Dialectical Annihilation in War and Death: G. W. F. Hegel’s Absolute Negation In the 1930s-40s Writings of Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille

This inquiry analyzes the role of the concept of annihilation, also referred to as absolute negation, and its relevance to a comparative understanding of two influential interpretations (and, in a way, creative continuations) of G.W.F. Hegel’s PoSby the French 20^th-century thinkers Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille. The intellectual triad of Hegel, Kojève, and Bataille is effective in understanding the major currents of thought shaped by the catastrophe of WWII. Up to the early years of World War II, Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s PoS could have been understood within the realms of an annihilating utopia that manifests itself in Stalin’s totalitarianism, when Bataille presents a deeply tragic and radical interpretation of death, war, and the final state of absolute annihilation of consciousness in his radical thought. The first chapter of this work sets the ground of the discussion by reviewing how the theme of annihilation and its connection to the concepts of death and war are presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The second chapter provides a close reading of manifestations of these concepts in Kojève’s Lectures, a catalyst for the new light shed on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which will set the base for the analysis of the development of the intellectual lines of Bataille’s and Kojève’s Hegelianism. The third chapter lays the basis for Kojève’s and Bataille’s intellectual positions within the personal and communal contexts outside of the Lectures, which allows a reader to contextualize their examination of Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1930s France closer to the turbulent circumstances of the political and social realities of the time. In the fourth and last chapter, our inquiry will locate and analyze the culminative development of the themes of annihilation, death, and war within the early WWII writings of Kojève and Bataille.