Desire is at the base of Self-Consciousness, i.e. of a truly human existence (and therefore—in the end—of philosophical existence).
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
As late as 1931 Alexandre Koyré reported in the Revue d’histoire de la philosophie1 that Hegel studies in France were practically nonexistent. With the exception of Jean Wahl’s Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, published in 1929, no major French commentary on Hegel claimed any intellectual popularity in France.2 By 1946, however, the situation of Hegel studies in France had changed considerably: in that year Merleau-Ponty was to claim in the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception that “all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel.”3Although we may reasonably question Merleau-Ponty’s exuberant valuation of Hegel’s influence, the more significant inquiry is into the intellectual climate that made such exuberance possible. Indeed, the intense interest in Hegel during the 1930s and 1940s in France appealed to widely shared and long-suppressed intellectual and political needs. In Force and Circumstance Simone de Beauvoir recalls that she turned to Hegel in 1945 at Hyppolite’s urging: “we had discovered the reality and weight of history; now we were wondering about its meaning.”4 By 1961 Koyré, in a postscript to a reprinted version of his 1931 review of French Hegel studies, remarked that Hegel’s presence in academic life had “changed beyond recognition.”5
If my inquiry were to enter the domain of the sociology of knowledge, I might then ask after the historical conditions of world war in Europe which precipitated the enthusiastic turn to Hegel during this period.6 My question, however, concerns the significance of the theme of desire appropriated from the Phenomenology of Spirit: what view of subjectivity and history did Hegel’s concept of desire afford the writers of this period? In the case of Kojève, Hegel provided a context for an inquiry into certain philosophical questions relevant to the times: the problem of human action, the creation of meaning, the social conditions necessary for the constitution of historically responsible subjectivities. The Phenomenology’s vision of an active and creating subjectivity, a journeying subject empowered by the work of negation, served as a source of hope during these years of political and personal crisis. Hegel provided a way to discern reason in the negative, that is, to derive the transformative potential from every experience of defeat. The destruction of institutions and ways of life, the mass annihilation and sacrifice of human life, revealed the contingency of existence in brutal and indisputable terms. Hence, the turn to Hegel can be seen as an effort to excise ambiguity from the experience of negation.
The ontological principle of negation made itself known historically during these times as a principle of destruction, and yet Hegel’s Phenomenology provided a way to understand negation as a creative principle as well. The negative is also human freedom, human desire, the possibility to create anew; the nothingness to which human life had been consigned was thus at once the possibility of its renewal. The nonactual is at once the entire realm of possibility. The negative showed itself in Hegelian terms not merely as death, but as a sustained possibility of becoming. As a being that also embodies negativity, the human being was revealed as able to endure the negative precisely because he could assimilate and recapitulate negation in the form of free action.
Kojève’s lectures on Hegel are both commentaries and original works of philosophy. His appropriation of the theme of desire is, accordingly, an elucidation of Hegel’s concept as well as a theory that stands independently of Hegel. Taking seriously Hegel’s claim that the object of philosophical analysis is itself partially constituted by the analysis itself, Kojève analyzes Hegel not as an historical figure with a wholly independent existence but, rather, as a partner in a hermeneutical encounter in which both parties are transformed from their original positions. Hegel’s text is not a wholly independent system of meanings to which Kojève’s commentary endeavors to be faithful. Hegel’s text is itself transformed by the particular historical interpretations it endures; indeed, the commentaries are extensions of the text, they are the text in its modern life.
Kojève’s peculiarly modern appropriation of Hegel’s doctrine of desire occasions the questions of what in Hegel survives into the twentieth century and what is lost. Hegel’s claim that desire presupposes and reveals a common ontological bond between the subject and its world requires that we accept a prior set of ontological relations which structure and unify various subjectivities with one another and with the world that they confront. This presupposition of ontological harmonies that subsist in and among the intersubjective and natural worlds is difficult to reconcile with the various experiences of disjunction which emerge as insurpassable in the twentieth century. Kojève writes from a consciousness of human mortality that suggests that human life participates in a peculiar and unique ontological situation that distinguishes it from the natural world and that also establishes the differences among individual lives as negative relations that cannot be wholly superseded in a collective identity. Kojève’s refusal of Hegel’s postulation of an ontological unity that conditions and resolves all experiences of difference between individuals and between individuals and the external world is the condition of his own original theorizing. By rejecting the premise of ontological harmony, Kojève is free to extend Hegel’s doctrine of negation. The experience of desire becomes crucial for Kojève’s reading of Hegel precisely because desire thematizes the differences between independent subjects and the differences between subjects and their worlds. Indeed, desire becomes a permanent and universal feature of all human life, as well as the condition for historical action. Hegel’s Phenomenology becomes for Kojève the occasion of an anthropology of historical experience in which desire’s transformation into action, and action’s aim of universal recognition, become the salient features of all historical agency.
Kojève’s reading of Hegel is clearly influenced by the early Marx’s recapitulation of Hegelian views of action and work. Although inspired by the newly discovered manuscripts of 1844, Kojève sought in Hegel a more fundamental theory of action, labor, and historical progress than he found in Marx. Reversing the Marxist trend to view Hegel as wrong-side-up, Kojève argued that Hegel provided an anthropology of historical life (IH 72–73), alienating the essential features of human existence which necessitate the continual re-creation of social and historical worlds. Kojève traced Marx’s theory of class struggle to Hegel’s discussion of lord and bondsman in the Phenomenology, and although Marx viewed class struggle as the dynamic proper to capitalist society, Kojève generalized his conclusion, claiming that the struggle for recognition forms the dynamic principle of all historical progress. Although influenced by Marx, Kojève appears exclusively concerned with the early Marx: the theory of labor as the essential activity of human beings, the theory of alienation, the necessity of transforming the natural and intersubjective worlds in order to fulfill essential human projects. The early Marx, as opposed to the Marx of Capital or the Grundrisse, accepted an anthropological view of human labor, that is, a view that enforced the universal and invariant features of labor as an essential human activity.
Kojève found the basis of an anthropological view of human action and labor in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology. Indeed, one might argue that the Phenomenology stops with Chapter 4 for Kojève, for it is there that the structures of desire, action, recognition, and reciprocity are revealed as the conditions for historical life universally. For Kojève, the Phenomenology achieves the telos of Western culture insofar as it occasions the beginning of an anthropocentric understanding of historical life. Kojève’s claim that all post-Hegelian thought inhabits a posthistorical time attests to this achievement. Insofar as Kojève and his readers live post-historically, they live without the hope that philosophy will reveal new truths concerning the human situation. The telos of history was to reveal the structures that make history possible. Modernity is thus, for Kojève, no longer concerned with unlodging the teleological plan that is the historical cunning of reason; modernity is characterized by historical action on the part of individuals, an action less determined than free. The end to teleological history is the beginning of human action governed by a self-determining telos. In this sense, the end of history is the beginning of a truly anthropocentric universe. In Kojève’s words, it is the revelation of “Man” or, perhaps more descriptively, of human subjectivity.
Kojève appears to reverse the order of significance that the Phenomenology establishes between human desires and a larger metaphysical order. For Kojève, Hegel’s metaphysical categories find their consummate expression in human ontology; the categories of Being, Becoming, and Negation are synthesized in human action. Action that is truly human transforms (negates) that which is brutally given (Being) into a reflection and extenuation of the human agent (Becoming). In a 1941 review of the contemporary significance of Hegel, Mikel Dufrenne wrote that for Kojève, “what is ontologically considered as negativity, and metaphysically considered as time [is] phenomenologically considered as human action.”7 For Kojève, then, the perspective of human agency gave concrete expression to Hegel’s entire system; indeed, the Logic was to be understood as gaining its concrete meaning only in the context of human action. In this sense, Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology becomes the central moment in Hegel’s entire system. Kojève went so far as to claim that Hegel’s entire theological speculations ought to be understood as a theory of human action (IH 258–59).
In order to maintain the centrality of the human perspective in Hegel’s system, Kojève rejected the panlogistic interpretation of Hegel’s view of nature. Indeed, in order to safeguard reason as the sole property of human beings, Kojève had to read Hegel’s doctrine of the dialectic of nature either as mistaken or as requiring the contributing presence of a human consciousness.8 Kojève introduces desire in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel as designating the ontological difference between human and purely natural beings. In particular, Kojève distinguishes human consciousness as something more than a simple identity, that is, as the kind of being that only becomes itself through expression. Reformulating the drama of Explanation found in the Phenomenology, Kojève argues that human consciousness remains indistinguishable from animal consciousness until it asserts its reflexivity in the form of self-expression.
In Kojève’s view, prior to its self-constituting expression, human consciousness is like animal consciousness, absorbed in the objects outside itself; this absorption is termed “contemplation” by Kojève. The self learns nothing about itself in contemplation for “the man who contemplates is ‘absorbed’ in what he contemplates; the ‘knowing subject’ ‘loses’ himself in the object that is known.” As opposed to a contemplation that cannot afford the experience of self-constitution or self-knowledge, Kojève distinguishes desire as the only mode through which the human subject can express and know itself. Desire distinguishes human subjects as reflexive structures; it is the condition of self-externalization and self-understanding. Desire is “the origin of the ‘I’ revealed by speech”; desire prompts the linguistic subject into self-reference: “desire constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say ‘I’” (IH 3).
