Abstract
In current Western philosophical discourse, secularism appears to be at a crossroads. There has been much written about the return of religion into politics and the public sphere, as well as the rise of fundamentalism and new spiritualisms. At the same time, there has been a revaluation of political theology and a critical examination of the legacy of secularism, with even the suggestion that we are already in a “post-secular” age. In this article, I argue One of the key model of secularisation that continues to shape such discussions of the topic originates from a framework initiated by the Russian-born French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève. At the centre of Kojève’s interpretation of Georg W.F. Hegel’s philosophical idealism is the doctrine of the end of history, which Francis Fukuyama famously appropriated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I will propose that there is a thematic thread that runs from Kojève’s controversial yet unique theorisation of the modern secular State as an ‘End-State’ into the recent political messianism of Giorgio Agamben mediated by Carl Schmitt’s political theology. The issue of the relationship between religion and secularism in these discussions concerns the theological remainder that persists in the modern Hegelo-Kojève end of history. Kojève and Agamben’s re-consideration of theology and its anthropological or political “truth” is worthy of attention for raising important questions concerning the spiritual foundation of modern secularism. Despite this importance, I will argue that both sides of this discussion overestimate the significance of a theological-political framework for understanding modern secular life.
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Notes
- 1.
I will be citing from the French edition of Kojève’s Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, except for those parts already translated in the English edition. The English translation Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1980) is an abridged version that was selectively edited by Allan Bloom. Notably absent from this version was the whole section on Religion (1968: 196–264). All other English translations from Kojève’s French writings are my own. Further, many of the key terms in the chapter will be written in capitalised form, such as ‘State’, ‘Science’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Man’, as they are written by Kojève, Hegel, and Schmitt.
- 2.
Kojève made several ‘sketches’ of the universal and homogenous State [UHS], neither of them definitive, and at times even contradictory. During the Hegel Course itself (given between 1933 and 1939), he did not refer to any actual political State at the time embodying the principles of the UHS, and only gesturing that with Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena in 1806, the ‘germ’ of the UHS began to disperse around the world and offered itself as a ‘project’ to be realised in the future. In 1943, he drafted a more concrete outline of the UHS in the manuscript Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (2000), foreseeing it as a ‘Socialist Empire’ that reigned on the authority of international law and administrative justice. After the War, his outlook became more ambiguous, and considered communism was just one of the ‘programs’ on offer for the UHS, the other being American liberal democracy (‘American way of life’) (See 1970: 41–42, 1980: 158–62, fn.6, 1991: 256). Towards the end of his life, he considered that no singular nation state could implement or embody the UHS, but instead would be realised through the actions of the international institutions and unions formed from 1948 onwards. Of biographical note, is that Kojève himself actively participated in realising his vision of the UHS, by being one of the architects of the European Common Market in 1957, which later became the European Union.
- 3.
During the years 1934 and 1935, Kojève published a two-part article for Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses under his Russian name, ‘Kojevnikoff’; he changed his name to ‘Kojève’ when he became a naturalised French citizen in 1937. The two articles I will use as my sources: ‘La metaphysique religeuse de Vladimir Soloviev’, [Part I] Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses vol. 14, no. 6 (1934), 534–544, and Part II in vol. 15, nos. 1–2 (1935), 110–152. The original thesis written in German under the supervision of Karl Jaspers is held in the Fonds Kojève, Boxes V-VI, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux.
- 4.
Solovyov claimed to have experience three visions of ‘Sophia’ throughout his life. The sites of these revelations were Egypt, Moscow Church, and the British Museum in London. He characterised this figure as a divine being with a feminine human form.
- 5.
‘A Brief Tale about the Antichrist’ was Solovyov’s last written text as part of ‘Sunday Letters’ series (1897–1898), also known as ‘The Three Conversations’. Kojève calls Solovyov’s late writings produced before his death in 1900 and after his conversion to Catholicism as ‘pessimistic’ and not representing his true ‘path of thinking’ (Kojevnikoff 1934: 536).
- 6.
