This course is a return to one of the structuring problematics of 20th century French thought; that is, the divergent (but always intimate) paths of literature and philosophy as they branch toward representing what lies on their borders. It will follow the overlapping philosophical/political/literary trajectories of Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève, with particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s.
We will begin by contextualising each thinkers’ intellectual background prior to their meeting. We will then spend two weeks approaching Kojève’s seminar series—Hegel’s Religious Philosophy—at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in which, from 1933–39, he executed his interpretation, translation, and commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bataille dated his own attendance “From 1933 (I think) to 1939”, and most scholars agree that he was attending assiduously by 1934. Following this line, we will locate Bataille’s wartime writing as an historically singular convergence of Hegelian thought and literary-erotic form; a convergence which could only take place in response to the form of Hegelianism created by Kojève. We will end the course with a discussion of the implications of this convergence for the poststructuralists’ “taking-up” of Bataille after his death in 1962.
I would recommend this course to anyone looking for an introduction to Bataille or Kojève; to eroticism; to the variegated elements of 20th century French Marxist-Hegelianism; or to the essential backdrop of the later poststructuralist fascination with lingual transgression, and the non-teleological revolutions of avant-gardist art. The problem of negativity-as-excess is now inextricable from the question of a teleological philosophy of History, and its possibility. The confrontation of Hegelian philosophy, with the philosophies (or ideologies) of desire, is the basis of this whole encounter.
Week 1. France Before Hegel / Bataille Before Kojève / Kojève Before Bataille
In this first lecture, we will introduce the necessary biographical and intellectual context for the Bataille/Kojève encounter. We will begin by setting the scene of French philosophy (and politics) prior to the introduction of Hegel, with particular emphasis on the dominance of neo–Kantianism in its most prominent schools. We will then sketch out Bataille’s dalliances with Catholicism, Surrealism, and Marxism throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, alongside a foundational mysticism shared with Kojève (and the necessity of this mysticism for the latter’s reading of Hegel). We will also compare the alternate readings of Hegel put forward prior to Kojève’s seminars at the École Pratique des Haute Études, and the singularity of his intervention.
Required Reading:
- Badiou, Alain, et al. “Hegel in France.” The Adventure of French Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, Verso, 2022, 19–25.
Suggested Reading:
- Geroulanos, Stefanos. “Man Under Erasure: Introduction.” An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 130–72.
- Love, Jeff. “Introduction: A Russian in Paris.” The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève. Columbia University Press, 2018, 1–16.
- Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. Penguin, 2001.
Week 2. The Encounter / L’Angoisse
This week, we will approach the beginning of Kojève’s lectures, focusing on the years 1933–1936, through his emphasis on Chapter IV of the Phenomenology, “Autonomy and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Mastery and Servitude” and its principal event: the initiation of human desire and recognition in the dialectic of master and slave. We will track Kojève’s communist turn; that is, the transformation of Hegel’s slave into the proletarian subject, who, through the labour of self-negation, acts to lead humanity towards the end of history in violent revolution. In reading “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel”, the final lectures of the 1933/4 academic year, we will also begin to think through the significance of l’angoisse for Kojève’s characterisation of the slave, and the relevance of this characterisation for Bataille’s later work. Here, we will introduce the significance of Martin Heidegger for Kojève’s thought and discuss the implications of Heidegger’s failure (as outlined by Kojève) to account for Struggle and Labour within a system of history.
Required Reading:
- “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel” (Included as Appendix II of Introduction à la lecture de Hegel and translated into English by Joseph R. Carpino for interpretation in 1973).
- Hegel, G.W.F., “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.” Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977.
Suggested Reading:
- Geroulanos, “Alexandre Kojève’s Negative Anthropology, 1931–1939.” An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 130–72.
- Butler, Judith. “Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel.” Subjects of Desire, Columbia University Press, 1987, 61–100.
Week 3. The End of History
This week, we will reflect on the immediate impact of Kojève’s early lectures, particularly tracing their influence in Bataille’s shifting relation to Marxism, Nietzscheanism, his formation of the Acéphale group, and the College of Sociology. In doing so, we will read Bataille’s 1937 “Letter to X [A Lecturer on Hegel]” and discuss the significance of the concept of “unemployed negativity” for his developing theory of expenditure. We will also compare the representation of the master/slave dialectic in Kojève’s 1939 translation of and commentary on Chapter IV of the Phenomenology to “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel”. Moving towards Kojève’s final lectures, prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, we will engage with his most famous proclamation—the End of History as a material experience of the 20th century itself, manifest in the state formation of Stalinism.
Required Reading:
- Kojève, “In Place of an Introduction.” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr., edited by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1969, pp. 3–30.
- Kojève, “Interpretation of the Third Part of Chapter VIII of the Phenomenology of Spirit (conclusion).” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr., edited by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1969, pp. 150–68.
- Bataille, “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel…Paris, December 6, 1937.” The College of Sociology (1937–9), edited by Denis Hollier, translated by Betsy Wing, vol. 41 of Theory and History of Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 89–93.
4. System / Eroticism
Following Kojève’s assertion of the End of History, we will now turn to Bataille’s writings from 1939–1941, primarily “Torture”, the central chapter of Inner Experience, and the erotic récit Madame Edwarda. We will outline the texts’ crucial inflection of a continued struggle with Kojève’s Hegel, the role of Nietzsche in the struggle, and the resulting possibility of a form of literary enunciation that, while remaining fixed under the gaze of philosophy, fixes its own graze on the procedures and conventions of philosophical systematization. We will think through the distinctions between the erotic and the pornographic, the suitability of either designation to Bataille’s work, and the actual function of transgression in a literary form which predicates itself on the explicit representation of sex. We will also touch on the Anti-Bataille—Jean-Paul Sartre—in his own response to the Kojèvian Hegel, and in his most explicit critique of Bataille—A New Mystic.
Required Reading:
- Bataille, “Madame Edwarda” [my translation].
- Bataille, “Torture,” Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall, SUNY Press, 2014.
Recommended reading:
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A New Mystic.” On Bataille and Blanchot, translated by Chris Turner, Seagull Books, 2021, pp. 1–60.
- Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination (1967).” Styles of Radical Will, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987, pp. 35–74.
5. Bataille’s Hegel
In this final week, we will follow Bataille’s addresses to Hegel throughout the 1950s, as can be read in his 1955 essay “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice”, and the 1956 preface to the re-published Madame Edwarda. We will touch on the representation of Hegel and transgression in 1953’s Erotism, before arriving at the point of Bataille’s death, and the subsequent issue of Critique—Hommage à Georges Bataille (1963). We will consider Michel Foucault’s contribution to that issue, “Preface to Transgression”, and its articulation of the process by which philosophy ostensibly became secondary to language; forced to experience its own limits in the mirror of the other’s transgression. Through this, we will begin to think through the complications of the Bataillean/Kojèvian/Hegelian inheritance for other central figures of French poststructuralism—Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers—and the essential role of that inheritance in all subsequent thought which positions itself across avant-gardist literature, the writing of experience, and philosophy.
Required Reading:
- Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Translated by Jonathan Strauss, On Bataille, special issue of Yale French Studies, edited by Allan Stoekl, no. 78, 1990, pp. 9–28.
- Bataille, “Preface”, Madame Edwarda [1956].
Suggested Reading:
- Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression (1963).” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, edited by Bouchard, translated by D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 29–52.
- Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, The University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 251–77.
- Nealon, Christopher. “Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry.” Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, Brill, 2023, pp. 89–95.
- Bataille, “Sanctity, eroticism and solitude.” Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood, City Lights Books, 1986, pp. 252–64.