Abstract
The article critically addresses Boris Groys’ interpretation of photographs by Alexandre Kojève. In 2012, Groys organized the exhibition After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, which intended to demonstrate the “posthistorical” dimension in Kojève’s artistic output. The article questions the adequacy of that perspective, given the somewhat tendentious curatorial presentation of the photos as showing an empty, dehumanized world. Considering the aesthetic and ontological aspects of the analysis of visual images that were central to Kojève’s brief account of his 1920 visit to the Borghese Gallery in Rome and to his 1936 article on Kandinsky, Groys’ reading of Kojève’s photographic stance is subject to revision. The notion of aura, as proposed by Walter Benjamin, is operative in a comparative treatment of the photos by Kojève and Eugène Atget.
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Notes
Postcards also hark back to his trips to Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Great Britain, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, USA, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Cuba, and Tahiti.
An exhibition entitled After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer was held at: BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013; The James Gallery, The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, 10 April–1 June 2013.
The same article, with a few minor differences, was published in the Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal (Arts Magazine), 2012, No. 86–87, under the title Philosopher as a Sage. http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/11/article/144. See also (Groys 2013b).
According to Isabel Jacobs, at the BNF, there are some photographs Kojève took back in the 1920–30s that are portraits of leisure and snapshots of his friends, dogs, lovers, and cars.
Groys speaks of “a certain post-historical melancholy”, so congenial to Kojève’s photography. However, transforming photographs into a “motion picture” blocks this feeling. As Barthes points out, the photograph “is without future (this is its pathos, its melancholy); in it, no protensity, whereas the cinema is protensive, hence in no way melancholic” (Barthes 1981, p. 90).
In his later years, Kojève engrosses himself in theological literature. Refer, for example, to his essay The Christian Origin of Modern Science (1964).
It is unlikely that Kojève himself ever partook in a tea-drinking ceremony while in Japan; he rather viewed it as a system of highly structuralized images. In other words, it is not so much the taste of the tea as the way one drinks it that is significant.
The ritual action brings Man back to himself but does not bring him back to the real World he is living in.
First published in 1966, when Kojève spent a lot of time traveling.
Marco Filoni (Filoni 2008) assumes that this could be a painting by Domenico Beccafumi titled Madonna col Bambino et San Giovannino (1538–1540). Kojève, however, speaks of the Madonna breastfeeding the child. This description sounds more like a painting Madonna col Mambino by Ventura Salimbeni (late sixteenth century), which, however, cannot be viewed as one of Leonardo’s school paintings.
The given quote is back-translated from Italian. The Russian text, which is part of Kojève’s archives kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, has not yet been published.
That said, Kojève keeps his photographs in a personal archive, while Atget sells his shots to artists.
For Kojève, there is no need to write a book, it has already been written and is known as The Phenomenology of Spirit.
References
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A Russian version of this article was initially published in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 175: 40–53, 2022.
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Tokarev, D. Alexandre Kojève’s photography: some reflections. Stud East Eur Thought 76, 75–90 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09543-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09543-z