Kojève and Photography: The Visualization of Logos

Photograph taken by Alexandre Kojève during his travels through Japan in 1959. Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France. © Nina Kousnetzoff.

During his time as a peripatetic bureaucrat dealing with the problems of international trade, Alexandre Kojève collected postcards of historical monuments and works of art; at the same time, he took up the practice of photography. Kojève produced around five thousand photographs, and he collected many thousands of postcards. Both his photographs and his collection of the postcards can be found in his archive in the Bibliothèque Nationale Française in Paris. Kojève’s photographs are beautiful, and he seems to have been aware of that. He did not print them—every one of his photographs remained in his collection as a unique slide, a unique artwork.

For his photographs, Kojève adopted the anonymous and highly conventional style of the thousands of postcards he collected. One could say that Kojève photographed photography itself by appropriating this commercial aesthetic. Kojève’s photography celebrates the disappearance of the subject in the neutrality, anonymity and objectivity of the camera’s gaze. One can see here a parallel to Andy Warhol’s paintings or the early photographs by Richard Prince that practice the same neutral, emotionless repetition of images of American mass culture. At first glance, Kojève seems to repeat not the mass culture of his time but the monuments of a glorious European historical past. But Kojève repeats that glorious past in the style of mass-produced postcards. This use of a neutral, ordinary photographic style is especially noticeable in comparison to those postcards in Kojève’s collection that represent historical artworks. This part of the postcard collection demonstrates Kojève’s characteristically modernist taste. The twentieth century is represented mostly by Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and other leading modernist painters.

Kojève put all his postcards in boxes and arranged them in a way that reflected the travels he undertook in his function as a political dignitary during the years 1959–68, mostly in Europe and Asia. In the boxes that contained his postcards, Kojève also placed self-made cards—the same size as the postcards—on which he traced the itineraries of the travels during which he had collected postcards and taken photographs. In general, one can argue that the art collection not only presents images for our gaze but also demonstrates the framing of their presentation—the mode in which the gaze of the spectator is determined, oriented, and manipulated by the collector. The collection is not merely selective; it exhibits its own selectivity. The collection exhibits itself before it exhibits anything else. A worldview is a technologically created illusion—but Kojève’s collection and its arrangement show precisely how this illusion is produced and presented.

The artistic practice and discourse of post-histoire and postmodernity had photography as their main point of reference. The reproductive, non-original character of photography made it the leading medium of our time. In contemporary society, photography is produced continuously and ubiquitously. Not everybody is a painter, and not everybody is painted. But every observer of a photograph is, at least potentially, a photographer or a photographic model. Everybody who looks at a photograph finds it easy to identify with the photographer’s strategies of self-dramatization, self-concealment, narcissism, or voyeurism. Moreover, photography, unlike painting, never pretends to express the hidden essence of things but, rather, remains on their surface—depicting all of them, including human beings, as empty forms.

This emptiness is well thematized by a short article by Siegfried Kracauer from 1927 entitled “Die Photographie,” which eloquently describes what can be called the photographic condition.1 As an example, Kracauer refers to a photograph of his grandmother, that is, a private photograph, a photograph of sentimental value, and he observes that this photograph does not bring back memories of his grandmother as it should, but blocks them. His grandmother as a person, as an individual, as an inner being is not disclosed in the photograph; instead, only her outward appearance is visible, which, however, because of the fashion of the times—that is, the clothes and make-up—seems impersonal and deindividualized. Kracauer writes:

We are contained in nothing and photography collects fragments around this nothing. When my grandmother stood in front of the lens, she was present for a second in the spatial continuum offering itself to the lens. Yet instead of my grandmother, this aspect is immortalized. Not the person stands out in the photograph, but the sum of what is to be subtracted from her. It destroys the person by portraying her, and if she were to coincide with it, she would not exist.2

For Kracauer, every photograph is merely, as he says, a general inventory of diverse fragments or details that lacks, however, an inner unity. Such a unity can arise only on the level of that which is meant, its sense and meaning, and yet this sense and its meaning cannot, by definition, be photographed. As a consequence, photography, for Kracauer, is mere refuse, a phantom and a sign of death: instead of vanquishing death, photography kills, for it captures only the body and negates the soul.

