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

Isabel Jacobs is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, and Jacob Saliba is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame. Their co-edited volume Authority, History, and Political Theology appeared with Bloomsbury in 2026. The volume documents the relationship between the famed Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève and his friend, the Jesuit theologian Gaston Fessard. Beginning with a critical introduction, the collection includes dozens of their reviews, lectures, correspondence, and several unpublished essays. With many newly translated into English and others appearing in print for the very first time, these texts show how each thinker grappled with some of the century’s most pressing political and theological issues, including totalitarianism, secularism, fascism, and Marxism. Alexander Aerts spoke with Isabel and Jacob about their new book. Alexander Aerts: Recently, two intellectual biographies of the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève have been published in English. Earlier this year, a biography of the French theologian Gaston Fessard was published in France. There seems to be a renewed interest in these thinkers, who played major roles in the development of twentieth century thought in France and beyond. What do you think explains this renewed interest, and how do you intend for your edited volume on Kojève and Fessard to contribute to the ongoing revival of these thinkers? Isa Jacobs: We’re experiencing a real Kojève moment right now. Over the last few years, translations of his work into English have been catching up, from Atheism (2018) to Notion of Authority (2020) and, most recently, Kant (2025). We also finally have the first volume of his Sophia manuscript—also known as the “letter to Stalin”—which just came out in French. Written in Russian between 1940 and 1941, it’s a wartime text that reworks the Hegel seminar through the lens of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. These “minor writings” made people discover Kojève as a thinker beyond his famous Hegel seminars. This is a discovery in itself: Kojève not just as a—possibly bad—reader of Hegel but as a complex, multifaceted philosopher in his own right. I think, though, that the more interesting question is, “Why now?” And this has political reasons. I’ll talk about this a little more later. What we tried to do with this collection is to bring out another facet of Kojève that needs more framing and mapping: his deep engagement with theology and politics. This is why we were keen to present primary sources, many of which were previously unpublished, and to contextualize them. To understand his larger project, it’s not enough to unearth more and more archival sources; we also need to reconstruct the networks around him. This has been done with some of his students, such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and, to some extent, Raymond Queneau. Yet these people are usually framed as adepts of the “master-figure” that is Kojève. His relationship with Fessard, who was one of his closest friends, stands out. It was far more horizontal; they were truly dialectical interlocutors, enacting the positions of the atheist and the theist. Kojève remarked in his review of Fessard’s work in 1936/7 that it remained open “to know which of [them] play the role of the master”—something that can also be said about their dispute. Compared to the better-known Kojève-Strauss debate, the dialogue with Fessard might even have been more central to the development of Kojève’s thinking, as he constantly grappled with religion. Jacob Saliba: It is also worth noting that the Fessard-Kojève debate was known by several of their contemporaries in France, as well as in the United States. For example, when the political philosopher Stanley Rosen recalled his time with Kojève in Paris in the 1960s, he noticed that Kojève often invoked Fessard as the figure that stood above the rest of his circle, referring to him as “one of Kojève’s closest friends, perhaps his closest friend in Paris.” The legacy of Fessard since then has not gained prominence in English-speaking scholarship. Fessard is a known figure, thanks to works by Stefanos Geroulanos, Sarah Shortall, Piotr Kosicki, and Edward Baring, but he has yet to earn widespread credit as a pioneering thinker in his own right—in the fashion of his confrère, Henri de Lubac, for example. Fessard certainly deserves more scholarly attention, especially as one of Kojève’s closest and longest interlocutors. AA: The opposition between atheism and theism is central to your volume, as well as to the general intellectual context of the debate. In a 1955 letter to Kojève, Carl Schmitt cites a passage of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which he uses to point out that political theology is the centerpiece of Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Kojève, writes Schmitt, reinterprets the Hegelian system as atheistic and without God. Why is it so important to bring Fessard, a Jesuit priest, into the picture? How does this contribute to highlighting the politico-theological dimensions of their works? JS: Fessard’s presence highlights the volume’s ability to suggest the possibility of religion to productively inform political thought. As part of a generation of Jesuits who came of age during the first half of the twentieth century, Fessard and his compatriots realized first-hand the urgency of using theology to overcome the threat of fascism in Europe. This was most exemplified in his involvement in the Jesuit resistance networks of Témoignage chrétien, founded in Lyon in 1941. It is not untrue that Fessard’s thinking operated in the wake of Schmitt (whose early work he read and of which he even owned hand-signed copies), for whom theology could be a legitimate form of discourse for thinking about the stakes of secular and post-secular politics. However, whereas Schmitt employed his critique of liberalism and concept of sovereignty to legitimize the ideology of the Third Reich, Fessard saw these ideas