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Performance of Negation, Negation of Performance: Death and Desire in Kojève, Bataille andGirardAuthor(s): Bo EarleReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2002), pp. 48-67Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247327 .

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Performanceof Negation, Negationof Performance:Death and Desire in

Kojève, Bataille and Girard

BO EARLE

Horatio, I am dead,Thou livest. Report me and my cause arightTo the unsatisfied.

- Hamlet. V, ii.

If philosophies of modernity characteristically invoke themes of loss (ofGod, traditional social authorities, epistemological and discursive norms,etc.), much modern philosophy is distinguished by a kind of discursive

reflexivity, or poetic license, that allows such loss to be rhetorically re-hearsed, and its subtler implications probed, ratherthan merely lamented.Nietzsche's FrôhlicheWissenschaft,to take a paradigmatic case, does not

simply proclaim the death of God, but puts the proclamation in the mouthof a "crazyman" who also, in snowballing self-contradictions, continuesto "seek God" by the light of a lantern held out to illuminate "the brightearly morning."1 To neglect such rhetorical texturing of doctrine is to

overlook the distinctive elevation in significance philosophical discoursehas won in the wake of modernity's loss of stable epistemological andmoral norms. As Nietzsche's account of the "crazyman" attests, what-ever may be the truth of the modern predicament, at stake in assessmentsof that truth is not only doctrinal validity, but also the practical andaesthetic sustainability of the kinds of discursive performance a givendoctrine allows. Nietzsche's rhetorical account of the death of God sug-gests that the objective assertion of God's absence pales in significancerelative to its implications for the subject who would make that asser-tion.

Indeed,Nietzsche indicates that

propoundingthat assertion

only

COMPARATIVEITERATURETUDIES,ol.39,No.1,2002.Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

48



DEATHAND DESIREN KOJÈVE, ATAILLE, ND GIRARD 49

exacerbates the conflict it pretends to resolve: the mere "fact" of God'sdeath is thus only the beginning of the problem, not the end.

According to the philosopher Robert Pippin, it was Hegel's concep-tion of self-consciousness per se as a fundamental experience of insuffi-ciency, or desire, that "virtually inaugurated," if not this theme of desireitself, then the distinctly literary modes of treating it that have come tocharacterize what is known as "Continental Philosophy."2The turn torhetorically inflected exposition is an appropriate response to HegePsconcept of desire, since, if our self-relation is an expression of our innate

insufficiency, then this is a relation that we can never unequivocally ar-ticulate, for any such articulation will always be more than what it says:while what it says may appear to constitute a coherent proposition, suchcoherence is in fact always also a response to insufficiency, and thus notcoherence at all but precisely a want of coherence. In itself such desirecannot be defined without begging the question for whom?Whose desire,whose inadequacy, does this ostensibly "adequate" definition express?Philosophical exposition of self-consciousness as desire is by nature per-petually undermined by the fact that, as Hegel says, "in coming on the

scene, it is not yet developed and unfolded in its truth."3 HegePs veryformulation of the problem, however, implicitly transforms this concep-tual paradox into a dramaticconflict:philosophy, in Hegels words, "trittauf;" it literally takes to the stage. Hegel evokes philosophy itself as adramatic character in strife, at odds with itself, not yet having achievedwhat it wants for itself (truth). But, as a dramatic performance, philoso-phy may indeed manage to significantly penetrate the paradox that soutterly defeats conceptual analysis. For,as such, philosophy does not pre-tend to objectively define the truth of self-consciousness, but to subjec-tivelyparticipate n the "development and unfolding" of that truth. Theeffect of HegePs original conception, then, is to transform the problem ofdefining desire into one of performing it. Rhetorical texturing is

philosophy's manner of "Auftreten," taking to the stage. In turn, as read-ers we may discern the discursive forms desire assumes without being se-duced into believing we have definitively and conclusively comprehendedits content. Like Nietzsche's account of the death of God, such exposi-tion deprives its readers of the satisfaction of knowing that they havereached the end of the story. In this way, such exposition confronts read-ers with their own desire, and thereby renders the truth of desire more

adequately than any ostensibly adequate definition.Both the discursive style and doctrine of Kojève's L! ntroductionà lalecture de Hegel reflect a misreading of Hegel's conception of self-con-sciousness as desire; a misreading that in itself would not necessarily be



50 COMPARATIVELITERATURESTUDIES

remarkable were it not, as I shall argue it is, symptomatic of Kojeve'sresistance to the desire animating his own work, and, by extension, tothe discursive performance of desire generally. By considering this workin juxtaposition to two texts of his onetime student, Bataille- L'Expérienceintérieurand Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice I hope to show that, in contrastto Nietzsche's account of the death of God, Kojève does not, as he claims,perform a "dismemberment" of the subject by desire, but rather reifiesthe act of dismemberment and of death itself, ultimately rendering desiredefinitively and conclusively knowable; which is to say that Kojève's text

does not bring the truth of desire to the surface but represses it. Indeed,here the rhetoric of death and desire does not open upon a provocativeincompleteness, but seductively coalesces into something deceptivelyconclusive. It is precisely defiance of the seduction of closure that de-fines Bataille's notion of "sovereignty,"and that his writing in turn at-tempts to performatively enact. As illustrations of this notion I considerShakespeare'strue "dismemberment"of Hamlet and attendant incitementof the audience's own "desire" to discursive performance. Finally, by wayof an examination of Girard's 1984 reading of Hamlet, I attempt to indi-

cate the abiding relevance of these issues to contemporary literary theory.

NEGATION OF PERFORMANCE: KOJÈVE'SHELLENIZATIONOF HEGEL AND BARBARIZATION OF HISTORY

In the appendix on "L'Idéede la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel,"Kojève distinguishes Greek fromJudéo-Christian philosophical discourseaccording to the ontology to which each respectively is by nature com-

mitted: Greek philosophical discourse models being on knowledge andconstrues philosophy, discourse and man as passive mirrors of a staticnature; Judeo-Christian philosophical discourse models being on freeaction and defines man essentially as freedom, and philosophy and dis-course as the means by which his freedom is exercised.

