ABSTRACT
Having placed Kojève in his time, this chapter will then take up Kojève and time, and Kojève who, as a philosopher, is specifically a phenomenologist of time. The chapter will discuss the nature of time phenomenology, and the centrality of the desire for desire as crucial to what Kojève understands as human time. The chapter will detail how Kojève as time phenomenologist sees desire for desire as both leading to tyranny as the predominant social and political condition, and how this dynamic leads to a phenomenological separation betweeen the tyrant-as-ruler and the ruled. The book will term this Kojève’s “time-tyrant problem,” a dilemma rooted in Kojève’s pre-war Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. The chapter will show how the heart of the dilemma is non-relation between ruler and ruled, which expresses an underlying condition of timelessness.
