Studies in East European Thought https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09543-z TRANSLATION Alexandre Kojève’s photography: some reflections Dmitry Tokarev 1 Accepted: 22 January 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 Abstract The article critically addresses Boris Groys’ interpretation of photographs by Alexan- dre Kojève. In 2012, Groys organized the exhibition After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, which intended to demonstrate the “posthistorical” dimension in Kojève’s artistic output. The article questions the adequacy of that perspective, given the somewhat tendentious curatorial presentation of the photos as showing an empty, dehumanized world. Considering the aesthetic and ontological aspects of the analysis of visual images that were central to Kojève’s brief account of his 1920 visit to the Borghese Gallery in Rome and to his 1936 article on Kandinsky, Groys’ reading of Kojève’s photographic stance is subject to revision. The notion of aura, as proposed by Walter Benjamin, is operative in a comparative treatment of the photos by Kojève and Eugène Atget. Keywords Alexandre Kojève · Photography · The end of history · Groys · Kandinsky · Aura · Eugène Atget In Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), the protagonist Antoine Roquentin has a box of photographs and postcards of places he once visited that he keeps at his home. They are supposed to serve as an aid for his memory, which fails to supply him with co- herent visual (and other kinds of) images. The problem is, these images are starting to become supplanted by words, losing their inherent sensuous intensity in the pro- cess. The transformation of an image into a narrative is detrimental to the narrator’s personality, too, who loses his individuality as a result: There are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is left but words; I could still tell stories, tell them too well (as far as anecdotes are concerned, I can stand up to anyone except ship’s officers and professional A Russian version of this article was initially published in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 175: 40–53, 2022.  D. Tokarev tokarev.dimitri@gmail.com 1 University of Nantes, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre – BP 81227, 44312 Nantes Cedex 3, France