In Kojeve's account, Hegel's is the first anthropological philosophy,above all due to its adequate representation of the finite, temporal exist-ence such action presupposes: unlike philosophers in the Greek tradi-tion, Hegel recognizeshuman reality asactively made rather than passively

found, but also unlike his philosophical predecessors in the Judeo-Chris-tian tradition (Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Fichte), he resolves its con-tradictory postulate of a being at once, on the one hand, infinite andimmortal (and thus identical and static), and, on the other hand, cre-ative, active, dynamic (and thus historically situated and mortal). Hegel



DEATHAND DESIREN KOJÈVE, ATAILLE, ND GIRARD 5 1

manages this by replacing God with philosophical discourse itself, themedium through which man recognizes himself as historically situated,finite "Geist" [Spirit].4HegeFs achievement, according to Kojève, is tohave rendered being per se synonymous with discursive action. After

Hegel, "to be" is "to say,"which is to say that meaning is conferred to ourlives no longer in virtue of entities thought to exist independently of ourdiscursive practices, but in virtue of those practices themselves.

In turn, Kojève claims, by freeing philosophy from any reliance uponexternal sources of meaning, Hegel opens the possibility for an absolutelyconclusive accounting of the meaning of human existence: "cettephilosophie doit avant tout rendre, philosophiquement, compte d'elle-même comme d'un Discours révélant d'une manière complète et adéquatela totalité de PEtre, et du Réel. Elle y parvient en expliquant comment et

pourquoi PHomme arrive à parler d'une façon cohérente de soi-même etdu Monde où il vit et qu'il crée" (539). But, since the world man createsis fundamentally predicated on man'shistorical determinacy and mortal'

ity as a discursive agent, such a philosophy can achieve complete ad'

equacy and coherence only to the extent it articulates a thoroughgoing

recognition of the significance of death itself: "L'acceptationsans réservesdu fait de la mort [. . .] est la source dernière de toute la pensée hégélienne,qui ne fait que tirer toutes les conséquences, même les plus lointaines, del'existence de ce fait. [. . .] c'est en se résignant à la mort, en la révélant

parson discours, que l'Homme parvient finalement au Savoir absolu ou àla Sagesse, en achevant ainsi l'Histoire" (540).

Sentences like this last one, I want to suggest, characterize the es-sence of Kojève's text which is a seduction at once philosophical anddiscursive. By glossing over the distinction between "se résignant à lamort"and "la révélant

parson discours,"Kojève's conception of the Sage

obscures what he himself presents as the crucial distinction between on*tology based upon free action and one based upon knowledge. For, ac-

cording to that distinction, acting (or philosophizing) "in the face ofdeath" is clearly incommensurable with any kind of definitive revelationor disclosure of death per se. If what is human is action, and if acting is

predicated on living, then death, whatever it may be in itself, cannot

figure positively for a human existence. Kojève's notion of the Sage pre-sents an ineluctable paradox since, as the culmination of history and sat-isfaction of desire, it effectively transcends the temporality and finitude

upon which Kojève's emphatically anthropological philosophy is based.It is precisely in virtue of this paradox, however, that death may serve itsseductive function in Kojève's text, insinuating the possibility of the verytranscendence it explicitly renounces.5




Kojève denies that the finite and infinite are conflated in the personof the Sage by arguing that complete "circularity"is the inevitable end-point of finite discursive practice itself, since it is in and through thedevelopment of that practice that human existence has become what itis (287). Kojève, like Hegel, construes that development, which is noth-ing other than history itself, according to the dialectic of master andslave. History does not simply happen but is the result of work, and thecondition of all work is slavery. Historical progress, however, is a func-tion of the progressive freedom and rationality achieved by the slave

through its work, which in turn win the slave recognition and conse-quently its own form of mastery.This comes about as follows. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of a difference between how the world is foroneself and how it may be in- itself, independent of one's perspective onit; it is thus to be conscious of a disunity in oneself, a lack of self-suffi-ciency. Therefore to be self-conscious is to desire. In hopes of seeing it-self reflected in the eyes of another as the unity it cannot achieve alone,one self-consciousness appeals to another. But of course the other desiresthe same from the first, which makes the two at once absolutely incom-

mensurable and absolutely interdependent, an intolerable predicamentthat can be resolved only by a fight to the death. But at some point thefear of death overrules the desire for recognition, and the slave is the firstto forfeit the fight for satisfaction in order to preserve its life; the slave'sdesire is "gehemmt" [restrained] and death "aufgehalten" [suspended](135), in Hegel's words, for the sake of a life devoted to the work of sat-isfying the master. The master, however, can never be satisfied, for hedemands of the slave's work something it cannot provide- a reflection ofhis (the master's) own particular identity. What that work in fact reflectsis not fear of the actual master but fear of what Hegel called that"furchtbareUnwirklichkeit" [most dreadful non-actuality] of death. Pre-cisely because his work is beholden to no one in particular but only tothis fear of losing life generally, the particular way in which his workaccomodates this fear genuinely reflects the slave's own particular ap-proach to living and thus to his true freedom. The slave can ultimatelyachieve satisfaction while the master cannot because the slave's self-rec-ognition is mediated by its work and thus tangible and concrete: unlikethe master who defines his desires abstractly and is thus perpetually dis-satisfied by the real world, the slave desires only recognition of the free-

dom expressed concretely in the form of his work. Consequently, whilethe unmediated, abstract recognition required by the master is by natureexclusive and absolute, the slave's mediated recognition is inclusive andprogressive, and expands as more and more slaves engage in discursive




practices aimed toward what comes to be understood as the shared pur-pose of rationalization and liberation.

This sums up Hegel's account of the master-slave dialectic. But

Kojève's conception of a definitive revelation of the significance of death

hinges on a crucial additional point concerning the consummationof sat-isfaction and of work per se; i.e., no longer concerning the operation or

performanceof the master-slave dialectic - or of a particular Aufhebungthat remains internal to it- but rather the very completionand ultimate

supersessionof the dialectic as such. The slave's work is complete when it

is finally recognized as constitutive of human reality as a whole, of thesum of human history, the entire intelligible world. Thus the reality con-stitutive of the particular slave himself is recognized to be indistinguish-able from that of human reality generally, effectively releasing him fromthe dialectic and reconstituting him as a fully autonomous "Sage"whoneither desires nor works. The Sage's satisfaction consists not simply inthe achieved circularity of its oeuvre and the world it inhabits, but in his

recognition of that circularity as such. It is only from a perspective exter-nal to the dialectic as a completed unity that the Sage can assure itself

that its work is finished and its satisfaction complete. For, in becomingthe Sage, what the slave recognizes is not simply that the truth of hiswork is the suspension of death; rather, he apprehends the scope andlimits of all possible suspension of death. And it is only in virtue of tak-

ing that apprehension for the definitiverevelationof absolute truth- rec-

ognizes it as the revealed circular essence of life and death- that theslave achieves definitive satisfaction and becomes the Sage.