as an opportunity to interrogate various regimes of history and the theological requirements for overcoming the regime that Schmitt himself supported. A lot of this can be seen in the crucial years from 1938 to 1939. In 1938, for example, Fessard gave a lecture at the home of Gabriel Marcel on the evils of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, which was attended by Kojève, entitled “Revolution and Persecution: The Principle of a Political Decision.” Then, in 1939, just before France declared war on Germany, Kojève hand-picked him to give a presentation at the final session of his Hegel seminar. In it, Fessard offered, against Kojève’s master-slave reading of Hegel’s fight to the death, a theological reading of recognition as the precondition for reconciliation. IJ: Schmitt was absolutely central to the conceptual framework of our book: he is the silent third interlocutor. While political theology as a concept was not explicitly used by either Fessard or Kojève, we have decided to frame their debate within that discursive field in order to reinscribe their debate into the intellectual history of political theology. In his first letter to Kojève, Schmitt speaks of Gott-Nahme (the taking of God), referring to the removal of transcendence from the Hegelian system. Schmitt was fascinated by Kojève’s attempt to update the Hegelian system whilst accepting the death of God. This idea is the central point of conflict between Kojève and Fessard. Kojève, the atheist, immanentizes all transcendence from Hegel’s system of knowledge, making it finite and therefore closed. Fessard, as a theologian, deliberately refuses Gott-Nahme, believing that Hegelian philosophy would lose its entire meaning without the centering principle of God. It is important to mention here that Kojève was not only close to Schmitt in the 1950s, corresponding and meeting with him on multiple occasions (even entertaining Schmitt’s daughter in Paris), but also other figures in political theology such as Eric Voegelin and Jacob Taubes. Taubes read the manuscript of Kojève’s monumental three-volume history of pagan philosophy long before it was eventually published (mostly posthumously and in parts). Kojève thus very much shaped what we today call “political theology,” but his contributions often draw little notice. We hope that our book can remedy this. AA: I would like to go back to one of the central ideas in the Kojève-Fessard debate, namely the idea of the “the end of history.” It is generally known as coming from Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history after the fall of the Berlin Wall: there is no other political alternative but Western capitalism. Yet the collected writings of Kojève and Fessard reveal a far richer understanding of the concept, one rooted in profound politico-theological concerns. How did their respective conceptions of the end of history differ, and why did this idea come to occupy such a central place in their philosophical systems? JS: As a theologian, Fessard’s view of history is necessarily eschatological, which is to say that history holds an end beyond the finite domains of time and space—in religious terminology, an end co-constitutive of the soul of the human being. In this respect, Fessard takes away or adds to (depending on how you look at it) the notion of finitude in Hegelian philosophy, in the sense that Fessard reaffirms the infinite horizons of history. This became a major point of contention for Kojève, as seen in his review of Fessard’s Pax Nostra and La main tendue (1936/37) and his later essay “Christianity and Communism” (1946), where he doubles down on his atheistic reading of Hegel. As Kojève quipped, he could accept the existence of Jesus Christ, but he could never accept his resurrection. That, of course, is the irony of Fessard’s relationship to Kojève and why their friendship seemed to be so strong. Despite one being a theist and the other an atheist, both Fessard and Kojève saw each other as practitioners of a dialectical philosophy of history without which politics—and religion—could not make sense. IJ: I despise Fukuyama’s “reading” of Kojève with passion! Fukuyama’s popularization of a distorted end of history idea—the victory of liberal democracy and capitalism after the fall of communism—could not be further from Kojève’s own concept. Also, can you believe that Fukuyama does not even list Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in his bibliography? I think that it is important to wrest Kojève’s idea of the end of history out of Fukuyama’s clutches. The problem is that it’s a deeply enigmatic concept. As soon as you try to define it, it slips through your fingers. I believe that for Kojève, unlike Fessard, the end is not meant eschatologically, but more as a strategic move to close the Hegelian circle—the idea of radical finitude in order to create a philosophy that is graspable here-and-now by us mortal humans living in a world without God. The end of history is a crucial piece in the machine of the Hegelian system—a system that Kojève believes we absolutely need to close. Even when you retrace the idea of the end of history in the Hegel lectures alone, you get multiple definitions, often contradicting one another, such as the dyadic encounter between Napoleon and Hegel in Jena or his orientalist ideas of Japanization and snobbery in the famous footnote on the end of history. You could, of course, also argue that Kojève gleaned the idea of an end from Russian philosophy, transforming Vladimir Solovyov’s eschatology into radical immanentism—what in Kant he further develops as a teleology without telos. Kojève repeatedly emphasizes the double meaning of an end as both end (“fin”) and goal (“but”), entwining temporality with purpose, which is also related to his conception of the master-slave dialectic which comes to a standstill after history. A Kojèvian end of history is, in my view, non-eschatological, and it’s up for discussion how such an end would appear—whether as a free play of forms, a world without politics, endless leisure, or a classless society under communism. JS: I