Alexandre Kojève's Hegel Seminar: Decentered Readings and European-Transatlantic Translationes Studiorum.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christine Blättler
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541150608

Alexandre Kojève's Hegel seminar at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études in Paris from 1933-1939 is considered a lieu de mémoire of the interwar period in France. Many later prominent intellectuals attended the seminar, such as Georges Bataille, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, and Hannah Arendt, who were introduced to Hegel's philosophy through Kojève. In this seminar, Kojève passed to his Parisian audience and the international reception an ambiguous reading of Hegel and a double legacy: on the one hand, a very partial Hegel, and on the other, at the same time, a conceptual potential to overcome this Hegelian approach. The effectiveness of this seminar can be seen in theory movements of international intellectual history up to the present day via the coupling of the questions concerning human beings and history, in posthuman and posthistorical conceptions, too. The aim of the research project is to present Kojève's Hegel Seminar, on the one hand, in its history of origin and its European and transatlantic reception history, which continues to this day, and, on the other hand, in Kojève's complete works and to unfold it as a concise philosophical chapter of a translational turn in terms of the history of philosophy and translation theory. To this end, 1. the first complete German edition of Kojève's Hegel Seminar will be published in the series "Philosophische Bibliothek" of the Meiner Verlag Hamburg based on the archival material from the Fonds Alexandre Kojève of the Bibliothèque national de France; 2. this edition will be provided with an up-to-date introduction and contextualisation as well as a scholarly commentary based on the evaluation of the archival material and the latest research literature; and 3. a long essay on methodological, philosophical-historical, and systematic dimensions of translation will be published.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants