“Be human, after all!” – “But I don’t want to be human!” Bertolt Brecht, Mahagonny, cited by Kojève

Until 2025, the name “Alexandre Kojève” was a paradox. A philosopher often invoked yet rarely read – a famous enigma. For decades, Kojève’s mythical reputation rested on rumors and anecdotes orbiting his Hegel seminar of the 1930s. This year, two intellectual biographies appeared in English at once: Marco Filoni’s The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève and Boris Groys’ Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography. Approaching Kojève from different angles, both restore him as a thinker in his own right, not just as a source of influence for students like Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille, who would later turn their backs on his Hegelianism. 

Filoni and Groys convincingly show that Kojève was more than just a reader of Hegel –whether a good or bad one. In many ways, he was the father of postmodernism and our own radical contemporary. It was Kojève who first captured the tedious experience of life under late capitalism: the exhaustion of resources, endless admin, and the repeated, often cruel subsumption of bodies and minds under automation. Anyone who has recently called a hotline and tried to reach a human voice or received yet another Chat GPT-generated rejection email for a job application will recognize the world Kojève saw coming. The end of history is the eternal present of a bureaucracy without humans.

Let’s start at the end. History is over and that’s it – Kojève’s most famous provocation. And he lets the credits roll for a while: it’s the end but it’s not over yet. Kojève was himself not quite sure when exactly history had ended. He changed his mind more than once: first Napoleon, then Stalin, finally the Japanese snob drinking tea and arranging flowers. What Kojève really meant by the end of history is open to debate, but no reader has distorted the idea more than Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s. 

In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama made Kojève’s end of history synonymous with the fall of the Soviet Union and the final triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. A violent misreading that also misses Kojève’s irony. One cannot help but wonder whether Fukuyama even read Kojève (not a single work appears in the bibliography). In fact, the end of history as Kojève envisioned it in the 1930–40s was far from a victory for capitalism. Socialism holds an ambivalent place in his work, shaped by his youth in Soviet Russia, reading Hegel with Marx, and his later involvement in left Eurasianist circles and the French Resistance.

Kojève’s life was as strange as his philosophy. Born in 1902 into a wealthy family in Moscow as Aleksandr Kozhevnikov (his uncle was the painter Wassily Kandinsky), Kojève left Russia to study in Germany before settling in Paris. The story of his escape is spectacular: After his adoptive father was assassinated by revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks arrested Kojève for trading soap on the black market. Thanks to Filoni, we now know that Kojève’s uncle was Lenin’s personal physician – a connection that may have saved his life. He packed his bags with jewels which financed a lavish life in Germany of the Roaring Twenties (what Filoni calls the “Berliner Wild West, dripping with nouveaux riches”).

He was a Renaissance man, studying Buddhism, philosophy, physics and mathematics. His dissertation was devoted to the Russian religious thinker Vladimir Solovyov. With his first wife, he lived off diamonds until losing his capital in the 1929 crash, after investing in the French cheese manufacturer La Vache qui Rit. What remained, Filoni notes, citing Kojève’s friend Evgeny Reis, was “his library, a few rugs, some German Rococo furniture, and little more.” It was in need of a job that Kojève took over the Hegel seminar – the rest is history. Everyone in Paris who later became a name, including Jean-Paul Sartre, learned their Hegel (and more) from Kojève.

In his philosophy, the central problem is what remains of the human after history has ended. Groys argues that at the core of Kojève’s understanding of human life lies negativity: “Nothingness is open to everything – it presupposes a potentially unlimited number of possibilities.” Lacking any fixed identity, humans are “holes in the world.” Their desire for recognition ignites a struggle between master and slave. In Groys’ reading, Kojève prioritizes the slave who can overcome nothingness through work. A philosophy of uncertainty put into practice.

During World War II, Kojève’s operations in occupied France were shady, to put it mildly. He shifted nonchalantly between the Resistance, the Vichy regime and the Soviet embassy. At one point, he even sent a 1,000-page manuscript to Moscow, attached to a letter addressed to Stalin himself; the text was published for the first time in French translation in 2025. It is interpreted at length in both intellectual biographies. (Once again, Kojève narrowly escaped execution, this time thanks to chatting in flawless German with a Gestapo officer.) Filoni offers a detailed reconstruction of these double games, which foreshadowed Kojève’s postwar career in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Thought and action were inseparable for Kojève; his politics were notoriously ambiguous. He sometimes called himself “Stalin’s conscience,” at other times a right-wing Marxist or a left conservative. Maybe even a KGB agent? He was often deliberately paradoxical, as when he described Henry Ford as “the only great, authentic Marxist of the 20th century” – a joke, of course. Groys casts Kojève as a martyr of modern bureaucracy, reading his politics as a reformulation of Solovyov’s political theology. Filoni, by contrast, links it to Kojève’s concepts of tyranny and propaganda. Bureaucracy was the philosopher’s return to the polis, tasked with completing history and shaping its end state. 