One of the Biblical sources of Solovyov’s story is the letter Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, which told of a similar event, where the Apocalypse was heralded. The passage in question is: ‘And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness [anomos] is already at work; but the one who now holds it back [ho katechon] will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way’ (St. Paul, cited by Agamben 2005: 184). I will be using Agamben’s citations of Paul’s Letters due to the inclusion of him in this article. Earlier in this letter Paul speaks of the ‘the man of lawlessness, the son of destruction, the one opposing and exalting above all things called God or object of worship, so as for him in the temple of God to sit, demonstrating himself that he is God’ (Thessalonians 2:2–4). In this letter, Paul was writing to his converts in Thessalonica who were persecuted by the Roman Empire, and believed the end of the world was upon them. Karl Löwith cites the Catholic Church, under the influence of Saint Augustine, acted as a neutralising force à la the Katechon against ‘the anarchical potentialities of the radical eschatology of the early Christians’ and whose spirit would be revitalised by Joachim and his followers (Löwith 1970: 156).
- 7.
Katechon will be a term Schmitt uses quite frequently, especially in Nomos of the Earth (see Part I, Chap. 3, B), where he argues that it is essential for a Christian understanding of history (2003: 60). Hoelzl says Schmitt used the term throughout the war and more frequently between the years 1950 and 1957, which ‘explains the apologetic and defensive tone in his writings’ (2010: 102–03; See also Taubes 2004: 103). Agamben discusses Schmitt’s use of Katechon in The Time that Remains (2005: 109–110) and The Kingdom and the Glory (2011: 7–8).
- 8.
Kojève had taken over the course on Hegel from his fellow Russian émigré and friend Alexandre Koyré. Between the years 1926 and 1932 Koyré taught on the relationship between science and religion, with reference to Nicolas De Cusa, Calvin, Jacob Boehme, Friedrich Oetinger, and culminating in the ‘Religious Philosophy of the Young Hegel’ (1932–1933). These courses were taught in the Ve Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which was titled the ‘Religious Sciences’.
- 9.
Kojève wrote this in response to Henry Niel’s book, De la médiation dans la philosophie de Hegel, which put forward the idea that Hegel was fundamentally a theological thinker. Kojève differs from the left Hegelians, who from Feuerbach and Marx onwards, have accepted that Hegel’s philosophy was too influenced by theology (see Feuerbach 1986: 36). In 1955, Kojève wrote to Carl Schmitt that one could not understand his interpretation if one did not understand Hegel’s anthropotheism (2001: 96), admitting that no ‘Right-Hegelian’ for example could recognise such an interpretation. Hegel though clearly rejected the concept of atheism in the final Lectures on Religion (See Hegel 1984/1987: Vol. 1, 139, 377). Kojève acknowledged that Hegel continually wrote on religion, but added, this was only part of his effort in ‘“suppressing” it’ (Kojève 1970: 40, fn.6). Georg Lukács (1975: 461–64) also acknowledges the ambiguous character of Hegel’s thoughts on religion, and cites Heinrich Heine’s theory that Hegel’s published views were only ‘exoteric’, concealing his ‘esoteric’ atheism. Interestingly, Kojève had also read Heine’s studies on Hegel (see 2001: 97).
- 10.
The passage in Hegel that Kojève claims is ‘equivocal’ is paragraph 672 of the Phenomenology (1977: 410) where Hegel discusses ‘das absoluten Wesen’ (Absolute Being). Like Kojève, Žižek in The Puppet and the Dwarf makes quite an astonishing claim that to become a ‘true’ dialectical materialist one must go through the Christian experience (2003: 6). Of note also, is Žižek’s debate with the radical orthodox thinker John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (2009), which coincidentally reflects the subject matter of the Kojève-Fessard exchange (Kojève 1991/1992) on the relationship between Hegelian dialectics and Christianity as well as Marxism and Catholicism.
- 11.
Kojève’s critique of religious transcendence also dominates L’Atheisme with his arguments about ‘pure theism’. We should also note that his writings on atheism prior to his interpretation of Hegel are filtered through his understanding of Buddhism (which he calls an ‘atheist religion’) and Heidegger’s phenomenology (‘atheist philosophy’), defining it in sum as the full acceptance of the finitude of existence.
