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 1962 to 1973, Axelos taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met Jacques Lacan, Pablo Picasso, and Martin Heidegger.
[9] The journal had links to other European publications, e.g., Praxis in Yugoslavia and Das Argument in Germany,[10] and pursued a non-sectarian Marxist approach.
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.
Axelos tried to relate these descriptions of alienation and loss of "play" to Heidegger's concept of technological "enframing as standing-reserve [bestand].
For Axelos, this expanded understanding of technology became a way of interrogating both modern society and Marxism[13] Following the example of his teacher Heidegger, who employed a poetic style of philosophy, Axelos often used a continuous flow of aphoristic statements to relate phenomena together, attempting to listen to "the game of the world".
Using this method to approach the "horizons of the world," Axelos unpacks the "mythological elements" of Marxism and especially criticizes tendencies toward meta-narrative that he considers nihilistic and anthropocentric.
In employing both Marx and Freud, Axelos did not carelessly reject their arguments despite trying to "liberate the vital forces" within them (1964), as his autobiography notes: "it remains to ask again, to extrapolate the Marxian and Freudian intuitions" (1997).
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" (1997).
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.