Arguably, no one knows Kojève’s life and legacy better than Filoni, who was among the first to work with his vast archives at the French National Library in Paris, editing several of the texts that the “master” (as Lacan called him) jokingly referred to as his posthumous work – to be released only after his sudden death in 1968. Kojève was a philosopher who wrote but not a writer who published. During his life, he released only two books, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), edited by the Surrealist Raymond Queneau, and the first volume of a monumental history of paganism (1968). Less interested in publishing than in the activity of philosophy itself, Kojève directed his efforts toward his full-time job as a bureaucrat, which made him de Gaulle’s right hand in negotiating Greek tobacco, Algerian independence and the foundation of the European Union.

Among Kojève scholars, Filoni’s biography (originally published in Italian in 2008 and revised in 2021) has long been the gold standard. Scholarly sound, it emerges from the Italian philosopher’s decades-long dedication to Kojève’s work. And it will remain the most important biography of Kojève available to English readers for years to come. David Broder’s translation brilliantly captures the clear, yet often cheeky and affectionate tone of the Italian original. Filoni’s wit matches that of his subject, following Kojève’s bonmot that human life is a comedy played seriously. Filoni emphasizes the essential point: reading Kojève is fun, and we may understand him best if we don’t take every word literally. 

As Kojève put it in his last interview: “I’m a lazy guy and I like to play – in this very moment for example.” He donned various masks (including Hegel’s) to épater le bourgeois, shocking his audience with unexpected views. Many people who have met Kojève describe his distinctive grin, sardonic and sly. Kojève once wrote to his friend Leo Strauss that he wanted to be understood by the few, not the many. Some of his texts are notoriously difficult to read. Where Filoni’s biography comes with plenty of footnotes and a scholarly apparatus, Groys makes Kojève a thinker for the masses – a paradox, given the philosopher’s aversion to the republic of letters and commercial success.

Groys’ book has great appeal, especially for readers encountering Kojève for the first time. It’s full of immensely creative, inspiring and often surprising readings of Kojève. But the book is not what it says on the tin: it is not an intellectual biography. Rather, it reveals as much about Groys himself – also a philosopher and emigrant from the Soviet Union – as it does about Kojève. (Interestingly, both Kojève and Groys wrote at some point a book titled Diary of a Philosopher.) Readers will encounter recurring themes from Groys’ other work, including care, the artwork, Stalinism, and ideas of divine humanity drawn from Orthodox theology, such as the man-god and Sophia.

Groys draws extensively on Solovyovian Sophiology, a branch of gnostic and Russian religious thought centered on the divine feminine – philo-sophia as sexualized love for Sophia. Building on a lifetime of his own thinking rather than making use of the growing field of Kojève scholarship, Groys invites readers to make Kojève their own: to find new meanings in his texts and go beyond them, updating Kojève for the present moment just as Kojève himself claimed to update Hegel for the twentieth century.

Most importantly, Groys manages to wrestle Kojève’s original concept of the end of history from Fukuyama’s clutches, giving it new life: “After the end of history, the anti-consumerist, ascetic lifestyle becomes the revelation of nothingness as the only content of human existence.” In such a vision of posthistory, art is the tool to bring about this revelation of nothingness, not as a way to understand the world but to change it. 

In Kojève’s aesthetics developed together with his uncle Kandinsky, art does not represent things but their essential nothingness which is beauty. The only reason for art to exist is to be beautiful – nothing else. After the end of history, human life gradually vanishes into images and words. The new humans are no longer humans at all; overcoming the human means to embrace nothingness, as Groys put it. Being human is to not want to be human anymore:

The overcoming of man is the negation of the negation – and thus, the end of history. But this end must be the beginning of a reign that will have no end. Kojève understands himself as a prophet of this reign. He writes that the coming of the man-god is not seen by the gaze that is turned to the sky but rather heard by an ear put to the ground.

Read together, both books give voice to what laid buried under the ground for over half a century. They uncover two facets of a dusty diamond, letting it shine like never before.

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