Alexandre Kojève’s Reading of Hegel and its Double Legacy

Abstract

Kojève represents a pivotal point not only for the reception of Hegel in the 20th century, but for continental philosophy as a whole. By reading Hegel unilaterally, with a magnifying glass on the logic of the lord-bondsman relationship, Kojève imploded the traditional philosophy of history and anticipated, from within Hegelianism, treatments of historical temporality that would appear in opposition to Hegel with the emergence of French structuralism. In Kojève’s reading, humanism and the strong notion of a subject who produces the world also collapse of their own weight. The author thus demonstrates how this “double unavailability”– of man and of history – that so well characterizes continental philosophy in the second half of the 20th century finds its precursor in Kojève’s seminars. (Translator’s abstract).