by Alexander Aerts

In 1918 the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) was caught selling soap on the black-market in Moscow by the Tchèka, the political police of the Bolshevik party. After Kojève’s stepfather was killed by raiding peasants in 1917, the Kozhevnikov’s, an archetypical Muscovite bourgeois family, plunged into financial precarity leading Kojève to earn an extra buck in the informal economy. At the time of the Russian Civil War, the Tchèka were executing thousands of people for petty crimes. Kojève’s niece, Nina Kousnetzoff, stated that Kojève, while sitting in his prison cell, fully understood the risk of being executed. There were adolescents, the same age as Kojève, who were being executed for much less. Luckily, after three days, he was released via family connections. In this think-piece, I argue, following Dominique Auffret’s biography of Kojève, that this short imprisonment in a Tchèka cell was an intellectually formative moment for him, that is, it held a Bildungseffekt on Kojève’s later work on revolutionary terror in his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit during the 1930s, specifically his analysis on Hegel’s commentary of the French Revolution.

In his first and final interview for Le Grand Continent (1968) Kojève stated that during and after his imprisonment he identified as a communist. Denyse Harrari, a life-long friend of Kojève, affirmed his claim that this “was the period when he was seduced, in prison, by revolutionary ideas.” Kojève’s niece also asserted that his imprisonment compelled him to feel that the Russian Revolution was, in Marxist-Hegelian terms, something world historical. In moments of revolutionary terror when people come face to face with death, Kojève argued that this terror reveals the core feature of the human being, namely, their “nothingness” (“Introduction à la lecture de Hegel,” 169-70). One of the historiographic difficulties has been juxtaposing his interest in left-wing revolution alongside his other, mature views from the 1968 interview that “the establishment of communism meant thirty terrible years.”

After Kojève was released from prison and received rejections to study philosophy in Moscow, he commenced a long odyssey to Heidelberg where he would eventually finish his doctoral dissertation on the Religious Metaphsyics of Vladimir Solovyov (1926) under the supervision of the German thinker, Karl Jaspers. With an intermediary stay in Berlin, like many other Russian émigrés and exiles, he finally settled down across the border in Paris. In these two metropoles,  Kojève encountered other Russian intellectuals that had fled or were ex-communicated on the “Philosopher Steamers,” as they were called, in 1922. By this time, Paris was the hub of a newly emergent emigre Russian philosophy, with important thinkers such as Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev gathering in the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. Many of these intellectuals came from pre-revolutionary religious philosophy – a tradition that started with Solovyov – and were ardent opponents of the Soviet regime.

In contrast to others in the Russian diaspora, Kojève defended the Bolshevik politics of censure which, ironically, was the very cause behind this fleeing diasporic community. In March 1929 in an article for Eurasia, a leftist Eurasianist journal founded by Russian emigrees in Paris, Kojève claimed that philosophy had stagnated after Hegel. Kojève believed that Soviet censorship might free philosophy from the grip of the European tradition thereby creating a new system of knowledge that would both unite the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ traditions together. This was a controversial, if not strange, endorsement of the Soviet government. Kojève himself was denied to study philosophy because of their new educational policies. Yet, he did not support philosophers who specifically targeted their critique towards the Soviet government. Kojève thought that Soviet policies provided an historically unique opportunity to surpass a narrow form of critique for critique’s sake that was common to intellectuals. What was needed were sages who embraced and supported the Soviet attempt to create a broader, world-defining philosophical synthesis.

Once in Paris, Kojève was invited by his friend Alexandre Koyré, an eminent Russian philosopher of science, to join the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE). As has been widely noted, Kojève soon took over Koyré’s course on Hegel’s philosophy of religion at the EPHE. Like Koyré, Kojève came to be an influential transcultural mediator who disseminated an eclectic mix of Russian religious thought, Marxism, German phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In this way, I follow other scholars in a special issue from Studies in East European Thought who have investigated how transcultural mediators like Koyré and Kojève contributed to twentieth century intellectual movements in France, such as surrealism, existentialism and even post-structuralism.

