Alexandre Kojève casts a long if mysterious shadow on the horizon of twentieth century European political thought. For connoisseurs of especially post-WWII French philosophy, he shaped its contours and internal debates as much as any other, notably through his famous Hegel seminars of 1933–39, attended by the likes of Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A more circuitous if arguably even more influential road connects him to an erstwhile student in Paris, Francis Fukuyama, whose (in)famous (mis)reading of Kojève's thought would produce, by the end of the Cold War, the all-too-familiar thesis about the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy. Notably, Kojève also played a major behind-the-scenes role as a bureaucrat of the French government and an early architect of what would become years later the European Union. In The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève, it is Jeff Love's ambition to add further nuances to this complex portrait by not only offering close readings of some of Kojève's major texts, but also by exploring the Russian roots of his “post-historical” thought.

Apart from an “Introduction” and a brief “Epilogue,” the book is divided into three major sections, respectively, on Kojève's Russian context, his famous “Hegel Lectures,” and the later writings of his life. The discussion of Kojève's Russian predecessors includes sustained discussions of some of Fedor Dostoevskii's seminal texts, such as Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and Brothers Karamazov, organized around the inseparability between the human striving to be godlike and the constant threat of madness and crime. Ultimately, in Love's reading, Dostoevskii's work persistently displays the tension between a “vertical” eros seeking metaphysical emancipation, and a “horizontal” eros aiming at social emancipation. A full chapter in his section explores the influence of Vladimir Solov΄ev (the subject of Kojève's dissertation in the 1920s) and of Nikolai Fedorov on Kojève's thinking, through the ideas of the “Godman” (богочеловек) of the former and of universal resurrection of the dead of the latter.

The book's second section focuses on Kojève's “Hegel Lectures,” including the work for which he is most famous, his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. In the first and overall fourth chapter, Love offers a brief yet nuanced summary of those influential seminars, whose particular “violent” interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology would have a lasting influence on Lacanian psychoanalysis, among others. The remaining two chapters explore the all-important role of philosophical wisdom, the figure of the sage and the Book he produces, and the nature of the “universal and homogeneous state” at the end of history. Love articulates here an idea he would return to time and again: Kojève's conception of that end of history as the “self-immolation” of both individuals and communities, along with attending to its antinomies throughout Kojève's work.

The book's final section explores Kojève's late writings, including a still unpublished handwritten manuscript in Russian, an ambitious investigation of the juridical system in the universal state, and an extensive discussion of pagan and Christian philosophy. Of note here are the discussions of truth and finality, along with, in the final ninth chapter, an insightful genealogy of western conceptions of freedom from the Greeks to the modern period. Bringing it all home, the “Epilogue” revisits both the Russian link and the irresolvable tensions in Kojève's oeuvre through the famous figure of Dostoevskii's Grand Inquisitor.

The book, meticulously researched and boasting an extensive bibliography in multiple languages, would be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and generally anyone interested in learning more about the still woefully underexplored history of “East-West” intellectual exchanges. Yet it is with respect to this particular history that the book could have gone further still. For starters, Love's sparse yet weighty comments on the left's relationship to Kojève (along with Kojève's own self-proclaimed “philosophical Stalinism”) leave something to be desired: it is mostly Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno, along with some Alain Badiou, who are presented as a stand-in for a much more variegated leftist tradition, while both Kojève's own problematic equation of “Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism” and his complex relationship to the Soviet Union are left largely unexplored. An even bigger concern are the “(post)colonial” slippages in the text, form Solov΄ev's orientalist dismissal of Islam's “inhuman God” (72) to Kojève's own Euro-fascination with Japan (205–6), a staple of many a twentieth-century French intellectual, neither one of which is critically interrogated. Love suggests that Kojève's work offers an alternative to the postmodern “proliferation of discourses”; arguably, his own analysis would have benefited from a more robust engagement with postcolonial theory as well.