Jeff Love

Alexandre Kojève

Atheism

Michael Meng

This book confronts the question of immortality: Is human life without immortality tolerable? It does so by exploring three attitudes to immortality expressed in the context of three revolutions, the Soviet, the Nazi and the Communist revolution in China. The book begins with an account of the radical Russian tradition of immortalism that culminates in the thought of Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), then contrasting this account with the equally radical finitism of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Both these strands are then developed in the context of modern Chinese philosophical thinking about technology and the creation of a harmonious relation to nature that reflects in turn a harmonious relation to mortality, one that eschews the radicality of both Fedorov and Heidegger by discerning a “middle way.”

Revolutionary Bio-politics from Fedorov to Mao

A concise but comprehensive guide to Tolstoy's literary and philosophical writings, focusing on aspects of his work that students find most difficult.

Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed

Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was an important and provocative thinker. Born in Russia, he spent most of his life in France. His interpretation of Hegel and his notorious declaration that history had come to an end exerted great influence on French thinkers and writers such as Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau. An unorthodox Marxist, he was a critic of Martin Heidegger and interlocutor of Leo Strauss who played a significant role in establishing the European Economic Community; a polyglot with many unusual interests, he wrote works, mostly unpublished in his lifetime, on quantum physics, the problem of the infinite, Buddhism, atheism, and Vassily Kandinsky’s paintings. In The Black Circle, Jeff Love reinterprets Kojève’s works, showing him to be an essential thinker who challenged modern society and its valuation of individuality, self-interest, and freedom from death. Emphasizing Kojève’s neglected Russian roots, The Black Circle puts him in the context of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian debates over the proper ends of human life. Love explores notions of perfection, freedom, and finality in Kojève’s account of Hegel and his neglected later works, clarifying Kojève’s emancipatory thinking and the meaning of the oft-misinterpreted “end of history.” Combining intellectual history, close textual analysis, and philosophy, The Black Circle reveals Kojève’s thought as a profound critique of capitalist individualism and a timely meditation on human freedom.

A Life of Alexandre Kojève

The Black Circle

This important collection reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of Heidegger’s impact, adding to our knowledge of the interaction between Western philosophy and Russia as well as the often neglected East European milieu.

Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe

Beneath the facade of the ego, beyond the ability of the mind to conceive of it, yet within reach of everyone through direct personal experience, there is a God-like Self, the authentic "I AM" or the Quantum God or Goddess. From the perspective of a Quantum God, life is a co-created reality made of consciousness and a special condition of consciousness called matter. Matter is the medium; being is the message. You and I are the Quantum Gods. The book features: A profusely illustrated introduction to the classical Kabbalah and its Tree of Life "The Creative Law," a practical, seven-step process of creative visualization. It was discovered by applying Kabbalistic principles to decipher the code hidden in the first book of the Old Testament mistakenly entitled Genesis. It is how the Quantum Gods co-create reality. "Psychometaphysics," a radical metaphysical model of reality in the form of a commentary on Kabbalah which relates the scientific view of the world to personal experience "The Enlightenment Intensive," a method of self-inquiry discovered in 1968. It is a Zen-like method utilizing both contemplation and communication to discover first hand the true nature of Self and Life from one's own direct personal experience

The Origin and Nature of Matter and Consciousness

The Quantum Gods

Jeffrey Metzger

"Nietzche and Dostoevsky"are collectedessays on Nietzsche Dostoevsky andtwentieth-century intellectual history."

Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

The Overcoming of History in “War and Peace” marks a radical departure from the critical tradition dominated by Sir Isaiah Berlin's view that the novel is deeply divided against itself, a majestically flawed contest of brilliant art and clumsy thought. To the contrary, Jeff Love argues that the apparently divided nature of the text, its multi-leveled negotiation between different kinds of representation, expresses the rich variety of the novel's very deliberate striving to capture the fluidity of change and becoming in the fixed forms of language. The inevitable failure of this striving, revealing the irreducible conflict between infinite desire and finite capacity, is at once the source of new beginnings and the repetition of old ones, a wellspring of continually renewed promises to achieve a synoptic vision of the whole that the novel cannot fulfill. This repetitive struggle between essentially comic and tragic conceptions of human action, far from being a pervasive flaw in the texture of the novel, in fact constitutes its dynamic center and principal trope as well as the productive origin of the unusual features that distinguish it as an uncommonly bold narrative experiment.

Jeff Love

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