Through referring to the role of self-expression in desire, Kojève builds upon Hegel’s notion that desire both forms and reveals subjectivity. For Kojève, desire motivates the formation of a distinct sense of agency. In order to achieve what one desires, one formulates desires in speech or expresses them in some other way, for expression is the instrumental medium through which we appeal to Others. Expression is also the way in which we determine our desires, not simply in the sense of “give concrete expression to,” but also in the sense of “give direction to.” Desires are not contingently related to their expression, as if wholly formed prior to their expression; desire is essentially a desire-for-determination; desire strives for concrete expression as part of its satisfaction. Moreover, the determination of a desire as a concrete desire-for-something necessitates the determination of the self. In the formulation “I desire x,” the “I” emerges as if by accident; subjectivity is unwittingly created and discovered through the concrete expression of desire.
Kojève argues that animal desire does not achieve self-reflection through desire, whereas for human desire, satisfaction and self-reflection are indissolubly linked. Human desire does presuppose animal desire insofar as the latter constitutes the organic possibility of the former; animal desire is the necessary but insufficient condition for human desire. Biological life, according to Kojève, can never constitute the meaning of human desire, because human desire is less an organic given than the negation or transformation of what is organically given; it is the vehicle through which consciousness constructs itself from a biological into a nonbiological, i.e., distinctively human, being. Contrary to the common belief that desire is itself a manifestation of biological necessity, Kojève inverts this relation and claims that desire is the transcendence of biology insofar as biology is conceived as a set of fixed natural laws.9
Kojève views nature as a set of brutally given facts, governed by the principle of simple identity, displaying no dialectical possibilities, and, hence, in stark contrast to the life of consciousness. Desire is thus non-natural insofar as it exhibits a structure of reflexivity or internal negation that natural phenomena lack. The subject is created through the experience of desire and is, in this sense, a non-natural self. The subject does not precede his desires and then glean from his desires a reflection of a ready-made self; on the contrary, the subject is essentially defined through what it desires. Through desiring a certain kind of object, the subject posits itself unwittingly as a certain kind of being. In other words, Kojève’s subject is an essentially intentional structure; the subject is its desire for its object or Other; the identity of the subject is to be found in the intentionality of its desire.
For Kojève, the proper aim of desire is the transformation of natural givens into reflections of human consciousness, for only through taking this process of transformation as its object can desire manifest itself as the transformative power that it is. In Kojève’s view, “desire is a function of its food” (IH 4), so that if a subject were to remain content with desiring natural objects alone, his desire would remain a purely natural desire; he would not evince the “transcendence” implicit in human desire: “The I created by the active satisfaction of such a Desire will have the same nature as the things toward which that Desire is directed; it will be a ‘thingish’ I, a merely living I, an animal I” (IH 5).
Kojève gives emphasis to the transition between “The Truth of Self-Certainty” and “Lordship and Bondage” as the development of desire’s intentional aims from objects to Others. Interpreting Hegel’s contention that desire is conditioned by its object, Kojève views the transition between these chapters as signifying the cultivation of desire into a “transcendent” or non-natural capacity. Arguing that desire takes on specific forms according to the kind of object it encounters and pursues, Kojève rejects the suggestion that an inexorable logic necessitates the transformation of desire into a satisfactory synthesis of self and world. There is nothing intrinsic to desire, no inner teleology, that would itself create the anthropogenesis of the world that Hegel views as desire’s ultimate satisfaction. Desire is itself dependent upon the availability of a proper historical community to express its own transformative potential. Desire’s satisfaction, then, is not secured through ontological necessity, but is itself context-bound, dependent upon an historical situation that provides for the expression of desire’s transformative potential.
In Kojève’s view, desire only becomes truly human, fully transformative, when it takes on a non-natural object, namely, another human consciousness. Only in the context of another consciousness, a being for whom reflexivity or inner negation is constitutive, can the initial consciousness manifest its own negativity, i.e., its own transcendence of natural life: “Desire directed toward another Desire, taken as Desire, will create, by the negating and assimilating action that satisfies it, an I essentially different from the animal ‘I’” (IH 5).
The act of reciprocal exchange that constitutes the two subjectivities in their transcendence is that of recognition. The initial consciousness does not contemplate itself reflected in the Other; the passivity of contemplation is supplanted by the activity of desire. Kojève explains the movement of desire in search of recognition as an active negation: “this ‘I’… will be ‘negating-negativity,’” and “since Desire is realized as action negating the given, the very being of this I will be action” (IH 5). Recognition of one consciousness by another takes effect within a shared orientation toward the material world; the context of work (the negation of the natural world) occasions the process of recognition (the negation of the Other’s naturalness). Work that exemplifies human being as transcending the natural and which occasions the recognition of Others is termed historical action. As the efficacious transformation of biological or natural givens, historical action is the mode through which the world of substance is recast as the world of the subject. Confronting the natural world, the historical agent takes it up, marks it with the signature of consciousness and sets it forth in the social world to be seen. This process is evident in the creation of a material work, in the linguistic expression of a reality, in the opening up of dialogue with other human beings: historical action is possible within the spheres of interaction and production alike.
Kojève’s anthropocentrism leads him to view desire as a negating activity which founds all historical life. Desire cannot be overcome precisely because human subjectivity is the permanent foundation of historical life; action does not indicate a prior and more inclusive reality as its ground—action is the ground of history, the constituting act by which history emerges as nature transformed. Desire is thus a kind of negation that is not resolved into a more inclusive conception of being; desire indicates an ontological difference between consciousness and its world which, for Kojève, cannot be overcome.
Kojève’s formulation of desire as a permanent activity of negation permits a modern conception of desire freed from the implicit teleological claims of Hegel’s view in the Phenomenology. Kojève views desire as a “revealed nothingness” (IH 5), a negative or negating intentionality without a preestablished teleological structure. The various routes of desire are conditioned by the social world confronting desire, but the specific routes that desire pursues are in no sense prearranged. Human desire thus indicates a set of options for Kojève. The dissolution of Hegel’s harmonious ontology, the scheme whereby negation is continuously superseded by a more encompassing version of being, allows for the formulation of desire as an expression of freedom.
Posting negation as a permanent feature of historical life proves central to articulating subjectivity as constituting and constituted by desire. For Kojève, desire does not—as it does for Hegel—discover its pre-given commonality with the world through an affirmation of itself as a sensuous medium. In Kojève’s view, the sensuous aspect of human identity is precisely what calls for transcendence, what desire seeks to negate. Recalling the lord’s project of abstraction, desire is, for Kojève, an idealizing project; it endeavors to determine human agency as transcendent of natural life. In this way, Kojève’s formulation of desire avows the insurpassability of subjectivity; the ultimate project of desire is less a dialectical assimilation of subjectivity to the world, and the world to subjectivity, than a unilateral action upon the world in which consciousness instates itself as the generator of historical reality.
For Hegel, desire is a negating activity that both distinguishes and binds consciousness and its world, whereas for Kojève, desire is a negating activity through which consciousness is related externally, yet efficaciously, to the world. Rather than revealing the mutually constitutive dimensions of subject and substance as ontological presuppositions of their encounter, Kojève asserts consciousness as creating its relation to the world through its transformative action.
Kojève clearly questions the pre-given “place” of the human subject, and argues in an existential vein that whatever place there is, is a place created by that subject. Yet, by viewing desire as non-natural, as a transcendence of the purely sensuous, this “place” remains a metaphysical abstraction rather than a concrete existential situation, and Kojève deprives his position of an embodied understanding of desire. His subject becomes an abstract creator, the paradigm for the philosophical thinker himself; negation is less an embodied pursuit than an effort to become a pure freedom. Moreover, Kojève’s rejection of Hegel’s positive linkage of self-consciousness’ sensuousness with the sensuousness of the world implies a radical disjunction between human consciousness and the natural world which deprives human reality of a natural or sensuous expression. Kojève’s distinction between the sensuous and the “truly human” involves him in an idealist position which recreates the paradox of determinateness and freedom that Hegel seemed to overcome in the Phenomenology. I turn to the problematic features of this position first in order to clarify the relation between the sensuous and desire and in order to lay the groundwork for Kojève’s view of desire as manifesting human existence in its temporality and freedom.
Kojève’s reading of the “Lordship and Bondage” section underscores his difference from Hegel on the problem of the sensuous. In Hegel’s chapter the bondsman discovers that he is not a thing-like creature, but a dynamic, living being capable of negation. The bondsman experiences himself as an embodied actor, one who also thirsts for life. Although the bondsman confronts his freedom from natural constraints through the negating activity of his labor, he rediscovers the “natural” aspect of his existence as a medium of self-reflection. The body which once signified his enslavement comes to appear as the essential precondition and instrument of his freedom. In this respect the bondsman prefigures the synthesis of determinateness and freedom that Geist subsequently comes to represent. In the larger terms of the text, substance is recast as subject through the reconciliation of determinate life and absolute freedom.
Kojève’s reading of this section stops before the reconciliation of determinate life and freedom is introduced through the concept of Geist, and neither does he acknowledge the bondsman’s body as a medium of expression. Instead, Kojève argues that the lesson of the section is that negating action consists of a transcendence of the natural and determinate. The paradox of consciousness and the body remains a dynamic and constitutive paradox. The fate of human reality is “not to be what it is (as static and given being; as natural being, as ‘innate character’) and to be (that is, to become) what it is not” (IH 5). In this formulation, prefiguring the Sartrian view of the paradoxical unity of the in-itself and for-itself, Kojève underscores his view of consciousness as that which transcends rather than unites with nature. The project of subjectivity is to overcome all positivity that includes the “inner nature” or apparently fixed features of consciousness itself: “in its very becoming this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is” (IH 5).
