Description: Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Alexandre Kojève's thought.
Review Quotes: Kojève is a riddle, his Russian roots eclipsed by his legendary role as explicator of German idealism to French intellectuals in the 1930s. This splendid translation of his erudite, eccentric 1931 text reveals him taking on the most Dostoevskian of questions with all the wisdom of Western Europe at his back. What is our relation to what is outside the world? Here is an inquiry into atheistic anthropology that would have thrilled Heidegger himself.--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University