will just add that Fessard would also disagree with Fukuyama, whose account locates the end of history within politics alone, culminating in the triumph of liberalism over the Soviet Union. For Fessard, the end of history is constituted by its theological heading—the satisfaction of reason by revelation, or nature by grace—rather than by its ideological finality. The distinction is therefore not simply between two different conceptions of what comes “after” history, but between a political conception of historical finality and a theological conception of history as ordered toward an end that no political regime can itself fully instantiate. Fessard continued to grapple with this conceptualization late into his career, namely in his essay “The Problem of the End of History” (1960–1973). Interestingly, during this time Kojève himself delivered one of his final public lectures, “The Structure and History of Philosophy,” in 1965 at the Jesuit seminary of Chantilly, where Fessard was teaching. AA: Fessard first encountered Hegel—and later Kojève’s seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit—through the French philosopher and poet Jean Wahl. It was Wahl who encouraged Fessard to write to Kojève in July 1934, initiating what would become a lifelong friendship. Could you tell us a bit more about the intellectual milieu of 1930s Paris, in which vibrant intellectual communities emerged and where both Fessard and Kojève developed their opposing readings of Hegel? What was it about Hegel’s thought that spoke so powerfully to the concerns of that generation? JS: Interwar France was a fascinating moment of intellectual fermentation. Today, it is best known for planting the seeds of existentialism that grew in the 1940s and early 1950s with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre but were prepared earlier by exilic thinkers such as Lev Shestov and Benjamin Fondane. It is difficult to pack into a few sentences all of the changes that took place during this period. Gary Gutting, for example, set up the period by beginning with the university context. After World War I, teaching Kant and Descartes became increasingly considered by the era’s younger generation as unable to capture the dimensions of lived experience previously taken for granted in human consciousness (to put it phenomenologically). For example, as Alan Schrift and Samuel Moyn have shown, Jean Wahl and Emmanuel Levinas went to attend Heidegger’s seminar from 1928 to 1929 in Germany, as well Husserl’s lecture in Paris in 1929. By the time of the founding of Recherches philosophiques in 1931 and Kojève’s Hegel seminars a couple years later, this spirit of experimentation also extended to the relationship between the religious and the secular that was unlike their rigid boundaries before World War I. Baring’s Converts to the Real (2019)—a history of Catholicism’s role in circulating the central principles of secular phenomenology—paints a vivid picture not only of the intellectual surprises of the period, but also the porousness of those boundaries that enabled friendships and intellectual exchange to thrive. More broadly, as Michael Roth, Bruce Baugh and Judith Butler have shown, Hegel became a crucial resource for several French intellectuals concerned with reimagining historical consciousness after the emergent crisis of rationalism. By the time of Kojève’s Hegel seminars, intellectual experimentation largely revolved around how to work through the secular-religious binaries. The most notable example may be found in Kojève and Fessard, who self-consciously theorized their own intellectual relationship—and, thus, the relation between atheism and theism—in explicitly Hegelian terms. Both seemed to be acutely aware of the peculiar context of the interwar period in which more political contradictions seemed to be coming into focus, in their view, as generative of world-historical forces. Hegel’s system—precisely because it understood contradiction not as a failure of thought but as the very motor of history—provided the philosophical grammar to make this process visible and productive. IJ: Another interesting question for me is why we have been so obsessed with French thought of the 1960s—post-structuralism, deconstruction, and so on—yet there seems to be an amnesia of the 1930s as a great period of experimentation. There are solid historical studies, such as Stefanos Geroulanous’s An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010) or Ethan Kleinberg’s Generation Existential (2005), which show that the 1930s really were the testing ground for what happened in the 1960s. Vincent Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy claims that after the Second World War, the “three H’s”—Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger—were replaced by the “masters of suspicion”—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. I think that neither Kojève nor Fessard fit neatly into this historiography (1980, 3). In their debate, they already anticipated plenty of themes that would mark French postmodernist thought, such as the problem of a spiraling openness of meaning, relativism or the role of Marxism. Our volume tries to show both the continuities and ruptures in Kojève’s exchange with Fessard until his death in 1968. For me, Kojève is also so central because he participated in every moment of twentieth-century continental philosophy, from neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, Hegelianism, existentialism and psychoanalysis to Marxism and post-structuralism. AA: You state in your introduction that “their debate, rooted in divergent readings of Hegel, was centered on the limits and possibilities of a political theology for their own dark times.” Kojève’s first major manuscript was devoted to the question of Atheism. Fessard, by contrast, was a Jesuit priest best known for his book on St. Ignatius of Loyola and his numerous intellectual interventions calling on Christians to resist fascism. Theology figures prominently in the work of both thinkers. However, Kojève was shaped by a politico-religious context that differed significantly