Publications

This editorial introduction at once surveys and makes an intervention into the main problematics of the volume, charting an unorthodox trajectory of German Idealism as a political-theological thinking of nothingness, immanence, and world-(de)legitimation -- and a key genealogical resource for the present and future of political theology.

This paper explores the relation between world-annihilation and world-construction in Schelling, Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel, in light of a central question: how to think the world without absolutizing or justifying it – to (re-)construct a world, or the way the world is or could be, without falling into the logic of justification – while accounting for the world’s being-there, as fact or problem?

This groundbreaking volume reassess the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective. Over the course of the volume, German Idealism emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity.

What our paper as a whole traces is the way that the declarations of nothingness, anarchy, and cosmism all offer a “Russian” mode of thought that is radically decoupled from national identity, particularity, or ethnos – a mode of thought that is preoccupied with and immanently affirms nothingness or the void. To think by beginning with the void is to delegitimate the world – to unground its mechanisms of power, succession, and reproduction. But it is also to think immanently out of this void – to think a future decoupled from tradition and history, and their (sovereign, no less than sacrificial) logics of violence and oppression. In this, the (im)properly Russian thinking of nothingness remains genealogically and conceptually relevant to the debate within contemporary continental philosophy, political theology, and humanities theory broadly construed.

What is to Be Done? Art Practice, Theory and Criticism in Russia during the Long Nineteenth Century

Kant famously claims that we have all freely chosen evil. This paper offers a novel account of the much-debated justification for this claim. I reconstruct Kant’s argument from his affirmation that we all have a price – we can all succumb to temptation. I argue that this follows a priori from a theoretical principle of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely that all empirical powers have a finite, changeable degree, an intensive magnitude. Because of this, our reason can always be overpowered by sensible inclinations. Kant moreover holds that this necessary feature of our moral psychology should not have been the case: We ought to instead be like the divine human being, for whom the moral law yields a greater incentive than any possible temptation. On Kant’s view, we are thus responsible for having a price, and the synthetic a priori fact that we do proves that we each made an initial choice of evil. 

The book focuses most of all on women's and partly on men's agency, to discuss variant ways in which women and men actively use their scopes of action - through political activism, protest, movements, in the military. The book is aiming to dicuss variant perspectives on these issues in different contexts witin Eastern Europe.  How do these in change affect conservative societies and the concepts of masculinity?

The volume is structured in four parts:

I) Floating concepts of Femininities and Masculinities

    (essentially this is a discussion on the role of feminism in the transformation period in Eastern Europe)

II) Political Activism

    (this part deals with political participation of women - also within conservative parties - and of variant forms of protest)

III) Nationalism and Militarization of societies

 (also papers on violence)

IV) Social Roles and Concepts of Women and Men

This text begins by applying the critique of phrenology to contemporary neuro-science in order to raise, once again, the question of consciousness. I then argue that consciousness is a process and product of the body, driven by history; like the work (and a work ) of art. This becomes clearer with Hegel's differentiation between human and animal consciousness, that is, in how our language and thought can tolerate contradiction, even grasp it as true. Thus, as Aristotle knew: consciousness is to the body as the sign is to the referent — and this has implications for our very survival.

Does Kant hold that we can have intuitions independently of concepts? A striking passage from §13 of the Critique of Pure Reason appears to say so explicitly. However, it also conjures up a scenario where the categories are inapplicable to objects of intuition, a scenario presumably shown impossible by the following Transcendental Deduction. The seemingly non-conceptualist claim concerning intuition have therefore been read, by conceptualist interpreters of Kant, as similarly counterpossible. I argue that the passage in question best supports an underappreciated middle position where intuition requires a pre-conceptual use of the understanding. Such preconceptual use of the understanding faces both textual and systematic objections. I show that these objections can be rebutted.

In this article I analyse retrospectively main directions in the interpretation of the notion sobornost’ in modern Russian philosophical thought. Key for religious Russian Philosophy on the border of the XIX - XX centuries, this term hasn't lost its importance today, but it has acquired some new senses and significations. Religious-philosophical and epistemological notion first and foremost, it was transformed into ontological and anthropological category, what allowed to describe the Russian national current community as "conciliarity" corresponding to “Russian idea”.

