Alexandre Kojeve - Shadia B. Drury

Alexandre Kojeve (1902-1968) was Hegel's most famous interpreter, reading Hegel through the eyes of Marx and Heidegger simultaneously. This book reveals the nature of Kojeve's Hegelianism and the influence it has had on French postmodernists on the Left (Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault) and American postmodernists on the Right (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama). According to the author, Kojeve followed Hegel in thinking that reason has triumphed in the course of history, but it is a cold, soulless, instrumental and uninspired rationalism that 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 that characterize the postmodern world.