The Discarded Master

In Hegel’s dialectic between master and servant (Herr and Knecht), there comes a moment when the master’s revelry in his power becomes undone. It is the servant who, in mastering in turn their control over objects, becomes the true hero of the Phenomonology, of World History. One open question, at least from Kojeve’s highly concretised reading: what is to become of the Master, left instead to consume the remnants of what the servant has left him, as the servant moves on to their higher calling? What does world history do with its discarded Masters?

“We borrow from Chinese peasants in order to purchase what they produce”. An extension of a hillbilly’s elegy, Vance’s racism coils around the recognisation of a self-abasement, rage emanating from a ground source of bottomless despair. Racism or fentanyl: both supplied in turn by the threat from outside, but more profoundly motivated by the collapse of purpose that was always the Master’s fate, as he became complacent and as the Servant did what the Master bid: producing rubber toys or semiconductors. The solution: to turn the Master into the Servant once more, a Servant to oneself, or more correctly, to re-nationalise the dialectic along familiar delineations of class and other struggles. It is as though having invited the Other to play the role of servant in a street game of global capitalism, there comes the moment when twilight draws near, the servant has gotten used to the game, is in fact winning, that the originary little Master decides to back up his bat and ball and return home. To tell long stories of the traumatic events of the day to – who exactly? – some imaginary father and mother, a transfigured Oedipal conflict where these roles are in fact some most likely some concoction of a “public” and a “media”.