In consequence, however, the absolute enlightenment of the Sagenecessarily casts an equally absolute shadow upon the sum of the work ofthe dialectic itself. Indeed, Kojève's theory of the consummation of his-

tory effectively obviates the progressive character of the Hegelian dia-lectic. For,if the end of history is markedby the revelation of the truth of

negativity, it is equally marked by the revelation of the untruth of all

previous understandings of it. Thus Kojève's theory of the Sage intro-duces a positively anti-Hegelian account of normative truth. Kojève aban-dons Hegel's conception of truth as a function of the mutual recognitionachieved through determinate discursive practices, and replaces it withthe fully consummated normative ideal of the person of the Sage himself.

For, although the Sage has claim to universal recognition, he can recog-

nize only those who emulate himself. In those who do not merely reflectthe Sage back to himself, the Sage, in contrastto Hegel, cannot recognizea positivemoment in the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Rather the Sagesees only the work and dissatisfaction of those still blind to the actual



54 COMPARATIVEITERATURETUDIES

truth of their own negativity: of those whose existence is devoted to, inKojève's formulation, the "lutte à la mort de pur prestige" (14), and whoare so devoted precisely becausethey have yet to comprehend it as such.There can be no positive, progressive movement toward the truth of ab-solute negativity because the truth of such negativity is precisely its ab-soluteness: everything short of the truth of absolute negativity is equallyuntrue. The wisdom of the Sage is its insight into the nullity of humanexistence generally, but its satisfaction is a function of its deliverancefrom the fight for recognition in which everyone who is not a Sage is bydefinition equally absolutely implicated. The absolute satisfaction of theSage mirrors the absolute dissatisfaction of everyone else. But the factthat such satisfaction is a function of achieved revelation, and such dis*satisfaction a function of ongoing dialectical struggle, means that theSage's satisfaction has in fact lost all reference to the actual, historicallysituated discursive performance of desire that supposedly defines it.

Kojève argues that the discourse of the Sage remains true to humanfinitude, because, unlike that of the theologian, it satisfies desire in away that does not depend upon any artificial distinction of the sacred

and profane, the infinite and finite, but obtains solely by virtue of thesheer internal coherence and universal recognition of a discourse thathas assimilated to itself the accumulated wisdom and experience of allhuman history. A humanly as opposed to divinely created existence mustultimately submit itself entirely to human understanding; but this circleis completed only when this existence has itself achieved the rationalformproperto its finitude and temporality; i.e., only when it has assumedthe form of what Kojève calls the "universal,homogeneous state" (284f).There seems to be no escaping the fact, however, that a discourse in whichsuch circularity is recognized as such has, on Kojève's own terms, implic-itly shifted from the Judeo-Christian to the Greek mode. For what is cir-cularity to an ontology based in action rather than on knowing? It isnothing beyond the movement along the circle. The figure ultimatelydescribed by that movement may indeed form an object of abstract specu-lation to the human existence describing it, but only at the cost of ob-scuring the true temporal being of that existence which consists in theactual performanceof such description itself.

It is this distinction that clearly informs both the philosophical anddiscursive departure from Hegel of Kojève's Sage. For, in Kojève's ac-

count, what the Sage is ultimately recognized for is not in fact his labor;it is not his wisdom per se as a normative medium in and through whichgenuinely mutual recognition can take place. Rather, the Sage is recog-nized simply as the normative ideal of an entirely self-contained state of



DEATHAND DESIRE N KOJÈVE, ATAILLE, ND GIRARD 55

achieved satisfaction. Thus, genuinely mutual recognition never happensin Kojève; sharing in the Sage's satisfaction is purely a matter of oneindividual replicating the thoroughly self-enclosed Selbstbefriedigungfanother. As Kojève himself puts it, the Sage's satisfaction is nothing otherthan his "personal pride" (551) at knowing himself to have definitivelywon the fight forpure prestige. Kojève'scircle, in clear contrast to Hegel's,is an achieved, narcissistic, and even secretive state rather than an on-

going social project open to public recognition.6If Hegel's conception of self-consciousness as desire brings philoso-

phy sur la scène, how does Kojève bring the drama of philosophical desireto a close? Why were Kojève and his many followers so persuaded thatthis performance should resolve itself in the Sage's triumphantly smug"personalpride?"A case may be made that, faced with the profound in-

stability and disorientation of the interwar period, the image of theKojèvian Sage was uniquely seductive because it actually offered a wel-come return to the severe but unambiguous authoritarianism of a feudalideology disguised as an unflinching doctrine of radical freedom. Kojève'saccount of the Sage can be seen to accomplish this by appealing to cer-

tain rhetorical tropes of cultural nostalgia evoking death and desire asintegral to the glory and satisfaction the self-sufficiency- of a lost no-

bility. Animated by persistent revolutionary aspirations, on the one hand,and imminent threat of global war, on the other, Kojève at once depictsdesire as pursuit of aristocratic, military valor ("noblessed'épée")and ex-hibits a Christian insistence that peaceable coexistence can be possibleonly under the ministrations of a homogeneous world state (^noblessederobe"). Nostalgia for these two forms of nobility conforms with what

Stanley Hoffmann describes as the dual tendencies of political authorityin modern France generally: to violent, revolutionary action, on the onehand, and to anonymous, bureaucratic centralization on the other.

