Alexandre Kojève

During the early 1950s, Alexandre Kojève resumed his ambitious project to bring the analytic reason of Kantianism in line with Hegel’s logic and philosophy of history. Kant is one of the most extensive text fragments where Kojève turned his attention to the gaps left open in the system of critical philosophy. Published in its raw, unedited form in 1973, in...

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky, endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the...