Five-year plan of philosophy

stalinism after Kojève, Hegel after stalinism

Siarhei Biareishyk

pp. 243-258

in: David Bakhurst, Ilja Kliger (eds), Hegel in Russia, Studies in East European Thought 65, 2013.

Abstract

The aporia inherent in Kojève's discussion of the end of history stems from the temporality implicit in the moment of inscribing the end of history in philosophy. Hegel's Phenomenology as the unfolding of absolute knowledge stands at the last moment in history, without necessarily constituting its end. Reading the post-NEP (New Economic Policy) Soviet ideology through Kojève demonstrates that the doctrine of "socialism in one country" similarly situates itself outside historical time as history's last moment, marked by the coincidence of being and concept, the disappearance of negation, and classless society without an historical agent. In the reconceptualization of labor in Stalinist ideology as a temporalization of being without negation, the representation of time in five-year plans radically reinvents temporality as a suspension of history in the perpetual deferral of its end. Going beyond Kojève, the immanent logic of temporality of five-year plans enables a non-teleological reading of Hegelian philosophy with regard to the status of its method and the function of the end of history.

Cited authors

Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Kojève Alexandre