French history and the divergences among Frenchmen concern-

ing political legitimacy have introduced features [of authority] thatare peculiar to the political sphere. The most obvious is addictionnot merely to revolutionary talk, but to violence. In other words,the degree of willingness to observe the rules of the game whenthe results fail to give satisfaction is low. Also, the centralizingefforts of the ancien régime, the work and ideology of the Revolu-

tion, and the mistakes made by the post- 1815 monarchies injectedinto the whole political sphere a special kind of equalitarianism.[. . . A]uthority patterns in the political sphere are distinguishedby national equalitarianism, that is, an insistence by most of the




population on, and the superiorauthority'ssomewhat grudgingac-

ceptance of, the dogma of equality before the law, irrespective ofsocial privileges.7

In the work of Kojève, then, subjective performance of the develop-ment of self-consciousness in fact gives way, under specific historical exi-

gencies, to what Hegel called the "unhappyconsciousness;" i.e., to implicitreification of self-consciousness according to certain culturally privilegedfigures; it covers over the perpetually recurrent incompleteness of dis-

course in a manner I have likened to a seduction. Kojeve's text fails tobecome conscious of itself as an instance of the desire it describes; con-

traryto Hegel's injunction such desire is not brought sur la scène, is not

performatively enacted, but, on the contrary, is seductively covered over

by culturally specific rhetoric nostalgically evoking the satisfactionsof alost nobility. This nostalgic rhetoric depicts such nobility precisely interms of its lack of self-conscious desire and, in turn, provides Kojève a

persuasive means of figuring the structure of consummation of self-con-scious desire per se.8 The unsettling truth of discourse as a perpetually

unfolding performance of desire is obscured by rhetorical evocation ofconclusive fulfillment; yet such desire is not thereby sated, but only reas-

suringly repressed.

PERFORMANCE OF NEGATION: BATAILLE,HAMLET ANDDISCURSIVE ENDURANCE OF DEATH

To fully elucidate this problem we must ask what it would mean for dis-

course to "endure death" rather than succumbing to the comforting illu-sion of accessing death's deep truth; to perform the work of confrontingthe idea of the negation of temporal existence and desire, rather than

dodging the task by seductively repackaging that idea as the consumma-tion of that existence and fulfillment of that desire. First of all, as Bataillenever tires of insisting, it would mean something at once necessary and

impossible: necessary because, as we have seen, death is the ultimate ref-erent of discursive negation perse, but impossible because it is that refer-ent only in virtue of negating discourse itself. Death stabilizes discourse

insofar as it provides discourse with a referent of negativity in and foritself, but death "dismembers"discourse insofar as it necessarily also de-fies discursive negation: it dismembers discourse by confronting it with a

negation that discourse cannot negate, by confronting discourse with, in




other words, the lie or fiction of its own negation. Proper discursive con-frontation with death, Bataille insists, always returns to its own insuffi-ciency: the seductive illusion of closure must perpetually be disclosed assuch. In its attempt to delimit or define death, discursive negation be-comes a "simulacrum"of negation. According to Bataille, it is preciselythis subterfuge of discourse- its pretense to negate what in fact negatesit- that marks the distinctively human essence of discourse. In turn, it is

by laying the performance of this subterfugebare that death is confrontedin a distinctively human manner: not by transcending the limits of dis-

course, but as a profound penetration of discursive limitation itself. Sac-rificial ritual, Bataille writes,

Serait [. . .] une comédie si quelque autre méthode existait quirévélât au vivant l'envahissement de la mort: cet achèvement dePêtre fini, qu'accomplit seul et peut seul accomplir sa Négativité,qui le tue, le finit et définitivement le supprime.[. . .] Ainsi faudrait-il, à tout prix, que l'homme vive au moment où il meurt vraiment,ou qu'il vive avec l'impression de mourir vraiment. Cette difficulté

annonce la nécessité du spectacle , ou généralement de lareprésentation, ans la répétition desquels nous pourrions, vis-à-visde la mort, demeurer étrangers, ignorants, comme apparemmentle sont les bêtes. Rien n'est moins animal en effet que la fiction,plus ou moins éloignée du réel, de la mort.9

Discourseperse is discourse of death. While both Kojève and Bataillelink the essence of discourse and human existence generally with theconfrontation with death, however, Bataille's insistence on the necessar-

ily and manifestly inadequatenature of discursive representation of thatconfrontation is the more consistent to the notion of death as absolutenegativity. If death defines the limit of the knowledge of an inherentlyacting and therefore living existence, discourse cannot pretend to accessthe truth of death without in fact pushing that truth further away. The

paradoxical essence of the truth of death is that it is the negation of

meaning and thus of truth generally; "jedois donner un sens à ce qui n'ena pas," Bataille writes, concluding that "l'être à la fin nous est donnécomme impossible!"10

The truth of this impossibility can be approached discursively only

by reiterating, or, as in Nietzsche's account of God's death, rhetoricallyrehearsing, an analogous paradox. Thus, the representation of death ismost adequate that somehow testifies to its own inadequacy; that con-fronts us not with death per se but precisely with a simulacrum of death;




death explicitly recognized not as such but as a paradoxical representa-tion of something unrepresentable. It could be said that it is just such a

representation that Nietzsche's "crazyman" seeks to illuminate by the

light of his lantern in "the bright early morning."The most obvious way of describing such a representation is as a

ghost:a speculative evocation of death that nonetheless appears, impos-sibly, to "live." Indeed, Bataille's view is well illustrated by the WesternTradition'sperhapsmost cultivated ghost story,Shakespeare'sHamlet.ForHamlet, as for both Kojève and Bataille, death constitutes, in Hegel'sphrase, the "absolute Herr"[absolute master] (134) because it is perpetu-ally against the infinite and unfathomable horizon of "this dreadfulnon-

actuality" that the actions of life must be carried out. The implications ofdeath are unknowable, yet no freely self-determining agent can fail toaccount for them without succumbing to self-delusion. If, as per Hamlet'sresolution, "to be" is "to act," however, then the negation of being can-not simply be nothing, a simple absence of being, but rather must be akind of action from which the "life" has somehow been removed. Thus,as Hamlet puts it, it is not in fear of "sleep" that we act, but of "what

dreams may come:"

To sleep perchance to dream. Ay, there's he rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, [. . .]Must give us pause there'sthe respectThat makes calamity of so long life.11

In turn, it is not against death in itself that Hamlet's fear of death andresolve to be are tested. Rather it is against a positive that is, tangiblymediated- representation of the kind of life death might entail; i.e. of aghost; indeed, of an all too concretely specific ghost, whose form andmessage, although profoundly destabilizing to Hamlet's understanding ofthe world, are disruptive precisely because they are not universal but par-ticular in nature. Hamlet's dilemma is defined by the fact that the impli-cations of the king's ghost are not immediately apparent; Hamlet isconfronted with the necessity of making coherent sense of the appari-tion, and, in the course of the play, eventually with the impossibility ofdoing so conclusively. Hamlet struggles with this necessary impossibilityand in doing so struggles with the dilemma of discursive performance

generally: it is a dilemma to which no merely revealed meaning, but onlydeterminate discursive action, can adequately respond, if not conclusivelyresolve. The representation of death against which Hamlet is tested isimplicitly incommensurablewith any such "revelation," and it is precisely



DEATHAND DESIRE N KOJÈVE, ATAILLE,ND GIRARD 59

this incommensurability that ultimately tests him the most. Just as Ham-let determines that it is only a "play,"a determinately situated discursive

performance, that can adequately test Claudius, it is likewise the deter-minate performance of the ghost of his father that tests Hamlet. But, asHamlet learns to his dismay a dismay that precipitates the play's cli-max merely to be assured in the knowledge that Claudius lied and the

ghost did not is not in the least to respond to that test, since, as I exam-ine in detail below, the discursive action which that test demands is de-fined precisely in opposition to assurances of this kind.

