One of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.
One of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.
Alexandre Koj_ve offers a systematic discussion of key themes such as right, justice, law, equality, and autonomy in which he presages our contemporary world of economic globalization and international law. Edited and translated (with Robert Howse) by Bryan-Paul Frost, this is the authoritative English language translation of a monumental work in political philosophy.
A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojève’s text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty? Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojève’s life and writings.
In The Notion of Authority, written in the 1940s in Nazi-occupied France, Alexandre Kojève uncovers the conceptual premises of four primary models of authority, examining the practical application of their derivative variations from the Enlightenment to Vichy France. This foundational text, translated here into English for the first time, is the missing piece in any discussion of sovereignty and political authority, worthy of a place alongside the work of Weber, Arendt, Schmitt, Agamben or Dumézil. The Notion of Authority is a short and sophisticated introduction to Kojève's philosophy of right. It captures its author's intellectual interests at a time when he was retiring from the career of a professional philosopher and was about to become one of the pioneers of the Common Market and the idea of the European Union.
Immanuel Kant's philosophical system, Kojève argues, is haunted by the Thing-in-itself as the ultimate expression of 'bourgeois hypocrisy' and its internally divided reason, split between action and discourse. Making a case for the post-historical moral imperative to turn away from infinite progress and the practical justification of the ideas of God and the immortality of the soul, Kant outlines the material conditions of possibility for revolutionary action within the twin horizons of accomplished and recollected history.
The original text of this work was published in the French journal Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses. This English translation presents Kojève’s attempt to unify the religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov into a metaphysical system that Solovyov strived for but was never able to fully articulate in his lifetime.
Alexandre Koj?ve soll 1967 in Westberlin, wo er auf seinem Weg von Peking nach Plettenberg einen Zwischenstopp eingelegt hatte, den revoltierenden Studenten auf die Frage "Was tun?" geantwortet haben, sie sollen Griechisch lernen. So will es die Legende. Doch Legenden, und zunächst als solche fris?tet Koj?ve sein dürftiges Nachleben in Deutschland, neigen seit alters dazu, zu verblassen. Hier hilft nur Text: Etwa jene Fußnote, die in der deutschen Ausgabe der Hegeleinführung fehlt. Nachgeliefert wird sie von dem unver?gesslichen Jacob Taubes in seinem Aufsatz "Ästhetisierung der Wahrheit im Posthistoire". Sie stellt ein weiteres Mal die Frage, was aus dem sogenannten Menschen wird am Ende der Geschichte, ein Tier oder womöglich doch ein Snob. Bereits in den 50er Jahren hatte Koj?ve in zwei Rezensionen für "Critique" gemutmaßt, welche Wesen eine kommende Gemeinschaft bevöl?kern könnten: untätige Gauner (le voyou desoeuvr?) und junge Mädchen (la jeune fille). Bataille war erwartungsgemäß entsetzt. Seine "arbeitslose Negati?vität" wollte sich den "Sonntag des Lebens" bekanntlich auf heiligere Weise vertreiben. Koj?ve behält das letzte Wort: In einem Interview, das Gilles Lapouge für die "Quinzaine litt?raire" mit dem Philosophen und Staatsbeam?ten führte. Es erschien im Juli 1968 postum; Koj?ve war am 4. Juni während eines Vortrags in Brüssel gestorben, wo er auch begraben liegt.
Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) is most widely known in America for his provocative assertion that history is at its end, that is, its completion. In the “practical” sense, this means that the process of historical development can at last be seen (if from a distance) as the realization of the Marxist “universal and homogeneous state.” However, Kojève claimed as well that the history of philosophical thinking had also reached its goal in the transformation of philosophy, as the “love of wisdom” (or the unsatisfied quest for comprehensive knowledge), into that very Wisdom itself and had done so in the most essential respects in the philosophy of Hegel.The Concept, Time, and Discourse is the first volume of Kojève’s magnum opus, which was to have given an exposition of the (Hegelian) System of Knowledge and of which five volumes were written before his death. It contains, along with a preliminary discussion of the need for an updating of the Hegelian system, the first two of three introductions to the exposition of that system: a First Introduction of the Concept (the integrated totality of what is comprehensible, which is the final object of philosophic inquiry) and a Second Introduction concerning Time, both introductions leading to the (Hegelian) identification of the Concept with Time, an identification which alone takes adequate account of the fact that Philosophy is necessarily discursive (that it must actualize the requirements and essential structure of Discourse).The present volume offers Kojève’s fullest statement of his Ontology. It includes a critical discussion of the traditional oppositions of the “general” to the “particular” and of the “abstract” to the “concrete” and an analysis of the act of “generalizing abstraction,” which detaches Essence from the Existence of Things. Kojève then discusses the three great figures in the three-stage development of philosophy into wisdom: Parmenides, Plato, and Hegel. Parmenides’ monadic account of Being (= Eternity) rendered it ineffable, thereby reducing philosophy to (non-philosophic) silence; Plato’s dyadic account of Being (as eternal) was intended to make Being a possible subject of discourse but failed to reflect adequately the triadic (and temporally developing) structure which Plato himself discerned in Discourse. Finally, Hegel’s triadic account of Being as itself “dialectical” achieved the final identification of the Concept with Time.This is a first-time, meticulous translation of Kojève’s late, unfinished magnum opus, the “updating” of the Hegelian System of Knowledge, meaning its modification so as to make it comprehensible to the author himself and to his contemporaries. It is, however, much more than an exposition of its central terms, The Concept and Time and their identity. It is an acute, original review of the major themes of the West’s philosophical tradition; it is, in fact, a philosophical education in itself. Robert Williamson has done this tradition a great service by making Kojève’s work accessible to Americans. – Eva Brann, Dean Emerita and Senior Faculty, St. John’s College, Annapolis, MarylandWe now recognize Alexandre Kojève as one of the central figures of 20th century European philosophy. A translation of his The Concept, Time, and Discourse will enable English speaking readers to have a fuller understanding of his remarkably ambitious intellectual project. – Michael S. Roth, President, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.Robert B. Williamson is Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he continues to teach. He is co-author, with Alfred Mollin, of An Introduction to Ancient Greek (University Press of America) and the author of articles on Plato’s philosophy and Einstein’s early work on relativity theory.James H. Nichols, Jr. is Professor of Government and Dr. Jules L. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches political philosophy. Among his publications are Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De rerum natura of Lucretius, translations with interpretations of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, and most recently Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History.
Die Freundschaft von Alexandre Koj?ve und Leo Strauss reicht bis in die frühen 30er Jahre des letzten Jahrhunderts zurück. Sie äußerte sich, wie ihr Briefwechsel (1932-1965) zeigt, in erster Linie als intellektuelle Auseinandersetzung, die zuweilen auch publizistische Früchte, wie "Über Tyrannis" (1963), trug. Der vorliegende Band vereint zwei Texte zu einem anderen Thema: Die Kunst des Schreibens. Zum einen Alexandre Koj?ves Text "Kaiser Julian und die Kunst des Schreibens", der zuerst 1964 in englischer Übersetzung in einer Festschrift für Leo Strauss erschien, zum anderen den Aufsatz des Jubilars von 1941, auf den sich Koj?ve ausdrücklich bezieht: "Verfolgung und die Kunst des Schreibens". Es geht also um das Verhältnis von Exoterik und Esoterik, um das, was gesagt wird und das, was unausgesprochen bleibt. Und darum, ob es eine spezielle Schreibtechnik gibt, "eine Technik, an die wir denken, wenn wir vom Zwischen-den-Zeilen-Schreiben sprechen", die zu verstehen gibt, was nicht ausgesprochen wird. Abschließend stellt Friedrich Kittler Kaiser Julians so genannte Apostasie in ihren medien- und institutionsgeschichtlichen Kontext, in den jede "Kunst des Schreibens" eingebunden ist.
