himself or "appears" as a dialectical totality, instead of annihilating himself and "disappearing" by "pure" or "abstract" negation of every given whatsoever, real or thought. It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the moral danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radical "nonconformist" Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all ( even the "sublimated" given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into active anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a "permanent revolution" that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing.

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
...
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality....
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

(T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent)

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We must in all seriousness despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential. To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and for action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and from action or for merely glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is now every bit as necessary as it may be painful.

...
History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, the man who fights one great battle, who needs the exemplary men, teachers, and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions.

Anyone who has learned to recognize the sense of history in this way must get annoyed to see inquisitive travelers or painstaking micrologists clambering all over the pyramids of the great things of the past. There, in the place where he finds the stimulation to breathe deeply and to make things better, he does not wish to come across an idler who strolls around, greedy for distraction or stimulation, as if among the heaped-up art treasures of a gallery.
In order not to despair and feel disgust in the midst of weak and hopeless idlers, surrounded by apparently active, but really only agitated and fidgeting companions, the active man looks behind him and interrupts the path to his goal to take a momentary deep breath. His purpose is some happiness or other, perhaps not his own, often that of a people or of humanity collectively. He runs back away from resignation and uses history as a way of fighting resignation. For the most part, no reward beckons him on, other than fame, that is, becoming a candidate for an honoured place in the temple of history, where he himself can be, in his turn, a teacher, consoler, and advisor for those who come later.
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History is borne only by strong personalities; the weak personalities it obliterates completely.
...
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History belongs secondly to the man who preserves and honours, to the person who with faith and love looks back in the direction from which he has come, where he has been. Through this reverence he, as it were, gives thanks for his existence. While he nurtures with a gentle hand what has stood from time immemorial, he want to preserve the conditions under which he came into existence for those who are to come after him. And so he serves life. His possession of his ancestors' household goods changes the ideas in such a soul, for those goods are far more likely to take possession of his soul. The small, limited, crumbling, and archaic keep their own worth and integrity, because the conserving and honouring soul of the antiquarian man settles on these things and there prepares for itself a secret nest. The history of his city becomes for him the history of his own self. He understands the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival like an illustrated diary of his youth, and he rediscovers for himself in all this his force, his purpose, his passion, his opinion, his foolishness, and his bad habits. He says to himself, here one could live, here one can live, and here one can go on living, because we endure and do not collapse overnight. Thus, with this “We” he looks back over the past amazing lives of individuals and feels himself like the spirit of the house, the generation, and the city. From time to time he personally greets from the distant, obscure, and confused centuries the soul of his people as his own soul, with a feeling of completion and premonition, a scent of almost lost tracks, an instinctively correct reading even of a past which has been written over, a swift understanding of the erased and reused parchments (which have, in fact, been erased and written over many times). These are his gifts and his virtues.

...

a third method of analyzing the past is necessary for human beings, alongside the monumental and the antiquarian: the critical method. Once again this is in the service of living. A person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it. That past is worthy of condemnation, for that is how it stands with human things: in them human force and weakness have always been strong. Here it is not righteousness which sits in the judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force. Its judgment is always unmerciful, always unjust, because it never emerges from a pure spring of knowledge, but in most cases the judgment would be like that anyway, even if righteousness itself were to utter it. “For everything that arises is worth destroying. Therefore, it would be better that nothing arose.” It requires a great deal of power to be able to live and to forget just how much life and being unjust are one and the same. Luther himself once voiced the opinion that the world only came into being through the forgetfulness of God; if God had thought about “heavy artillery,” he would not have made the world. From time to time, however, this same life, which uses forgetting, demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness. For it should be made quite clear how unjust the existence of something or other is, a right, a caste, a dynasty, for example, and how much this thing merits destruction.
Each of the three existing types of history is right only for a single area and a single climate; on every other one it grows up into a destructive weed. If a man who wants to create greatness uses the past, then he will empower himself through monumental history. On the other hand, the man who wishes to emphasize the customary and traditionally valued cultivates the past as an antiquarian historian. Only the man whose breast is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any price has a need for critical history, that is, history which sits in judgment and passes judgment. From the thoughtless transplanting of plants stem many ills: the critical man without need, the antiquarian without reverence, and the student of greatness without the ability for greatness are the sort who are receptive to weeds estranged from their natural mother earth and therefore to degenerate growths.

...
You can interpret the past only on the basis of the highest power of the present. Only in the strongest tension of your noblest characteristics will you surmise what from the past is great and worth knowing and preserving. Like by like! Otherwise you reduce the past down to your level. Do not believe a piece of historical writing if it does not spring out of the head of the rarest of spirits.
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And here I recognize the mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers, which brings forth a more fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity, without having more of this future happiness and beauty still to come than a promise-filled premonition. These youth will suffer from the evil and the counter-measures simultaneously, and nevertheless they believe they may boast of a more powerful health and in general a more natural nature than their previous generations, the educated “Men” and “Old Men” of the present. However, their mission is to shake the ideas which this present holds about “health” and “culture” and to develop contempt and hatred against such hybrid monstrous ideas. The guaranteed mark of their own stronger health is to be precisely the fact that they, I mean these young people, themselves can use no idea, no party slogan, from the presently circulating currency of words and ideas as a designation of their being, but are convinced only by a power acting in it, a power which fights, eliminates, and cuts into pieces, and by an always heightened sense of life in every good hour. People may dispute the fact that these youth already have culture, but for what young person would this be a reproach? People may speak against their crudeness and immoderation, but they are not yet old and wise enough to be content; above all, they do not need to feign any ready-made culture to defend and enjoy all the comforts and rights of youth, especially the privilege of a braver spontaneous honesty and the energizing consolation of hope.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life)