Marco Filoni | The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève | Translated from the Italian by David Broder | Northwestern University Press | June 2025 | 271 pages
Boris Groys | Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography | Verso Books | November 2025 | 166 pages
“Be human, after all!” – “But I don’t want to be human!” Bertolt Brecht, Mahagonny, cited by Kojève
Until 2025, the name “Alexandre Kojève” was a paradox. A philosopher often invoked yet rarely read – a famous enigma. For decades, Kojève’s mythical reputation rested on rumors and anecdotes orbiting his Hegel seminar of the 1930s. This year, two intellectual biographies appeared in English at once: Marco Filoni’s The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève and Boris Groys’ Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography. Approaching Kojève from different angles, both restore him as a thinker in his own right, not just as a source of influence for students like Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille, who would later turn their backs on his Hegelianism.
Filoni and Groys convincingly show that Kojève was more than just a reader of Hegel –whether a good or bad one. In many ways, he was the father of postmodernism and our own radical contemporary. It was Kojève who first captured the tedious experience of life under late capitalism: the exhaustion of resources, endless admin, and the repeated, often cruel subsumption of bodies and minds under automation. Anyone who has recently called a hotline and tried to reach a human voice or received yet another Chat GPT-generated rejection email for a job application will recognize the world Kojève saw coming. The end of history is the eternal present of a bureaucracy without humans.
Let’s start at the end. History is over and that’s it – Kojève’s most famous provocation. And he lets the credits roll for a while: it’s the end but it’s not over yet. Kojève was himself not quite sure when exactly history had ended. He changed his mind more than once: first Napoleon, then Stalin, finally the Japanese snob drinking tea and arranging flowers. What Kojève really meant by the end of history is open to debate, but no reader has distorted the idea more than Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s.
In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama made Kojève’s end of history synonymous with the fall of the Soviet Union and the final triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. A violent misreading that also misses Kojève’s irony. One cannot help but wonder whether Fukuyama even read Kojève (not a single work appears in the bibliography). In fact, the end of history as Kojève envisioned it in the 1930–40s was far from a victory for capitalism. Socialism holds an ambivalent place in his work, shaped by his youth in Soviet Russia, reading Hegel with Marx, and his later involvement in left Eurasianist circles and the French Resistance.
Kojève’s life was as strange as his philosophy. Born in 1902 into a wealthy family in Moscow as Aleksandr Kozhevnikov (his uncle was the painter Wassily Kandinsky), Kojève left Russia to study in Germany before settling in Paris. The story of his escape is spectacular: After his adoptive father was assassinated by revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks arrested Kojève for trading soap on the black market. Thanks to Filoni, we now know that Kojève’s uncle was Lenin’s personal physician – a connection that may have saved his life. He packed his bags with jewels which financed a lavish life in Germany of the Roaring Twenties (what Filoni calls the “Berliner Wild West, dripping with nouveaux riches”).
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