Read more
One of the twentieth century's most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève's thought.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Atheism and Politics
Translator’s Note
Atheism
Notes
Index
About the author
Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was a Russian-born French philosopher and polymath whose influence on contemporary thought via his many disciples and detractors, from Derrida to Lacan to Leo Strauss, is vast. While most famous for his Hegel lectures, Kojève also had exceptional influence while working in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs as an important figure in the creation of the European Economic Community.
Jeff Love is Research Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University. He is the author of The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (Columbia, 2018) and The Overcoming of History in “War and Peace” (2004). He is also cotranslator of F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom (2006) and editor of Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe (2017).
Summary
Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Alexandre Kojève’s thought.
Additional text
We are glad to have this profound essay to stimulate our thinking on theism, atheism, and mortality, and to give us further insight into the breadth of Kojeve's inquiries.
