Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, given at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the years before the Second World War, are an important and much discussed moment in European intellectual history. The lectures were edited and published in 1947 by Raymond Queneau, and about half of that volume was translated into English by Allan Bloom. Much discussed in content, they are almost as famous for the audience. A lot of interesting figures were there: Henry Corbin, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Queneau, and Éric Weil all attended in the first year. There are many, often conflicting reports of who else was there in subsequent years. I’ve seen Raymond Aron, Maurice Blanchot, André Breton, Alexandre Koyré, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre all mentioned. I also said in The Early Foucault that Louis Althusser did, but I’ve been told that was wrong, and a December 1946 letter from Althusser to Kojève indicates that this correction is right – it’s clearly not a letter from someone who had attended these classes. I’ve also seen reports that Henri Lefebvre attended, but when I mentioned this in Understanding Henri Lefebvre I said this was uncertain.

Jean Hyppolite reportedly chose not to attend for fear of being influenced. His translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit would appear in two volumes in 1939 and 1941, and his massive commentary on the text, Genesis and Structure in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, also in two volumes in 1946. The latter was recently reedited by Giuseppe Bianco for Classiques Garnier. Hyppolite was the supervisor of Foucault’s recently rediscovered and published diploma thesis on Hegel and rapporteur for his secondary doctoral thesis translating and commenting on Kant’s Anthropology.

The reason I’m interested, again, in this story is not the seminar itself. Rather it’s that before the war Kojève was working on a French translation of the Phenomenology; who he was potentially working with; and why this was never completed.

In the Kojève archive there is correspondence with Gaston Gallimard in June 1938 indicating that a contract for a translation was close to being agreed. Gallimard offer a royalty of 7% and 10 complementary copies. Kojève wanted 12% for the first 1000 sold and 15% of those afterwards, and 25 copies. This request was conveyed to Gallimard by Bernard Groethuysen on behalf of Kojève, but Gallimard argued that increasing the royalty would put up the cost, which would make the book prohibitively priced, and therefore would benefit none of them. But he would happily agree to additional copies. Then the surviving Kojève-Gallimard correspondence ends, until it is picked up after the war in relation to publishing books written by Kojève, notably his Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne. Could it really be that Gallimard’s low royalty had derailed the translation?

Kojève’s correspondence with Groethuysen throws up a different possibility. In January 1938 Groethuysen had said that he hopes the saga of the translation could be ended, and that he wanted to introduce Kojève to Henri (misspelt as Henry) Lefebvre. He suggests a three-way meeting, which from subsequent correspondence seems to have happened. (Again, though, this seems to indicate Lefebvre had not attended the earlier seminars.) There is one letter from Lefebvre to Kojève in which Lefebvre agrees they should join forces, but notes when they met that they had not decided on a division of labour. Lefebvre indicates the sections of the text for which he has a translation already, and suggests that they could each work on parts. Would Kojève agree to this divide?

The correspondence with Lefebvre predates the correspondence with Gallimard, so it is possible Kojève rejected the offer and decided to go alone. Notably Lefebvre, along with Norbert Guterman, would publish Morceaux choisis of Hegel with Gallimard shortly afterwards. That book has gone through multiple editions from 1939. Gallimard’s website says it was published on 1 January 1939. However the translated material Lefebvre tells Kojève he has ready to be part of a joint venture is much more extensive than the short passages included in Morceaux choisis.

In April 1939 – ten months after the discussion of royalties – Groethuysen writes to Kojève to say that Gallimard has told him that Fernand Aubier will be publishing a translation of the Phenomenology by Hyppolite – misspelt as ‘Hippolyte’. Gallimard doesn’t think two versions in quick succession would be viable. Groethuysen tells Kojève that this is “more than annoying… it’s a disaster”. He says that Hyppolite’s translation was known about, but that he had been assured it was not going to be published. (Amazing as it might seem, the translation was actually Hyppolite’s secondary doctoral thesis, with Genesis and Structure the primary thesis.) Groethuysen wonders if at least a part of Kojève’s translation could be published, with a commentary. A second-best solution, he thinks, but at least something. Here, again, the correspondence in the files breaks off.

Kojève’s commentary, when it did appear after the war in 1947, was a significant moment in itself. The different readings of Hyppolite and Kojève have been discussed in various places. I briefly talk about this in a forthcoming piece on “Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite”, mainly through the reading Canguilhem made of “Hegel en France”. But the correspondence seems to me to indicate that Lefebvre had more material than he and Guterman published – or, possibly more likely, he and Guterman had more material than Lefebvre told Kojève he could use for their project. By 1938 Guterman, who was Jewish, was in exile in the United States, and he and Lefebvre’s joint working relationship was largely conducted by letter. It was Guterman who did most of the translation work for their joint ventures before the war, with Lefebvre taking the lead on the commentaries. Guterman would carve out a career in the US as a translator, as well as working with Leo Löwenthal on Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, first published in 1949, recently reedited by Verso.

Although it doesn’t seem to be discussed in Marco Filoni or Jeff Love’s books on Kojève, Stefanos Geroulanos has indicated how much work Kojève had done preparing his lectures over several years, including translating the work. 

With the exception of the final year of his course, 1938–39, where his lectures numbered to twelve, Kojève always gave more than twenty lectures (twenty-one the first year, twenty-two the second, twenty-four the third, twenty-six the fourth, and twenty-five the fifth). Kojève numbered the pages of his lecture notes, including in this count the translations he worked off. Though notes from the first four years are relatively scarce, the translation survives in full, and the final page numbers in each of these years indicate a total of more than 2,682 pages of notes.

An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 354 n. 14

Those notes are in the Kojève archive. Perhaps the promised availability of the Lefebvre archive will shed light on what, if anything, survives of the material he told Kojève about. How a collaborative project to merge these two translations would have worked is open to question. But it seems to me that the correspondence alone sheds a little light on an interesting aspect of the story of Hegel in twentieth-century France.

Update April 2024: there is a Spanish translation here. I didn’t know about this, and don’t know the translator – will update if I have more information.