Kant forms the centerpiece of Alexandre Kojeve’s intriguing discovery of objective reality and its repressed history in Western philosophy

During the early 1950s, Alexandre Kojève resumed his ambitious project to bring the analytic reason of Kantianism in line with Hegel’s logic and philosophy of history. Kant is one of the most extensive text fragments where Kojève turned his attention to the gaps left open in the system of critical philosophy.

Published in its raw, unedited form in 1973, in the aftermath of the anti-Hegelian drift of the student-led revolt of May 68, the book has remained largely unexplored, despite its protean influence on various “returns” to Kant, from Weil to Deleuze, and from Foucault to Tosel and beyond. Kant is a deep and provocative text, equal in breadth and depth of insight to the famous Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

Kant’s philosophical system, Kojeve argues, is haunted by the Thing-in-itself, as the ultimate expression of ‘bourgeois hypocrisy’ and its internally divided reason between action and discourse.

Making a case for the post-historical moral imperative to turn away from infinite progress and the practical justification of the ideas of God and the immortality of the soul, Kant outlines the material conditions of possibility of revolutionary action within the twin horizon of accomplished and recollected history.