SO MUCH DEPENDS UPON La Vache qui rit, which you know as the Laughing Cow, the individually wrapped wedges of spreadable cheese from your childhood. Founded in 1921 by a French veteran of the First World War, the company’s name is based on a pun on Wagner’s Valkyries and an anti-German slur. The product’s package—a circular box with a jolly red-faced cow wearing ear tags that have jolly red-faced cows on them—has gone down in advertising history as an early instance of successful branding. In the mid-1920s, a Russian émigré who had recently arrived in Paris from Heidelberg, where he received a doctorate in philosophy, invested his sizable inheritance in the company, only to see his stocks wiped out in the 1929 Wall Street crash. For the first time in his life, he needed to find himself a job. Man plans . . . the cow laughs. The job he wound up getting would alter the course of twentieth-century intellectual and political history.
His name? Alexandre Kojève. Never heard of him? You’re far from alone.
Alexandre Kojève was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov to the upper strata of the Russian bourgeoisie in Moscow in 1902. His uncle, with whom he would remain close, was the painter Wassily Kandinsky. After his father, a merchant, was killed in the Russo-Japanese War, his mother married a jeweler. Kojève received an education in modern and classical languages from a prestigious grammar school and soaked up the philosophical and artistic climate of Moscow in the decade and a half before the October Revolution, with its heady brew of orthodox theology, spiritualism, Marxism, Spenglerian pessimism, and the decadent modernity of Russia’s Silver Age poetry. Already, the teenage Aleksandr seems to have decided on his future vocation, titling one of his notebooks “Diary of a Philosopher,” which he filled with diagrams, explorations of the concept of the “inexistent,” and ruminations on love.
In the chaos following the revolution, Kojève was sent abroad to study. Later, his mother told him that had he stayed in Russia he would have been “shot five times over.” Whether this was because of his class background, the contrarian streak already evident in his thought, or his puckish sense of humor she did not specify. Getting shot, alas, was to be the fate of his stepfather, who was killed resisting an attempt to collectivize his estate. Kojève literally inherited the family jewels—two pint glasses full of diamonds—which he split with his bosom friend Georg Witt, who daringly smuggled them across the border. Witt, an avid cinephile, became a producer; his share of Kojève’s inheritance helped finance, among other things, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Kojève’s share went to his philosophy degree at the University of Heidelberg, where he would desultorily work on a dissertation on Vladimir Solovyov, “the Russian Hegel.” During the early ’20s, Kojève shuttled back and forth between intellectually rigorous but sleepy Heidelberg and the University of Berlin, where he indulged in his eclectic interests in Indian and Chinese religious philosophy as well as all the sex, drugs, and artistic experiment on offer to a man of means in the dissolute capital of the Weimar Republic.
It was in Berlin that he seduced Cécile Léonidovna Shoutak, a married woman. The two eloped to Paris, where they were visited by Shoutak’s brother-in-law, the philosopher Alexandre Koyré, who came to break up the affair, but ended up charmed by Kojève instead. Kojève contributed to Koyré’s journaland studied mathematics and the new physics. Everything was going well until October 1929. Not long after the Wall Street crash, Shoutak returned to Berlin and filed for divorce. During the first years of the Depression, Kojève sold Leica cameras he imported from Germany to make ends meet. Meanwhile, he worked on The Idea of Determinism, which argued that quantum physics entailed atheism, and Atheism, which argued that the essence of the human being is awareness of mortality.
Matters started to improve in January 1933, when Koyré received an appointment from the University of Cairo and asked Kojève to cover his Hegel seminar at the École Practique des Hautes Études. For the next six years, Kojève would lecture on The Phenomenology of Spirit, the German philosopher’s notoriously difficult 1807 book. A philosophy seminar is hardly a remarkable thing, it would at first seem. Until, that is, you look at the names of the people who attended the class: the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher and pornographic novelist Georges Bataille, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and memoirist Michel Leiris, the surrealist André Breton, the political scientist Raymond Aron, and Raymond Queneau, the mathematician and novelist who founded the Oulipo. Queneau compiled Kojève’s papers with his own notes from the seminar to form Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, published by Gallimard in 1947. Aside from his dissertation, it was the only book Kojève allowed to appear during his lifetime.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is a house with dozens of doors, whose interior looks very different depending on which one you enter through. When I was a student, I took three classes on the Phenomenology with three eminent Hegelians—Michael Inwood, Étienne Balibar, and Robert Pippin—and came away with three incompatible impressions of what the book is about. Kojève enters the Phenomenology through the door marked “B.IV.A: Self-Consciousness: The Truth of Self-Certainty: Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness; Mastery and Servitude,” the Master/Slave Dialectic, as it has come to be known. Kojève’s interpretation of this short chapter—with its emphasis on the themes of desire, death, struggle, recognition, and labor—brought Hegel into simultaneous conversation with Heidegger, whose Being and Time had appeared in 1927, and the young Marx, whose “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844” were first published in 1932. It has always irritated more scrupulous scholars; Pippin, for example, calls it “incredibly eccentric.” Like Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, and Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is creative philosophy passing itself off as commentary on a better-known text. Kojève himself thought of it as an “update” of the Phenomenology for the twentieth century.
As such, its influence was enormous, in ways that were often surprising. Paraphrasing Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground, we might say that not many people attended Kojève’s seminar, but everyone who did started a school of thought. Beyond the attendees themselves, it made its mark on existentialism via Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, feminism via Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and anti-colonialism via Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Kojève is the first philosopher we encounter in Subjects of Desire, Judith Butler’s first book, a study of Hegel’s reception in France, published in 1987. During the ’90s, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel was at the center of academic debates on the “politics of recognition,” an early formulation of what today we call identity politics. His musings on “the universal and homogeneous state” that would bring about “the end of history” found a wide audience in the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, thanks to Francis Fukuyama. This means that, along with Strauss, whose correspondence with Kojève is included in an appendix to On Tyranny, and Strauss’s student Allan Bloom, who wrote the introduction to the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel when it appeared in English in 1969, there are also three Kojève proteins in the intellectual DNA of American neoconservatism.
Wassily Kandinsky, Inner Alliance, 1929, oil on canvas, 30 × 26″. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
THE HEGEL SEMINAR CAME TO AN END with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Kojève was called up to serve in the French military, but when the Wehrmacht broke through the Ardennes, he was on leave, and was unable to rejoin his unit. By the time he returned to his apartment on the outskirts of Paris, the northern half of France had been occupied, and a puppet government had been installed under Marshal Pétain in Vichy. He would soon leave for Marseille in the “free zone” with his new partner, Nina Ivanoff.
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