ALEXANDRE KOJČVE A SPY?
From The New Criterion Vol. 18, No. 3, November
1999
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KOJEVE, Alexandre (1902-1968). Born in Russia
and educated in Berlin Kojeve gave his influential
lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1933-1939
in Paris, which were collected and edited
by the poet Raymond Quesneau as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947). After the Second World War Kojeve
worked in the French ministry of Economic
Affairs as one of the chief planners of the
Common Market.
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Alexandre Kojčve, KGB Spy?
The New Criterion November 1999
Ideas have consequences. We suppose that
is one lesson of the recent revelation by
the French secret service that the Russian-born
French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre
Kojčve was a Soviet agent for some thirty
years. It would be difficult to overstate
Kojčve's eminence in the pantheon of twentieth-century
French intellectuals. Daniel Johnson, who
reported the story in the London Daily Telegraph,
noted that "Kojčve's subterranean influence
is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our
political arena. Francis Fukuyama's 'end
of history' is recycled Kojčve. So is Tony
Blair's vision of a post-conservative, post-national,
post-political, post-historical Europe."
In intellectual and cultural terms, Kojčve's
influence is even more extensive. Born Alexander
Kochevnikoff in Moscow in 1902, Kojčve left
Russia in 1920, going first to Poland and
then to Germany, where he encountered two
life-changing personalities: his uncle Wassily
Kandinsky, who became a close friend, and
the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which seduced
him utterly. In 1926, Kojčve moved to Paris,
changed his name, and became a French citizen.
In 1933, he embarked on what is probably
the most famous philosophical seminar of
the century: his Marxist-inspired, line-by-line
dissection of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
His students included André Breton, Georges
Bataille, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Eric Weil, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau:
the good, the bad, and the ugly of twentieth-century
French intellectual life. Among Kojčve's
later admirers was Allan Bloom, who described
him as "the most brilliant man I ever
met." Aron thought him "more intelligent
than Sartre."
Recalling Kojčve's seminar in his Mémoires
(1983), Aron wrote that "the subject
was both world history and the Phenomenology.
The latter shed light on the former. Everything
took on meaning. Even those who were suspicious
of historical providence . did not resist
the magician: at the moment, the intelligibility
he conferred on time and events was enough
of a proof." It is difficult for the
uninitiated-namely, anyone who did not come
under the spell of Kojčve's personality-to
understand his influence. The printed version
of his lectures -Introduction to the Reading
of Hegel (1968) -is almost comical in its
fuzzy megalomania.
(Though in this, it has to be admitted, itclosely
resembles the teachings of Hegel himself.)
The book is full of statements like this:
"there is History because there is Philosophy
and in order that there may be Philosophy."
Although like Hegel he professed to believe
that history-or at any rate History -came
to an end with the Phenomenology, in 1945
Kojčve nevertheless decided to join the Ministry
of Economy and Finance because, Aron reports,
he "wanted to know how it [history]
happened. . Like Plato, he wanted to advise
a tyrant, in the shadows exercise influence
over the visible actors." For more than
twenty years, Kojčve
(who died in 1968) succeeded in just that.
He was by all accounts a brilliant negotiator.
Dreaming of a resurgent Latin Empire, he
was instrumental behind the scenes in the
formation of the European Economic Community
and encouraged de Gaulle to block British
membership. If nothing else, Kojčve was a
living testimony to the mesmerizing power
of personality. Even Aron was taken in by
Kojčve. Although he noted that in
1938-1939, Kojčve referred to himself as
a "strict Stalinist," Aron believed
that Kojčve later abandoned his Stalinism
for the sake of serving France. "Did
there," Aron asks, "remain in him
a kind of Russian patriotism, hidden and
rationalized? I don't doubt it, although
there is no question that he served the French
nation, freely chosen, with unshakable loyalty."
It turns out, though, that Kojčve was unshakably
loyal only to the Hegelian ideal of the World
Historical Personality. The young Hegel idolized
Napoleon when he was on his way up, referring
to him in 1806 as diese Weltseele-"this
world soul." Stalin was Kojčve's Napoleon:
a tyrant through whom the forces of history
seemed to converge. The French government
has not yet released Kojčve's dossier, so
it is not clear how much damage he did in
his decades of espionage. He was the confidante
of de Gaulle and Giscard d'Estaing, and doubtless
had access to numerous French secrets. As
Mr. Johnson points out, this "miraculous
mandarin turns out to have been a malevolent
mole. Nobody of his eminence has ever been
exposed as a traitor on this scale before."
The French, though they have exposed Kojčve,
have yet to condemn him. Perhaps that is
a sign of the lingering influence of his
ideas. If it is true that we are at the dawn
of the "post-historical" era, then
working as a spy for the greatest tyranny
of the twentieth century might be able to
be dialectically interpreted as a "progressive"
gesture. Then, too, many of the people Kojčve
worked with are still alive. Honest condemnation
might be embarrassing or worse. And after
all, Kojčve was universally admired for his
beguiling brilliance. For our part, the saga
of Alexandre Kojčve's treachery reminds us
of Walter Bagehot's comment on Ruskin's harebrained
economic ideas: "In the faculty of writing
nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius."
Bagehot might have added: In the faculty
of perpetrating evil, common sense is no
match for the Hegelian dialectic.
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