Kojève and Fessard on Political Theology: An Interview with Isabel Jacobs and Jacob Saliba

The co-edited volume brings together primary sources, reviews, lectures, and correspondence between Alexandre Kojève and his friend Gaston Fessard, aiming to map their relationship and explore their engagement with political and theological issues of the twentieth century. Isabel Jacobs notes that new translations and unpublished manuscripts, such as Kojève’s "letter to Stalin," reveal Kojève as a complex thinker beyond his known Hegelian work. The volume emphasizes the horizontal dialectical dialogue between Kojève and Fessard regarding the tension between atheism and theism, exploring how religion can inform political thought. Furthermore, the exchange highlights the debate over the "end of history," where Fessard's eschatological view contrasts with Kojève's conception of finitude as a strategy to close the Hegelian circle. The dialogue is situated within the broader intellectual context of interwar France, where figures like Hegel provided a grammar for understanding contradictions, and where political and religious boundaries were porous.

The text reveals a dynamic where intellectual friendship—between Kojève and Fessard—served as the crucible for examining profound metaphysical and political conflicts. The tension between the religious framework of theology (Fessard) and the atheistic project of immanentizing transcendence (Kojève) is not merely a philosophical disagreement but a structural engagement with history itself. This dynamic suggests that ideological alignments, whether religious or political, are fundamentally attempts to establish historical finitude. Fessard’s concept of "double refusal" operates as a mechanism to articulate a position beyond ideological binaries, suggesting that true dialectical understanding requires transcending established political categories. Kojève's ambiguity—simultaneously aligning with different power structures—and his engagement with the violent realization of freedom through tyranny present an unsettling mirror to contemporary dissolution of fixed political identities. The assertion that this historical debate is relevant today implies a challenge to the neat, endpoint narratives offered by post-war philosophy like Fukuyama’s, suggesting that the pursuit of absolute ideological finality masks deeper, unresolvable tensions regarding human experience and meaning.