Abstract

French interpretations of Hegel have been immensely influential in the past fifty years. One has only to think of the names Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite to begin to recognize the enormous debt which all students of Hegel owe to French scholarship in this period. Beyond the problems posed by the specific interpretations of Hegel advanced by Kojève and Hyppolite, however, there is also the task of beginning to assess the great influence upon subsequent French thought brought about by their students, among whom are grouped a veritable pantheon of modern French thinkers. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alexandre Koyré, Raymond Aron, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Bataille, among others, all attended Kojèves’s lectures, while Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida attended seminars with Hyppolite.