Jeff Love reinterprets Alexandre Kojève’s works, showing him to be a provocative thinker who challenged modernity's valuation of self-interest. Joining intellectual history, close textual analysis, and philosophy, The Black Circle reveals Kojève’s thought as a profound critique of capitalist individualism and a timely meditation on human freedom.

Love Jeff :

Gordon Jeff Love (PhD, Russian Literature, Yale) is Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University. He is the author of Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008) and The Overcoming of History in War and Peace (Rodopi, 2004), the translator (with Johannes Schmidt) of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith (SUNY, 2006) and of Kojeve’s Atheism (Columbia, 2019), and the editor (with Jeff Metzger) of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy (Northwestern, 2016). His essay “In Praise of Suicide,” on Kojeve, appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books column “The Philosophical Salon (April 11, 2016).”Jeff Love is Research Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University. He is the author of The Overcoming of History in “War and Peace” (2004), editor of Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe (2017), and translator of Kojève’s Atheism (Columbia, 2018), among other works.

Ilya Kliger, New York University:
A sophisticated contribution to the study of one of the most enigmatic modern thinkers, this book is simultaneously scholarly and bold. It not only retraces Kojève’s roots in more than a century of Russian literature and thought but also–attuned to the paradoxes and ironies embedded in his kaleidoscopic corpus–orchestrates a spirited exchange among canonical figures of the 'Western tradition,' from Plato and Aristotle to Beckett and Leo Strauss.

Donna Orwin, University of Toronto:
In this excellent intellectual biography, Jeff Love explicates the thought and speculates on the intentions of expatriate Russian Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Love’s readings of neglected Russian influences on Kojève (Dostoevsky and philosophers Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Fedorov) and of Kojève himself are satisfyingly complex, clear, and accessible. His Kojève is deep, controversial, and a 'philosophical propagandist' still relevant today.

Henry W. Pickford, Duke University:
Known only in Anglophone letters for a drastically truncated translation of his idiosyncratic and influential Parisian “Lectures on Hegel,” Alexandre Kojève bequeathed to posterity a multitude of tantalizing manuscripts and has finally received the intellectual contextualization and philosophical interpretation he deserves. In his magisterial study Jeff Love uncovers the profound presence of nineteenth-century Russian thought within Kojève’s literary style and his philosophy of negation, finality, perfection, repetition, political community, and radical freedom, such that Kojève emerges from Dostoevsky's underground as a distinctly Russian Hegelian existentialist thinker worthy of serious consideration today.

William Todd Mills, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Harvard University:
Kojève is best known as arguably the best twentieth-century commentator on Hegel. But Love’s incisive book shows that he is much more. This is by far the best, most comprehensive overview of Kojève’s thinking in any language and the only one to draw in detail on Kojève’s Russian background. Clearly, elegantly written and argued, it is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the complexity and range of twentieth-century thought.

Caryl Emerson, Princeton University:
The Black Circle is an extraordinary study in which hardcore philosophical issues are approached at a cosmic level but lyrically, almost as part of an intimate conversation. Alexandre Kojève was so thoroughly at home in German and French culture that his origins in yet a third culture have been neglected. In this book, Jeff Love restores Russian contexts to Kojève’s thought on Hegel and the ‘end of history.’