- 12.
There are then two contradictory messages Kojève gives us on religion in the Hegel Course. Firstly, in 1934–1935, he said, ‘the “conversion” of religious man to Hegelian atheism (more precisely: to anthropotheism) is not necessary, that religion is indefinitely viable’. For the religious person ‘can take pleasure in unhappiness. Hence the possibility of religion’s unlimited duration’. (1968: 73; See also 206, 212) Towards the end of the Hegel course, from 1937 and onwards, Kojève is more Marxian in his views, for example, claiming ‘Religion is thus the epiphenomenon of human Work’ and ‘real’ history (390; and 217–18), ideological, and ‘a sort of ideal super-structure’ (See Kojève 1970: 34, 2000: 51, 188), which can be overcome. Kojève derives the ‘projection’ thesis in part from Hegel’s association or religion with ‘picture-thinking [Vor-stellung]’, but perhaps more importantly, from the work of Feuerbach and Émile Durkheim (see Kojève 1998, 2000: 188) Geroulanos argues that during the Hegel Course Kojève departs from the more ‘materialist’ terms of Marx and Feuerbach’s positivist critiques of theology (2010: 362, fn. 62).
- 13.
Kojève claims that those who understand the ‘dure parole [hard saying]’ that God is dead possess the wisdom of a post-historical Sage (1968: 256). The part of the Hegelian text Kojève is interpreting here concerns the unhappy consciousness and its knowledge of a ‘total loss’ of a dying Christ on the Cross (Hegel 1977: Para. 752, 455). It is a phrase Hegel continues to unpack later in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ‘“God himself is dead”, it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the weak, the negative, are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself… This involves the highest idea of Spirit’ (1984/1987: Vol. III, 326). In a letter to Schmitt in 1955, Kojève says about the ‘dead God’, ‘how few understand that!’ (Kojève 2001: 97)
- 14.
The correspondence between Schmitt and Kojève began in 1955 and lasted up until 1957 (See Kojève 2001: 91–114). Kojève does not engage directly with Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception, although he agreed with the latter’s concept of the political (see Kojève 2000: 134, 410). Jacob Taubes recounts Blumenberg telling him in respect to his surprise at the Kojève and Schmitt correspondence, ‘[y]ou and Kojève and Schmitt, you’re concerned with the same thing’ (Blumenberg, cited by Taubes 2004: 101) Taubes adds that he considered Kojève the ‘most important philosopher of that generation’ (101) and Schmitt to be ‘the apocalyptician of the counterrevolution’ (69). The controversy surrounding Schmitt relates in most part to his decision to become a member of the Nazi Party in 1933. He had been a constitutional lawyer during the Weimer Republic years, and once the Nazis assumed power Hermann Goering appointed him as Prussian State Councillor.
- 15.
Schmitt cites the presence of the State of Exception in Article 48 of the 1919 Weimer Constitution, which he notes is problematised by a conflict over the use of such emergency powers between the President and the Parliament (1985: 11–12).
- 16.
Napoleon established the Napoleonic Civil Code on March 21, 1804. The code forbade privileges based on birth, allowed freedom of religion, abolished slavery, established a secular public education system, and specified that government jobs go to the most qualified. Yet this code did not establish full-scale secularism in France as Napoleon had previously signed an agreement with Pope Pius VII (The Concordat of 1801) that assured Roman Catholic Church still had a national and civil status in France and would receive State funding. It was not until 1905 that the separation of State and Church became law in France.
- 17.
Kojève discusses the Enlightenment and the Intellectual throughout the 1936–1937 semester of the Hegel Course, another part of the Introduction which was not translated in the English edition (1968: 111–144). Later, when corresponding with Schmitt, Kojève said Hegel had underestimated ‘the tragedy of the Intellectuals’ (2001: 110)—i.e. the tragedy of inaction.
- 18.