Kracauer retains loving memories of his communications with his grandmother. But these memories—being familial memories—cannot be found in the photographic image that is made for the external, nonfamilial world. In this photograph, Kracauer’s grandmother became an émigré. And the grandmother knew that from the beginning. Her mode of appearance in the photograph was obviously chosen by her with the goal of looking good and dignified. Kracauer’s grandmother was not merely a passive object in front of the camera but an active presenter of her own image to the gaze of the photographer and, thus, more generally to the gaze of others in a search for recognition. Through this act of self-presentation, she revealed her inner world—that is why, as Kracauer writes, nothing of her has remained beyond what can be seen in the photograph. This “beyond” was her relation to her relatives but, by accepting to be photographed, she stepped out of the familial context—and into the foreign world.

She manifested her desire to be recognized by this world precisely through her choice of makeup and clothes. Kracauer could not remember his grandmother through the photograph because he had seen her earlier in a loving familial context. And, thus, he failed to see her body, her face, her way of presenting herself outside of this context. The act and the effort of self-exposure beyond the familial circle, beyond the native environment, require an act of discommunication, a break with one’s own original milieu, an emigration out of it. When Kracauer writes that in the photographs of his grandmother he could recognize only the fashion of her time and not her subjectivity, he overlooks the fact that our subjectivity is nothing other than our ability to follow the fashion that defines our “here and now”—or to break with it. We follow—or do not follow—fashion not blindly and instinctively but, rather, in a conscious and informed way. We want to be contemporary and we want to be recognized by a certain international cultural milieu—and our strategy of following a certain fashion reflects this desire. The correlation between the act of being photographed and the readiness of the model for this act is well captured by Friedrich Jünger:

The photographic process could be invented only after man had become psychologically ready to be photographed. The new invention, in other words, signifies a change of mind. It was in the degree that the human model adapted itself to portrayal by photography that the new techniques developed.3

And the adaptation to photography is nothing other than an inner readiness for risk—if not of one’s life then at least of one’s familiar self-image—in the struggle for recognition beyond the familial, native cultural context.

Often enough, photographers try to escape the situations in which their models are aware of being photographed and in which they take poses they believe to be more advantageous to them. As a rule, photography tries to catch a unique moment of life, to eternalize the fleeting here and now with the click of a camera. But Kojève totally ignores photography’s ability to stop the flow of time. Instead, he photographs only monuments that already represent arrested, immobilized time. His goal is to collect the images of the past that have survived the end of history and can still evoke “historical spirits.” Kojève’s photographs manifest and confirm his faithfulness to the event of history—in the middle of post-historical reality. In this respect, Kojève makes no exception for his beloved France and his native Russia. The Soviet Union that Kojève had visited in the 1950s and ’60s looked very different from the Russia that he had left in 1919. Nevertheless, Kojève does not let himself be fascinated by the new Soviet reality. Instead, he obstinately photographs old Russian churches. Looking at these images, one could wonder in which century they were taken. Thus, Kojève indicates—by his photographic strategy—that Soviet socialism is, for him, merely another version of the same mode of existence in the post-histoire that is characteristic of the states of the West. What in Russian territory has remained from history is only the Russian Orthodox tradition.

One can argue that Kojève’s photographic work is a continuation of his philosophy by other means. Indeed, it is an attempt to produce an image of the world in its post-historical condition. The photographs that Kojève made during his travels reflect his administrative view of the world combined with a certain post-historical melancholy. Indeed, photographic practice has a lot in common with administrative work. In an earlier period, painters produced images through the immediate involvement of their bodies. Thus, the painter remained basically a manual worker. But photographers are not manual workers. Rather, they do everything that an administrator does. They select, choose a standpoint, collect or discard. Their gaze is a sovereign gaze. This gaze does not produce images but orders and places them. The same can be said about the curator of a collection, whose role is to order the collection. Kojève functions here as a curator of his private collection—a collection that has the goal of presenting the entire world.

