Authors

Discussion

In this paper, I explore Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève's aesthetic project of the 1950-60s. Incorporating his photographic practice and late writings, I present Kojève's neo-Hegelian philosophy as shaped by an aesthetics of exhaustion, repetition, and return. Focusing on notions of temporality, I read his work as a critical response to both French postmodernism and Soviet modernism. Influenced by and diverging from post-Hegelian aesthetics, Kojève's philosophy and visual practice do not seek synthesis or totality. Instead, and that unites him with metamodernism, he comments on the very production of philosophical discourse itself. Proclaiming that the end of both philosophy and art is already achieved, Kojève's project explores the return to Hegel as the only possible remaining discourse. I will elucidate how this return, similar to Lacan’s proclaimed return to Freud, is less a simple repetition than a pedagogical, or in Kojève's words, propagandistic tool. In this context, I analyze Kojève's photographs through the lens of concepts of emptiness, circularity, and timelessness, as developed in his final book project Concept, Time and Discourse(published posthumously).