Kostas Axelos

Kostas Axelos studied at Faculty of Arts of Paris, Varvakeion High School and German School of Athens. The recorded working language is Greek, French and Modern Greek. The field of work recorded is philosophy, politics and editing. Heraclitus, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx are recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with University of Paris. Distinctions recorded are honorary doctor of the University of Patras.

• Region — Western philosophy • Era — 20th-century philosophy • Name — Kostas Axelos • Born — 26 June 1924 • Birthplace — Athens, Greece • Died — 4 February 2010 • Place of death — Paris, France • Education — University of Athens University of Paris (PhD, 1959) • School Tradition — Continental philosophy, Western Marxism, phenomenology • Main Interests — History of philosophy, praxis, techné, social alienation • Notable Ideas — Open Marxism, the game of the world, planetary thinking, mondialisation, errance • Institutions — CNRS École Pratique des Hautes Études University of Paris • Doctoral Advisor — Maurice de Gandillac Jean Wahl

Axelos was born in Athens in 1924 to a doctor and a woman from an old Athenian bourgeois family, and attended high school at the French Institute of Athens, the German School of Athens, and the Varvakeio High School. He 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. With the onset of World War II Axelos 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, on the Mataroa voyage, 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 CNRS, where he was writing his two dissertations, and subsequently proceeded to work in École Pratique des Hautes Études. From 1962 to 1973, Axelos taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met Jacques Lacan, Pablo Picasso, and Martin Heidegger. His 1959 primary doctoral thesis 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' secondary thesis was on Heraclitus and was eventually 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). 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 ' in Les Éditions 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. A notable book he wrote was Le Jeu du Monde (The 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.

Axelos' approach to thinking and philosophizing can be called 'Open Marxism,' a term Axelos himself used. However, 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 (paralleling Heidegger's assessment of Nietzsche). Open Marxism is therefore an attempt to transcend the political-ideological role of Marxism and to instead "pose fruitful questions and demystify 'existing realizations.'" Axelos stressed that all kinds of action (political or otherwise) cannot be defined a priori. Axelos' thought attempts to question all forms of closure and is a form of open systems theory (as opposed to closed systems theory). Elsewhere, he called this "planetary thinking" (1964).

Axelos uses the concept of "play" (le jeu) both as an ontological category (the "system of systems") and as an ethical ideal for an unalienated society. Axelos argues, following Marx, that the opposition between work (necessity) and play (freedom) needs to be abolished, but recognizes that this would be both a concrete and ontological "world-play" (le jeu du monde) or errance. He also argues, following Heidegger, that play is the meaning of Being which has been forgotten in the modern world (the oblivion of Being). Critiquing overly determinist accounts of globalization, for example, Axelos argues that it is a process of world-forming (mondialisation) which is more open to transformation than classical Marxists theorists often admit. The relational aspect of play is what links human activity with the activity of the world, and the various systems of human life (magic, myth, religion, poetry, politics, philosophy, science) together and to the world. Thus, play is not at all a childish vocation for Axelos.

The following is established of the heading itself.

The following is established of origins and background. Axelos died in 2010 at 15th arrondissement of Paris. It is also recorded that kostas Axelos was born in 1924 at Athens.