In one of her essays in On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag writes: “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”4 As an example, she cites a parody of such a total collection of the world in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Les Carabiniers (1963), in which two poor chaps, Ulysses and Michelangelo, go to war with the goal of capturing the world. They later come home with bags full of postcards, saying to their wives, Venus and Cleopatra, that these postcards are proof that they have indeed conquered the world. Photography is analogous to language because it seems to be a medium for appropriating reality—acquiring knowledge and power. Of course, this appropriation is an illusion, but it is the illusion that defines modern and contemporary culture. Discussing the question of the relationship of photography to art, Sontag writes:

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art—it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure—photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris.5

Photography is a kind of language because everything in the word can be photographed—just like everything can be said. As Sontag writes, “The most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”6  This assessment is even more accurate today, in the era of Facebook and Instagram.

In fact, Kojève no less than Mallarmé believed that everything that exists should and will end up in a book—and, actually, had already ended up in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Thus he writes that after the end of history, the action of the sage separates itself from human beings and enters the book. The world, including human beings, becomes a thing of the past. And he continues:

The material carrier of the perpetual movement of the Notion becomes the Book that is called the Logic: this book (“Bible”) is the incarnation of the eternal Logos. Thus, the Sage does not act as a human. But the Sage does not act in this way only because the human cannot act any more at the moment at which Wisdom became possible.7

Insofar as a philosopher continues to live in history, they do not have to understand reality but, as Marx says, transform it. However, after the end of history has been reached, the attitude of the sage becomes contemplative. But the sage does not contemplate the world to understand it because, at that moment, the world has been already understood. Instead, the sage reads a book—Hegel’s Science of Logic, the post-philosophical bible—and follows the circular, dialectical movement of its concepts.

Here Kojève professes his faith in the book—together with the conviction that the world has already emigrated into a book. However, being an acute observer of his time, Kojève could not miss the ubiquity of photography as a new way of communication that partially extended and partially substituted itself for language. As photographed, the real world became immobilized and turned itself into an illustration and extension of Hegelian philosophy—an empty form that should be kept and cherished. Choosing between reality and language, Kojève always chose language—simply because he did not believe that reality could escape language. And thus he did not believe that reality could escape photography either.

However, Kojève collected not images of the world but art images—as slides or postcards. In this sense, his collection was a part of what André Malraux called a Museum without Walls (Le musée imaginaire). Malraux speaks about color photography as a medium in which different kinds of visual art can be equally represented—be it painting, sculpture, architecture, stained glass, tapestry, mosaics, or murals. In this sense, photography is the lingua franca of art—and, especially, it is such for ordinary people who are unable to visit the places where the originals are exhibited. Postcards, albums, and book illustrations can be seen as parts of an open museum for the masses that potentially brings art to everyone. In this sense, Malraux’s Museum without Walls can be seen as a precursor of Instagram and, more generally, art on the internet. However, Malraux points out that the medium of photography as it is used in postcards and illustrations changes the reception of art insofar as it presents all artworks in a similar frame—so that a small drawing looks as if it is the same size as a big statue. This normalized frame makes artworks comparable that would not be easily comparable in reality.8 Kojève uses the medium of photography precisely as a common denominator for the art of different epochs and countries. In this sense, Kojève’s photographs and collection of postcards reflect the post-historical administration of historical memory. In the context of his photographic work, Kojève continues the strategy of original non-originality that he had already pursued in presenting his own philosophical discourse as a mere repetition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. And one should not forget that, according to Kojève, Hegel’s philosophy itself is a repetition of the real historical movement of the masses, who—through war and work—created the space in which this philosophy became possible. Thus it is not surprising that, on the visual level, the recollection of this movement is presented through a mass medium.

This is an excerpt from Boris Groys’s Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography, out now from Verso.