The article gives an outline of masculine strategies in the context of sociocultural preferences of post-Soviet Orthodoxy. The article reveals the specific features of deformation and distortion of normative masculine strategies in the conditions of religious conservatism and the post-secular resort to patriarchal norms, which causes a lack of men in the Orthodox Church, i.e., a certain masculinity crisis. The author subjects to verification the traditional view of gender imbalance, showing that this imbalance is diminishing, although there are still fewer men in the church (participating in worship and church life) than women. The evidenced decline of the percentage disparity between men and women in the church environment over the past 30 years allows us to acknowledge a partial overcoming of masculinity crisis in the Orthodox environment. Analyzing the limitations of ways to realize normative masculinity in the Orthodox environment, the author shows that the way out of this crisis are three ways of hypercompensation: consumerization of the church space, involvement in the global imperial project of Orthodox civilization and cultivating of a special religious attitude toward the war, accompanied by the militarization of the church culture. At least the second option and the third one involves a certain resort to neopatriarchy as they are shifting priorities to the side of primordial masculinity with a greater value of physical strength, authoritarianism and military exploit.

The article focuses on the reclaiming of militaristic ideas and the emergence of specific “militant piety” and “theology of war” in the Orthodox discourse of post-Soviet Russia. It scrutinizes the increasing prestige of soldiering in the Church and its convergence with the army. This convergence generates particular hybrid forms, in which Church rituals and symbols interact with military ones, leading to a “symbolic reception of war” in Orthodoxy. The authors show that militaristic ideas are getting influence not only in the post-Soviet but also in American Orthodoxy; they consider this parallel as evidence that the process is caused not only by the political context—the revival of neo-imperial ideas in Russia and the increasing role of power structures in public administration—but is conditioned by socio-cultural attitudes inherent in Orthodox tradition, forming a type of militant religiosity called “militant piety”. This piety is not a matter of fundamentalism only; it represents the essential layer of religious consciousness in Orthodoxy reflected in modern Church theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics. The authors analyze war rhetoric while applying approaches of Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, R. Scott Appleby, and other theoreticians of the relationship between religion and violence.

Context • Recent decades have seen the development of new branches of semiotics, including biosemiotics, cognitive semiotics, and cybersemiotics. An important feature of these concepts is the question of the relationship between linguistic and extralinguistic reality; in particular, the constructivist question of the role of observation and the observer in semiosis.

Problem •  Our understanding of the observer’s role in the framework of second-order cybernetics is incomplete without understanding where in the observation the significant activity, semiosis, takes place. By describing this mechanism, we see that semiosis has the structure of an eigenform. In this article I will concentrate on linguistic semiosis, and will illuminate the role of the sign and interpretation, emphasizing the scheme and logic of this process.

Method • I use theoretical and conceptual methods of argumentation, such as logical (deductive) and philosophical (phenomenological) proofs and thought experiments.

Results • This research explores the importance of including the interpretation (via the observer) in the process of signification, and maintains both the reciprocal connections between all three elements and their cyclic nature. I apply this approach to show that semiosis works according to the principle of an eigenform because of the cyclic and recursive nature of semiotic interpretation.

Implications •  My conclusions have productive implications for epistemic theories, linguistic theories, philosophy of language, theories of semiology, and semantics.

Constructivist content • Radical constructivism claims that we do not have access to a mind-independent world. It considers knowledge to be the ordering of experience to cope with situations in a satisfactory way.

This paper revisits the rhetorics of system and irony in Fichte and Friedrich Schlegel in order to theorize the utopic operation and standpoint that, I argue, they share. Both system and irony transport the speculative speaker to the impossible zero-point preceding and suspending the construction of any binary terms or the world itself – a non-place (of the in-itself) that cannot be inscribed into the world’s regime of comprehensibility and possibility. It is because the philosopher and the ironist articulate their speech immanently from this standpoint, that system and irony are positioned as incomprehensible to those framed rhetorically as incapable of occupying it (the dogmatist or the commonsensical public). This standpoint is philosophically important, I maintain, because it allows to think the way the (comprehensibility of the) world is constructed without being bound to the necessity of this construction or having to absolutize, dogmatically, the way things are or can be.

