Monographie: Kojèves verkannte Autorität
The monograph Kojèves verkannte Autorität by Marius Kemper is now available!
About the book:
In a small room at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris in the 1930s, Alexandre Kojève infected an entire generation of young intellectuals with the “Hegelian virus” . Staggering, “half suffocated,” Georges Bataille left the seminar sessions that gave rise to his doctrine of sovereign life, which, like no other, was to embody in Michel Foucault’s maniacal laughter. It was also Foucault who, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, recognized that the virus had long since spread beyond the stuffy seminar room and was still rampant among his generation as “general anti-Hegelianism”. It was therefore necessary to assess “how far Hegel may have secretly followed us; and what in our thinking against Hegel may still originate from Hegel.”
The book attempts to trace the immediate and indirect effects of Kojève in the inseparable unity of theoretical explanation and existential narrative. In the spirit of a performative interpretation, the historical echo of Kojève's teachings in theories of authority, power, or domination is reconstructed. Kojève is to be revisited, but not in the same way that he himself revisited Hegel, virtually making him a contemporary in his famous seminars from 1933 to 1939.
During this “intellectual Pentecost experience”, Kojève developed his own teachings in actu, which helped him, a bourgeois emigrant from Soviet Russia, to achieve a unique position in the intellectual field in France. This special position is evident in the influence Kojève exerted on such diverse personalities as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss. The thinking of these authors revolved around concepts such as power, sovereignty, or tyranny, but less so around authority. Kojève, on the other hand, developed a four-part theory of authority, in which the four figures of authority he distinguished can be replaced by participants in his seminars: the figure of the “judge” can be replaced by Jacques Lacan instead of Plato; Hannah Arendt replaces the scholastics; Maurice Merleau-Ponty embodies the figure of the “leader” instead of Aristotle, and not Hegel, but Hegel as interpreted by Kojève, often referred to as “Hegel-Kojève,” incarnates (at least apparently) the figure of the “master.” These figures of thought also remain present in Kojève's late memorandum for a “Latin Empire”.
It is therefore less a matter of Kojève's presence than of a performative repetition in Derrida's sense, in the course of which not only Kojève's presence but also his contemporaneity is to be revealed.
