Alexandre Kojève

Unravelling the mystery of Alexandre Kojève

In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Kojève was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the creators of a nascent European Union. His concept of the human as something defined by negation and unique among animals in being separated from nature is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly ‘natural’ rights.

Groys reveals a Kojève with a unique perspective on our political capacities and human condition.Introduction: What does it mean to be human?

I. History as Self-Negation
1. Struggle for Recognition
2. The Self-Reflection
3. The Anthropogenic Desire

II. From Sophia to Stalin and Back
1. Political Androgyny
2. Paradisal Work
3. Napoleon
4. Stalin
5. The Sage
6. The Working State
7. History as Magic

III. The Giving Empire
1. The Christian Empire
2. The Ideocratic State
3. The Latin Empire
4. Colonialism and the Giving Empire
5. Bataille and Marshall Plan

IV. Becoming a Sage
1. Painting the Totality
2. Visualization of Logos

Epilogue: How to remain human after the End of History?"Kojève’s lectures made a deep impression on his listeners — to more various and influential effect than probably any others in France this century"
—Perry Anderson

"Kojève’s originality and courage, it must be said, is to have perceived the impossibility of going any further, the necessity, consequently, of renouncing the creation of an original philosophy and, thereby, the interminable starting-over which is the avowal of the vanity of thought"
—Georges Bataille

"Kojève had a major impact on the intellectual life of the continent. Among his students ranged such future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron"
—Francis FukuyamaBoris Groys lives and works in Berlin. He has taught as Professor at the universities in Germany (ZKM), USA (NYU), UK (Courtauld) and some others. He has curated many exhibitions including an exhibition of Kojève’s photography (shown in BAK (Utrecht), Palais Tokyo (Paris), Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), OKAT (Shenzhen, China).

His previous books include: Art Power, 2008; An Introduction to Antiphilosophy, 2012; On the New, 2014