Malevich has usually perceived as revolutionist and iconoclast, and completely not as divine worshiper.  Meanwhile, those are two interconnected sides of his intellectual activity, and probably his way of glorification of God demanded revolutionary form at his time. In this article, I would like to show Malevich not only as art theorist, as it ordinarily applied, but as metaphysician, and even religious metaphysician. Still it can be said, that Malevich’s theoretical legacy haven’t been understood properly. The situation is this because only ten years has passed since the most complete collected edition of his works by the editorship of Alexandra Shatskikh have seen the light of the day. 

In this article it is shown that in some theories defending the non-reductive nature of the first-person perspective a not very consistent attitude to this perspective may be found. Such theories are related by the author to a so-called moderate naturalism. The article shows the difference between moderate and radical naturalism. Radical naturalism completely abandons the idea of subjectivity as unobservable from a third-person perspective. On the contrary, moderate naturalism defends the irreducibility of subjectivity, but believes subjectivity to be a part of the nature. As a case of moderate naturalism, the article considers the approaches of L. Baker and T. Metzinger. Using their approaches to the first-person perspective as an example, it is shown that in case of certain work strategies focused on the first-person perspective, it is possible that a so-called description error may appear, by which a description error of subjectivity – when it is placed in the world on the rights of a part of nature, according to the laws of which it exists – is understood. The logic of this error points to one of L. Wittgenstein's statements about the incorrect placement of the eye in the perspective of the eye view itself. If the first-person perspective is introduced as a point of view (or a point of observation), then its subsequent shift to the observation result area leads to description error. If there is no observation, as well as no viewpoint, we lose the very idea of first-person perspective and actually take the position of radical naturalism.

The paper deals with St. Basil's distinction between κήρυγμα (kerygma) and δόγμα (dogma), which has been the subject of much discussion over the last sixty years (Spir. XXVII.66-67).

 

Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age makes a powerful case for the autonomy of modernity with regard to the preceding Christian epoch – but it also emphasizes at least one continuity between the two, which can be framed via what Blumenberg casts as their common enemy: Gnosticism. Far from being external or secondary, this opposition to Gnosticism structurally defines both of these epochs as their task. What is, however, at stake in this common task? Reading with and against Blumenberg – and following his own account of the epochal shift to modernity – we will shed light, first, on the genealogy and, secondly, the political theology of Blumenbergian modernity, its structure of sovereignty, and key related concepts, such as the world, position, possibility, legitimation, theodicy, immanence, and self-assertion.

The understanding of the unity of the world — in the human and natural sciences, and the arts — has remained steadfast from ancient metaphysics to contemporary phenomenology: the world is one accidentally and necessarily, as true and false, potentially and actually, and categorically. But these four ways of being one can be traced back to how unity is or comes to be present and / or absent in anything whatsoever. If presence and absence, however, have their common root in implication, then this is how the world is (and why it must be) one — for unity is implied in everything that is.

The monograph discusses two questions: what is war in the 21st century? And how does the moral theory assess modern wars? The author providessocial, political, and ethical interpretations of conflicts. In order to address the first question, he tracks down the history of the development of the classical image of interstate war. Aligning with the leading specialists, such as MaryKaldor, Herfried Münkler, Martin van Creveld, he offers the original conceptual framework of new wars. This approach allows to identify both the most significant features of new wars and the typical practices of waging them. Answering the second question, the author delves into the ways in which moral justification of military actions is carried out and explores the moral component of the most distinctive forms and practices of waging modern war, namely terrorism, robotization and computerization of war, as well as the activities of privatemilitary companies.
The book is intended for philosophers, political and social scientists, historians, and specialists in cultural studies.