Bataille 's and Hamlet's common concern with discursive action ratherthan discursive meaning indicates what Kojève would call their Judeo-Christian rather than Greek orientation. If it is in the representation of

paradox and incongruity- rather than circularity, supreme coherence -

that Bataille and Hamlet confront the truth of finite existence, both re-

spond to that truth, not by simply articulating it, but by translating itinto analogously paradoxical action. In Bataille this action takes the formof a dynamic juxtaposition of what Derrida terms "major"and "minor"

writing.12While "minor"writing provides discourse an articulateness and

perspicacity that are necessary, "major"writing disrupts, destabilizes dis-course with a silence that, in remove from such determinate meaning,would in itself be impossible: it "réintroduit] - en un point- le souverainsilence qu'interrompt le langage articulé" (5: 196). It is the absolute sov-

ereignty of this silence - its infinite refusal to signify anything, to servediscourse, to even represent itself, render itself identifiable as such- thatarticulate discourse exists to hide. "Ce qui n'est pas servile est inavouable:une raison de rire, de [. . .] il en est de même de l'extase. Ce qui n'est pasutile doit se cacher (sous un masque)" (5: 196). Bataille's sovereign, like

Hegel'smaster, does not in fact negate anything at all. But whereas the

master does not negate anything because its negativity, or freedom, ispurely abstract, the truth of the sovereign cannot be traced back to thework of the slave. The sovereign knows neither the dissatisfactions ofthe master nor the satisfactions of the slave, for sovereignty consists in

simply exceeding the articulate truth, the meaningful existence accord-

ing to which Hegelian satisfaction is defined. It is subject neither to theinane rivalry of the Kojèvian dialectic nor to the pride of his Sage. The

sovereign is such in virtue of resisting the seduction of conclusive, com-

prehensive significance; or, more precisely, in virtue of not resisting the

disconcerting, perpetual incompleteness of an existence that consists indiscursive performance. Thus sovereignty does not, like the circle of

Kojève's Sage, represent the revealed truth of death, but rather effectsthe enactment of that truth. It effects the eruption of a major writing




within a minor in the sense that it destabilizes such revealed truth to the

point that the ultimate, effective significance of death for a finite, discur-sive existence - its profound indeterminacy, its unsettling lack of deter-minate significance - is brought to bear upon such an existence in a waythat such revelation by nature preempts. It is in this sense that Derridadescribes sovereignty as a major laughter erupting from within a minor

laugher, destabilizing the destabilization of laughter itself, in virtue of

preempting the solace, or satisfaction,of knowing such destabilization assuch.

By definition, then, Bataille cannot define this eruption withoutthereby negating it himself, making it 'serve' the meaning he ascribes it.This is the conundrum at the heart of Bataille's own discursive perfor-mance, determining both its form and content. Bataille's text resists ex-

plaining this eruption otherwise than in terms of its sheer inexplicability:it is an "arbitrarysliding" that Bataille likens to a single wildflower that

happens to escape the all-consuming harvest of reason's craven subjec-tion to meaningfulness.13For Bataille as for Hegel the movement of self-consciousness as an action- as opposed to a state- cannot represent itself

but in the form of such movement. But it is the nature of this form torender its content indeterminate: against a static, atemporalhorizon, suchmovement cannot appear but as, in Hegel's words, a "verwundersameAkzidentelle" [astounding accident] (25f).

But even to identify it as arbitrary s to identify and thus negate it. Itis at the level of discursive form, where discourse first becomes recogniz-able as action, that this serendipity is encountered. Hence Bataille's

"principe de l'expérience intérieure: sortir par un projet du domaine du

projet" (5: 60). HThe accidental dismemberment of significance cannotoccur but from within the context of the comprehensible, purposive"projet."Thus Bataille essentially concurs with Hegel that it is only bybearing the "poids"of significative discourse that one encounters the sov-

ereign accident that dismembers it. Bataille's objection to Hegel is thathe then only "lets [that weight and, thereby, sovereignty itself] go," byconstruing that dismemberment not as "un hasard, une malchance, quiseraient dépourvus de sens,"but as "plein de sens," as the ultimate confir-mation of the Sage's "pleine autonomie" (12: 344): the satisfaction of itsdesire, as "ipse>" de soumettre le monde à son autonomie" (5: 101). The

Sage thus passes "d'une humanité qu'humilia la grandeur divine à celle

du Sage divinisé [. . .] gonflant sa grandeurà partirde la vanité humaine"(12: 330). In light of the distinction I have attempted to draw, how-ever- between the tangibly mediated, social character of Hegelian Spiritand the unmediated, narcissistic character of the Kojèvian Sage- this



DEATHAND DESIREN KOJÈVE, ATAILLE, ND GIRARD 6 1

objection can be seen to apply far more appropriately to Kojève thanHegel. It is only in the guise of Kojeve's Sage that Hegel can remotelyappear to divinize rather than deconstruct the self-certainty of Bataille's

"ipse." In "recommencing" Hegel's PhenomenologyBataille does not, ashe claims, simultaneously "undo" the Phenomenologyitself so much asKojève's reading of it.15

The significance of discursive action for the distinction betweenBataille's Sovereign and Kojève's Sage is interestingly elucidated byShakespeare's presentation of the duel of Hamlet and Laertes. The first

thing to notice about this duel is that for neither Hamlet nor Laertes is itreally a "fight to the death for pure prestige." For Laertes this is becausehe believes his and Claudius' surreptitious machinations have precludedhis own death and insured that of Hamlet. Laertes thus embodies the

Hegelian master whose confrontation with death is preempted by his

appearing to have already won the prestige for which he was to fight. ToLaertes' mind his own mastery depends only upon "the voice" of "someelder masters of known honour" (V, ii), and of this Laertes is assured inadvance by King Claudius' own complicity in the scheme to kill Hamlet.