Kojève’s normative view, that desire must become manifest as a thoroughgoing experience of “conscious and voluntary progress” implies that all claims regarding innate drives or natural teleologies to human affectivity must be dismissed as mistaken. Insofar as the givenness of an agent’s own biological life is to be transformed into a creation of will, Kojève is proposing that desire be regarded as an instrument of freedom. The reification of desire as a natural phenomenon is, then, the arbitrary restriction of desire to certain ends, and the unjustifiable elevation of those ends to a natural or necessary status. As an expression of freedom, desire becomes a kind of choice.
Kojève’s view of the paradoxical ontological situation of human beings—not to be what it is (nature), and to be what it is not (consciousness or negation)—has the consequence that human beings are necessarily projected into time. The human “I” is a continual surpassing of itself, an anticipation of the being that it is not yet, as well as an anticipation of the nothingness that will emerge from whatever it at any moment happens to be: “the very being of this I will be becoming, and the universal form of this being will be not space, but time” (IH 5). Desire is a nothingness that is essentially temporalized: it is a “revealed nothingness” or an “unreal emptiness” which intends its own fulfillment, and, through this intending, creates a temporal future. In Kojève’s view, the experience of time is conditioned by the various projects instituted by human agents; time, like the Heideggerian notion of temporality, is relative to the human orientation through which it is experienced. By “time,” Kojève means lived time, the experience of time conditioned by the way agents, through their hopes, fears, and memories, create a specific experience of future, present, and past. The experience of desire, in particular, gives rise to futurity: “the movement engendered by the Future is the movement that arises from desire” (IH 134).
In keeping with Kojève’s rejection of “natural being” as irrelevant to human consciousness, he relinquishes natural time for a human temporality essentially structured by desire and its intended fulfillment. Unsatisfied desire is an absence that circumscribes the kind of presence by which it might relinquish itself as absence. Insofar as it posits itself as a determinate emptiness, i.e., as empty of some specific object or Other, it is itself a kind of presence: it is “the presence of an absence of reality” (IH 134); in effect, this absence “knows” what it is missing. It is the tacit knowledge of anticipation. The anticipation of fulfillment gives rise to the concrete experience of futurity. Desire thus reveals the essential temporality of human beings.
Kojève’s theory of the lived experience of time suggests an existential alternative to the Phenomenology’s approach to temporality. I suggested earlier that the Phenomenology makes use of a fictive temporality in order to demonstrate the development of appearances into their all-encompassing Concept. That certain figures of consciousness “appear” at some juncture in this development does not mean that they come into being; rather, their opacity must also be regarded as an essential moment of their being. In effect, it is only from the human perspective that appearances pass in and out of being. In effect, every moment of negation is ultimately revealed to be contained within a unity that has been there implicitly all along. The progression of the Phenomenology consists of the gradual development of the point of view of the journeying subject into that of the comprehensive absolute.
Kojève appears to reject the possibility of an absolute point of view, restricting his account of desire and historical action within the confines of the lived experience of a finite subject. In effect, he keeps our traveling subject from widening the circumference of his metaphysical reality. Kojève does not view himself, however, as rejecting or even revising Hegel; he argues that Hegel’s position is rightly represented in his own. Rather than enter into a debate over whether Kojève’s interpretation is correct, suffice it to say that Kojève asserts the ontological primacy of individuality over collectivity, and also maintains that Hegel’s Phenomenology, despite the appearance of Christ at the closure, is a tract in atheism.10 Whether Kojève rewrites Hegel or simply brings into relief a possible reading of Hegel, the point remains that Kojève asserts the perspective of lived experience as the necessary context in which to analyze desire and temporality. For Kojève, human action is the highest incarnation of the Absolute, so that the experience of lived time is vindicated over and against the fictive temporality of the Phenomenology’s development. According to this latter view, lived temporality could only be regarded as a mere appearance within the overarching framework of Hegel’s ontological unity: hence, the temporal experience of desire moving beyond itself toward an object (and thereby opening up a future for itself), turns out to be a perspective essentially deceived. The movement of desire reveals itself as a movement internal to the all-encompassing dance of subject and substance, “a bachanallian revel” (¶ 13) to be sure, but one in which every movement returns to its original place.
Kojève’s view implies that temporality gains its meaning only through the concrete acts through which it is engendered. Anticipating a future that is not-yet, the desiring agent does not come to find that the not-yet has always been; rather, desire creates the not-yet through an orientation toward an absent object. Desire, for Kojève, no longer reveals a pre-given structure of temporal progression within an overarching unity, but institutes temporality ex nihilo. The ecstatic character of desire, then, is not resolved into a more inclusive form of self-relatedness, but desire remains truly outside itself. Desire in the form of anticipation (the negation of the present, the desire for the not-yet) reveals the ambiguous “place” of subjectivity, as neither here nor there, but spanning both; anticipation discloses subjectivity as a being projected into time and as a being who projects time. That temporality gains its meaning through subjective experience alone is underscored by Kojève in his essay, “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept”: “we have seen that the presence of Time in the real World is called Desire” (IH 137).
In this same article Kojève refers to Hegel’s comment in his Jena lectures that “Geist ist Zeit.”11 This formulation is echoed in the preface to the Phenomenology: “die Zeit ist der daseiende Begriff selbst” (¶ 46). This “time in the real world” is the experience of projected possibilities implicit in desire which distinguishes human desire. Time arises through human “projects” which manifest the idealizing function of desire:
Time (that is, historical Time, with the rhythm: Future Past Present) is Man in his empirical—that is, spatial—integral reality: Time is the History of Man in the World. And, indeed, without Man there would be no Time in the World…. To be sure, the animal, too, has desires, and it acts in terms of those desires, by negating the real: it eats and drinks, just like man. But the animal’s desires are natural; they are directed toward what is, and hence they are determined by what is; the negating action that is effected in terms of these desires, therefore, cannot essentially negate, it cannot change the essence of what is. Being remains identical to itself, and thus it is Space, and not Time.… Man, on the other hand, essentially transforms the World by negating action of his (struggles) and his Work. Action which arises from non-natural human Desire toward another Desire—that is, toward something which does not exist really in the natural world (IH 138).
The desire of another individual serves as the condition for the experience of futurity; hence, reciprocal recognition and temporality are, for Kojève, essentially related. To recognize another means to relate to the other’s possibilities, implicit in which is a sense of futurity, i.e., the conception of what the Other can become. Only when we relate to others as natural beings do we assert a purely present relation to them; only by acknowledging them as consciousness, i.e., as negativities, beings who are not yet what they are, do we relate to them as truly human: “desire… is directed toward an entity that does not exist and has not existed in the real natural World. Only then can the movement be said to be engendered by the Future, for the Future is precisely what does not (yet) exist and has not (already) existed” (IH 134).
The Other is distinguished from natural beings insofar as the Other is capable of futurity and is, thus, a nonactual being in terms of the present. And yet the Other comes into being as a social being to the extent that he is recognized, and this recognition follows upon the performance of transformative acts. Insofar as desire achieves this second-order being through recognition, the pure futurity that was desire is transformed into “History” or equivalently, “human acts accomplished with a view to social Recognition” (IH 135).
The transformation of desire into a social identity constitutes the structure of the act by which history emerges from nature. Defined as a “hole” in existence, or occasionally, as “the absence of Being” (IH 135), desire reciprocal recognition. Unrecognized, desire lacks positive being; recognized, desire achieves a being that is second nature, the creation of a community of reciprocally recognizing desires. Without the world of Others, desire and the personal agency it introduces would have no reality: “only in speaking of a ‘recognized’ human reality can the term human be used to state a truth in the strict and full sense of the term. For only in this case can one reveal a reality in speech” (IH 9).
History is defined by Kojève in normative terms; it is not merely a set of events, but, rather, a set of projects which effectively transform naturally given being into social constructions. History is a set of acts in which an idea or possibility is realized, something is created from nothing, anthropogenesis succeeds. In a formulation that breaks with the monism of Hegel’s Concept, which prefigures Sartre’s view of negation as pure creation, Kojève argues that
the profound basis of Hegelian anthropology is formed by this idea that Man is not a Being that is in an eternal identity to itself in Space, but a Nothingness that nihilates as Time in spatial Being, through the negation or transformation of the given, starting from an idea or ideal that does not yet exist, that is still nothingness (a “project”)—through negation that is called the Action (Tat) of Fighting and of Work (Kampf und Arbeit). (IH 48)
In Kojève’s reading of the Phenomenology, the traveling subject achieves his most sophisticated form as an historical agent. Moreover, there are certain markedly ahistorical features about this historical agency, namely, his relentless “nothingness,” the structure of his action, the ideal of recognition. The extent to which Kojève’s revision of Hegel results in both an anthropology and a normative ideal of anthropogenesis suggests that the subject’s travels have, in effect, come to an end. As a posthistorical agent, one whose historical formation has been concluded, Kojève’s subject no longer requires a dialectical narrative to reveal his own historicity. Narrative history is already over, and the subject who emerges from that history enacts an anthropogenesis, a reproduction of substance as subject, from the point of view of the bondsman emerging into collective identity, that is, from the viewpoint of the end of Chapter 4. As a subject for whom progressive history is over, Kojève’s historical agent is expressed, not through an omniscient narrative, but in the words of the first-person singular. Its word becomes its deed, the linguistic creation of the subject itself, a creation ex nihilo.
