Posthuman Prehistory
2015; Routledge; Volume: 29; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09528822.2016.1235861
ISSN1475-5297
Autores Tópico(s)Water Governance and Infrastructure
ResumoAbstract‘History stops at the moment when the difference, the Opposition, between Master and Slave Disappears,’ Alexandre Kojève famously claimed in his 1930s lectures on Hegel. So long as there are still masters and slaves, we have history. When the master/slave dialectic has been abrogated, history will have come to an end. Kojève's essential syllogism (if slavery, then history) deserves to be engaged with – precisely in order to be turned against the End of History diagnosis that he launched.In contrast to CLR James in his contemporaneous work on the Haitian Revolution, Kojève had little to say on forms of actual slavery. This article proposes to desublimate Kojève by analysing his account of the master/slave dialectic in conjunction with contemporary aesthetic and activist engagement with neo-slavery in various guises – for example in the practice of Gulf Labor. In the process, the notion of the posthistorical is placed in a critical constellation with that of the posthuman.Keywords: Sven LüttickenFrancis FukuyamaAlexandre KojèveGulf LaborHendrik De ManJonas Staalend of historyprehistoryposthuman With thanks to Simon Sheikh for editing the original, longer text down to a manageable size.Notes1 See the downloadable poster at http://gulflabor.org/2014/week-17-charles-gaines-and-ashley-hunt-cultural-enrichment/.2 Alexandre Kojève, in Allan Bloom, ed, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, James H Nichols Jr, trans, assembled by Raymond Queneau, Cornell University Press, New York, 1980, p 433 Bloom’s English translation of the Introduction is incomplete; the full text is in Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ibid, p 90.4 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [1807], Hans-Friedrich Wessels and H Clairmont, eds, Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1988, pp 12–1375 As Perry Anderson puts it, ‘the Phenomenology, bearing at once on the formation of the self and the development of the world, in language of opaque passion and elusive intensity, invites the largest interpretive constructions while withholding most of the empirical specifications needed for them’. Perry Anderson, ‘The Ends of History’, in A Zone of Engagement, Verso, London, New York, 1992, p 316.6 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 20097 From Hegel’s section on the master/slave dialectic, quoted in Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, op cit, p 8.8 GWF Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [1821], Werke 7, Surhkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, pp 123–1259 Things become rather obscene in Kojève’s 1943 Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit (published posthumously; Gallimard, Paris, 1981), in which the author stresses repeatedly that from the slaves’ point of view, it is ‘just’ that the master is master, for he has taken a risk (in the fight for life and death) that the slave refused to take.10 CLR James’s The Black Jacobins was published in 1938, when Kojève was still working his way through the Phänomenologie des Geistes in Paris.11 http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/calendar/symposia/metamodernism-the-return-of-history12 Lutz Niethammer in collaboration with Dirk van Laak, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, Patrick Camiller, trans, Verso, London, New York, 1992 [German edition 1989]13 See Hendrik de Man, Vermassung und Kulturverfall: Eine Diagnose unserer Zeit, A Francke, Bern, 1952, p 125. This is the origin of the mistaken attribution of the term ‘posthistoire’ to Cournot, which Gehlen took from de Man. De Man here argues that since history is produced by man, and since it appears to be impossible to assert human influence on contemporary events, the world has become posthistorical. For Gehlen, see Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie, Luchterhand, Neuwied am Rhein, Berlin, 1963, p 344. Niethammer discusses this genealogy on pp 82–85.14 Perry Anderson in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin, London, 1992, p 27915 See Arthur C Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986; Hegel’s account of the end of art is in GWF Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik;1 Werke 13, Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, eds, Suhrkamp Taschenbauch Wissenschaft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, pp 141–142.16 Arthur C Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Lydia Goehr, Foreword, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998, A W Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Bollingen series, pp 35–44, p 12, p 2717 Karl Marx, ‘Preface’, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, 1859], S W Ryazanskaya, trans, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, trans, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, p 9619 Anderson, The End of History and the Last Man, op cit, p 33620 For Anton Pannekoek, see for instance ‘The New Blanquism’ [1920], https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1920/blanquism.htm; ‘Party and Working Class’ (1936), https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party–working–class.htm; ‘Lenin as Philosopher’ (1938), https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/index.htmIn opposition to mainstream Trotskyism, CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya’s ‘Johnson–Forest Tendency’ argued that the Soviet Union represented a form of state capitalism. For their definitive statement, see CLR James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee (Boggs), State Capitalism and World Revolution [1950], Charles H Kerr, Chicago, 1986.21 For Kojève on Jena, see Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, op cit, p 44.22 As Eric Michael Dale has argued, one can see why even before Kojève, Engels and Nietzsche felt that Hegel ought to have declared history over, had he been consistent. If, according to Hegel’s anti-Schellingian conception, the absolute is ‘ganz wesentlich Resultat’ – if spirit is indeed an absolute subject realising itself ever more fully, this suggests that the process could come to an end. Eric Michael Dale, Hegel, The End of History, and the Future, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, pp 13–109.23 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, op cit, p 65, p 6824 Ibid, p 6825 Ibid, p 6926 Ibid27 On Kojève and Stalin see Hager Weslati, ‘Kojève’s Letter to Stalin’, Radical Philosophy 184, March/April 2014, pp 7–18. At the end of the 1936–1937 lectures, left out of Allan Bloom’s English edition (for which he is criticised by Weslati, p 9), Kojève notes that for Hegel it would still have been a problem that Bewusstsein (Napoleon) and Selbstbewusstsein (Hegel) were separated. To overcome this duality, Napoleon would have to invite Hegel to Paris to become the philosopher of the universal and homogeneous state. ‘Ceci pourrait se faire (et encore!) si Napoléon “reconnaissait” Hegel, comme Hegel a “reconnu” Napoléon.’ The ‘et encore’ can only refer to Stalin and Kojève, but in the end it does not seem to matter if we are talking about 1806 or 1937: ‘Quoi qu’il en soit – l’histoire est terminée’. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’Esprit professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des Hautes Études, Gallimard, Paris, 2014, p 181. By contrast, in a late (1968) interview, Kojève looks back at his Hegel lectures and paraphrases his stance at the time rather less ambiguously as amounting to: Hegel was wrong by about 150 years, Stalin and not Napoleon is the Vollender of history, and I’m his prophet. Kojève, interview from La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1–15 July 1968, in Kojève, Überlebensformen, Andreas Hiepko, ed, Merve, Berlin, 2007, p 61.28 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, op cit, p 16029 Kojève mentions the ‘self-determination of the Papuans’ along with the ‘two world wars’ in the 1962 footnote, ibid.30 Ibid, p 16131 Christoph Kletzer, ‘Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelianism and the Formation of Europe’, in The Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, vol 8, 2005–2006, John Bell and Claire Kilpatrick, eds, Hart Publishing, Oxford, UK and Portland, Oregon, 2006, pp 133–15232 http://www.formerwest.org/ResearchExhibitions/AfterHistory, accessed 24 July 201633 Georges Bataille, letter to Alexandre Kojève, 6 December 1937, in G Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, Michel Surya, ed, Les Cahiers de la NRF, Gallimard, Paris, 1997, pp 131–13234 Le Dimanche de la vie (Gallimard, 1966) is the title of one of Raymond Queneau’s ‘Kojèvian’ novels, which Kojève reviewed for G Bataille’s journal Critique: ‘Les Romans de la sagesse’, in Critique 60, May 1952, pp 387–397.35 Bataille, Choix de lettres, op cit, p 13336 Boris Groys, ‘WikiLeaks: The Revolts of the Clerks, or Universality as Conspiracy’, Open! 22, 18 November 2011, pp 36–4537 The term ‘hacker class’ is McKenzie Wark’s; see A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2004.38 On Metahaven see for instance http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/19/5223620/hi-res-censorship-metahaven-on-edward-snowden-and-rebranding-wikileaks. Trevor Paglen’s photos were published on Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/new-photos-of-nsa-and-others/.39 On Gulf Labor see also Andrew Ross, The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, OR Books, New York, 2015.40 Jonas Staal, ‘To Make a World, Part III: Stateless Democracy’, e-flux 63, March 2015, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/to-make-a-world-part-iii-stateless-democracy/41 http://newworldsummit.eu/; http://newworldsummit.eu/news/new-world-academy/42 Havin Güneşer, ‘Feminicide’, New World Academy Reader 5, special issue, Renée In der Maur and Jonas Staal, eds, Stateless Democracy, BAK, Utrecht, 2015, p 63. Güneşer here echoes Öcalan, who has written in similar terms about women’s enslavement. Also see Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [1884], Penguin, London, 2010.43 Oxana Timofeeva, ‘The End of the World, From Apocalypse to the End of History and Back’, e-flux 56, June 201544 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, op cit, p 8645 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p 15, pp 216–21846 Ibid, p 947 HOWDOSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, ‘No Humans Involved’, exhibition at Witte de With: Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2015. The exhibition’s title is a reference to the 1994 essay ‘No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues’ by feminist philosopher and writer Sylvia Wynter, NHI, Knowledge for the 21st Century, vol 1, no 1, autumn 1994, Knowledge on Trial. See exhibition guide, https://issuu.com/wittedewith/docs/no-humans-involved-english-wdw-rich48 See for instance Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, Zero Books, London, 2011.49 Will Steffen et al, ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, 16 January 2015, pp 1–18. See also Ian Angus, ‘When Did the Anthropocene Begin … and Why Does It Matter?’, Monthly Review, vol 67, issue 4, September 2015, http://monthlyreview.org/2015/09/01/when-did-the-anthropocene-beginand-why-does-it-matter/50 René Riesel and Jaime Semprun, Catastrophism, Disaster Management and Sustainable Submission, Roofdruk, Amsterdam, 2014, p 12. The French original was published by the Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances in 2008.51 Alain Leauthier and René Riesel, ‘The Progress of Submission Moves at a Frightening Speed: An Interview With René Riesel’, Liberation, 3–4 February 2001, translated from the French by Not Bored!, August 2007, http://www.notbored.org/riesel-interview.html#_ednref16. For a critical comment on Riesel’s habit of quoting Theodore Kaczynski, see note 11.52 Kerstin Stakemeier, ‘Desiring Catastrophe: Fictitious Sciences of a Less Probable Life’, unpublished manuscript.53 Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ [written in 1843 and first published under the title Zur Judenfrage in Paris in the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844], quoted in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000, p 7454 Donna J Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1990, p 150. For Riesel’s single-vision response to Haraway, see Remarques, p 88.55 Nick Land, ‘Circuitries’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, Falmouth, 2014, pp 251–27456 Beatriz Preciado [now Paul B Preciado], Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Bruce Benderson, trans, Feminist Press, New York, 2013, p 33, p 10657 Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia, Verso, London, 2016, p. 1358 See Achille Mbembe and Thomas M Blaser, ‘Africa and the Future: An Interview with Achille Mbembe’, 20 November 2013, http://africasacountry.com/2013/11/africa-and-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/
Referência(s)