Laertes' mastery derives from that of Claudius; thus it does not dependon any fight to the death, but only on the success of the scheme to defeatHamlet's threat to Claudius' power. So, for Laertes, the duel, while no

fight to the death, is still understood in the context of a universal strugglefor recognition, only now by means of duplicitous stratagemsrather than

outright violence: politics as war by other means. Laertes' strategic per-spective on the duel also essentially describes his behavior throughoutthe play,and that of Claudius, Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildensternas well. The regime of Claudius is one in which the struggle for power isabsolute and universal- in which family and friends persistently betrayone another's trust and reflects perfectly the depravity of the Kojèvianworld before the advent of the "universal, homogeneous state."

Girard's assessment of the play takes the Kojèvian precept of univer-sal rivalry to its full logical conclusion by construing Hamlet himself as

essentially implicated in, rather than opposed to, Claudius' strategic du-

plicity.

Not Hamlet alone but the time is out of joint. And when Hamletdescribes his revenge as "sick,"or "dull,"he speaks for the whole

community. In order to appreciate the nature and extent of thedisease, we must realize that all behavior we tend to read as strate-

gic or conspiratorial in that play can also be read as symptomaticof "sick revenge."16




If, on Girard's account, Hamlet along with the rest of the cast isconsumed by the pursuit of "sick revenge" revenge that no longer hasthe stomach to be "to the death" then so are we, the audience, who

persist until today in valorizing Hamlet's existential dilemma. Girardconfirms the essentially Kojèvian character of his exegesis by juxtapos-ing this scene of inane, universal rivalry (the play now merely reflectingthe truth of the world at large), to the person of the Sage himself - inthis case Shakespeare- to whom the profound meaninglessness of such aworld has been revealed. The dilemma posed by the futility of an exist-

ence devoted to inane rivalry has not changed from Shakespeare's timeto our own, Girard writes, "it has only assumed more extreme and spec-tacular forms that should make its perception and definition easier for usthan for Shakespeare but, curiously, Shakespeare is still ahead of us as a'démystifier'" (286). But in Girard as in Kojève there can really be onlyone true Sage; thus Shakespeare demystifies only by virtue of reflectingthe truth of Jesus.17On Girard'sconsummately Kojèvian account, then,one either enters entirely the realm of light or remains utterly benighted;there's no alternative or middle ground. Writing in the context of the

cold war, Girard finds it ironic that Hamlet's "sick revenge" should con-tinue to be valorized, since that context should finally have made ines-capable the sheer, pointless destructiveness (negativity) at the heart ofrivalrous existence. For Girard as for Kojève, man's sole hope of emerg-ing from a life governed by inane rivalry consists in the establishment ofsome form of "universal,homogeneous state" based on the truth revealedin the person of the redeemer, be it Hegel or Jesus.

This Kojèvian insistence on the distinction between the absolutetruth and grace revealed by the light of Jesus, and the benighted violencethat governs everything outside the light, in fact blinds Girardhimself toa crucial aspect of Hamlet's character and, according Hegel and particu-larly Bataille, of discursively mediated existence generally. What Girardcharacterizesas an incapacitated, "sickrevenge"would be better describedin positive terms as an acceptance of contingency and repudiation of the"servile"need to know oneself vindicated. For, what is the duel to Ham-let? What does he avenge? When the universality of mimetic rivalry ispresumedfrom the outset, it is not difficult to interpret anything at all asa manifestation of it. In light of what Hamlet actually says and does,rather than of an intuition obscurely projected onto his author, however,

Hamlet's entry into the duel appearsrather unambiguously to reflect anemphatic resignation to the whims of fate, to the "special providence inthe fall of a sparrow"(V, ii). Hamlet's action is determined not by a de-graded or "sick"vengeance, but a renunciation of any claim to "know"




that his action is justified. The action undertaken by Hamlet at the endof the play is distinguished from that which precedes it above all for fore'going the assuranceof knowledge: it is born of a recognition that "to act"and thus "to be" demands something knowledge alone cannot supply.Thus Hamlet enters into the duel as a result precisely of having renouncedthe ratiocinations that in Girard's account symptomize Hamlet's inca-pacitated vengeance. It cannot be said that the logic of vengeance as-serts itself conclusively, for Hamlet has renounced the coherence ofpurpose, the autonomy, which that logic demands.

Shakespeare does indeed conclude the play with a scene of rampant,senseless destruction; but this is not to convey some profound message tothe audience, some truth that, had Hamlet only been possessed of it,could have saved the day. Again, by attending to what is actually said inthis scene, rather than an obscure hermeneutics of authorial intension,its implications are not difficult to discern, for Shakespeare rather ex-

plicitly emphasizes precisely that no fundamental truths of life or deathper se are revealed therein. What the conclusion confronts us with is notthe underlying truth of death but precisely its inscrutability. Shakespeare

highlights this inscrutability in several ways: by the resignation ratherthan self-assertion that characterizes Hamlet's entry into the duel, byHamlet's own characterization of the tragic end as mere "chance," byHamlet's emphatic"silence" as to the meaning of his death, and above all

by his explicit appeal to Horatio, and by extension to the audience of the

play, to provide an explanation themselves:

You that look pale and tremble at this chanceThat are but mutes or audience to this act,Had I but time- as this fell sergeant, Death,Is strict in his arrest O, I could tell you-But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,Thou livest. Report me and my cause arightTo the unsatisfied.

V,ii.

Shakespeare emphatically does not provide us the truth of death or ofsatisfaction, but rather reminds us where we stood to begin with: facedwith our own mortality, with death, as with an inscrutable abstraction,

the infinite negation of everything conceivable, which we must accountfor somehow but can do so only in a tangibly mediated, finite, and thus

by definition inadequate way. In Hamlet's injunction to Horatio to "tell

my story"Shakespeare presents Horatio, and through him the audience




at large, precisely with a necessary impossibility: the necessary impossi-bility, Bataille would say, of the discourse generally.