We can see that the narrative strategy of the Phenomenology is necessitated by the doctrine of internal relations, that web of constitutive relations which always remains partially hidden, and which requires a temporalized presentation to be grasped in its integrity. Kojève, on the other hand, has no need of metaphysical narrative, because the “becoming” of his traveler is self-generated. Indeed, the traveler has ceased his travels altogether, set up shop in the environs of ontological exile, and shown Hegel, as it were, that contrary to the argument of the Phenomenology, an efficacious subjectivity can emerge from such soil. Kojève’s subject lacks the irony of Hegel’s incessantly myopic traveler; he is no longer mocked by the metaphysical domain which seemed always to exceed his understanding. On the contrary, Kojève’s subject is less comic than heroic, exemplifying the efficacy of transformative action, affirming autonomy as true accomplishment, no longer as a comic moment of inflated self-appraisal. Hence, when Kojève’s historical agent speaks, the nothingness of his self is articulated and then ensconced in the being of the audible utterance, his own desire thereby giving birth to himself. The subject is “not what is” only to the extent that the generating silence remains concealed, and must continually be renewed, but this internal non-coincidence of the subject is only efficaciously vital and never comic. The reason is that this subject knows itself as this non-coincidence, and is not fooled by a limited version of its own identity. This is a subject alarmingly intact, self-serious, no longer displacing the Absolute, but claiming it now as its very self.
Kojève clearly attributes freedom to his historical agent in ways that Hegel would have dismissed as metaphysically ill-informed. For Kojève, desire is an active negation which is not resolved into a more inclusive conception of reality, but is, rather, a free project in pursuit of recognition and, consequently, historical reality. At first glance, this conception of the desiring agent as a “voluntary progress” might seem paradoxical in light of Kojève’s other claim that “all human Desire… is finally a function of the desire for recognition” (IH 7). Although voluntary, human desire manifests a choice which ultimately gains its meaning from within a domain of existing conventions of recognition. In other words, in desire, choice is manifest in the kind of recognition one seeks, but it remains outside of the limits of choice to avoid recognition altogether.
Although Hegel closes the preface to the Phenomenology with an admonishment that “the individual must all the more forget himself, as the nature of Science implies and requires” (¶ 72), Kojève argues that social recognition is always directed toward the individual’s value. Indeed, for Kojève, the kind of action which satisfies human desire is that in which one is “recognized in (one’s) human value, on (one’s) reality as a human individual.” For Kojève, all human value is individual value, and “all Desire is desire for a value” (IH 6).
Recognition does not have the effect of assimilating the individual into a more inclusive community; following the tradition of classical liberalism, Kojève views recognition as a process in which individuals form communities, but these communities facilitate the development of individuality and not its transcendence. The difficulty of achieving this state of reciprocal recognition is exemplified for Kojève in historical strife. Every individual agent desires recognition of his value from all other individuals in the community; as long as some individuals do not recognize an Other, they view him as a natural or thing-like being and exclude him from the human community. Domination arises as a self-contradictory effort to achieve recognition in this context. For Kojève, the desire for domination is derivative of the desire for universal recognition, but the strategies of the oppressor—the lord—guarantee the failure of the project. The lord may attempt to impose his individual will upon the bondsmen who depend on him, but this imposition can never elicit the recognition that the lord requires: the lord does not value those by which he aspires to be recognized so that their recognition cannot be received by him as a human recognition.
The satisfaction of desire, for Kojève, which is simultaneously the development of individuality, requires the universalization of reciprocal recognition, i.e., a universally instituted egalitarianism of social value. The struggle for recognition which has produced a conflict of interests throughout history can be fully overcome only through the emergence of a radical democracy. Conversely, this kind of egalitarianism would imply the complete recognition of individual values, the satisfaction and social integration of desires:
Man can only truly be “satisfied,” History can end, only in and by the formation of a society, of a State, in which the strictly particular, personal, individual value of each is recognized as such; and in which the universal value of the State is recognized and realized by… all the Particulars. (IH 58)
Although Kojève claims that it is the essence of Hegel’s system that he his analysis to certain central themes of the Phenomenology, and provided a peculiarly modern elaboration of these themes. Kojève clearly accepts the modern liberal conception of individual desire as the foundation of the social and political world. Although a good many Hegel scholars view individual desire as transcended in and through the concept of Geist, Kojève clearly sees the ideal Hegelian society as one that maintains a dialectical mediation of individuality and collectivity. In fact, collective life appears to gain its final measure and legitimation in proving capable of recognizing individual desires.
Kojève’s brand of democratic Marxism does not, however, rely on the Hobbesian view of the conflict of desires without reinterpreting that doctrine. In line with Hegel, Kojève views the conflict of individual desires not as a natural state of affairs but as one which implies its own supersession through a universally accepted social order resting on principles of reciprocal recognition. Moreover, individuality itself is not to be understood strictly in terms of individual desire, for desire creates a distinctively human subjectivity through recognition of and by another desire; individuality gains its own full expression and satisfaction only through a validated participation in the social sphere. As distinct from the Hobbesian view, society does not arise as an artificial construct in order to arbitrate between naturally hostile desires, but society provides for the articulation and satisfaction of desire. Accordingly, the political community does not recognize individual wills which, strictly speaking, exist prior to the state apparatus of recognition; rather, recognition itself facilitates the constitution of true individuals, truly human subjectivities, which is the ultimate aim of desire. The end of history, the satisfaction of desire, consists in the successful recognition of each individual by every other.
Kojève’s reading of Hegel through the natural law tradition results in a theory that values individuality more than Hegel’s original theory does. His acceptance of the subjective point of view permits him an analysis of desire in terms of the structures of freedom and temporality that desire presupposes and enacts. And yet the distinction between consciousness and nature that pervades his view leads him to promote desire as a disembodied pursuit; desire is a negation, but one that is unsupported by a corporeal life. Kojève’s references to desiring agents as “negations” and “nothingnesses” suffer from an abstractness that has philosophical consequences. Hegel’s argument that the pursuit of recognition must take place within life remains true: the body is not merely the precondition for desire, but its essential medium as well; inasmuch as desire seeks to be beyond nature, it seeks to be beyond life as well. I turn to Hyppolite in an effort to reconsider the paradox of determinateness and freedom which still troubles the Hegelian formulation of desire. Is the heroic subject still possible? Does it make sense to understand desire as a disembodied generativity, or is this a contradiction in terms which no Hegelian synthesis can resolve? What would it mean to accept the existential transvaluation of Hegel’s subject, but to place him in the midst of life, an embodied being intrinsically related to the natural world? If we take even more seriously the finitude of this subject, then how will his desire and his action be further circumscribed? If Kojève’s project of anthropogenesis proves impossible, does this subject, once comic, then heroic, now become a tragic figure?
In the modern human world, the tragic never seems to disappear. We can well perceive that human existence, in its precariousness, is jeopardized, but we are not sure, as Hegel was, that this coincides with the rational. This coincidence is once again a kind of optimism that we can no longer postulate.—Jean Hyppolite, “The Phenomenon of ‘Universal Recognition’ in Human Experience”
Hyppolite initiated his own studies of Hegel in part to continue and revise Kojève’s effort to ground Hegelianism in a post-historical time. By bringing to bear the Logic and the Early Theological Writings on the Phenomenology of Spirit, however, Hyppolite sought to escape the anthropocentric biases of Kojève’s heroic narrative of the human spirit. Kojève’s subject appeared as an omnipotent actor on the historical scene, guilty of metaphysical grandstanding as the generating agency of both history and time. In Hyppolite’s view, the demise of ideological history necessitated the further circumscription of the Hegelian subject: even the grandest historical actors are not freed of the temporal exigencies that attend any human life; heroism inevitably has its demise. The Hegelian traveler who once relied on the metaphysics of internal relations becomes for Kojève the historical actor solely responsible for creating interrelations, and in Hyppolite, this subject becomes even less sure of its place. Indeed, its “place” turns out to be its “time,” the temporal basis of its identity, the necessary anxiety of its life.
Most of Hyppolite’s reflections on the Phenomenology are to be found in his monumental commentary on the text, Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit, published in 1946 in France, following the gradual publication of his translation of the Phenomenology in 1939–1942. The title itself suggests the philosophical problem to be pursued: that the Phenomenology permits an analysis in terms of its “genesis and structure” suggests that Hegel’s narrative requires yet another conceptual schema by which to be properly understood. Throughout the commentary, Hyppolite argues that phenomenological presumptions regarding the progressive movement of history and the satisfaction of the subject are historically conditioned ideas. Hence, only from a perspective beyond the Phenomenology do the historical origins of the text become clear. This very claim, however, is a result of the “structure” of the Phenomenology itself: the privilege of the retrospective point of view as the most wise, the most all-encompassing, the one that can discern the condition that makes any given unified picture of the world break into dissension and dissolve. In effect, Hyppolite makes use of the principle of retrospective wisdom to criticize the Phenomenology for its presumptions of progressivity, elaborating the reflexive structure of Hegel’s narrative transitions to effect a transition beyond the Phenomenology itself. That the Phenomenology requires a commentary at all indicates the problem of reading this text within an historical experience that can no longer support the optimism of Hegel’s ever-buoyant narrative. To question the teleological model of history, and still to remain an Hegelian, one must find the posthistorical prefigured in the text itself. Kojève finds this experience of modernity embodied in the slave who, shaken with terror, flees from the body to a life of dissociated abstraction and becomes the philosophical craftsman, carving out history and metaphysical truth in a single act. Hyppolite stops Hegel’s phenomenological narrative further back, at the moment of Life and the infinite labor of desire.
