Alexandre Kojève: Production of the Spirit - Journal #134 March 2023 - e-flux
Issue #134
March 2023
1.
Let us ask: Why do people work?
In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève explains the origin of work by referring to the initial battle scene in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind. According to Hegel’s description, two self-consciousnesses fight each other—and one of them wins. The other self-consciousness then has two choices: (1) to die, or (2) to work to satisfy the winner’s desires.1 Thus, we see two types of humans emerge: masters and slaves. Hegel’s masters would rather die than work for others, while slaves accept their fate and work for others until death. If we follow Hegel down this path, it means none of us ever work to satisfy our own desires. Our desires and needs are satisfied by aggression, violence, and dominance—not by work. Workers—slaves in Hegel’s dichotomy—suppress their own desires to satisfy those of the masters.
That is why, in Kojève’s reading of Hegel, only the workers are truly human. The masters remain animals; their behavior is determined by “natural” desires such as hunger or sexual desire. By contrast, workers are denaturalized, alienated. Kojève writes:
Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being … Therefore, it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is “incarnated spirit,” he is “historical” World, he is the “objectivized” History. Work then is what “forms-or-educates” man beyond animal. The formed or educated man is the completed man.2
Work, as well as education, are specific, secular forms of ascesis. Through work, the slave/worker suppresses their own nature—and, thus, forms it. One ceases to be an animal by suspending one’s own natural desires. This reduction of animal desires, Kojève explains, makes humans “supranatural,” “spiritual” beings. In the “natural” world, humans are subjected to their base instincts. But workers become masters over nature, including their own nature, in the new, technical world transformed by their work.
Wassily Kandinsky, Three Elements, 1925. The painting belonged to Kojève and later to his widow Nina. License: Public Domain.
The embodied “spirit” of which Kojève speaks should not be confused with the soul, with identity, self, subjectivity, and so on. In other words, spirit is not something that precedes incarnation. Incarnation is not an act of creativity that makes visible something previously “hidden” inside the human body. For Kojève, the driving forces inside the human body are always the same natural needs and desires that operate within all other animal bodies. A specifically human body is artificially produced by means of some external pressure—be it work or education—that suppresses innate needs and desires. Throughout history and the present, when confronted with an ascetic body—with an ascetic lifestyle—we often speak about a manifestation of the spirit. In this sense, the production of spiritualized bodies through ascetic practice precedes the phenomenology of the spirit. Christian and Buddhist monks turn their bodies into spiritualized bodies through ascetic practices. They suppress their animal desires by working in the service of a particular divine principle. Since modernity, the working class has practiced secular ascesis. Even if this ascesis is a result of external social and political oppression and exploitation, it turns the working class into a spiritualized, “chosen,” universal class. Under the conditions of modernity, this spiritualized dimension of the working class manifests itself as art. Art demonstrates that the utilitarian function of every kind of work, including industrial work, is merely accidental. The essential function of work is the production of the ascetic, spiritualized bodies of the working class.
2.
For Kojève, an artist is a worker who produces autonomous, artificial objects. To become truly autonomous, an artwork must radically reduce any desire for representation that connects art to all other animal, natural desires and needs. In his 1936 essay “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” Kojève claims that (his uncle) Kandinsky’s artworks operate by ascesis and the reduction of everything natural. Kandinsky’s works are not abstract, but concrete—as autonomous and concrete as any other natural thing. However, these artworks are not products of “natural creativity,” but rather of an unnatural “spiritual negativity.” They reduce all representation and, thus, all objects of natural desire. The bodies of these artworks are spiritualized bodies. Or, if you will, Kandinsky’s works are negativity incarnate, spirit incarnate.