‘Negativity without use’: death, desire and recognition in the work of G. Bataille and A. Kojève

Abstract

ABSTRACT Georges Bataille was a regular attendee in Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel between 1933 and 1939. Bataille developed a lifelong friendship with the Russian philosopher, with whom he corresponded, and whose numerous unpublished drafts came to his possession after Kojève’s death. Initially, Bataille accepts the Kojèvian starting point of humanity and history, as desire and discourse, action and negativity, a vision which culminates in the apocalyptic end of history. However, progressively, Bataille comes to question the identification of negativity with human history or historical action. Bataille speaks of a ‘negativity without use’; an excess of negativity and death which does not disappear after history has ended. Grappling with Kojève’s suffocating vision of the end of history, Bataille emerges as a profound thinker who attempts to make sense of the post-historical and post-human horizon, and the return to animality, where there is neither desire, nor action and there is ‘nothing else to do’. In this eclipse of sense and historical action, the only endeavours available to humanity seem to be art, death, eroticism and play. Thus, for Bataille, the end of history is an exclusively human condition, in which humanity is brought resolutely to confront its own negative excess.