Hegel Dust
4 comments
·July 21, 2025bm3719
Avicebron
> Kojève called this “giving colonialism.”
rough night? He's talking about what we would call "soft power" today. But yeah, we can also do research and hoard commodities, they probably aren't mutually exclusive.
klooney
> La Vache qui rit, which you know as the Laughing Cow, the individually wrapped wedges of spreadable cheese from your childhood. Founded in 1921 by a French veteran of the First World War, the company’s name is based on a pun on Wagner’s Valkyries and an anti-German slur.
Can someone explain the slur to an English speaker?
mijoharas
So, I was confused by this, looked it up a bit, and essentially think this is incorrect.
The name "La Vache qui rit" is a pun, and comes from the name of a meat wagon in the war that was called "La Wachkyrie". It was mocking the German propensity to name things after Valkyrie's etc.
I think it's incorrect to describe it as a slur however and think the author misspoke.
In addition, I am very confused about this section of the article. At first I thought the article was saying that the subject Kojeve was the creator of the laughing cow and that was the connection. As it is, that doesn't seem to be the case, and I don't understand the relevance of this aside at all?
Can someone explain it to me?
EDIT reread that section and Kojeve invested all his money in the company. I was waiting for it to reoccur in the main text and forgot the details.
Interesting that Kojève and Bataille were pals. Might be relevant to the following:
> In “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” Kojève argued that the industrial nations of Europe should give financial aid to the “underdeveloped countries” that were their current or former colonies. Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and Bataille’s theory of expenditure, Kojève called this “giving colonialism.”
Bataille did suggest this in his book The Accursed Share, specifically that the US should give all its excess wealth to India "without reciprocation". He posits that energy (wealth) that isn't used for maintenance or growth can only be wasted on war or luxuries like monuments, calling that wealth the book's namesake.
What he misses is that there are other options, like investing in research which can open up new avenues for growth, or hoarding commodities (thereby storing the wealth) like China is doing with rare earths. Whether either of those (or other options) is a good idea is a separate question, of course.
This is just a personal take, but I consider this in conflict with (my interpretation of) Bataille's famous essay, The Solar Anus. Perhaps if he was able to conceive of the above, that wouldn't be the case.