Kojève’s lectures, in particular, were highly influential. They were attended by important figures of French intellectual life —and beyond—such as Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Eric Weil, Jacques Lacan, Hannah Arendt, and even prominent French Jesuits such as Fr. Gaston Fessard. At this time, Kojève’s French audience lacked access to Hegel’s major works which were not yet translated in French, or were poorly edited. While Kant was prominently studied in the French canon, Hegel did not yet have a fixed place in the French tradition. Kojève not only provided a comprehensive venue to the study of Hegel—specifically, The Phenomenology—but also offered one of the first translations of Hegel’s work in French.

Part of the radicalism in Kojeve’s interpretation hinged on his view of Hegel’s understanding of the French Revolution. In his lectures on Hegel, Kojève argued that the French Revolution had culminated in the so-called end of history which was embodied by the Napoleonic empire. According to him, history was driven along and mediated by a bloody struggle for recognition between masters and slaves, ultimately culminating in the post-historical figure of the citizen. As some scholars have shown, this reading of the Phenomenology was favorable to the context of the Third Republic where the French Revolution was portrayed as the most important event in world history. In other words, Kojève’s French audience was very receptive to the francocentric claim that the French Revolution had successfully catapulted the world towards a grand, post-historical order. 

And, yet some have argued that Kojève’s lectures can also be analyzed as a specifically Hegelian interpretation of the Russian Revolution. His comments on the French Reign of Terror can be read in analogy with the events that unfolded during the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and the Stalinist purges which all reached their pinnacles at the very time of these lectures (1936-37). This revolutionary terror, which Kojève experienced first-hand, featured as a key moment in the bloody transition from the revolutionary period to a post-revolutionary state.

Specifically, in the 1936-37 lectures Kojève explained that during the Enlightenment, the ideas of the Ancien régime were subverted by so-called enlightened propaganda (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 159-65). These enlightened critics accused Christianity and absolutism of wrongly putting human existence at the mercy of God and building up the absolute monarch with a falsified view of transcendence. The goal of their critique—as a mode of propaganda—was to realize a total negation of the transcendent world ‘up in the sky.’ Yet, as Kojève observed, these enlightened critics did not realize that this transcendence was in fact a product of human imagination. The longing for freedom from transcendence was, thus, only in thought.

For Kojève, the revolutionaries of 1789 attempted to bring a critique of transcendence from the cloudy heights back to earth through a political struggle for recognition. The negation of the transcendent world above made way for the revolutionary negation of the world down below and, thus, the creation of a new society. As Kojève provocatively wrote: “Man is in total emptiness: this is ‘Absolute Freedom’” (p.166). The moment of the revolutionary Reign of Terror is characterized by absolute freedom where every individual can step forward as the–false–representative of society. Through the Terror, society fragmented into a collection of isolated groups and individuals who thought that the state existed because of their (anti-) revolutionary consciousness. And, yet, for Kojève, this new revolutionary government never succeeded in its self-proclaimed representation of all society precisely because it remained the representation of only the revolutionary faction of society. The true arrival of a post-revolutionary state could not take place without the suicide of the revolutionary government—either through the annihilation of the party or the death of its leader. As Kojève summarized: “The Terror is in fact the suicide of Society itself” (p.168). Not unlike the post-war revisionists around Francois Furet, the Reign of Terror was seen as the conscious destruction of the old-world order for a new ideological master. It was the suicide of society by society itself.

According to Kojève the absolute freedom of revolutionary terror is a definitive form of bildung. A formative moment for himself, this bildung reveals a pure nothingness of humankind to the ones who have experienced the struggle between revolutionary and anti-revolutionary factions. The revolutionary fraction becomes conscious that if they want to realize absolute freedom, they must necessarily sacrifice themselves for a higher cause than mere self-preservation. They arrive at the supremely existential concern that “to achieve abstract (‘absolute’) freedom is to want death,” that is, to live “as body and soul” comes with spiritual and political costs. (p. 169). Where the Reign of Terror compelled individuals to adhere to a state where they would be able to realize freedom, the creation of a post-revolutionary state (the Napoleonic empire) was the dialectical reversal of absolute freedom, from pure negativity to pure positivity.

Here, Kojève’s commentary on the French Reign of Terror can also be read as a Hegelian interpretation of the Russian Revolution. His theoretical comments give insight into why he was seduced by and defended the revolutionary ideas of the Bolshevik’s. For him, the Russian Revolution was the struggle for prestige wherein slaves sought recognition as humans and to realise freedom in the here and now. The Bolshevik party emerged as the victorious fraction of this struggle for recognition. Yet, this did not mark the end of revolutionary upheaval. Afterwards, a long period of revolutionary terror commenced. Kojève thought that this revolutionary terror formed the necessary condition for the creation of freedom to come. The realisation of this ‘actual’ freedom came about with the eventual dissolution of ‘absolute’ freedom. In 1918, with Russia standing at the crossroads of history, the constitution of the Bolshevik regime and the previous period of war communism were neither the completion of the revolution nor real existing communism — that is, post-revolutionary communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the extension of the revolution and its victorious fraction into the realm of the state. For Kojève, it logically followed that those thirty terrible years of Red Terror were necessary to ultimately arrive at post-revolutionary tranquility.

In addition to Kojève’s more famous work on Hegel’s Phenomenology and his support for   Bolshevik policies during the 1920-30’s, it is important to note that in 1940-41 he also wrote an unpublished manuscript entitled София, фило-софия и феномено-логия (Sophia, Philo-sophy and Phenomeno-logy). A 900-page long phenomenological analysis of the Soviet Union, the text was addressed to no other than Stalin himself. From his imprisonment in a revolutionary cell up until the 1940’s, Kojève interest in revolution—as a lived phenomenon and a theoretical tool—came full circle in his work on the world-historical meaning behind the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and Stalin’s regime.

At times, Kojève openly defended the Bolshevik government in journals of Russian emigrées but mostly made only esoteric references to the Russian Revolution in his lectures on Hegel or his unpublished analysis on the Soviet Union. In either case, Kojève provides us with a highly politicized a deeply provocative reading of the Phenomenology. As he himself explained: “One can therefore say that, for the moment, every interpretation of Hegel, if it is more than idle talk, is nothing but a program of struggle … and one of work” (“Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” 41). And, the work of an interpreter of Hegel takes on the form of political propaganda. That is why Kojève stated in a letter to the Marxist phenomenologist Trân Duc Thao that “my course was primarily a work of propaganda, intended to make an impression” (“Exchange between Trân Duc Thao and Alexandre Kojève,” 349). This impression was intended to be felt in Marxist circles.

And, yet, Raymond Aron, the famed liberal French philosopher and student of the Kojève seminars, expressed his doubts about Kojève’s philosophical Stalinism. Allegedly, Kojève told Aron that he was aware that ‘Red Russia’ was governed by brutes with its very language vulgarized and its culture degraded. Even more, Kojève claimed, “that only imbeciles could ignore this” (“Memoires,”131). It remains an open question whether Kojève saw himself as an advisor-sage to Stalin’s regime or as an enlightened critic. Like the young Kojève behind bars, the older philosopher Kojève also remains a masked figure.

Alexander Aerts is a PhD student in the history department at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He is currently working on a dissertation about Alexandre Kojève’s role as an advisor and negotiator in the postwar French administration (1945-68). His research interests include twentieth century French philosophy, literature critique and the history of European integration. His writings have appeared in Marx and Philosophy, Lava Revue and Krisis (forthcoming).

Edited by Jacob Saliba.

Cover Image: Photograph of a young Alexandre Kojève, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.