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L’ingénieur Kirillov (Dostoïevski, Les Démons), nihiliste hégélien chez Alexandre Kojève et Albert Camus
The article focuses on the place occupied by one of the heroes of Demons, Alexei Kirillov, in the philosophical reflections of Alexandre Kojève and Albert Camus. While making only a few brief allusions to Kirillov during his seminar on Hegel at E.P.H.E. in 1934-1935, Kojève analyzes the “logical suicide” of this Dostoevskian character as a major argument in favour of a radical, “nihilistic”, interpretation of the notion of absolute freedom in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. There are echoes of this interpretation in The Rebel (1951), where Kirillov, already referred to in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), is placed in a negative context related to the inevitable mutation of “philosophical suicide” into “philosophical murder”. The latter can take the form of individual terrorism or state terrorism, which is absolutely inadmissible for Camus.