do tanto que obras há coisas que escapam
(o mais na verdade) metidas nos nervos, por entre
as soqueiras, nos seres que se esganam, que cravam,
que pilham, e tu, que o sabes, não galgas o dia, e luz-te
uma cor destroçada, quebrada, ou clara
pra não poderes ver: à sombra da qual noite fora
tu cavas e traças e plantas na terra
e não hás-de comer. mas sabes pra quem?
pra quem é que colhes, pra quem é que tremes,
quem há-de roer? vermelha é a terra, vermelho
é o som, que moldas que fundes, mas sim, sem saber,
se espalha e desliza, raiz ou um fungo que raia
e desmaias ao veres onde vai e saberes que não chega
onde hás-de parar. então não desistes? não furas
a mão, não largas quem espreme a terra que afunda,
o pão que de tanto correr e de tanto comer e de tanto
quebrar fica duro, e já se não deixa sagrar?

Hegel, Kojève, and the Irruption of History in a Colonial World

On Tyranny (1948) is a text that purports to be a series of back-and-forth commentaries on Xenophon's Hiero between Alexander Kojève (1902-1968) and Leo Strauss (1899-1973) apropos the idea of Power and of Wisdom. While Strauss is concerned with the fact that philosophers might be risking their lives to emperiled rulers if they claim to hold absolute wisdom, and so tries to build a political philosophy of deception and irony, Kojève reflects on what the political consequences might be if Absolute wisdom does exist in the world and can be attained by a human community.

This is a vaguely Hegelian conundrum, and in fact something that's operative throughout is the Hegelian stand that recognition (pushed to an extreme in his Lectures on Hegel) is not only a democratic position for egalitarianism as the only stand that can enable universal recognition, but also the position that enables a global participation in wisdom. In other words, universal recognition means that, once you've reached a uniform stand of human dignity (a "world empire", as he calls it), where no aristocratic notions of difference are valid, then all you're left, after the task of emancipation is done, is "the administration of things".

This connects to a short book of his called The Notion of Authority, which is supposed to be a sort of structuralist approach to Authority. There he states that authority is always one of four types, or combinations thereof: That of the Leader (someone who has a plan for the future and appears as one who will bring the community in a specific direction), that of the Master (someone who exerts power in the now, through the state apparatus); that of the Judge (who judges by taking into account trans-temporal or even eternal laws or principles), and that of the Father (standing for the traditional authority of the past reaching into the present).

He goes on to say that the specific feature of Modernity is to reject the authority of the Father as a valid basis for authority. The collapse of the patriarchal idea of authority led to the removal of the concept of History and "Past" from the sphere of politics. This creates an unsolvable tension, inasmuch as it removed the possibility of solving conflict (and specifically class conflict) through the apppeal to an idea of a shared community reaching back into the ancestral past.

In other words, if we have no shared past, then all we have is the present state of affairs in its brutality (Master), enforced by the state and its violence, where every political project (Leader) is unmasked as the political project not of the whole community but only as that of a specific segment, and the universal law (Judge) appearing as a constant light shining on the disparity between the professed ideals of liberalism and the brutal reality (its only role, now that the philosophical foundations of Common Law and of Precedent, being based on History, have been wrecked). In conclusion, the collapse of History makes class struggle the only possible resolution of conflict, if a specific class should become a class unto itself and set forth a revolutionary praxis (Leader) to fight the current state of affairs (Master) in order to achieve the promise of universal Law (Judge).

I think that's a fair conclusion and a way to spin him against the reactionary metabolism of End-of-History closed circuits, but there's something else we might add. There is a tension inherent in the end of patriarchal authority and the present state of affairs which makes the present situation even more unstable. Modernity collapsed the idea of inherited power, and then proceeded to freeze things in time as they were at that particular instant in History. This is the wide-ranging project of the Bourgeoisie in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, and one of the ways Hegel was right in talking about the End of History. He was right, if we assume the point of view of the bourgeoisie, because the plan of the bourgeoisie was precisely to ommit the intrinsically historical reasons through which it was able to turn itself into the universal subject.