Hyppolite is quite clear that desire can have no consequence within the finite life of the individual that is not further desire, that an ultimate satisfaction is impossible, that human negativity is never successfully integrated into a higher-order identity. The infinity of desire is referred to in “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” and is implicitly affirmed in the Logic and Early Theological Writings; indeed, the experience of infinite desire is not only the “posthistorical” moment within the Phenomenology, but the incipient modernism of Hegel’s metaphysical notion of the Absolute.
Hyppolite’s rehabilitation of time as a monistic absolute suggests an alternative to Kojève’s ontological dualism. For Kojève, the human and natural worlds were ontologically distinct domains; for Hyppolite, the common structure of time serves as a monistic principle which governs in both worlds. Although Hyppolite claims to be “in agreement with Kojève in his effort to recognize all of the existential resonances in Hegel’s work” (F 239), he clearly thought that Kojève failed to take account of some key existential themes. Kojève interprets negation as the transformative action that marks the natural world with a human signature; Hyppolite extends the domain of negation, arguing that human subjects are negativity inasmuch as they are temporal beings comported toward death. Kojève’s figure of the historical actor implicitly denies the existential facts of temporality. Although Kojève criticizes the notion of ideological history, he has not cured himself of the belief in a telos to human existence. Hence, for Kojève, the teleological view of history is less rejected than internalized as a potential feature of an individual life; the “end” of existence is found in the narrative of a life that makes universal history every time its own action engages worldwide recognition. Hyppolite suggests that this “end” or set of ends are only momentary achievements, and that the “momentary” status of these accomplishments remains unanalyzed in Kojève’s theory. In this way Kojève refuses to think through the consequences of a posthistorical time, the experience of temporality without relief, the thought of time as the essence of Life.
According to Hyppolite, Kojève’s almost exclusive emphasis on the Phenomenology necessitates the restrictive anthropocentrism of his view:
The Phenomenology would be the epic of the human spirit coming to the end of its history, of the working of negativity. In becoming conscious of this history, Hegel’s philosophy, consummated in the present, would be absolute knowledge. (F 237)
Negativity, however, is found not only in the historical self-constitution of the Phenomenology’s subject, but in the thinking of difference which, for Hyppolite, is the function of time and constitutes the being of Life. He writes,
I believe that Kojève’s interpretation is too exclusively anthropological. For Hegel, absolute knowledge is no more a theology than it is an anthropology. It is the discovery of the speculative, of a thought of being which appears through man and history, the absolute revelation. It seems to me that it is this sense of speculative thought which is opposed by Kojève’s purely anthropological interpretation. (F 241)
Hyppolite distinguishes two tendencies in Hegel’s work, one that begins with the point of view of the subject and one that begins, as it were, with the point of view of substance, the “adventure of being,” the subject-less sojourn of metaphysics. In an essay entitled “Notes on the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: The Absolute is Subject,” he writes:
According to us, there are two complementary and nearly irreconcilable aspects to Hegelian thought: 1) there is the thought of history, the concrete human adventure, and this constitutes itself through taking account of this experience; 2) there is also the adventure of Being—Hegel speaks of the Absolute—and not only of man, which is why it is speculative, absolute knowledge, beyond history, becoming, and temporality. (F 334–35)
Although this speculative knowledge of the absolute is “beyond history, becoming, and temporality,” it is only accessible to a human consciousness through its own temporal life. Life is the speculative element that is understood through human temporality, but that transcends human temporality as well, essential to logical and natural relationships apart from any relationship to human reality. Hence, Hyppolite does not ask after the being of “man,” but after the being of “life”; through this return to Life, the imparting and dissolution of shape, Hyppolite finds the absolute as both dynamic and thoroughly monistic.
As speculative rather than anthropological, Hyppolite’s notion of time is opposed to Kojève’s postulation of time as created by the various “projects” of human agents. For Hyppolite, time constitutes human reality as an ek-static enterprise, a mode of permanent self-estrangement. Living in time, human beings are necessarily other to themselves, not only because they cannot inhabit memory and anticipation at once, but because time itself is necessarily beyond their control; indeed, time is less a human creation than the necessary limit on all human creativity, the inevitable transience of all human creations. While for Kojève, the absolute is found in properly historical acts, for Hyppolite, it is found in a temporality which inevitably reveals these acts as less than absolute. Kojève appears to forget the key Hegelian lesson of the Phenomenology that Life is a matter of necessary repetition. Indeed, Kojève’s view of History seems opposed to time; historical deeds and works are meant to stay time, to elevate the human spirit beyond the futility of animal life to the permanence of the historical world. And if history is understood as a realm of permanence, then history itself must be opposed to time. Kojève admits as much, arguing that the truly human task is to transform time into History, to resolve transience into durable forms. In this sense, Kojève has elevated the wisdom of the bondsman to an absolute task, for the bondsman learned that in the creation of a work, “desire is held in check” and “transience is staved off” (¶ 195). For Hyppolite, such an actor who, through his acts, lifts himself out of time, is a lifeless being, a being turned against life. Hyppolite emphasizes that intrinsic to life is the dissolution of form as well as its reconstitution. Hence, for Hyppolite, the absolute is not an achievement as such, but the dialectic of achievement and loss, the perpetual noncoincidence of beings and, in the human sphere, the permanence of desire, the inevitability of transience.
Hyppolite understands his own project as less a rewriting of Hegel than an elaboration of some underrepresented Hegelian themes. The interpretation of absolute knowledge as the thought of time is a case in point:
Absolute knowledge does not really exist; it is not beyond becoming in a supervening intelligible or suprasensible realm. In turn, this becoming is not an effect of dispersal, lacking connection; it is an unprecedented teleology, an adventure of sense, where the moments conjoin and separate like the moments of time: “Time is the Concept which is there… it is the disquiet of life and the process of absolute distinction.” (F 335)
Hyppolite’s interpretation of absolute knowledge as the “disquiet of life” aligns Hegel more closely with Kierkegaard. Following Jean Wahl’s argument that Hegel’s Early Theological Writings evince a Kierkegaardian view of the Absolute as paradox, Hyppolite argues that Hegel’s effort “to think pure life through” is a paradoxical venture, like Kierkegaard’s “thought of existence” (“CE”).12 According to Hyppolite, the Hegelian thinker who attempts to think the absolute, the truth that structures all things, must learn to think time itself, and this thought is of necessity an experience of anxiety, placelessness, inevitable transience. Hence, to think the absolute is to engage both a knowledge of temporality and a temporal experience of this truth; in effect, the truth of time must be suffered to be known.
In the introduction to this commentary, Hyppolite reconstructs Hegel’s efforts throughout the Jena period to effect a conceptual synthesis between the being of man and the being of life. In Early Theological Writings, Hegel rejected the possibility of a rational movement between the finite perspective of the human knower and the infinity of the world. In the System der Sittlichkeit he argued that only a religious movement could effect this transition. And in his essay, Natural Law, he outlined the kind of transcendent intuition that alone could grasp the finite and the infinite within a single movement of consciousness. That Hegel later developed the Concept as a rational comprehension of the infinite is not, according to Hyppolite, a thorough break with his earlier claims concerning the limits of reason. Reason accommodates rather than replaces religion and intuition. Hyppolite argues:
If later, in the Logic, [Hegel] managed to express in rational form an intuition of the very being of life or of the self, which he earlier declared could not be thought through, we should not conclude from this that nothing remains of the first intuition, the kernal from which his whole system developed. (GS 147)
Even in the Logic, according to Hyppolite, the Concept is tied to the notion of infinity such that conceptual knowing must itself be a continuous process rather than a determinate act or set of acts. The telos of conceptual knowing is not the resolution of Becoming in and through an enhanced conception of Being, but, rather, the discovery that this enhanced conception of Being is nothing other than continuous Becoming. Being, no longer conceived as simple identity, is identity-in-difference, or, equivalently, self-relatedness through time. Identity does not “contain” difference as if some spatial relation adhered between the two; identity is now defined as flux itself, the perpetual “disquiet” of the self. Commenting on the preface to the Phenomenology, Hyppolite writes, “the Absolute is always unstable and disquieted, that in which the tendency, the impulse, has not disappeared behind the achieved result… the Absolute is always an instance of alteration, is always a departure, and adventure” (E 333). The identification of the being of man and the being of life is made possible through a common groundlessness, the loss of a stationary metaphysical place. Thus, Hegel’s metaphysical subject is no longer understood as ensconced in a metaphysical place, but is now revealed as modern, anxious, perpetually dislocated: “this being of life is not substance but rather the disquiet of the self” (GS 149).