The recently published manuscript, Identité et réalité dans le ‘Dictionnaire’ de Pierre Bayle is based on part of a planned book Kojève was working during the 1936–1937 course on Bayle for Georges Friedmann’s ‘Socialisme et Culture’ series collection. The course itself was entitled ‘La Critique de la religion au XVII siecle: Pierre Bayle’ and involved 23 lectures given from November 12 1936 to May 24, 1937. The notes from the course are held at Fonds Kojève, Boîte XII, Bibliothèque nationale de France (Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux). In preparation for the course, Kojève wrote to Leo Strauss that he considered Bayle’s ‘problem of tolerance’ between Catholicism and Protestantism relevant to understanding the crisis over resolving the conflict between Fascism and Communism in 1930s Europe (See Kojève 1991: 234). Geroulanos argues that Kojève’s critique of the rationalism of the Enlightenment during this period and the attack on ‘myth’ in general are ‘paramount’, ‘insofar as they contextualise the overcoming of theology by anthropology’ and ‘the homogenizing process of secularisation and the movement beyond absolute Reason as a step into a reality and society the individual is incapable of controlling’ (Geroulanos 2010: 155).
- 19.
Despite Kojève’s general proclamation that the French Revolution overcame the limitations of a tolerant secular State, and brought into existence the UHS, he would still privately tell Strauss that Bayle’s secular ‘Republic’ model remained ‘alive’ in modern democracies (see Kojève 1991: 302–03).
- 20.
Kojève says, ‘St. Paul formulates very well: that the [distinction between the] Knowledge [Savoir] of the Sage and the Religious person are to each other like madness and truth, and not—as for the Sage—the successive steps of revealing the attainment of the one and the same truth, namely the Knowledge of the Wise’ (1968: 294, fn.1). The religious person, on the other hand, can attain their wisdom instantaneously (1980: 90–91). However, Kojève describes the ‘post-historical’ citizen in terms that betray the (secularized) influence of Paul messianic community, whose citizen is ‘[n]either Jew, nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). For example, in the Hegel Course, Kojève says the future citizen of the universal and homogenous State will relate ‘directly to the Universal (State) without there being any screens formed by “specific differences” (Besonderheiten: families, classes, nations)’ (1968: 145–46). Further, Kojève cites Paul directly (much more positively on this occasion) in his debate with Strauss as one of the first progenitors of the ‘classless’ UHS (1991: 171–73). On these points, Kojève differs to Hegel, who believed the relationship between Particular and Universal (citizen and the State) would have to be mediated by differences of social estate (Stände) (See Hegel 2008: 289–308). Agamben discusses Paul’s ‘ekklēssia’ [messianic community] in reference to Marx’s classless society (‘secularisation of the messianic’) and Hegel’s ‘Stände’ (See 2005: 22, 28–33).
- 21.
Father Gaston Fessard was a Jesuit who was also one of two students who Kojève invited to offer a critical response to his lecture series in 1939, the other student being Raymond Aron (see Fessard 1990: 260–68). Fessard’s interest in Hegel came at the same time as he read the letters of Saint Paul, and therefore, he does not separate the two on the issue of eschatology.
- 22.
Tran-duc-Thao echoes Marx’s critique in the 1843 article ‘On the Jewish Question’ of Bruno Bauer’s critique of theology. Marx argued Bauer’s understanding of the secular state was ‘still moving within the province of theology’. For Marx, even if a secular state ‘politically’ emancipates itself from religion, it can still be ‘powerless’ against the persistence of religion (See Marx 1975: 211–42). See also Lukács (1975: 9) who argues Hegel’s critique of Christianity does not reach atheist materialism.
- 23.
Agamben refers to Kojève once in Homo Sacer, but it is also an important note, ‘Alexandre Kojève’s idea of the end of history and the subsequent institution of universal and homogenous state presents many analogies with the epochal situation we have described as law’s being in force without significance’ (1998: 60).
- 24.