It is this injunction to provide a tangibly mediated account thatGirard'sexegesis cannot accommodate without arbitrarily construing theappeal for speech as a disguised appeal for silence. For Girard as for Kojèvethere can be only the light of revealed truth and the night of inane ri-valry. But perpetuating ghost stories can only affirm our investment inthe night. Shakespeare's injunction betrays Girard because it does notenjoin us to turn our back on the night of the play and simply witness the

light of truth, but precisely the contrary: to engage the play, to discuss it,interpret it, to "tell its story."ForShakespeare as for Bataille, the truth ofthe night consists not in itselfbut in its discursively mediated representa-tion/or us.

Thus, ironically, it is the ostensibly anthropological Kojèvian textthat is haunted by truly otherworldly phantoms- whether that of theSage, Shakespeare, or Jesus in the light of which the supposed truth ofthe absolute negativity of the real world is exposed.18But Shakespeare'splay itself testifies to the fact that our failure to bear witness to this

otherworldly light need not merely reflect our own "sick"negativity, asGirard would have it. For Shakespeare's injunction is not necessarily tovalorize Hamlet, but simply to "report[him] and [his] cause." But to do soisnecessarily to addressprecisely Hamlet's deathand lack of coherent cause,which, in turn, is to confront our own mortality, finitude, subjection todesire and to chance. The truth of death is not reassuringlyrevealed butdisconcertingly problematized and given to us to sort out. We are givennot an ostensible truth that pretends to bring an end to discursive perfor-mance, but a desire for truth that incites such performance. To confrontsuch desire is to assume precisely what Bataille calls the "poids"of dis-course itself. That is, it is not a matter of renouncing signification in thename of unrestrained "play;"on the contrary, as we have seen, Bataillefundamentally concurs with Hegel that it is only by assuming the burdenprecisely of significative discourse that one encounters the sovereign ac-cident that dismembers it. In turn, like Nietzsche's account of the deathof God, Shakespeare's account of Hamlet's death suggests that the sig-nificance of the sheer fact of that death is out-shadowed by that of itsimplications for us who bear witness to that fact and are now confrontedwith our own desire to make sense of it, to "report its cause [. . .] to the

unsatisfied." It is precisely by exposing a desire that was formally, in onewayor another, repressed,that Shakespeare'splay "catches the conscience"of its audience just as Hamlet's play catches that of the King Claudius.




ForShakespeare, Hegel, Nietzsche and Bataille alike, death is the begin-ning, not the end of the problem of discourse and desire.

If Kojève and Girardpretend to bear witness to a truth that resolvesthat problem, it is, I have argued, by simultaneously performing and sub-

mitting to a discursive seduction. Here the topic of death and desire isbroached not to open discourse to a provocative incompleteness, but tooffer the illusory solace of discursive satiation. Such an offer can be made

only by repressing the same desire it is intended to seduce; in this case byassimilatingthat desire to conventionally valorizedliterary tropesrespond-ing to cultural nostalgia for nobility, whether in the form of military valoror ecclesiastical authority.

This analysis of Kojève 's legacy suggests that one aspect of Bataille'shistorical significance consists in an attempt to liberate the Hegeliandrama of philosophical desire from the tropes of military and ecclesiasti-cal nobility through which Kojève brought that drama to an end wel-comed by many French intellectuals during the profound instability ofthe 1930s, and by which Girardian criticism would still have the self-conscious performanceof intellectual life determined- or,more precisely,

terminated- today.University of Chicago

Notes

I am indebted to all of the participants in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's excellent Kojève

seminar, Spring, 2000, at the University of Washington, for originally stimulating myinterest in the issues addressed here.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 15 vols., eds. Georgio Colli andMazzino Montinari (Frankfurt a.M.: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988) 3: §125.

2. Robert Pippin. "You Can't Get There From Here," The Cambridge Companion to

Hegel Frederick Beiser (New York:Cambridge UP, 1993) 60.3. G.W.F. Hegel. Phànomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988) 60; trans. Phe-

nomenology of Spirit A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 48.4. "L'esprithégélien [. . .] est humain en ce sens qu'il est un Discours qui est imma-

nent au Monde naturel et qui a pour 'support' un être naturel limité dans son existence

par le temps et l'espace." Alexandre Kojève, L'Introductionà la lecture de Hegel, (Paris:

Gallimard, 1947) 539.5. My use of the term "seduction" here draws directly from Jonathan Lear, Happi-ness, Death and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 20-25. Kojève'snotion of death, I am suggesting, serves what Lear describes as the seductive functionof an "enigmatic signifier."




6. On this point discursive and overtly political "performance"f philosophyarebroughttogether in a way that is too rich to explore in detail but too importantandinterestingto overlook. On the surface,Kojève's ingularlyextraordinaryareer,whicheventuallymanaged o combine the roles of intellectualrevolutionary,professionalaca-demic, high-level functionary n the FrenchMinistryof EconomicalAffairs,architectof the nascent EU bureaucracy, nd, finally,Soviet spy,can easilybe seen as a series ofnegationsby wayof which the Sage's(Kojève's)wisdom,and the worldstate that ex-presses t, areperpetuallyconcealed from the actual discursivepracticesthat the Sagemay at any given time engage. Indeed, while Kojève called bureaucracya "superiorgame" o philosophy,his doctrine, as well as the actualduplicityof his engagementofthe bureaucraticgame, suggesta deeper logic accordingto which superiortruths are

alwayspitted againstthe

recognizablemeaningandpurposeof discursivepractices(Cf."LaDST avait identifié plusiersagentsduKGBparmi esquelsle philosopheAlexandreKojève,"Lemonde,Sept. 16, 1999). This logic is perhapsbest epitomized by Kojève'sremark hat nothing meaningfulhappenedin the events of May,1968 because no onedied. Hadanyonedied,however,the meaning therebyaccomplishedwouldpresumablyhave been simplythat of death itself, andthus would not be morethan "enigmatically"or secretly available to the discourseof the living (Cf. Vincent Descombes Même etVautre,Paris:Minuit, 1979 [25]). In respectto Kojève'spurelyphilosophical inherit-ance, Heidegger's onception of the degradedcharacterof post-Socraticspatio-tempo-ral experiencegenerallyrelative to that of pre-Socratics ike Anaximander(which isnecessarilyonly obliquely, fragmentary available to us now) is clearly reflected inKojève'santi-Hegelian contempt for actual, recognizablemeaning, and reverenceforthat which would defy such

recognition(Cf. Martin

Heidegger"Der

Spruchdes

Anaximander,"Holzwege Frankfurt .M.:Klostermann,1977]. In turn,what I amsug-gesting mayconstitute the philosophicalunderpinningsof Kojève'sSoviet alliance sig-nificantly correspond o Heidegger'sown philosophicallymotivated ambition to pro-mote the Nazi "revolution."The categoricalimperativeto controvert the actual is atbottom an endorsementof political revolutionperse (whetherCommunistor National-Socialist is secondary). It is also, as PierreBourdieuargues,entirely continuous withthe "pensée ouche"[skewed hinking]that characterizesHeideggerianphilosophizing,and that is equallycharacteristic of what I am calling the "seductivelyparadoxical"discourseof Kojève (L'Ontologie olitique e MartinHeidegger Paris:Minuit, 1988]).

