Background

Kostas Axelos was born on June 26, 1924, in Athens, Greece. He was the son of a Miltiades Axelos and Konstantina Axelos. He also had a brother.

Education

Kostas Axelos studied at high school at the French Institute. He also studied at the Varvakeio High School and later entered the University of Athens in order to pursue studies in law and economics. However, he didn't attend this university. At the end of 1945, Axelos went to Paris where he studied philosophy at the University of Paris.

Career

Kostas Axelos started his career as a Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in 1950. He held this post until 1957 and then proceeded to work in École Pratique des Hautes Études. Axelos worked in École Pratique des Hautes Études until 1959 and in 1962 he took up a post of a professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris where he worked until 1973.

Kostas Axelos published his first book Essais philosophiques in Athens in 1952. His thesis was published in 1962 as Héraclite et la philosophie: La première saisie de l'être en devenir de la totalité (Heraclitus and Philosophy: The First Grasp of the Being-in-Becoming of Totality). Later he published such books as Lettres à un jeune penseur (Letters to a Young Thinker), Notices autobiographiques (Autobiography), Systématique ouverte (Open Systems). Axelos also worked as editor and writer at the magazine Arguments. He founded and, from 1960, ran the book series Arguments in Les Éditions de Minuit. Axelos translated works of Heidegger, Georg Lukács, and Karl Korsch. He has published texts mostly in French, but also in Greek and German.

Achievements

• Kostas Axelos was a French philosopher, educator, and writer who is famous for his books Le jeu du monde and Métamorphoses. His works have been translated into 16 languages. Because of this activity and connection to major European intellectual figures, Axelos played a central role in French and European intellectual life for over 50 years.

Works

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• book

  • Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger

    (Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelo...)

    1966
  • Métamorphoses

    (French Edition)

    1991

Politics

Kostas Axelos became interested in politics right after the beginning of World War II. During the German and Italian occupation, he participated in the Greek Resistance, and later on in the prelude of the Greek Civil War, as an organizer and journalist affiliated with the Communist Party. Later Axelos was expelled from the Communist Party and condemned to death by the right-wing government. He was arrested but managed to escape.

Views

Kostas Axelos tried to reconcile the ancient thinking of Heraclitus with the modern thinking of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others in order to gain a new perspective on some of the problems of Marxism during his time. He explored the consequences of "alienation" in history, such as the effects of the division of labor, private property and capital, in terms of the "externalization" of human beings in an "alien reality." He tried to relate these descriptions of alienation and loss of "play" to Heidegger's concept of technological enframing as standing-reserve. For Axelos, this expanded understanding of technology became a way of interrogating both modern society and Marxism.

Axelos advocated a post philosophical approach with poetic and aphoristic tendencies. Its basic concepts are those of 'wandering', 'planetary thought' and 'game of the world'. Planetary thought is engaged not in a quest for truth but a kind of wandering in the world, which is viewed as neither intelligible nor unintelligible but as a constant unfolding of games. The concept of the game, which resists rational systematization, characterizes both thought and the world.

Quotations: "I do not consider myself as an intellectual, that is to say, someone who gives his opinion on all things all day and night. I have personal preferences in this, in this, but what I think and what I try to do while addressing myself, to quote Nietzsche, "to all and to no one", can only stay underground and exercise, if it should ever exercise it, an invisible rather than visible power."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger

Connections

Father:

Miltiades Axelos

Mother:

Konstantina Axelos

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996
• Existential Marxism in Postwar France
  1975