By ARI MARCELO SOLON*
Considerations on the book “Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy”, by Trevor Wilson
1.
My students, jokingly or not, say, when I start talking about the end of the story, from the Phenomenology of Spirit, “Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger again, professor?”.
In this sense, I present to them a passage referring to the dialectic of master and slave: “many interpreters have stopped at the master-slave dialectic: masters do not work and slaves work for them”. I, as an interpreter of Hegel, stopped at the dialectic of master and slave, in Chapter IV, of Phenomenology of Spirit, in the light of Alexandre Kojève's lectures in 1939, that is, the masters do not work, and the slaves work for them. I added the instant, the Augenblick, by Martin Heidegger, to say that the justice that Hegel speaks of, at the end of the story, can only be accessed procedurally in the “blink of an eye”.
When judges say “I live, I always repeat the moment, I judge according to what I have always judged in the past”, they never achieve the justice of equity that Alexandre Kojève speaks of, in the phenomenology of law, as being the end of the dialectic of justice as equality and justice as equivalence.
It is necessary to look not only at the past. A moment in the present that projects into the future, a transformation of justice is necessary, overcoming ancient Greek and Roman bourgeois notions.
From Edmund Husserl, I took the formal indication of hermeneutics. Contrary to the nihilists, who do not believe in a just decision, at the end of History, which we have been living since 1807, it is possible for there to be just decisions. They are formally indicated by Augenblick, they flash like glowing fish in an aquarium where other fish do not glow.
On the other hand, I did not advance like Giorgio Agamben, beyond what Alexandre Kojève presented as an epigraph in his book Introduction to reading Hegel, true freedom is work, he sought beyond the dialectic of work, the dialectic of inoperativeness. After all, for Giorgio Agamben, after 1807, we had the First World War and a totalitarianism that continues to the present day, a position with which I vehemently disagree.
The following can be observed: “Alexandre Kojeve, however, has long been absent from accounts of Russian philosophy in the twentieth century. What can explain this lapse? The philosopher himself is partly to blame. In his first decade abroad, Kojeve devoted many of his early writings to topics in Russian philosophy—Eurasianism and the philosophy of Vladimir Solov'ev” (Wilson, 2024).
There is nothing new since Hegel finished the Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1807. Some studies, however, help to nuance what is happening in the present.
2.
This book by Trevor Wilson helped me solve some puzzles that plagued my thinking. What is the relationship between Hegel and Russian mysticism? What is the relationship between Alexandre Kojève and Eurasia?
What will the untranslated book be like, the only book that interests me, “Philosophy, phenomenology and sophia“, a 1940 manuscript of over 1000 pages, which Rampère promises to translate. What’s new at the end of History?
Napoleon is the antichrist. And the antichrist is the one Soloviev writes about in his last testimony. To Vladimir Soloviev we owe the “sophia” which he received in revelation in the London library.
Vladimir Sergueievitch Soloviev was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, writer and literary critic. He was born in Moscow on January 16, 1853, and died in the same city on July 31, 1900. In this work, Brief History of the Antichrist, Vladimir Soloviev (2016) describes the story of the Antichrist as “the great spiritualist, ascetic and friend of men”, whose extremely high self-esteem is justified by “rigorous manifestations of abstinence, self-denial and active willingness to help”. It is part of the traditional image of the Antichrist to appear as a “benefactor”, and in the audiences he shows himself “so kind that he will be acclaimed in all the newspapers”. This was written by Vladimir Soloviev in the last year of the XNUMXth century.
To Trevor Wilson, I owe the identification of the Antichrist. I already know who the Antichrist is: he was born in the Tribe of Dan, in the north, some say in 1962. He led a universal empire from Europe, a bureaucratic pseudo-welfare dictatorship.
All that was missing was to tie the antichrist in as the superman of the end of history, it's all in 2nd Thessalonians of Paul. There is nothing new, except that in the present there is a struggle against the antichrist to reach the end of history.
This is what Vladimir Soloviev describes, and soon after he died. If he died at all.
Another eureka: Eurasia. I discovered, in the pre-internet era, that there was a manuscript in Russian, by Kojève, on Chinese law.
I translated and wrote an article. I said that Alexandre Kojève, unlike the author of the book, was against the Westernization of Chinese law. From this, I developed the concepts of justice in Taoism. I was going to present it, but I had a problem that had to open my heart.
Trevor Wilson indicates that this article was published in the magazine Eurasia, by Kravasin.
So the secret of Russia and China is not Westernization at all. That's what Trevor Wilson teaches me: it's left-eurasianism. Finally, this year students will have something new: the same story as always, but with ingredients from the rich philosophical traditions of Russian mysticism – “sophia“, phenomenology and the history of the antichrist who was born in Dan, in the northern kingdom.
*Ari Marcelo Solon He is a professor at the Faculty of Law at USP. Author of, among others, books, Paths of philosophy and science of law: German connection in the future of justice (Prisma). [https://amzn.to/3Plq3jT]
Reference
Trevor Wilson. Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2024, 200 pp. [https://amzn.to/3Z49s97]
REFERENCES
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
HEGEL, Geord Wilhelm Friedrich. phenomenology of the spirit. Petrópolis, RJ: Voices, 2014.
KOJÈVE, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980.
SOLON, Ari Marcelo. Radical Legal Hermeneutics. New York: Routledge, 2018.
SOLOVIEV, Vladimir. Brief History of the Antichrist. New York: Routledge, 2016.
WILSON, Trevor. Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2024.
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