These are, of course and above all, primitive accumulation through slavery, enclosures, expropriations, witch-hunts, colonialism etc. The place of the bourgeoisie is historical inasmuch as it freezes in time a specific moment of world history, that of European and Western Modernity and its hegemony. As soon as the bourgeoisie is in /through/ History, it tries to close the door behind itself /to/ History and proclaim its own atemporal universality. Of course this is nonsense and totally unfeasible. It brings to mind the postwar consensus around nuclear weapons: As if the world would tolerate forever that (say) Britain would forever have access to nukes while Brazil or Iran wouldn't.

When you understand that, you also understand that the authority of the patriarchs that granted you this power (the Founding Fathers, the slave-traders, the colonial viceroys) /still holds/, it is still operative, and it is through it that you get to be where you are, specifically in what concerns the racial and international division of labour (but also in the sexual division of labour, through a lenghtier argument that would question the real assumption of women as universal subjects under capitalism). The sustenance of the stable end-state of the Last Man is assured only through the shrugging off of the way the Global North is sustained by a constant actualization of History in its bad infinity, as it is sustained by a vibrant neo-colonialism generating Western economic dominance. This imperial dominance in turn allows for the distribution of spoils that can ensure the labour-aristocratic way of life that's common to the (colonizing) populations of the West on the backs of both internal and external colonies, whose very existente as colonies is decreed by historical defeats, just like Hegel mentioned in the Phenomenology.

From here we conclude what was obvious anyway: that if the abolition of patriarchal authority was a complete farce, then what remains is yet another gap in the construction of the universal state, the end of History, and the "administration of things" above and beyond class struggle. The historical defeat of the conscience as portrayed in the master-slave dialectic was not yet completed, in fact it is far from completed. The way Hegel framed it was as if one had defeated the other and that they had turned, respectively, into master and slave, and that through a pattern of recognition the slave would have emancipated him or herself and would have made the previous master irrelevant.

What is missing is the fact that the master is still there, and he still holds the whip and the gunboat, the debt and the interest. If you want to complete the dialectic you have to enter into a logic of mutual recognition and reciprocity, yes, but you still have to defeat the master before you do that. We're back to class struggle (especially from an anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-racist point of view, though not exclusively that), from where we'd never left.

Karl Marx

Quin Augusti aetas huic dissimilis sit, nemo dubitare potest, nam ejus imperium clementia insigne est, cum Romani, quamvis omnis libertas, omnis etiam libertatis species evanuerat, jussis principis instituta legesque mutare valentibus omnibusque honoribus, quos prius tribuni plebis, censores, consules habuerant, tum ab uno viro occupatis, tamen putarent, se regnare, imperatorem tantum aliud nomen dignitatibus, quas prius tribuni aut consules tenuissent, neque libertatem sibi dereptam viderent. Hoc vero magnum clementiae argumentum, si cives dubitare possunt, quis princeps sit, an ipsi regnent, an regnentur.

Karl Marx (1835). Examinatio Maturitatis. Trad minha.

Ninguém poderia duvidar que a época de Augusto tenha sido bastante diferente desta [sc da do Neto], já que, nessa época, o poder torna-se famoso pela sua clemência. É verdade que toda a liberdade, aliás toda a aparência de liberdade desapareceu, que todas as instituições e leis podiam ser alteradas pela vontade do soberano, que aparece como um só homem dotado de todos os cargos que previamente tinham sido ocupados pelos tribunos da plebe, pelos censores, ou pelos cônsules. Contudo, os Romanos podiam julgar que eram eles quem mandava, e que a palavra 'imperador' não passava de uma forma de nomear aquelas honras que antes calhavam aos tribunos ou aos cônsules, sem com isso verem que a liberdade lhes tinha sido arrancada. Este é o maior argumento em favor da clemência, se os cidadãos podem estar em dúvida sobre quem é que é o soberano, sobre se eles próprios mandam ou se mandam neles.