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moved Alexandre Kojève to Alexandre Kojève
KOJEVE, ALEXANDRE (215)
'''Alexandre Kojève''' ('''Александр Владимирович Кожевников, Aleksandr Vladimirovič Koževnikov''')
([[April 28]] [[1902]] - [[1968]]) was a [[Marxist]] and [[Hegelian]] [[political philosopher]], who had a substantial impact on intellectual life in [[France]] in the 1930s.
Some of Kojève's more important lectures on Hegel have been published in English in ''Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit''. Kojève's interpretation of Hegel has been one of the most influential of the past century. His lectures were attended by [[intellectual]]s including [[Raymond Queneau]], [[Georges Bataille]], [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]], [[Andre Breton]], [[Jean-Paul Sartre]], [[Jacques Lacan]] and [[Raymond Aron]]. Other French thinkers have acknowledged his influence on their thought, including the [[post-structuralist]] philosophers [[Michel Foucault]] and [[Jacques Derrida]]. His most influential work was ''Introduction à la lecture de Hegel'' (1947), which summarized many of his lectures and included, in full, some others.
Kojève also had a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the US [[conservative]] thinker [[Leo Strauss]]; their correspondence has been published along with a critique Kojève wrote of Strauss's commentary on Xenophon in Strauss, Leo ''On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence'' (edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth). Several of Strauss's students went to Paris to meet Kojève in the 1950s and 1960s. Included in those was [[Allan Bloom]], who endeavored during his lifetime to make Kojève's works available in English language translations. It is worth noting, however, that the Straussian interpretation of Kojève is slanted and often patronizing: Kojève is regularly presented as a Machiavellian Mephistopheles, a grand and ingenious defender of evil. [citation?] In the 1950s, Kojève also befriended the former Nazi legal theorist [[Carl Schmitt]], whose "Concept of the Political" he had implicitly criticized in his analysis of Hegel's text on "Lordship and Bondage." Another close friend was the Jesuit Hegelian philosopher [[Gaston Fessard]].
In addition to his lectures on the ''Phenomenology of Spirit,'' Kojève has published other articles and books in French, a book on [[Kant]], and articles on the relationship between Hegelian and Marxist thought and [[Christianity]]. A book Kojève wrote in 1943 was published posthumously in 1981 by the French publisher Gallimard under the title ''Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit'' in which he contrasts the aristocratic and bourgeois views of right. ''Le Concept, le temps et le discours,'' also published by Gallimard, further extrapolate on the Hegelian notion that wisdom only becomes possible in the fullness of time. Kojève's response to Leo Strauss, who disputed this notion, can be found in Kojève's article 'The Emperor Julian and his Art of Writing' published in ''Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss'', edited by Joseph Cropsey, as well as in the above-mentioned edition of Strauss's ''On Tyranny''. Kojève also challenged Strauss' interpretation of the classics in a 1000+page book "Esquisse d'une histoire raisonnée de la pensée païenne," including one volume on the [[pre-Socratic]] philosophers, one on [[Plato]] and [[Aristotle]], and one on [[Neoplatonism]]. His posthumously published book on [[Immanuel Kant]] received little attention. Recently, three more books have been published: a 1932 thesis on the physical and philosophical importance of quantum physics, an extended 1931 essay on [[atheism]] ("L'athéisme"), and a 1943 work on "The Notion of Authority;" like "Le Concept, le temps et le discours" these have not been published in English translation.
[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:People]]
{{Encore}} p. 106
[[Category:Encore|Kojève, Alexandre]]
