Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 2, 2013
OBJECTS
OF AFFECT: TOWARDS A MATERIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS
In "Materiality of sound:
the cinema of touch," Lilya Kaganovsky uses materials from early
Soviet documentary cinema (primarily from Esfir Shub’s 1932 "K.Sh.E." [Komsomol: Patron of Electrification] and Dziga Vertov’s 1931
"Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass") to
investigate the concept of the haptic or tactile,
i.e. that which is connected to perception through hearing and touch. Despite
their differences, "Enthusiasm" and "Komsomol"
are closely connected: beginning with Vertov’s
attempts to turn sound into a document and ending with Shub’s
experiments with sound taking on the form of touch, Kaganovsky
attempts to reconstruct a trajectory whereby the organization of hearing with
the help of recording technology enabled sound to become an organic part of
cinematic composition.
The section continues with
"The stars’ embrace: on the corporeal qualities of glass in
In the article
"Constitutional awe," Kim Lane Scheppele analyzes the
phenomenon of awe, or "holy dread." Such a concept is founded on a
certain affective object; upon entering a space of politics, it becomes a
political fetish. This fetish is capable of producing a staggering affective
experience for the group of people that has chosen it as an object of
admiration — in other words, it can evoke a sense of awe. As an example of this
kind of affective object Scheppele offers Hungary’s
Holy Crown of St. Stephen, which became a key player in the numerous political
speculations of recent Hungarian history and which was transformed into a
material expression of national (and nationalist) identity.
ANTHROPOLOGY
OF THE POGROM
"Two days of hate in Leningrad: the ‘Ershov
Brothers’ vs. Doctor Zhivago" by Mikhail Zolotonosov contains a) fragments from
shorthand notes taken at a meeting of the Leningrad branch of the Soviet
Writer’s Union, during which — entirely in the spirit of 1937 — the group "discussed" Boris Pasternak’s
having been awarded the Nobel Prize for the novel Doctor
Zhivago; and
b) extensive commentary on the event.
In "The exclusion of A.A. Galich from the
Writers’ Union," Mikhail Aronov presents shorthand notes
from a meeting of the Secretariat of the Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union,
at which Aleksandr Galich was ejected from the Union.
INDIVIDUAL
EXPERIENCE: AN ATTEMPT AT HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL RECONSTRUCTION
"The death in Saint-Petersburg in July 1803" by Andrey Zorin completes the series of
publications based on Andrei Turgenev’s famous diary. It deals with the
mysterious circumstances of the diarist’s death in July 1803 and attempts to
reconstruct the logic of events based of the analysis of emotional patterns
that defined Turgenev’s lived experience and perception of his own situation.
An article by Valery Podoroga, "The tree of the
dead: Varlam Shalamov and the time of the Gulag (an attempt at
negative anthropology)" presents an attempt to reconstruct Shalamov’s
"camp world" (using his Kolyma Tales as material). The
analysis, which is aided by the categories and concepts of negative
anthropology, seeks answers to the following questions: Was it possible to
survive in Stalin’s camps without moral losses? How was it possible to maintain
the human element within human beings — through resistance, submission, insanity? Did
Shalamov himself — a
witness, victim and chronicler of the Gulag unknown in his own time — survive
his time in the camps?
VLADIMIR
SOROKIN: OVERCOMING LITERATURE
The first-ever English-language conference devoted
to the work of Vladimir Sorokin, "Vladimir Sorokin’s languages: mediality,
interculturality, translation," took place 31 March-1 April
CINEMATEXT
In
"Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996)," Grigory Amelin (Moscow) gives a "close reading" of the
film, which is based on Michael Ondaatje’s epony-mous novel. In addition to the
aesthetic and existential aspects of the film, Amelin somewhat paradoxically
focuses on questions of knowledge ("what can I know?") and the
attempt to endow history with human significance — all the way from classical
history according to Herodotus to a modern world torn apart by war.