Papers by Mikhail Epstein
After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature
South Atlantic Quarterly
All-Divergence: The Teachings of Iakov Abramov as Interpreted by His Disciples [1984–1986]
BRILL eBooks, Sep 29, 2022
Childhood and the Myth of Harmony1
Routledge eBooks, Oct 18, 2022
Chapter 11 ESSAYISM An Essay on the Essay
Russian Postmodernism
Chapter 13 MINIMAL RELIGION
Russian Postmodernism
The article explores the history of the concept “retromania” and analyzes possibilities and speci... more The article explores the history of the concept “retromania” and analyzes possibilities and specific features of its application to the Russian socio-cultural situation of the 21-st century. The distinction of Russia retromania resides, in the first place, in the scale of its spread incompatible with the scale of pop-culture in the space of which this term was born. Secondly, Russian retromania faces away from the recent past; it is directed to the deep past reaching archaic layers of culture. Retromania acquires forms of a new political metaphysics — necrocracy, total involvement of heroes of the past, especially war participants as witnesses and actors of modernity. The paper offers symbolic forms of work with the past and practices derived from them. The general strategy of necrocacy is depicted through tantalizations — the prevalence of death value regarding eros at all levels of social psychology and ideology. Chronos is also considered as time that changes its direction and fl...
Koinon, 2020
The article explores the history of the concept “retromania” and analyzes possibilities and speci... more The article explores the history of the concept “retromania” and analyzes possibilities and specific features of its application to the Russian socio-cultural situation of the 21-st century. The distinction of Russia retromania resides, in the first place, in the scale of its spread incompatible with the scale of pop-culture in the space of which this term was born. Secondly, Russian retromania faces away from the recent past; it is directed to the deep past reaching archaic layers of culture. Retromania acquires forms of a new political metaphysics — necrocracy, total involvement of heroes of the past, especially war participants as witnesses and actors of modernity. The paper offers symbolic forms of work with the past and practices derived from them. The general strategy of necrocacy is depicted through tantalizations — the prevalence of death value regarding eros at all levels of social psychology and ideology. Chronos is also considered as time that changes its direction and fl...
Koinon, 2021
The paper examines the event of the pandemic in three aspects: a metaphor of our age, an issue of... more The paper examines the event of the pandemic in three aspects: a metaphor of our age, an issue of ethics, a new phase of anthropogenesis. As the metaphor of the era, the pandemic stars as Belikov (A. Chekhov’s The Man in the Case): the form of bio-phobia and socio-phobia, the growing sterility of contacts, socializing over distances, closeness, and the priority of packaging (covers) before the procedures of openness, nudity, fusion. There appears a change in genres: the detective as a genre based on the revelation and removal of a shroud of mystery, the punishment of crime, gives way to the genre of the protectIva (from protegere: to shroud, to pull the veil, to shield). The protective is a genre to avert a catastrophe, protect against crime that has already become a norm, — the experience of survival on edge. There emerges homo tegens, “man who enclothes”, who pulls a veil over everything including himself. The pandemic as an issue of ethics poses a multitude of ethical challenges ...
The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity, 2018
Slovo.ru: Baltic accent, 2019
Digital philology studies texts and textuality in electronic networks and the ways of their readi... more Digital philology studies texts and textuality in electronic networks and the ways of their reading, writing and transformation. Electronic texts are much more fluid and transformable than paper texts and oral utterances. Textonics is a combination of theoretical and practical work with digital texts, the use of the Internet and all the capabilities of computer technology to create new sign ensembles, to develop new genres of intellectual creativity, and to rethink and reorganize existing textual formations. This article introduces a number of theoretical concepts, denoting different configurations of digital texts: megatext — a collection of texts that are perceived and studied as a single thematic or semantic whole; unitext — the totality of all megatexts; supratext — the text of a higher order in relation to the given one; syntexts united by a common supratext and functioning as synonyms with respect to each other; peritext — a list of syntexts, a table of contents as presented b...
