Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 5, 2011
TRACING RACE:
PHILOSOPHY AS ANTHROPOLOGY
The block on Race, Deconstruction and Critical Theory comprises three
essays edited by Dragan Kujundzic, the authorized proceedings from the
"tRaces" conference held in 2003 by Etienne Balibar and Jacques Derrida, and an introductory essay also
by Dra-gan Kujundzic. The idea of the conference was to bring together two ways
of thinking about race — one provided by
a prominent Marxist philosopher and the other by the founder of
deconstructionism — in order to show
not only the differences, but also the similarities and convergences of the two
theoretical strategies.
In his introductory essay "Race, deconstruction, critical
theory", Dragan Kujundzic (
In his essay on "Election/Selection", Etienne Balibar (
Jacques Derrida‘s essay "tRaces"
draws into sharp relief the fact that the decon-struction of Western
metaphysics has always been also a deconstruction of racism. From the
beginning, Western metaphysics constructed hierarchical oppositions be-tween
phusis, nature, and techne or nomos
(law). Thus, claims Derrida, the drive to racialize precedes the notion of
race; race is an aftereffect of this foundational moment, which has conditioned
Western philosophy from its very origins. Race is thus always a tRace,
a spectral other haunting the origins of philosophy. The deconstruction of race
promoted by Derrida in this essay constitutes the most radical reading and
critical as-sessment of the racialization of philosophy to date.
INTELLECTUALS IN A CLOSED
SOCIETY: The 1960s
"Physicists vs. lyricists: towards a history of a certain
‘dimwitted’ discussion", from Kon- stantin A. Bogdanov (RAS
Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), St. Peters-burg),
analyses the argument between "lyricists" and "physicists"
that rocked 1960s Soviet
intelligentsia — representatives
of the social and hard sciences were locked in debate over which group could
claim ownership of the future. Bogdanov provides a de-tailed illumination of
the ideological context of these debates, and of the evolution of utopian
expectations that developed along lines of faith in infinite scientific
progress, in the synthesis of disciplines and the possibility of developing a
harmonious personality.
In "The second science or ‘The glass-bead game’. The seminar
movement in 1960s— 1970s sociology",
Marina Pugacheva (HSE NRU Center for Fundamental Sociology)
addresses the phenomenon of scientific seminars, which in the 1960s- 1970s were wide-spread in the
social sciences overall and particularly in sociology. Proceeding from
interviews and materials from personal archives, Pugacheva analyses the
functions, profiles of participants and leaders, themes and results of the
activities. Her conclusions reflect the particularities of informal scientific
communication during this period and their role in the development of a
professional sociological community.
Tomas Glanc (
THE SOCIALIST TRAGEDY OF
ANDREI PLATONOV
This block of articles continues our series of publications devoted to
re-thinking the work of Andrei Platonov in the context of the 1917 revolution. In "A
merging of living beings: human and animal in A. Platonov", Hans Gunter
( Universitat
Bielefeld) analy-ses the figure of the animal in Platonov’s prose as part of a
tradition of the Russian avant-garde, connected with the idea of the
transformation, emancipation and huma- nisation of the animal world. Gunter
demonstrates how, by taking up the rich spectrum of relations between human and
animal rooted in Russian scientific, philosophical, literary and visual
traditions, Platonov develops his concept of the interrelations — and often,
interchangeability — of human and animal.
A short essay from
PARADOXES OF
SOCIAL REPUTATION
Igor Nemirovsky‘s article
"Liberalists and libertines: the case of Pushkin" presents an
analysis of the circumstances determining the Decembrist I. Gorbachevsky’s
harsh judgment of Pushkin. In a letter to M. Bestuzhev, Gorbachevsky wrote that
the De-cembrists were forbidden to make Pushkin’s acquaintance while the latter
was living in the South — because Pushkin,
"due to his character and cowardice, and his de-bauched lifestyle"
would inform the government of the existence of the Secret Society. Nemirovsky
discusses the factors informing Gorbachevsky’s judgment, which corre-lated the
poet’s social reputation with two important points — his participation in the
activities of the "Green Lamp" society and his relation to the French
poet Evariste de Parny. Nemirovsky asserts that the Decembrists (like the
authorities) were unable to accept Pushkin’s creative worldview, which combined
"distinct eroticism, religious freethinking and political liberalism".