7. StanleyHoffmann,DeclineorRenewal? ranceSincetheJ93O'sNew York:Viking,1974) 73.

8. JudithButler'sassessmentof KojèvianHegel receptionin Francereaches a similarconclusion from an inversepremise.Butlerarguesthat Kojève'smobilization of desireas the basisfor a radicalcritiqueof the metaphysicsof identity (carriedout in turnbyHyppoliteand Sartre)only ends in a crudeessentialization or mystificationof desire,because it neglects Hegel's original conception of desire as the performanceof self-consciousreflectionperse, andthus ascoextensive with rather han inimical to signifi-cative practices and mutual recognition. However, she views this Kojèvianessentialization as born of a clear-eyedappreciation orthe disorientingempiricalcon-ditions of life encountered in 1930sFrance,rather han, asI have presented t, assymp-tomatic of a desire preciselyto obfuscatesuch disorientation: "Intheir readingsandoverbadings of Hegel, KojèveandHyppolitequestionwhether the metaphysicallyen-sconced Hegelian subject is still supportableon the basis of a contemporaryhistoricalexperience everywherecharacterizedbydislocation,metaphysicalrupture,and the on-

tological isolation of the humansubject."Subjects f Desire(New York:ColumbiaUP,1987) 6. But it is preciselythe suppressionof such experience that most characterizesthe Kojèviantext.

9. GeorgesBataille,"Hegel, a mort et le sacrifice,"OeuvresComplètes 2vols. (Paris:Gallimard,1988) 12: 336f.



DEATH AND DESIRE IN KOJÈVE,BATAILLE,AND GIRARD 67

10. GeorgesBataille, "Méthode de méditation,"OeuvresComplètes12 vols. (Paris:Gallimard, 1973) 5: 199.

11. William Shakespeare."Hamlet,"CompleteWorks, New York:OxfordUP) III, i.Emphasisadded.

12. JacquesDerrida."De l'économie restreinte à l'économiegénérale,"L'Ecrituret ladifférenceParis:Editions duSeuil, 1967) 385. An analogouscharacterization s appliedto Marx and Hamlet n Spectres e Marx(Paris:Éditions de Galilée, 1993). Ultimately,however, deconstruction'snarrowly extual approach imits its applicabilityto the is-suesof self-consciousdesireraised n Hegel,Bataille,andShakespeare'slay.If,asFredricJameson says in his review of Spectres,he "consecrated orm"of deconstruction con-sists in "augustlyparasitical[. . .] explication etexte" hat "need no longerarticulateitsown

presuppositions,nor even the resultsof its own textual

critiqueof the various

thinkersthereby glossedandarchitectonicallyundone"since "theydeconstruct them-selves,"then deconstructioneffects a dissolution rather hanconfrontation of the prob-lem of self-consciousdesire outlined at the outset; a dissolution that apparently reessubjective self-consciousness from the text that is shown to be self-deconstructing("Marx'sPurloinedLetter,"New LeftReview 209 [1995]: 82). The claim to what deMan called the "philosophicalrigor"of deconstructionthus appearsas only anotherformof pretenceto self-conscioussatisfaction, which, in turn,like the KojèvianSage'sself-satisfaction,is defined in opposition to the irreducibleambiguityand false con-sciousnessof discursivelycommitted existence (Allegories f ReadingNewHaven: YaleUP, 1979.J118).

13. "Ce sacrificede la raison est en apparence maginaire, l n'a ni suite sanglante,niriend'analogue.Il diffère néanmoins de la poésie en ce qu'ilest total, ne réservepasdejouissance, sinon par glissement arbitraire,qu'on ne peut maintenir, ou par rireabandonné. S'il laisse une survie de hasard,c'est oubliée d'elle-même,commeaprès amoisson la fleur des champs" Bataille, 5: 178).

14. Also, cf. "Laconnaissance est l'accès de l'inconnu"(5: 119).15. "...mes effortsrecommencent et défont la Phénoménologiee Hegel"(5: 96).16. RenéGirard,A Theater f Envy:William hakespeare,New York:OxfordUP,1991

284.17. "thepassionof Jesusmust be read[. . .] as a revelation of humanviolence. [. . . A]

victim perfectlynonviolent andjustwill make the revelation of violence completenotonly in his words,but throughthe hostile polarizationof the threatened human com-munity.This victim's deathreveals not only the violence and injusticeof all sacrificialcults, but the nonviolence and justice of the divinity whose will is thus fully accom-

plishedfor the first and only time in history"(282).18. Tellingly, it is preciselyin his critiqueof Spinozistic theism that one of Hegel's

clearestavant la lettreindictments of Kojèvianand Girardiananthropology appears:"Thisnegative self-consciousmoment, the movementof knowledge... s lackingin thecontent of Spinoza'sphilosophy.[. . . T]he negation is only presentas Nothing. [. . .W]edo not find its movement, its BecomingandBeing. [. . .]Self-consciousness s borninto thisocean, drippingwith the water hereof, .e., nevercomingto absoluteselfhood."In Spinoza,as in KojèveandGirard,the self-consciousperformance or "movement")of negation is assimilatedto an ontological determination("Nothing");but the possi-bility of such a determinationrests in the concealment (or negation) of the perpetualincompletenessuponwhich this "movement" f "absolute elfhood" spredicated.Hegel'sLectures n theHistoryof Philosophy, vols., trans. E.S. Haldaneand FrancesH. Simson

(New York:HumanitiesP, 1974) 3: 289.

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Bo Earle - Performance of Negation, Negation of Performance Death and Desire in Kojève, Bataille...

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