According to Stefano Franchi, the issue of the quantity of references to Kojève is less important than Agamben’s ‘strategic’ use of the references (2004: 40, fn. 5). See also Sergei Prosorov (2009), who says, ‘Agamben has repeatedly engaged with the Hegelo-Kojevian problematic of the end of history (525).
- 25.
Derrida’s brief point is that Kojève, far from advocating the ‘triumphant end of history’ that underlines Fukuyama’s ‘good news’, is in fact proposing a formal way for post-historical man to retain ‘historicity’. Derrida argues that Kojève’s suggestion that ‘post-historical Man must [doit] continue to detach “form” from “content”’, ‘remains a prescriptive utterance’ (See Derrida 1994: 88–93).
- 26.
Agamben takes a different tact from Badiou’s excursus on Paul that was published prior in 1997 (See Badiou 2003). In his one reference to Badiou, Agamben says rather than a transcendence towards modern universalism or the ‘new’, Paul opens up the possibility for a further ‘operation that divides the divisions of law themselves’, therefore, ‘[n]o universal Man’ or emancipated humanity can be reached by such a procedure (Agamben 2005: 52).
- 27.
In true theological style, Agamben structures his book on Paul, not in chapters but in ‘Six Days’, with the epilogue entitled, ‘Threshold’, which is not the all-important ‘Seventh Day’ (Shabbat), which remains appropriately absent from the text itself. See also Graham Ward (2010) who compares Hegel’s philosophy to messianism, but in a different sense to Agamben.
- 28.
Agamben cites Paul’s sentence in question: ‘[The Messiah] will render the rule, authority, and power inoperative [katargese]’ (Corinthians 15:24). In Homo Sacer, Agamben links up Kojève’s sense of inoperativity with its presence in the writings of Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille (1998: 61–62). Aufhebung is one of Hegel’s key terms that is difficult to translate in other languages, often translated in English as ‘sublation’ to convey Hegel’s intended dual meaning of cancellation and preservation. The ambiguity of Kojève’s use of Aufhebung emerges in his translation of it as ‘suppression-dialectique’, ‘auto-suppression’ and also his repeated use of the word ‘supprimer’, all of which contain a stronger sense of cancellation than preservation.
- 29.
However, this genealogy of terminology is not as ‘tightly knit’ as Agamben elliptically makes it out to be. For example, Kojève does not use the term désoeuvrement as a direct reference to Aufhebung, but simply in reference the state of post-historical life and wisdom (i.e., as historically inactive). Taking a different tact, Sergei Prosorov argues that Agamben’s inoperative messianism follows more from Kojève’s admissions that history could stop before ending dialectically through the ‘suspension’ of work (2009: 528–29, cf. Kojève 1980: 220).
- 30.
The three novels by Queneau are Pierrot mon ami (1942), Loin de Rueil (1944), Le Dimanche de la vie (1952). The justification and relevance of Queneau’s novels for Kojève lies in the idea that they deal with the characterisation of post-historical wisdom (See Kojève 1952: 388).
- 31.
Stefano Franchi notes ‘there is a lot of latitude’ in this term, and that Agamben’s engagement with it reflects his interest in the debates between Georges Bataille, Queneau and Kojève on the ‘proper shape of the end of history’ (2004: 33). Interestingly, Prosorov argues that Kojève’s figure of ‘Intellectual’ discussed earlier, is more analogous to Agamben’s ‘inoperative subject’ than the post-historical ‘voyous desoeuvre’ (Prosorov 2009: 535–39).
- 32.
Badiou makes this analogy in reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s script on the life of Saint Paul. Žižek himself believes Pauline Universalism was directed against the Roman Empire, and in ways we too are trapped within a globalised Empire of Capital. Žižek diagnoses the problem of our age as one which Strauss saw in Kojève ‘post-historical condition’, that concerning ‘the last man’—the liberal hedonist who wants ‘a revolution without a revolution’ (Žižek 2003: 96).
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Jeffs, R. (2014). Secularism Stuck in the End-Times: From Alexandre Kojève to the Recent Messianic Turn. In: Sharpe, M., Nickelson, D. (eds) Secularisations and Their Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_10
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