In "The unknown Pestel", Olga Edelman exam-ines the
family correspondence of the Decembrist Pavel Pestel; these letters signifi-cantly
supplement and change our idea of this figure. She puts forth the hypothesis
that Pestel could have been the prototype for the character of Germann in
Pushkin’s short story "The Queen of Spades".
INTERPRETATIONS
Evgenii Bernstein‘s article "An
Englishman in a Russian bathhouse: towards the con-struction of an historical
poetics of Russian gay literature" elucidates the reasons be-hind M.
Kuzmin’s decision to make Shtrup, the hero of his novel Wings,
an Englishman (the ideas of W. Pater). Bringing in V. Rozanov’s critical
response to the novel, Bern-stein then addresses the role of these writers in
forming the means for working out the homosexual theme in literature. In terms
of genre, asserts Bernstein, Wings anticipated the
"coming-out novel"; meanwhile, Rozanov approached homosexuality as an
"exis-tential collision principally lacking any solution". In
"Labour, hack-work and the first Five-Year Plan (on L. Ginzburg’s novel The
Pinkerton Agency)", Stanislav Savitsky describes Lydia
Ginzburg’s experience of involvement with the "social mandate" and
her attempts at self-determination in the 1930s Soviet Union. Konstantin Bolenko in
"Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Behind was the Narvsky gate, /Ahead was only death…’:
towards the question of the subtext of the artistic image" interprets
Akhmatova’s poem in con-nection with the events of 9 January 1905. He suggests the poem contains a postulate of moral victory — the expiation of imperial and Soviet
soldiers who participated in fratricide.
THE FAR SIDE OF
THEATRICALITY, OR A FAREWELL TO MIMESIS
This block is based on materials from the "Theatricality in art and
beyond" round-table organized by the "Theatre in cultural space"
research laboratory (RSHU) in November 2010. An immediate impulse for the conversation was
provided by the concept of "post- dramatic theatre" put forth by
Hans-Thies Lehmann (Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt am
Main) in an eponymous book in 1999; the concept continues to be actively discussed and
used by both theoreticians and practitioners of contemporary theatre. Although
Lehmann’s ideas have been subject to constructive criticism on more than one
occasion (for instance, consider the position of the French researcher
Christophe Bidan as expressed in the article "Even theatre has become
post-dramatic: history of an illusion"), their polemical potential is
clearly far from exhausted. This has to do less with Lehmann’s notion of the
"end of theatre" — in the sense of
its notorious death or aesthetic renaissance — and more about global shifts in
ways of seeing that have implications for directors, actors, playwrights,
theatregoers, critics and re-searchers. The texts published in this block — fragments from Lehmann’s Post-dramatic
theatre, a detailed analysis of Bidan’s critical position
presented in an article by Maria Nekliudova (RSHU, Moscow)
"Does post-dramatic theatre exist?" and materials from the "Theatricality
in art and beyond" round-table — are all indicative of the search for a new "non-artistic"
language that would allow us to make sense of the new "post-
dramatic" moment, avoiding both anachronisms and the excessive use of
neologisms.
THE "ANTHROPOLOGICAL
CRACK": CONCEPTUALISM REVISITED
This block includes four conversations with
CLOSE
In his article "American Fazil", Aleksandr
Zholkovsky ( University
of South California, Los Angeles) analyses Fazil Iskander’s
story "Balthazar’s Feasts", which constitutes the eighth chapter in
his novel Sandro of Chegem — one of the acknowledged master’s finest works of
narrative art. Zholkovsky finds a few keys to this small masterpiece in the
author’s use of a Walter-Scott-type topos of interaction between an ordinary
man and an historical figure. Islander’s treatment is meanwhile diametrically
opposite: while with Scott or Pushkin the acquaintance is successfully made,
and with Tolstoy it breaks off in one way or another, in Iskander’s novel the
protagonist — who has been
dying to get closer to Stalin —
nevertheless
himself turns away when the pivotal op-portunity arises to become more closely
acquainted. However, the structural secrets in "Balthazar’s Feasts"
are not limited to this point. Yet another one, as Zholkovsky convincingly
demonstrates, lies in the subtle game with time (narrative and historical),
which may evoke the poetics of the American novella (primarily Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe).