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Kojève and Koyré.
Apr. 1st, 2026 08:10 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
languagehat_feedI find Jonathan Rée’s LRB review (5 February 2026; archived) of two books on Alexandre Kojève interesting on a number of counts. For one thing, he had the unusual duality of being both a well-known philosopher (Hegelian variety) and an important figure in French governments (Rée’s piece begins “The obituary in Le Monde was unequivocal: the death of Alexandre Kojève on 4 June 1968 had deprived France of one of its greatest civil servants”). Of more Hattic relevance is his name; he was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov (in Moscow), but at some point (neither English nor French Wikipedia is clear about this) he adopted the snappier Gallicized version Kojève. Here is a piquant account of his adventures after leaving Russia:
After a hard journey, including a spell in a Polish prison, Kojève reached Berlin in July 1920 and a few months later came into possession of a large stash of diamonds, sent illicitly from Russia by his mother. He was just eighteen and found himself, as he recalled, ‘at the mercy of money and the pleasures of life’. His extravagances and indiscretions may have been extreme, but they did not stop him taking courses in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese, and devouring, as he put it, ‘everything worth reading in philosophy’. He also registered at Heidelberg to pursue research on Vladimir Soloviev, whom he regarded as ‘the first Russian thinker to devise a universal philosophical system’. He commended Soloviev’s vision of an ‘end of history’ in which humanity would rally to the feminine figure of Sophia, or absolute wisdom, but criticised the irrational attachment to Christianity which, he said, prevented Soloviev from winning through to ‘a new stage in the evolution of thought’.
Kojève finished his dissertation in 1924 but didn’t stay in Heidelberg long enough to qualify for a degree. Berlin was far more exciting and before long he was involved with a glamorous Russian woman, Cécile Shoutak. She was already married, and her aggrieved husband persuaded his older brother, Aleksander Koyra, to remonstrate with Kojève. The scheme misfired, however: Koyra came away convinced that his sister-in-law was ‘absolutely right’ and that Kojève was ‘much, much better than my brother’. He then returned to his home in Paris and persuaded the scandalous couple to join him there in 1926. They married and lived in conspicuous luxury in the Latin Quarter, while Kojève took up an inquiry into determinism and modern physics. But the Crash of 1929 wiped out his investments, which put an end to his high living, his marriage and his work in natural science, though not to his friendship with Koyra.
Koyra was one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Russian diaspora. He had studied philosophy in Germany and France before joining the Foreign Legion, fighting on the Eastern Front and taking French citizenship under the name Alexandre Koyré. He completed a state doctorate in 1922, at the age of thirty, and was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he started trying to rehabilitate Hegel in France. The ‘traditional interpretation’, he said, was completely wrong: Hegel was not the ‘absurd dialectician and outrageous reactionary’ portrayed in patriotic French textbooks but a ‘singularly attractive’ thinker, more interested in ‘experience’ than ‘method’. Early in 1933, Koyré gave lectures on ‘Hegel in Jena’ in which he evoked ‘a human Hegel, vibrant and vulnerable’. He admitted that Hegel’s notion of an ‘end of history’ looked preposterous, even self-contradictory: how could abstract philosophical reasoning adjudicate on questions of historical fact and how could there be a ‘future’ in which there is ‘no longer any future’? But the difficulties disappear, according to Koyré, once you realise that Hegel was talking not about history as such, but about the way philosophy reflects on it. ‘Philosophy always arrives too late,’ as Hegel once put it. ‘When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a form of life has grown old,’ or in other words, the ‘owl of Minerva’ – symbol of philosophical insight – ‘takes flight only at dusk’. The notion of an end of history is therefore hypothetical rather than categorical: it means that philosophy will not be complete until history is finished, or conversely, that if philosophy is complete, then history must be over. Koyré seems to have thought that no one in their right mind could imagine that these conditions would ever be fulfilled; but he conceded rather sorrowfully that, in Jena in 1806, ‘Hegel himself may well have believed it.’
So there’s another odd onomastic change: why did Koyra (Койра) choose to become Koyré ([kwaʁe])? Is this what studying Hegel does to people? (Kojève’s innamorata Cécile Shoutak also has an odd name — Russian sources call her Цецилия Леонидовна Шутак, and what kind of Russian name is Цецилия?) Anyway, the whole review is worth reading if you care about this stuff, and I’ll quote another Hattic bit: Kojève “took some pride in having defied taboo by encouraging smoking and using colloquial French.”
Ben Nadler is a writer working between New York City and the Philadelphia area, where he teaches English at Widener University. He is the author of The Sea Beach Line: A Novel and Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side 1981–1991. His next novel, Prairie Ashes, is forthcoming from American Buffalo Books. More at 
March was a much busier month than I expected it to be, but it also flew by and I feel like I can’t even keep track of what all happened. I don’t know how we’re at the end of March already, and yet the trip to Colorado I took at the beginning of the month feels very far away. Somehow there’s never enough time to do anything, and when I look back at what I have done it feels like nothing got accomplished at all. It’s like every single day I have no free time and am always running around doing something, but then at the end of the day it feels like nothing even got done.