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In the manuscripts section of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I found five unpublished letters from Jacques Lacan to Alexandre Kojève, all from the year 1935. In the text that follows, I give an account of this discovery and reflect on what we can discern from the letters concerning not only psychoanalysis and the existence of an “early Lacan” but also and especially what they reveal about the formation of thought and human sciences in France during this epoch.
We are aware of the importance that the encounter between Jacques Lacan and Alexandre Kojève had in the formation of the former's thought, to the extent that Lacan considered Kojève his only master.1 Lacan, like many other intellectuals (including Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Michel Leiris, Henry Corbin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Eric Weil), regularly attended the courses that Kojève gave on Hegel when he replaced Alexandre Koyré at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the department of Religious Sciences. Kojève had left Russia in 1917 and moved to Berlin in 1920 to study philosophy. His subsequent move to Paris in 1926 (where from 1933 to 1939 he held his seminar on Hegel) made him known in the Parisian intellectual milieu.