Kostas Axelos - Biography

Biography

Axelos was born 1924 in Athens to a doctor and a woman from an old Athenian bourgeois family, and attended high school at the French Institute and the German School of Athens. He enrolled in the law school in order to pursue studies in law and economics due to dissatisfaction with the philosophy taught at the Philosophical School of the University of Athens, but did not attend. With the onset of World War II Alexos got involved in politics. Then 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 organiser and journalist affiliated with the Communist Party (1941–1945). He was later expelled from the Communist Party and condemned to death by the right-wing government. He was arrested but managed to escape.

At the end of 1945 Axelos moved to Paris, France, with around 200 other persecuted intellectuals, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and lived most of his life. From 1950 to 1957 he worked as a researcher in the philosophy branch of CRNS, where he was writing his dissertations, and subsequently proceeded to work in Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. From 1962 to 1973, Axelos taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met Jacques Lacan, Pablo Picasso, and Martin Heidegger. His dissertation Marx, penseur de la technique (translated as Marx, the Man Who Thinks Through Technique) tried to provide an understanding of modern technology based on the thought of Heidegger and Marx and was very influential in the 1960s, alongside the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse. Axelos' other dissertation was on Heraclitus, published in 1962.

Axelos was a collaborator on, columnist with, and subsequently editor of the magazine Arguments (1956–1962). He founded and, since 1960, has run the book series Arguments in Edition de Minuit. The journal had links to other European publications, e.g., Praxis in Yugoslavia and Das Argument in Germany, and pursued a non-sectarian Marxist approach. He has published texts mostly in French, but also in Greek and German. His most important book is "Le Jeu du Monde" (Play of the World), where Axelos argues for a pre-ontological status of play. 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.