Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography – Verso, November 2025

I’m sure this will be interesting, but I’m disappointed it’s only 160 pages. This really feels like it needs someone to do a really major treatment. I’ve read the Jeff Love and Marco Filoni ones – the latter in its earlier French edition; an English version is forthcoming, which I think is of the expanded second Italian edition.

Boris Groys’s new book is an intellectual biography of the fascinating and mysterious figure of Alexandre Kojève, discussing his involvement with Hegel’s dialectics, his idea of communism and his vision of a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève proclaimed himself to be a Stalinist and at the same time was one of the creators of the European Union. His anthropology that describes humans as always negating their nature and their identity, and always desiring to be different from what they are, is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly “natural” rights.