Although Hyppolite is concerned with infinite desire and Life, themes that are introduced before the section on lordship and bondage, it is clear that for him these earlier categories provide an explanation for the latter. The “disquiet” of the self, its experience of time, is exacerbated through the experience of the Other. Indeed, it is only as a social being that this subject learns that Life is essential to its own projects (the Life and Death Struggle) and that the fear of death initiates individuation (the willingness to risk its Life). As the necessity of repetition and the dialectic of form and formlessness, Life is the dialectical notion of time. The knowledge of death enforces this subject’s knowledge of limited time. But in the encounter with the Other, this subject learns that it does not exist all at once, but is alternately lost and then recovered: “This life is disquiet, the disquiet of the self which has lost itself and finds itself again in its alterity. Yet the self never coincides with itself, for it is always other in order to be itself.” (GS 250)
No longer convinced of the coincidence of subject and substance, Hyppolite here avows their infinite non-coincidence, and affirms this non-coincidence (of each to the other, and each to itself) as their common situation. The absolute mediation of the self and its alterity is no longer conceived as a feasible project, and Hyppolite confirms that alterity always exceeds the self, as the self exceeds alterity. Hyppolite understands this non-coincidence or dis-quiet at the heart of being as implicit in Hegel’s notion of the infinite, the priority of Becoming over Being, i.e., the reconceptualization of Being as a movement of Becoming. Reciprocal desire appears to approach this thought of the infinite. Hence, Hyppolite confirms the identity of desire and Conceptual thinking by claiming that desire is an “absolute impulse”13:
The concept is omnipotence; it is omnipotence only through manifesting itself and affirming itself in its other. It is the universal which appears in the soul of the particular and determines itself completely in it as the negation of the negation, or as genuine specificity. Or, in yet other words, it is love, which presupposes duality so as continually to surpass it… the concept is nothing else than the self which remains itself in its alteration, the self which exists only in this self-becoming. (GS 147)
The development of reciprocal desire is toward the ever-expanding autonomy of each partner. “Desire is conditioned by a necessary otherness” (GS 162), and yet this otherness is surpassed every time that one self-consciousness discovers the Other not as a limit to freedom but as its very condition. Concretely, the meaning of this paradox will only become clear in the Sartrian dialectic of self and Other, but we can begin to extrapolate its meaning here. This constant transformation of the Other from a source of danger into a promise of liberation is effected through a transvaluation of the Other’s body. The self and Other do not observe each other, documenting the mental events that occur in the course of their transaction; they desire one another, for it is only through desire that the exteriority of the Other, the body, becomes itself expressive of freedom. Desire’s project is to find the exteriority of the Other suffused by and with the Other’s freedom. Desire is the expressiveness of the body, freedom made manifest. The alterity of the Other is softened, if not overcome, as the body gives life to consciousness, as the body becomes the paradoxical being that maintains and expresses negation. In this sense desire is the embodiment of freedom, and reciprocal desire initiates an infinite exchange.
The ontological project pursued by desire for Hyppolite takes its bearings within Hegel’s own formulation, but strays from the presumption that the absolute can be discerned as a coincidence of the rational and the real. Hyppolite continues to assert that desire seeks to discover itself as ontologically joined with its world, but qualifies this claim through asserting this ontological dis-juncture as the being of time. Hyppolite maintains that “the most profound aim of desire is to find itself as a being,” not as determinate or positive but as a being internally negated, a temporalized and paradoxical being. Hyppolite steeps himself in Hegel’s own contentions in the Logic: “If we ordinarily say of Spirit that it is, that it has a being, that it is a thing, a specific entity, we do not thereby mean that we can see it or hold it or stumble against it. But we do make such statements” (GS 167).14 For Hyppolite, the kind of being that informs both consciousness and life in general, and that characterizes desire, “is not merely a positive reality, a Dasein which disappears and dies absolutely, crushed by what exceeds it and remains external to it; it also is that which at the heart of this positive reality negates itself and maintains itself in that negation” (GS 166).
Self-surpassing or internal negation requires a reciprocal relation of recognition between selves. The aim of desire, according to Hyppolite, “the vocation of man—to find himself in being, to make himself be,” is an aim “realized only in the relation between self-consciousness” (GS 167). Recognition conditions the “recovery” of the self from alterity, and thus facilitates the project of autonomy. The more fully recovered this self, the more encompassing of all reality it proves to be, for “recovery” is not retreat, but expansion, an enhancement of empathy, the positing and discovery of relations in which it has all along, if only tacitly, been enmeshed.
This ambiguous discovery of an alterity both reflexive and intentional constitutes the action of desire, the essence of self-consciousness. As Hyppolite claims, “Concretely, this is the very essence of man, ‘who never is what he is,’ who always exceeds himself and is always beyond himself, who has a future, and who rejects all permanence except the permanence of his desire aware of itself as desire” (GS 166). The experience of desire initiates our education into the Concept; the permanence of desire—the insurpassability of Otherness—is the lived experience of the infinite. Hence, Hyppolite makes phenomenological sense of Hegel’s contentions not only that “self-consciousness is Desire in general” but that “self-consciousness is the concept of infinity realizing itself in and by consciousness” (GS 166).
By interpreting the absolute not as a closure to Hegel’s system, but as its inevitable openness, Hyppolite counters the view of Hegel’s Phenomenology as a movement toward a determinate telos. The being that Geist achieves is not a plenitude void of negativity, but an infinite movement between positive being and nothingness. In Hegel’s original formulation, desire was conceived as that which posited and revealed both self and world as more than externally related opposites. The being that commonly structured self and world was to be understood as an all-inclusive reflexivity, a second-order being that contained difference within itself. The effort to find an all-inclusive being that could at once preserve the integrity of its moments and reveal their essential interdependence would not be a Parmenidean mass for which change is simply phenomenal illusion. This being would itself contain the infinite, would have the infinite as a constitutive feature. And yet to speak this way is still to court a substantial model, for if being were a “container” or a substance which either carried predicates within or bore them as so many attachments to its integument, such a being could not serve the purposes of Hegel’s vision. In speaking this way, one substitutes a spatial model which assumes substance as a discrete and independent entity to which predicates are only arbitrarily related. To do justice to the dialectical or mutually constitutive relation of substance and predicate in Hegel’s view, one must devise a model that accounts for the interchangeability of substance and attribute. The kind of being that “contains” the infinite is also, to extend and, then, undermine the metaphor, contained by the infinite. Hence, the relation between substance and predicate is a double relation, one that, in this case, presents the infinite as an aspect of being and also presents being as an aspect of the infinite. The usual hierarchy between substance and predicate is subverted through a constant exchange of roles. Hence, this second-order being is the infinite in this speculative sense of “is.” The Concept, that form of knowing and being that structures the being of the self and the being of the world, is time itself, infinite displacement, the movement of the world engendered constantly through apparent difference.
If the absolute is infinite, and desire is an “absolute impulse,” then desire no longer strives after “satisfaction,” but endeavors to sustain itself as desire, “reject(ing) all permanence except the permanence of itself as desire.” Only as dissatisfied desire is consciousness still alive and united with the being of life, a unity that is the infinite altercation of self and not-self that sets and sustains the organic world in motion. The dissatisfaction of desire must be seen as a determinate dissatisfaction, i.e., a dissatisfaction with an intentionality. It is not a simple craving, the plight of Tantalus infinitely distanced from the object of desire; desire’s dissatisfaction is one that is discovered in the midst of life, as a consequence of movement rather than stasis, as a consequence of the impossible project to reconcile determinate identity and time.
This non-coincidence of self-consciousness also implies that the object of desire is always partially undisclosed. The aims of desire are always twofold; there is a determinate object (the intentional aim) and the project to achieve greater autonomy (the reflexive aim). In other words, desire is always after something other than the self, but is also always involved in a project of self-constitution. Because the aims of desire are twofold, any effort to isolate the “real” object of desire necessarily falls into deception. Any effort to subject the object of desire to determinate thinking turns out to be a truncated version of the truth. Thus the problem of desire is the problem of the paradoxical nature of self-consciousness, how to remain oneself in the midst of alterity. If one resolves the aims of desire into the aims of a singular identity to discover and reflect itself, one dispenses with the realm of alterity and thereby loses the self as well. And if one claims that it is in the nature of determinate objects to solicit desire, one neglects the project of identity informing desire. Hence, any effort to determine the true aim of desire is necessarily deceptive. Desire, then, can be said always to operate under the necessity of partial deception; in Hyppolite’s words, “desire is in essence other than it immediately appears to be” (GS 160–61).
Because desire is in part a desire for self-reflection, and because desire also seeks to sustain itself as desire, it is necessary to understand self-reflection as a form of desire, and desire as a cognitive effort to thematize identity. Desire and reflection are not mutually exclusive terms, for reflection forms one of the intentional aims of desire, and desire itself may be understood as the ambiguous project of life and reflection. To comprehend the conditions of thought, to become a fully existing being through the reflection on the life that has produced the reflecting posture, is the highest aim of the Phenomenology, the all-inclusive aim of desire. Deception emerges as a function of perspective, of the insurpassable fact that human consciousness can never fully grasp the conditions of its own emergence, that even in the act of “grasping” consciousness is also in the process of becoming.
This noncoincidence of life and thought is not, for Hyppolite, cause for despair. The project of attaining capable identity is not to be forfeited simply because there is no guarantee of its success. The project is not necessitated by any natural or ideological principle, nor does it operate with the hope of success; in fact, it is both arbitrary and doomed to failure. The striving to know oneself, to think the conditions of one’s own life, is a function of the desire to be free. Only by assimilating Otherness can human consciousness escape the vulnerability of merely positive being. The desire to reflect is thus originally indebted to a desire to establish oneself as a negating being, that which is both ensconced and eluded in finite being.
If there is a telos to the movement of desire, an end and motivating force, it can be understood only as death. As a merely positive being, human life would have no capacity to influence its surroundings; it would be merely itself, relationless, brute. As a simple body, this life would appear as a positive being that only exists and perishes and that, insofar as it exists, has a positive existence, and, as dead, is an indeterminate negation. Construed in terms of positive being devoid of negation, human life would itself be negated irrevocably by death. But desire is a negative principle which emerges as constitutive of finite life, as a principle of infinite alteration that strives to overcome positive being through revealing the ever-shifting place of the self within a network of internal relations. Paradoxically, desire enlivens the body with negation; it proclaims the body as more than merely positive being, that is, as an expressive or transcendent project. In these terms, desire is the effort to escape the vulnerability and nihilism of positive being through making the finite body into an expression of negation, i.e., of freedom and the power to create. Desire seeks to escape the verdict of death by preempting its power—the power of the negative.
