The
21st Century Belongs to the KGB
by Chris Fujiwara
Feed Magazine
J A N U A R Y 1 3, 2 0 0 0
A FEW MONTHS ago, the French secret service discovered that the philosopher Alexandre Kojčve had served as a KGB agent for 30 years. Before this discovery, Kojčve was best known for his landmark seminar on Hegel in the '30s, widely regarded as the locus classicus of much postmodernist thought. His vision of the end of history has become so familiar, if only as a watered-down catchphrase, that people who've never cracked the spine of Hegel or Marx accept that they live at the end of all eras. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama, author of the famous 1989 essay "The End of History?" and the leading American exponent of Kojčve, personally worked to help end history from his post in the US State Department. Who would have thought that the unmasking of an abstruse theorist as a Soviet spook would close the ideological gap between the Bush Administration and the Evil Empire? Is it possible that the world at the beginning of the 21st century owes its ideological and geopolitical shape to the intellectual underpinnings of the KGB?
Kojčve was born to a bourgeois family in Moscow in 1902, but left Russia in 1920 and eventually found his second home in Paris. There, every Monday night from January 1933 to May 1939, at the École pratique des Hautes Études, Kojčve enthralled listeners with his seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. His lecture hall was packed with such future luminaries as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Pierre Klossowski, and Emmanuel Lévinas. According to Kojčve, the desire for recognition -- that is, everyone's need to define and exalt himself in the eyes of another -- makes conflict and bloodshed necessary, and terror is authorized in establishing the "universal and homogeneous state" with which history concludes.
In view of these extreme assertions, it's not surprising that Kojčve, the self-proclaimed "conscience" of Stalin, was an agent for the KGB. But he couldn't have been a typical one. He believed that the United States was a fully achieved version of a Marxist classless society and thought of the Chinese and Russians as poorer Americans who would eventually catch up with their wealthier comrades. By making such statements, was Kojčve setting a trap for a certain kind of American thinker? After all, Fukuyama officially lauded today's New World Order along Kojčvian lines. The least that can be said about a conservative American intellectual enchanted by a worldview he imbibed from a Soviet agent is that he embodies a certain historical irony.
And yet Kojčve's prescience may have gone further still. Unlike Fukuyama, for whom communism was a competing ideology whose defeat by liberal democracy spelled history's end, Kojčve insisted that the Soviet Union and the United States were effectively the same. Might he not have foreseen, and even tried to prepare the way for, the liberalization of Russia? Indeed, there have been recent indications that a KGB pedigree actually improves the résumés of world leaders. On Meet the Press, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin defended the new Russian president's 15 years in the agency: "Mr. Putin worked in the West. That's a very positive point... The people in the KGB, in some way, prepared perestroika...." Admittedly, this is all rather counterintuitive: The KGB lay the groundwork for perestroika, and a high-profile KGB agent smoothed the path for the New World Order? Perhaps not. But if a long stretch with the Soviet secret service is now considered good preparation for administering the world, maybe history really is over.
© Copyright 2000 by Chris Fujiwara