This talk examines what the twentieth-century thinker and functionary Alexandre Kojève can tell us about modernity and modern thought. The paper addresses Kojève’s account of the experience of death (and thus of life), and then offers an alternative framework in which death can be considered as what the paper will describe as the ‘unfigured’. This, it will be suggested, allows us to enter the space of contemporary thought in a different way, and thus to conceive modernity differently.

This session will also be available on MS Teams. Contact Suzanne Whitten (suzanne.whitten@qub.ac.uk) for link.