Toward the Concrete: Alexandre Kojève and the Avant-Garde

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This project explores new perspectives on the work of Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève in the context of interwar Paris. Situated on the borders of intellectual history, philosophy and comparative literature, my research examines Kojève's links to various intellectual networks: the Russian avant-garde, namely Vasily Kandinsky, Surrealism, psychoanalysis, the College of Sociology, Russian émigré culture and existentialism. A particular focus is on the transnational and exilic nature of Kojève's thought. My aim is to open up a new reading of the history of French thought in the 1930s through the prism of Kojève's work and his networks. I will not only trace Kojève's trajectory through Russian, German, Buddhist and French ideas, but also examine the afterlife of his philosophy in the works of Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Giorgio Agamben, among others. I will demonstrate how, by revalorizing Kojève's transnational networks in interwar Paris, the emergence of French modern thought can be conceptualised as an already globalised, multilingual and cross-cultural phenomenon.