Alexandre Kojève > Quotes

“Human life is a comedy-one must play it seriously.”
― Alexandre Kojeve

“The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work. He recognizes himself in it, he sees his own human reality in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself”
― Alexandre Kojeve

“Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work — of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the “What am I?” Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is 'absorbed,' so to speak, by this contemplation -- i.e., by this thing. He forgets himself, he thinks only about the thing being contemplates; he thinks neither about his contemplation, nor -- and even less -- about himself, his "I," his Selbst. The more he is conscious of the thing, the less he is conscious of himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word 'I' will not occur.

For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde....”
― Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“According to Hegel -- to use the Marxist terminology -- Religion is only an ideological superstructure that is born and exists solely in relation to a real substructure. This substructure, which supports both religion and philosophy, is nothing but the totality of human actions realized during the course of universal history, that history in and by which man has created a series of specifically human worlds, essentially different from the natural world. It is these social worlds that are reflected in the religious and philosophical ideologies, and therefore-- to come to the point at once -- absolute knowledge, which reveals the totality of Being, can be realized only at the end of history, in the last world created by man.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“The bourgeois intellectual neither fights nor works.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Puede decirse que el hombre es una enfermedad mortal del animal.
You can tell that man is a mortal disease of the animal”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Authority and the ‘recognition’ of Authority are one and the same thing...”
― Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority: A Brief Presentation

“Man who does not manage to satisfy himself through Action in and for the World in which he lives flees from this World and takes refuge in his abstract intelligence...”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“It is precisely to the organization and the ‘humanization’ of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts. (Did Marx himself not say, in repeating, without realizing it, a saying of Aristotle’s: that the ultimate motive of progress, and thus of socialism, is the desire to ensure a maximum of leisure for man?)”
― Alexandre Kojève

“Authority is therefore necessarily a relation (between agent and patient): it is an essentially social (rather than individual) phenomenon; there have to be at least two in order for Authority to exist. THEREFORE: Authority is the possibility that an agent has of acting on others (or on another) without these others reacting against him, despite being capable to do so.”
― Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority: A Brief Presentation

“Puede decirse que el hombre es una enfermedad mortal del animal”
― Alexandre Kojève

“A Past is always ‘venerable’; tampering with it is ‘sacrilegious’; to neglect it is ‘inhuman’.”
― Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority: A Brief Presentation

“It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the mortal danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides, which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radically “nonconformist” Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all (even the “sublimated” given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into inactive anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a “permanent revolution” that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of the concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Understanding or Knowledge of the Past is what, when it is integrated into the Present, transforms this Present into an historical Present, that is, into a Present that realizes a Progress in relation to its Past.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“History here is always a comedy, and not a tragedy: the tragic is before or after, and in any case outside of, temporal life; this life itself realizes a program fixed beforehand and therefore, taken in itself, has neither any meaning nor any value.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“The Americans have never known what war,politics and state mean the boys do not die as soldiers, but are killed as police agents, and, naturally, nobody sees anything good about that.”
― Alexandre Kojève

“the bourgeois World is but an agglomeration of private Property-owners, isolated from each other, without true community.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Il est vrai que le discours philosophique, comme l’Histoire, est clos. Ça agace, cette idée. C’est peut-être pourquoi les sages – ceux qui succèdent aux philosophes et dont Hegel est le premier – sont si rares, pour ne pas dire inexistants. Il est vrai que vous ne pouvez accéder à la sagesse que si vous pouvez croire à votre divinité. Or, les gens sains d’esprit sont très rares. Être divin, cela veut dire quoi ? Cela peut être la sagesse stoïcienne ou bien le jeu. Qui joue ? Ce sont les dieux, ils n’ont pas besoin de réagir, alors ils jouent. Ce sont les dieux fainéants !”
― Alexandre Kojève

“Life is a comedy; it must be played seriously.”
― Alexandre Kojève

“Ce qu’il en sera ? Comment l’imaginer, mais considérez le Japon : voilà un pays qui s’est délibérément protégé de l’Histoire pendant trois siècles, il a mis une barrière entre l’Histoire et lui, si bien qu’il laisse peut-être prévoir notre propre avenir. Et c’est vrai que le Japon est un pays étonnant. Un exemple : le snobisme, par sa nature, est l’apanage d’une petite minorité. Or, ce que nous enseigne le Japon, c’est que l’on peut démocratiser le snobisme. Le Japon, c’est quatre-vingts millions de snobs. Auprès du peuple japonais, la haute société anglaise est un ramassis de marins ivres.”
― Alexandre Kojève

“Human life is a comedy-one must play it seriously--Alexandre Kojeve”
― Alexandre Kojeve

“a Revolution is never realised. In so far as something is realised, this something ceases to be revolutionary. Revolution is always something that is being realised, that is in the process of becoming.”
― Alexandre Kojève, The Notion of Authority: A Brief Presentation

“This Slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“The Bourgeois is neither Slave nor Master; he is - being the Slave of Capital - his own Slave. It is from himself, therefore, that he must free himself.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“In mortal terror man becomes aware of his reality, of the value that the simple fact of living has for him; only thus does he take account of the 'seriousness' of existence.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Si on voulait résumer à gros traits, on pourrait dire que je commence par définir la philosophie. Celle-ci ne possède pas un domaine réservé. C’est un discours, n’importe lequel, mais qui se distingue de tous les autres discours en ce sens qu’il parle non seulement de ce dont il parle mais encore du fait qu’il en parle et que c’est lui qui en parle. Tout discours qui ne parle pas de lui même se situe, de ce fait, en dehors de la philosophie. Ce discours philosophique, qui est né en Grèce, du côté de l’homme qu’on appelle Thalès, a connu ensuite deux illustrations extrêmes : Parménide, dont le discours aboutit au silence et Héraclite – enfin ce qu’on appelle Héraclite – qui profère un discours ininterrompu, un discours infini dans lequel chaque phrase peut toujours être suivie d’une autre phrase. C’est de ce discours que procèdent les rhéteurs et les sophistes. Eh bien, les sophistes modernes, les fils d’Héraclite, ce sont les sociologues et les historicistes dont le discours a justement pour caractère d’être infini. C’est le fleuve d’Héraclite.”
― Alexandre Kojève

“Life is a comedy. It must be played seriously.”
― Alexandre Kojève