Berghahn Books, Dec 29, 2017
The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei S... more The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei Siniavsky, in particular to his treatise ''On Socialist Realism'' (1959). Instead of praising socialist realism as the ''truthful reflection of life'' (as did official Soviet criticism), or condemning it as a ''distortion of reality and poor ideologized art'' (as did dissident and liberal Western criticism), Siniavsky suggested the artistic utilization of the signs and images of socialist realism, while introducing a playful distance from their ideological content. This project was realized in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of Sots-Art and Conceptualism, influential artistic and intellectual movements that transformed the Soviet ideological system into material for parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism is not merely an artistic trend; its philosophical significance is revealed in the art and programmic statements of Ilya Kabakov and Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, in Alexander Zinoviev's fiction, in Dmitry Prigov's poetry, articles and manifestos, and in Boris Groys's theoretical works. As a philosophy, Conceptualism presupposes that any system of thought is self-enclosed and has no correspondence with reality. The relationship between Conceptualism and Marxism is somewhat reminiscent of the dispute between nominalists (whose moderate version was also called ''conceptualism'') and realists in the epoch of the Medieval scholastics: whereas Marxists assert the historical reality of such concepts as collectivism, equality, and freedom, Conceptualists demonstrate that all these notions are contingent on mental structures or derived from linguistic structures. Therefore, from a Conceptualist standpoint, a ''concept'' is any idea-political, religious, moral-presented as an idea, without any reference to its real prototype or the possibility of realization. That is why Conceptualism, as a philosophy, is so strongly connected with art: the idea is used in its aesthetic capacity, as a verbal statement or visual projection of idea as such, so that all its factual or practical extensions are revealed as delusions. For example, conceptualists view totalitarian thinking, with its claims of all-encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of madness: a network of self-referential signs and internal consistencies forcefully imposed on external reality. When considering more properly philosophical ideas, Conceptualism creates parodies of metaphysical discourse, using, for example, Hegelian or Kantian rhetorical models for the description of such trivial objects as flies or garbage. This is not merely an attempt at the ironic deconstruction of traditional philosophy-it is also a project for the proliferation of new, multiple metaphysics, each of which
Russian Philosophy of National Spirit from the 1970s to the 1990s
BRILL eBooks, 2006
Chapter 14 THE AGE OF UNIVERSALISM
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Chapter 25 CHARMS OF ENTROPY AND NEW SENTIMENTALITY The Myth of Venedikt Erofeev
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Common Knowledge, Aug 1, 2020
In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array o... more In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array of commentary from citizens, including 1,100 letters from viewers and readers to central institutions and cultural figures and more than 6,000 entries in comment books from art exhibitions. The letters include responses to the new cultural exchange policies, translated prose, radio programs, travelogues, and Western films in the context of Soviet ones and vice versa. The authors of these letters were teachers, librarians, doctors, engineers, and students. Students comprised nearly 30 percent of respondents to radio concerts of the French singer and actor Yves Montand in 1954-1956. Most of them were studying pedagogy and engineering. Secondary school teachers and engineers made up another 18 percent of letter writers. Among Ilya Ehrenburg's 206 correspondents about modern art, one hundred listed their professions. The majority (41 percent) were engineers and teachers (24 and 17 percent, respectively). Others were doctors, bookkeepers, and agronomists. They graduated from five-year colleges and specialized institutes of, for instance, forest management in Briansk, metallurgy in Magnitogorsk, water transport engineering in Leningrad, and construction in Odessa. Overall, of 550 letter writers who specified their jobs, the intellectual elite-writers, artists, filmmakers, translators, professors, doctoral students, researchers, and foreign affairs specialists-comprised a minority of just 12 percent. By contrast, teachers and engineers made up 23 percent, or twice as many. Only 9 percent of 550 letter writers with known occupations were workers. Letter writers were primarily urbanites; among the letters I examined, those from the countryside typically were penned by village teachers, librarians, bookkeepers, and agronomists. The letters in my sample came from across the Soviet Union. Out of 808 letter writers who supplied their addresses, Muscovites and Leningraders accounted for 40 percent. Their share was lower among respondents writing about cinema (27 percent), translated lit er a ture (29 percent), and international affairs (27 percent). Moscow and Leningrad were home to the country's most prominent theaters, film studios, museums, libraries, and universities. Not surprisingly, these population-dense Appendix: Assessing Responses to Cultural Imports
What Is Metarealism?
Berghahn Books, Dec 29, 2017
The Ethics Of Imagination
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 1999
Transcultural theory needs to articulate its own ethics, which can be called an ethics of the ima... more Transcultural theory needs to articulate its own ethics, which can be called an ethics of the imagination. Traditionally, imagination was considered to be the capacity least bound to ethical responsibility, incompatible with or even antagonistic to ethical imperatives. The long-standing debates between ethics and aesthetics targeted exactly this opposition between moral norms and free imagination, between duty and desire, between reason and fantasy.
Russian Postmodernism
N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history... more N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history under the name of postmodernism. The beginning of the twenty first century reacted ambivalently to this heritage. Many concepts that postmodernism introduced into global culture are now undergoing revision in attempt to reappropriate what was lost or rejected during the previous thirty years. The practices of quotation, allusion, intertextuality, and the traits of irony and eclecticism are still current, as well as skepticism toward the universality of canons and hierarchies of all kinds. However, postmodernism, as it is perceived now, got stuck at the level of language games: it was obsessed with overcoding, subtexts, and metatextuality, and did not recognize anything outside this domain. By the early twenty-first century, this game continued by inertia alongside the new realities that challenged it: the Iraqi War, Chechnya, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. … All these events took place far away from the United States, however, and major theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard still were inclined to interpret them as postmodernist phenomena, including the mass media's control over the world scene and the information industry's games. The limits of the game suddenly became starkly defined on September 11, 2001. The entire postmodernist era ended with deadly Preface to the Second Edition | xv Preface to the Second Edition | xvii Preface to the Second Edition | xxi Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover's introduction "'New Sectarianism' and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture." The selected bibliography has been expanded and updated.
Chapter 22 THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RUSSIAN CONCEPTUALISM
Russian Postmodernism
Chapter 23 POST-ATHEISM From Apophatic Theology to “Minimal Religion”
Russian Postmodernism
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Papers by Mikhail Epstein