Abstract

Ever since Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on the Phenomenology of Spirit during the 1930s, Hegel has served as a central reference point for the philosophical developments occurring in twentieth-century France. Such luminaries as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan absorbed Hegel through Kojève, making the now familiar themes of dialectics, negativity, and alterity into key pieces of their own intellectual edifices. Later, Jean Hyppolite became the principal scholar and disseminator of Hegelian ideas in Paris, translating Hegel’s works and publishing commentaries that set the tone for discussions of Hegel for another generation of French thinkers. Jacques Derrida is by far one of Hyppolite’s most famous and successful students. However, Derrida’s relation to Hegel is extremely complex and colored by a great deal of ambivalence.