Although the above sketch is my reading of the implications of Hyppolite’s view, it seems clear that Hyppolite does accept the above view of desire and death. In “The Concept of Existence in the Hegelian Phenomenology,” he claims that “the negation of every mode of diremption is always revived in the negative principle of desire. It is what moves desire” (CE 27). In a following discussion he claims that it is the principle of death in life that performs this role: “The fundamental role of death in annihilating the particular form of life becomes the principle of self-consciousness that drives it to transcend every diremption and its characteristic being-in-the-world, once this being-in-the-world is its own” (CE 28). We may safely conclude that the negative character of desire draws from a more fundamental principle of negation which governs human life; human life ends in negation, yet this negation operates throughout life as an active and pervasive structure. Desire negates determinate being again and again, and hence, is itself a quieted version of death, the ultimate negation of determinate being. Desire evinces the power human life has over death precisely by participating in the power of death. Human life is not robbed of its meaning through death, for human life, as desire, is always already partially beyond determinate life. Through the gradual appropriation of negation—the cultivation of self-reflection and autonomy—human beings tacitly struggle against their own ultimate negation: “Man cannot exist except through the negativity of death which he takes upon himself in order to make of it an act of transcendence or supersession of every limited situation” (CE 28).
Self-consciousness exists partially in rancor against determinate life and views its assimilation of death as the promise of freedom. Hyppolite speculates that “the self-consciousness of life is characterized in some way by the thought of death” (CE 25). This suggestive phrase might be made more specific if we understand desire as “the thought of death,” a thought sustained and pursued through the development of autonomy. As desire, the body manifests itself as more than positive being, as escaping the verdict of death’s negation. The self is extended beyond the positive locus of the body through successive encounters with domains of alterity. In desire, the self no longer resides within the confines of positive being, internal to the body, enclosed, but becomes the relations it pursues, instates itself in the world which conditions and transcends its own finitude.
One might conclude that Hyppolite has engaged Freud’s vision in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that all desire is in some sense inspired by a fundamental striving toward death, i.e., the desire to die. Although this claim is plausible in the above context, it is important to note that Hegel’s (and Hyppolite’s) Christianity would seem to imply that the death to which consciousness aspires is itself a fuller notion of life. Hegel is characteristically ambiguous on this point, but his claim in the Phenomenology that individuality finds its proper expression in Geist would seem to imply that death is not an absolute negation, but a determinate one which establishes the boundaries of a new beginning.
The “trembling” of the bondsman highlights a different aspect of Hegel’s thought on death, however, and aligns him more closely with the fear and trembling of Kierkegaard. Following Kojève and Jean Wahl, Hyppolite restricts himself to the interpretation of death offered in the section of lordship and bondage. He takes seriously the facticity of the body, finitude as the condition of a limited perspective, corporeality as a guarantor of death. The vision of a new life, a life beyond death, remains purely conjectural in Hyppolite’s view, but it is a conjecture that holds sway in human life. Human desire postulates a life beyond death which the human subject nevertheless cannot inhabit; for Hyppolite, desire affirms itself as an impossible project, a project whose fulfillment must remain imaginary—a theme that will be elaborated by Sartre throughout his career. That one cannot sustain life after death suggests that death must be sustained in life: self-consciousness exists only “through refusing to be.” And yet, “this refusal to be must appear in being; it must manifest itself in some way (GS 167). Freedom must make itself known in order to be, posit itself in existence and gain reality through the acknowledgment of others. This desire to be a pure freedom, however, is vanquished ultimately by the irreducible facticity of death, a facticity that is anticipated throughout life in the striving of this finite being to supersede its limits:
Consciousness of life is, of course, no longer a naive life. It is the knowledge of the Whole of Life, as the negation of all its particular forms, the knowledge of true life, but it is simultaneously the knowledge of the absence of this “true life.” Thus in becoming conscious of life man exists on the margin of naive and determined life. His desire aspires to a liberty that is not open to a particular modality; and all his efforts to conceive himself in liberty result only in failure. (“CE” 24)
Both Kojève and Hyppolite accept the formulation that human beings are what they are not and are not what they are. For Kojève, this internal dissonance of the self implies a dualistic ontology that severs human beings into natural and social dimensions; the work of negation is confined to the task of transforming the natural into the social, i.e., a process of the gradual humanization of nature. For Hyppolite, the paradoxical character of human reality suggests that freedom escapes each of the determinate forms to which it gives rise, and that this constant displacement of the self signifies non-coincidence, time itself, the monistic absolute that characterized human and natural ontologies alike. In effect, Hyppolite accepts Hegel’s doctrine of negation as including the difference between nature and human reality as a constitutive or internal difference. Kojève’s anthropocentric reading of Hegel restricts negation to a creative power that human beings exhibit in the face of external realities; for Kojève, negation is an action of human origin that is applied externally to the realm of the nonhuman. Hyppolite returns to Hegel’s original formulation in order to make modern sense of negation, not merely as action, but as constitutive of external reality as well. For Hyppolite negation resides already in the objects that human consciousness encounters; for Kojève, negation is the sole property of an active and transforming human consciousness.
Although Kojève would read desire as a human effort to transform that which appears initially alien and hostile to the human will, Hyppolite views desire as revealing the ontological place of human beings as a temporal movement that embraces the whole of life, which is, in effect, prior to human reality, more fundamental, yet essentially constitutive of human reality as well. While both positions view desire as implicating human beings as paradoxical natures, as determinate freedoms that cannot be simultaneously determinate and free, the one infers from this non-coincidence a dualistic world, and the other establishes duality (inner-negation) as a monistic principle.
Hyppolite wrote of Kojève that “the dualistic ontology that Kojève reclaims is realized by Sartre in Being and Nothingness” (F 240). And Sartre’s own formulation of human reality as a paradoxical unity of in-itself and for-itself appears to echo almost verbatim Kojève’s phrasing: “We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” (BN 58). It is unclear, however, whether Sartre consistently follows Kojève in adopting a dualistic ontology. Sartre occasionally refers to consciousness as internally related to its world, i.e., as a consciousness “of” the world which is nothing but the world it attends. Other times he suggests consciousness is a “rift” in being, a contingency that can have no necessary relation to that which it refers. Only when Sartre accepts consciousness as embodied does he relinquish the vocabulary of dualism for a language of intentionality which returns him in his own fashion to Hegel’s recognition that the sensuousness of desire becomes its access to the sensuousness of the world. This becomes clear in Sartre’s reflections on sexuality and on writing. I turn to Sartre in order to trace the gradual embodiment of consciousness, the phenomenological fulfillment of Hegel’s early contention that desire both constitutes and reveals the relations that bind the self with its world. To make Hegel’s doctrine concrete, human desire must be shown not merely to signify abstract ontological bonds, but as the negating activity an embodied and historically situated self.
Sartre’s discussions of desire and satisfaction take their bearings within the French reception of Hegel. For both Sartre and his Hegelian predecessors, the ideal of a secular satisfaction becomes increasingly remote. Prefiguring Sartre, Hyppolite disavows the possibility of final satisfaction and understands the relentlessness of desire as a function of human temporality. The project to establish an ontological unity with otherness, to recast apparently external relations as internal ones, is perpetually thwarted by a temporal movement that undercuts any provisional achievement of unity. In every case, satisfaction is tempered by the knowledge of impending time which is grasped phenomenologically as a relentless demand that the self renew its satisfaction in the present. The achievements of desire are consummations which must invariably give way to renewed desire; satisfaction is thus always provisional and never final or definitive. Hyppolite thus transforms Hegel’s journeying subject into a Faustian character who, in Goethe’s words, is forever “blundering with desire towards fruition, and in fruition pining for desire.”15
Only through positing an imaginary distinction between history and time can Kojève entertain a true and final satisfaction for desire; history in his view is less subject to time than it is its organizing principle; indeed, for Kojève, time arises as a feature of historical acts or projects, but otherwise exerts no power. One may thus conclude that Kojève’s historical acts are historical in a deeply paradoxical sense, for they transcend time in the moment that they consecrate time. History, as the progressive revelation of universal values, is a normative construal of time, a model of unity imposed upon an existential reality of perpetual disunity. In this sense, Kojève’s view of history is the denial of existential time, a denial that allows him to imagine a definitive satisfaction to desire.
From both of these formulations, we seem to learn that desire can achieve satisfaction only through the temporary denial of time, i.e., through the imagined or conjectured state of presence for which time discriminations are irrelevant. The ideal of self-sufficiency that haunts post-Hegelian thinking is a nostalgia for a life freed of the exigencies of temporality—one that could escape a fate of continual self-estrangement and then death. Kojève essays to recast satisfaction in the secular terms of historical action, while Hyppolite eschews the possibility of self-sufficiency, with the qualification that the “life beyond death” that haunts the project of desire remain a meaningful conjecture, an imaginary hope that gives meaning to the actual strivings of finite human beings.