from that of Fessard. How is it that they nevertheless found common ground during the dark years preceding the war? And let me add a second question related to these dark times of the 1930s and the Second World War. Both were active during the resistance. Fessard’s works called for Christians to resist, while Kojève called at times for revolutionary violence. How did they come to legitimize these different forms of political violence? IJ: Publishing this book was important to us because it shows how two free spirits of the period, Kojève and Fessard, both politically open, entered into a decades-long debate with someone with whom they fundamentally disagreed. This desire to talk with political or ideological enemies is something that maybe got lost a little today. Many leftists, for example, like to stay among themselves and quibble over small things rather than facing their true adversary in an open-minded debate. Kojève and Fessard virulently discussed many topics without ever coming to a final agreement. Kojève’s politics are incredibly ambivalent and complicated: He called himself a rightwing Marxist and, during the war, managed to simultaneously align himself during the war with the Resistance, the Vichy regime, and Stalin! In the 1950s, he was allegedly a KGB agent but also close to Schmitt, the old Nazi jurist. This desire for ambiguity makes both Kojève and their intellectual friendship exciting. One of the key concepts in the book stems from Fessard’s lecture “Revolution and Persecution,” where he introduces the position of double refusal: the idea of simultaneously rejecting two opposed philosophical or political positions. Double refusal is not a “third way,” a path to a moderate middle ground, but a radical dialectical attempt to go beyond contradictions, to move beyond any clear alignment, whether politically or conceptually. JS: I might take Isa’s point a bit further. What makes Fessard interesting is that he was conscious of rejecting political categories, identifying as neither right nor left. This framing has become a bit of a trope after Zeev Sternhell’s book, Neither Right Nor Left (1996) on the origins of fascism. However, Fessard’s concept of the “double refusal,” because it operated as a theological refusal of both extremes, became a way of interrogating—without neutrally reproducing—the political logic that triggers ideological contradictions in the first place. Put more simply, Fessard held that theology was above politics in the sense that human ends exceed the demands of one ideology or another. Some, for example, might criticize Fessard for quietism, yet he also believed in resistance as a viable political action, as seen in his own resistance to Vichy in the 1940s and theorized in his essay “France, prends garde de perdre ton âme!” (1941) in Témoignage chrétien. This text was, in fact, one of the first critiques of Philippe Pétain during the war, chastising him for being a “slave-prince” to Hitler. IJ: As for Kojève, grappling with and against theology was at the heart of his philosophy, from his earliest writings on Buddhism and Russian philosophy to the late fragments of a system. The Russian book project Atheism (1931) is probably Kojève’s most important early work. There, he tries to prove that both theistic and atheistic positions are philosophically untenable—similar to Fessard’s concept of double refusal which I mentioned earlier. Yet, alongside Heidegger—and maybe also Kierkegaard—he calls for an existential choice or leap that we must make toward an atheistic position of radical finitude. Atheism is a total rejection of Christianity and religion, broadly speaking. His late work on the history of paganism, which tries to reimagine a new genealogy of Western philosophy beyond what he calls the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” is the culmination of his atheistic project. Regarding your question on the justification of violence: this thread really crystallizes in the Sophia manuscript, a love letter to Stalin and tyranny. Kojève’s embrace of tyrannical terror already emerged in the 1936 Hegel seminar, though the conservative Straussian editor of its English edition, Allan Bloom, deliberately omitted those passages. In these lectures, Kojève argues that the realization of freedom can only come about through unconditional submission to a tyrant who suppresses the individual will, and who thereby realizes the collective and universal recognition of humanity. This is an incredibly problematic argument. Kojève also wrote this in utterly ignorant, almost cynical detachment from what was happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin, such as the persecution of intellectuals, including his own friends, such as the Eurasianist philosopher Lev Karsavin, who died in a Gulag. Kojève never addressed Stalinist terror or revised his problematic stance on tyranny and state violence. Maybe he just wanted to épater la bourgeoisie, or maybe he didn’t really care about such issues. We already mentioned how he flirted with the regime of Marshal Pétain during the Second World War. Kojève was a total political opportunist, extremely open to both left and right. This openness to positions beyond traditional left-right dichotomies, as Jacob noted, might also be one of the reasons why his work is presently experiencing such a resurgence in interest, as traditional political categories gradually dissolve today. Alexander Aerts is a PhD student in the history department at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He is currently working on a dissertation about Alexandre Kojève and the idea of the end of history in the twentieth century. His research interests include twentieth century French philosophy, literature critique and the history of European integration. His writing has appeared in Marx and Philosophy, Lava Revue, and Krisis. Edited by Zac Endter Featured image: Digital montage of portraits of Kojève (courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Fessard (courtesy of the Archives Jésuites) in front of Château de Chantilly (2023, courtesy of Wikimedia), 2026, Zac Endter.