(iPoster) Space Absent Time: Reimagining Kojève’s Archetypal Citizen

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical); Education Politics and Policy; & Political Science Education
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical)

Abstract

Paper Proposed for 2025 Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association
“Reimagining Politics, Power, and Peoplehood in Crisis Times”
Paper Title: Space Absent Time: Reimagining Kojève’s Archetypal Citizen
By: Gary M. Kelly, Ph.D.
Ukrainian Free University

At no time is political philosophy in greater Crisis, or in extremis, than when it contemplates the end of Peoplehood and organized political Power through community. At no time is philosophy in general in greater Crisis, or in extremis, than when it contemplates an end to thought.

This paper will maintain that such is the case in examining the corpus of Alexandre Kojève, a twentieth century interpreter of Hegel, whose call for imagining an “end of History,” gives rise to Crisis for doing away with Peoplehood understood as humanity, thought, and philosophy itself. This paper will further maintain that Kojève himself poses an alternative solution to this Crisis of imagining through Reimagining, not the end of History, but a philosophic space attained through its transcendence.

Both problem and solution are encapsulated in a lengthy footnote to Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, perhaps the most cited, yet least fully scrutinized, footnote to a text in contemporary political thought. The archetypal citizen of Kojève’s “end of History” is a member of a universal and homogeneous state. The very suggestion of an “end of History” in the 1990s prompted a sense of triumphalism in the West and the nomination of America as a candidate for that state, echoed by headlines of former Communist regimes toppling like tenpins and an information technology revolution taking hold, promising a bountiful global market for all. The paper will maintain that a happy Made in America for export marriage of market liberalism and rights-based democracy severed this triumphalist understanding of history from Kojève’s understanding of Time.

Therefore, the fullest consideration of the problem of imagining and its solution in Reimagining lies in the analysis of Kojève’s conceptions of time and space. The basis for Kojève’s Time is that for Man: the human desire for desire of an other. Time manifests Man; Kojève’s History manifests this Time and this Man. Kojève’s Space is independent of Time, albeit shaped by it through human acting on desire for desire. Thus, for Kojève, Time’s end ushers in a “’return to animality’” meaning the replacement of human desire for desire of an other by mere animal desire for things in Space or Nature.

While Kojève flirts with a model for Peoplehood based on the universalization of a consumerist America, his addendum and update to the footnote, entitled a “Note to the Second Edition,” registers his discomfort, with doing, and indeed delivering, philosophy in what amounts to a footnote that is temporally an afterthought, and spatially an inferior description relative to a text in the Introduction which is visually controlling, and therefore authoritative.

The paper will argue that the “Note” provides the profile of a new, and less scrutinized, citizen, the product of Reimagining time and space. This is a citizen not at Time’s end, but rather with Time’s transcendence. This transcendence is rooted in neither natural desire, nor the human desire for desire, but rather in a radically redirected focus on self and detachment from all desire that Kojève associates with the “Snobbery” of 1950s Japan.

Although this self-directedness suggests a severe atomism, he refers to Japan as a “Society that is one of a kind” and as a “civilization.”

The new archetypical citizen of the Japanese model is a subject, not as in a political or legal subordinate, but a philosophical subject, who is prompted by the ascetic, and aesthetic, of primitive art, and noble traditions in opposition to objective, community conventions.

This paper will maintain that in leaving Time viable but nonetheless aside, Kojève has done two things. First, he has preserved for Peoplehood a new self-directed citizenship that is still instructed by philosophy and is human for its snobbish rejection of desire for desire. Second, time transcendence yields a new space outside Kojève’s original natural Space of animalistic desire, one fueled by the symbols of culture and civilization yet speaking to the determinedly self-directed. Kojève meant his Japanese model to contest the consumerist, animalistic American model.

The Association’s invitation for 2025 suggests that “Reimagining” can change the discipline’s understanding of headlines; its invitation also suggests that political scientists focused on political thought give attention to yet another the “Crisis,” one with headlines demonstrating a politics based on determined self-directedness, isolation, and wars over culture. Kojève’s Japan, or some adaptation of it, may already be visiting our shores.

Author

• Gary Matthew Kelly, Ukraine Free University