Kojève, Carl Schmitt, and the Third as Fiction

Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) and Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) met each other in the late Fifties at a conference in Düsseldorf arranged by Schmitt. The conference was held after a short correspondence that had started only a few years later: the letters didn’t talk about law, they focused on history and the End-State. After their meeting, Schmitt started to quote Kojève’s words about a “giving nomos”, a fourth possible meaning aside the three he had pointed out in 1953 Nehmen/Teilen/Weiden (Take, Divide, Graze). Carl Schmitt couldn’t know that Kojève had not only mentioned him, but had used his very The Concept of Political in a long book he never published: the Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. Kojève had written the Outline in France during World War II and Schmitt can be counted among his very few sources – the other being a short list of French and German legal historians, philosophers and theorists. Far from being curious, the ‘political’ seems to be the foundation of what Kojève means by ‘right’, that is the phenomenological appearance of a Third in the struggle between A and B, the two consciousnesses fighting for the recognition of their subjective right to act (or react) as they do. In the wake of his famous Hegelian seminar of the Thirties, Kojève’s now uses the most renowned essay by the German legal thinker to figure out an autonomous juridical mediation, and in some way overcome Carl Schmitt’s reduction of law to politics. My contribution intends to provide the reader with a reconstruction of Kojève’s legal thought through his profound confrontation with Schmitt. Their late, explicit controversy on the meaning of nomos will provide further hints to understand where the two juridical paths part ways with each other