PERSON
Alexandre Kojève
Russian-born French philosopher (1902–1968) whose 1930s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études became the most influential twentieth-century reading of Hegel and shaped existentialism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, and postwar French thought.
Alexandre Kojève (born Kojevnikov) delivered a six-year seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology in Paris from 1933 to 1939. The audience included Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Raymond Queneau, and many others who became the leading figures of postwar French intellectual life. Kojève's reading was bold, selective, and controversial: he treated the lord-bondsman dialectic as the structural engine of the entire Phenomenology and read the whole work as an anthropological account of how human self-consciousness develops through the struggle for recognition. His Hegel was a philosopher of history, labor, and desire — a reading that suppressed the logical and metaphysical dimensions of Hegel's system in favor of its existential and political content. This Hegel became the Hegel of twentieth-century French thought.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Kojève's central claim was that the lord-bondsman dialectic is not merely an early stage in the Phenomenology's development but the paradigmatic structure through which self-consciousness achieves itself. The bondsman's labor, the struggle
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