Echoes of an origin: Kojève’s philosophy of the inexistent

Abstract Recent scholarship has increasingly acknowledged that the thought and work of Kojève cannot be easily reduced to his reading of Hegel. While important for understanding his idiosyncratic commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit , it has been argued that his lesser known “early period” texts speak to a train of thought that lies outside the scope of the more familiar themes associated with his philosophy and thus challenge its standard reception. In this essay, I shed further light on the evolution of this thinking by exploring a series of notebooks written in the early 1920s, collectively referred to as the Philosopher’s Journal [ dnevnik filosofa ], which contain the details of what he called “the fundamental principles of a philosophy of the inexistent.” Notwithstanding the lack of attention placed on these notebooks, I argue that they represent a significant contribution to his corpus, revealing the origins of a specific terminology and method, which allows us to view them as a compelling point of departure. Although the so-called principles of a philosophy of the inexistent are sketched out in a cursory manner, their rudimentary form already displays certain tendencies that will linger in his later readings of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. Thus, by tracing out the contours of this nascent phase of his thought, we gain entry to a different point of access to his philosophy—a philosophy which, in fact, raises distinct questions regarding “philosophical rigour” itself.