The “End of History” and the Renegotiation of the Subject.

With the deafening thunder of Napoleon’s canons filling the air at Jena, the romantic story goes that a middle-aged university professor and …

Kojève, Herder, and the “End of History”

—– I have not reas Kojeve or Herder, so the following goes off of only
Heaiods essay.

What we are seeing, what we are involve with, is the realization of what the human being is. The end of history as either a “happy” or “united” end is less the significant point than it marks or identifies a oarticular Kind of human being, one that sees itself in the context of either a “whole” of creatures that we call human, or one that understands that “human” defines a particular subset of this whole as to what is included and excluded in this “people” group.

Yes. The end of history may be about consumerism, but only in so much as there is an ideal effort which sees the whole through the exclusion. That is, “the whole” is allowed to be consumers, but it is only really about those who are indeed able to participate as this implied consumer. It is really only the people who do indeed prosper who are included in this ‘whole’. The rest are, by linguistic default, ‘not people’, they are something else that is excluded by the category itself, similar to trash that we deny by our consumerism. Think of recycling.

This secret ideological “ol’ in out, in out, know what I mean, know wheat I mean” motion of language is generally invisible to those people who are invested in the ‘truth’ of the linguistic category (think capitalism). The use of the idioms contained in every expression work to hide the ‘actual’ discursive functioning and reference which supports and justifies the user (subjectivity). Yet, it is not “those people” as much as it is indeed, ironically, all people who are included.

Hence, what we are really seeing now, what we are involve with, is the transition between ethical paradigms in how we deal with the whole through the part, and not so much how we include everyone or what that means. It is the investment of language “of the whole” which understands a modern perpetual ‘end’ in the various ways that we have seen argued over the past 200 years. We are seeing a renegotiation of the subject.

For, the more thoroughly we are invested in the topical use of language, the more we speak to ideology and its power to orient and fixate the subject in the world. Therefore, it is not so much “the content” of discourse that is significant to philosophy, as much as the significance lay and how we are oriented upon discourse and what it does. And this is to say that where the subject is not centered by ideology, but only uses ideology for its own subjective teleology, there we find the subject in a relationship of integrity with itself, for then it takes responsibility for the ideology which comes about through its own purpose. 

It is only there that we stumble upon the irony which traverse is the modern use of language to thereby be able to enact ones world consistently with ones form, for now we see that the very term that we understand as agency, the very power and force through which ideology subjects human beings, is just another enforcer of ideological placement by which the individual faces the paradox of choice.

For ultimately there is no choice to be made at every point, but only one choice which begins at every moment we use language.  Yet less how will we use language, and more what is informing that use.

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