Kostas Axelos enrolled in the School of Law of the University of Athens in order to pursue studies in law and economics due to dissatisfaction with the philosophy taught at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, but did not attend.
19 Facts About Kostas Axelos
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Kostas Axelos was later expelled from the Communist Party and condemned to death by the right-wing government.
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From 1962 to 1973, Kostas Axelos taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met Jacques Lacan, Pablo Picasso, and Martin Heidegger.
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Kostas Axelos was a collaborator on, columnist with, and subsequently editor of the magazine Arguments.
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Kostas Axelos founded and, since 1960, has run the book series Arguments in Les Editions de Minuit.
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Kostas Axelos has published texts mostly in French, but in Greek and German.
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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.
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Kostas Axelos used Heraclitus' philosophy as the primary basis for assessing the work of Marx and Engels.
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Kostas Axelos contributed to the growing interest of contemporary researchers in the Pre-Socratics, and generally for ancient Greek philosophy, through his reading of the role of concepts in interpreting the world.
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Kostas Axelos' starting point was the argument in Marx's thesis that "the world's becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy's becoming worldly, that its realization is at the same time its loss" In his dissertation Marx, the Man Who Thinks Through Technique and in his work Alienation, Techne, and Praxis in the Thought of Karl Marx, Kostas Axelos draws heavily on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, reading them with the help of Heidegger's and Nietzsche's concepts.
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For Kostas Axelos, this expanded understanding of technology became a way of interrogating both modern society and Marxism.
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Kostas Axelos continued to engage with contemporary thinking and the emerging global world by seeking to discover the "unseen horizon encircling all things", further refining his method as a continuous wandering through the splintered "wholeness" that surrounds contemporary human beings.
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In employing both Marx and Freud, Kostas Axelos did not carelessly reject their arguments despite trying to "liberate the vital forces" within them, as his autobiography notes: "it remains to ask again, to extrapolate the Marxian and Freudian intuitions".
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Kostas Axelos' texts were almost all written as meta-philosophical epilogues with the intention not to "passively endure our time: the inquiries that we have launched require us to look and see both near and far".
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However, Kostas Axelos identified aspects of modern technological thinking that needed to be criticized within Marx's texts, leading him to read Marx as the culminating figure of Western metaphysics.
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Kostas Axelos' thought attempts to question all forms of closure and is a form of open systems theory.
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Kostas Axelos uses the concept of "play" both as an ontological category and as an ethical ideal for an unalienated society.
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Kostas Axelos argues, following Marx, that the opposition between work and play needs to be abolished, but recognizes that this would be both a concrete and ontological "world-play" or errance.
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Kostas Axelos argues, following Heidegger, that play is the meaning of Being which has been forgotten in the modern world.