Alexandre Kojève

by Shadia B. Drury

Alexandre Kojeve is an enigmatic figure whose influence on postmodernism is better known than it is understood. Reading Hegel through the eyes of Marx and Heidegger simultaneously, Kojeve formulated a wild if not hypnotic melange of ideas. In this book, Drury reveals the nature of Kojeve's Hegelianism and the extraordinary influence it has had on both French and American intellectuals. According to Drury, Kojeve believed that history was a tragedy in which a cold, soulless, instrumental, and uninspired rationalism has conquered and disenchanted the world. Drury maintains that Kojeve's conception of modernity as the fateful triumph of this arid rationality is the cornerstone of postmodern thought. Kojeve's picture of the world gives birth to a dark romanticism that manifests itself in a profound nostalgia for what reason has banished - myth, madness, disorder, spontaneity, instinct, passion, and virility. In Drury's view, these ideas romanticize the gratuitous violence and irrationalism