Sartre concurs with Hyppolite on this point: human desire is motivated and structured by a projected unity with the world which must remain a pure projection, an imaginary dream. For Sartre, desire labors under imaginary ideals which give meaning to desire even as they elude desire’s reach. The effort at anthropogenesis elaborated by Kojève finds existential transcription in the Sartrian contention that all human desire is a function of the desire to become God. But for Sartre, this desire is bound to fail. Kojève, on the other hand, thought that godlike men were possible; he conceived historical agents like Napolean and Hegel as capable of an anthropogenetic creation of history through eliciting the pervasive recognition of Others. For Sartre, however, anthropogenetic desires can only be realized in an imaginary mode. In Sartrian terms, then, insofar, as Kojève deems certain individuals to be godlike men, he has transfigured them into imaginary characters. Indeed, whenever we conceive of a satisfaction for desire, we do so only through participating in the domain of the imaginary. Sartre’s contention throughout his career is that only in the imaginary can a timeless presence can be entertained, a transfigured temporality that relieves us provisionally from the exigencies of perpetual transience and self-estrangement, and constitutes the ideal of satisfaction. This ideal is thus defined as the privilege of imagination, a position that will have consequences for Sartre’s view of the artistic world as the exclusive realm of satisfaction, the telos of human strivings.
I will not argue that Sartre’s doctrine of desire is derived solely from Hegel and his French commentators, nor will I attempt to prove that Sartre self-consciously sought to extend the tradition we have been following here. However, we can see that Sartre’s dualism of in-itself and for-itself is Hegel’s logic in modern dissolution,16 and that his assertion of the internal non-coincidence of human beings reflects both the phraseology and meaning of Hegel’s French explicateurs. Sartre’s contention in Being and Nothingness that “man is the desire to be” (BN 565) echoes Hyppolite’s earlier claim that “the vocation of man (is) to make himself be.… We should recall that this being is… the being of desire” (GS 167). Rather than assert a relation of influence between authors—although Sartre apparently attended Kojève’s lectures—I restrict myself to a consideration of how the ideal of an absolute synthesis of self and world is taken up by Sartre in his understanding of desire. Accordingly, I will examine once again the role and extent of negation as the principle of desire, and the paradox of determinate freedom which characterized the corporeal pursuit of the absolute. Extending the rift between substance and subject, Sartre can be seen to enhance the powers of the negative—desire comes to be seen as a choice, a judgment, and a project of transfiguration. Desire is always and only resolved in the imaginary, a Sartrian truth which conditions the various projects of desire throughout mundane life, in sexuality, and in the creation of literary works.
Sartre’s ontological dualism of for-itself and in-itself can be seen as a reformulation of the paradox of determinate freedom, the perpetual self-estrangement of the subject which makes the ideal of self-sufficiency or final satisfaction into an impossibility. “Desire is the being of human reality” (BN 575) for Sartre, but it is desire governed by possibilities rather than actualities. The “desire to be” that characterized the impossible project of the for-itself is the desire to become the foundation of its own being—reflexive and anthropogenetic desire. Yet the factic aspect of existence, particularly the body, cannot be wholly self-created; it is simply given and, in Sartre’s view; this givenness or externality is adverse to the project of the for-itself; it is from the start the guarantor of the for-itself’s failure. The synthesis of for-itself and in-itself that forms the projected goal of desire is a hypothetical unity of self and world. The synthesis is an impossibility or, rather, a permanent possibility which can never be actualized.
In Sartre’s theory of imagination and desire, this permanent possibility is what gives rise to the special character of imaginary works for Sartre: the impossibility of realizing the imaginary in the real world points to a solution that is second best, namely, the imaginative realization of this possibility in the world of the literary text. Imaginary works are so many “noble lies” which allow for the creation of transfigured worlds which remain the elusive dream of desire. Imaginary works, like images, are “essentially nothingness” (PI 18), but they are a nothingness with a determinate goal: they manifest the “desire to be” through creating an embodiment—the text—which reflects the self that is its author. The impossibility of realizing the imaginary gives rise, dialectically, to the de-realization of the world in the literary text. The imaginary provides a tentative satisfaction for desire because it effects a momentary denial of the factic; it creates its own temporality, it renders fluid the facticity of matter; it shapes contingency with the authorship of the human will.
In chapter 1, I described the Phenomenology as a fictional text, and the Hegelian subject as a trope for the hyperbolic impulse itself. Sartre makes this imaginary dimension of desire explicit, describing human desire as a constant way of authoring imaginary worlds. The pathos of Hegel’s subject remains in Sartre’s work, and the inevitable failure of every fictive journey is underscored as the vanity of all human passions. Reading Sartre against the Phenomenology and the French reception of Hegel, we can see that he has made explicit the key theme of Hegel’s narrative of the human subject—the metaphysical desire to deny difference through the construction of false and partial worlds which nevertheless appear as absolute. In Sartre’s appropriation of this insight, desire itself becomes a fiction-making endeavor, and the author of actual literary fictions becomes the privileged typologist of desire. The subject of desire does not precede or contain desire, but is manufactured through the labor of desire, articulated as an imaginary being, gaining reality only through the projection of desire onto the world. Sartre’s notion of desire can thus be seen as the result of a thoroughly dissembled doctrine of internal relations; consciousness never becomes self-consciousness, but remains ontologically estranged, overcoming this estrangement only through the momentary enchantments of desire’s imaginary satisfaction.
The Hegelian framework allowed us to see the ontological significance of desire as a twofold structure, i.e., as the movement of an identity comported outside itself in order to be itself. This comportment toward the (apparently) external domain is analogous to Sartre’s view of intentionality. The intentionality of desire characterizes the directionality of consciousness which seeks to know the world outside itself. For the most part, Sartre views the world as forever external to consciousness, an exteriority that can never be assimilated. Because the world cannot be reclaimed as a constitutive aspect of consciousness, consciousness must set up another relation to the world; it must interpret the world and imaginatively transfigure the world. Desire becomes a way in which we impulsively situate ourselves in the world: it is the primary act, an act incessantly performed by which we define ourselves in situation. In effect, desire is the building of ourselves that we perform daily, and only rarely under the aegis of reflective thought.
The cognitive component of desire—that which constitutes it as a reflexive and interpretive act of consciousness—is understood by the Sartre of Being and Nothingness as pre-reflective choice. As such, it is both an epistemological and ontological relation. As non-positional awareness, desire is an epistemological relation which encompasses more than purely reflective kinds of judgments; in effect, desire forms the intentional structure of all emotional judgments—a theme to be addressed later. As an “upsurge” of consciousness, desire reveals human being as a self-determining or choosing being, a contingency that must give itself determinate form.
For Sartre, then, desire is both a relation to exteriority and a self-relation; but in post-Hegelian style, these two relations lack mediation in a dialectical unity. Consciousness is in exile from its world, and knows itself only in and through its exclusion from the world. Accordingly, the world bends to the human will only in the imaginary mode. Confronted with the impossibility of finding itself as a being, Sartre’s existential subject is one who thematizes this very impossibility, who makes it his meditation, and ultimately derives from it a literary form. “The desire to be” is constitutive of human life, and yet the impossibility of ever “being” in a definitive sense appears as an ontological necessity; caught in the paradox of determinate freedom—of being either free or determinate but never both at once—human beings are forced to desire the impossible. And impossibility guarantees the continued life of desire, the paradoxical striving that characterizes human beings essentially.
Desire can relieve human beings of the consciousness of their own negativity—whether that be their temporality or freedom or finitude—only through magically instating a provisional presence. The incantation of presence is an imaginary venture that can only claim plausibility in an imaginary world and hence is still no absolute satisfaction for desire. This incantation can be a reciprocal creation as in the case of sexuality, or it can be a literary transfiguration of the negative, remaining in every instance a struggle against difference which can never wholly be won. Desire thus reveals our ineluctable freedom in the face of ontological exile, a freedom that necessarily attends the world but can never relinquish itself there. We can never wholly lose ourselves, but neither can we achieve that ideal of anthropogenesis that would make us pure freedoms. Sartre’s persistent claim seems to be that we interpret the world even as we live it, that all immediacy is tempered by ontological disjunction and some semblance of self-awareness. Even in the experiences in which we appear alien to ourselves, seized or overwhelmed, a pre-reflective strategy of choice is at work, a strategy that seeks to establish a determinate reality for the self so that it can be known, and, in being known, created.
For Sartre, desire is the process of creating ourselves, and insofar as we are in that process, we are in desire. Desire is not simply sexual desire, nor is it the kind of focused wanting that usually goes by that name. It is the entirety of our spontaneous selves, the “outburst” that we are, the upsurge that draws us toward the world and makes the world our object, the intentionality of the self. As the world appears as a complex historical and biographical situation, desire becomes a central way in which we seek a social place for ourselves, a way of finding and refunding a tentative identity within the network of the social world.
The theme of desire can only be fully explored for Sartre in the context of a life whose “choice of being” can be reconstructed and explained. For Sartre, biography is precisely such an inquiry. And insofar as Sartre contends that all desire finds an imaginary resolution, it makes sense to see him turn again and again to those lives that have given imaginary forms to desire. Before I examine Sartre’s appraisal of two of these lives, Genet and Flaubert, I must first recount the steps of this theory: desire and the imaginary, desire as a choice of being, desire and incantatory creation. In turning to biographical studies, Sartre implicitly asks a question with rhetorical consequences for his own life’s work, namely, what is the desire to write? “Why write?” is an extension of “why give desire determinate form?” and, in the case of fiction writers, “why give form to impossible worlds?” I asked at the outset, what makes desire possible? For Sartre, it is precisely the domain of the merely possible that conditions desire; the conditions of desire are the nonactualities of our lives, the determinate absences of the past and the merely suggested and unexplored realms of the present.