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)

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)

Read "Pop Culture" as Folk Religion

The spirit of a nation is reflected in its history, its religion, and the degree of its political freedom. The improvement of individual morality is a matter involving one’s private religion, one’s parents, one’s personal efforts, and one’s individual situation. The cultivation of the spirit of the people as a whole requires in addition the respective contributions of folk religion and political institutions.

Through the mighty influence it exerts on the imagination and the heart, folk religion imbues the soul with power and enthusiasm, with a spirit indispensable for the noble exercise of virtue.

(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Prospects for a Folk Religion)