My principal research interests are in phenomenological philosophy, especially in French phenomenology (Lévinas, Marion, Henry, Richir, Maldiney, Koyré, Derrida), as well as beyond (phenomenology and theology; philosophical and religious conversion; radical transformations of subjectivity in philosophy, religion and psychoanalysis; phenomenological aesthetics). Among my publications are a monograph on Levinas (French Embassy prize for the best book on France in Russian 2012) and a monograph on phenomenological method (2013). I’ve also edited a phenomenological reader in Russian (2014) that includes commentated translations of Levinas, Marion, Henry, Merleau-Ponty and other contemporary phenomenologists. My most recent book, The art of phenomenology (2018), explores the link between phenomenological aesthetics and Russian Formalism. I have resigned from my previous job in Moscow following the start of the war in Ukraine.
Юбилей Бергсона предоставляет редкую возможность сделать радость темой философской статьи. Тема р... more Юбилей Бергсона предоставляет редкую возможность сделать радость темой философской статьи. Тема радости возникает у Бергсона на стыке его философских и мистических устремлений. Радость для него — не узко-субъективное переживание, но проявление той вселенской жертвенной любви, что «движет солнце и светила», а с ними — и самое историю. Анализ роли радости в бергсоновской философии приводит нас к необходимости обратиться к его мессианской концепции. Своеобразный неэсхатологический мессианизм, которым отмечены «Два источника морали и религии», предполагает, что хотя в истории нет определенной цели, конца времен, но историческое развитие обусловлено присутствием в ней «героев и святых», своего рода мистических гениев, и им делегируются те же функции исправления мира, которые в традиционном мессианизме берет на себя единственный Мессия. Все это позволяет нам сопоставить философию радости Бергсона с трактовкой радости у одного из ярких представителей бергсонианства во Франции, Владимира Ян...
Ежегодник по феноменологической философии [VI]. Москва: РГГУ, 2021. C. 24-38., 2021
Lockdown puts our everyday life on hold; in this sense it deautomatises it. As deautomatisation, ... more Lockdown puts our everyday life on hold; in this sense it deautomatises it. As deautomatisation, the experience of lockdown can arguably be seen as an analogue of estrangement, or even as a motivation for phenomenological epoche. In this paper I challenge this analogy. Lockdown makes manifest the habitual structures of ordinary experience, but it also distorts them. Our home world, as a region of shared safety, shrinks; its intersubjective character is deformed. Virtualisation of human contacts leads to partial loss of deictic dimension of shared sense experience; the lived space of social interaction is replaced by objective impersonal universe. Lockdown does not entail the reinterpretation of everyday experience, as one established form of experience simply gives way to another. I conclude that lockdown does not result in estrangement and thus should be qualified as a non-productive deautomatisation.
Статья посвящена интерпретации святоотеческого наследия в трудах веду-щего французского феноменол... more Статья посвящена интерпретации святоотеческого наследия в трудах веду-щего французского феноменолога Ж.-Л. Мариона. Парадигмой богослов-ствования для Мариона служит икона: задача богословия заключается в яв-лении Бога в качестве невидимого и недоступного. Богословие Ареопагита не является в строгом смысле примером «апофатического», или «негатив-ного», богословия, поскольку богословский дискурс не ставит своей целью производство позитивных или негативных высказываний о Боге: такой дискурс оставался бы в плену онто-теологии и носил бы не иконический, а идолопоклоннический характер. Однако Ареопагит не просто именует Бога, он воспевает божественные имена в молитве, что позволяет Мариону ин-терпретировать его богословие как своеобразный перформатив: воспевание действенно, поскольку оно трансформирует самого говорящего. Этот пер-формативный характер неотделим от своеобразной феноменализации Бога в богословском дискурсе, однако способ этой феноменализации отличен от апофансиса. Божественные имена не описывают Бога, а воспевают Его как Взыскуемого, являя говорящего как взыскующего. В более поздних ра-ботах Марион интерпретирует «божественные имена» как «насыщенные феномены». Тот, кто богословствует, не может быть описан как агент фено-менализации Откровения; однако он остается получателем и посредником этой феноменализации, приобретая служебный статус свидетеля феномена-лизации или же «наделенного собой»: того, кто участвует в феноменализа-ции Божественного откровения, получая себя самого от того, что является в этой феноменализации. Божественное имя взывает к говорящему, кото-рый в своем ответе-именовании являет сам этот зов. Откровение открыва-ется богослову-но оно же и открывает самого богослова. Ключевые слова: Жан-Люк Марион, Дионисий Ареопагит, феноменализа-ция, икона, идол, насыщенный феномен.
We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phe-nomenology us... more We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phe-nomenology using Viktor Shklovsky's theory of "estrangement" (ostranenie). In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenologi-cal experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art "forces us into" the aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomeno-logical epoché drives us into the phenomenological one. The change of attitudes is a condition of possibility of aesthetic and/or phenomenological experience. Estrange-ment is an artistic device that breaks the routinized forms of perception: one sees the thing as new and does not just "recognize" it automatically. Shklovsky insists that it is possible if one experiences or feels the form of the work of art-in an affective and even sensuous way. We claim that this is similar to the phenomenological seeing , or intuition, which, according to Husserl, should be devoid of all understanding. Phenomenological epoché can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to arrest the "ready-made," "taken for granted," "pre-given" meanings in order to access a new meaning which is not yet stabilized, the "meaning-information ." It is not enough to turn from what appears to how it appears; one has to oscillate between these conflicting attitudes, or rather to keep them both at the same time thus gaining a kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. This double life in two different attitudes (or, following a Husserlian metaphor, "double bookkeep-ing") can be clarified in terms of Roman Jakobson's theory of antinomic coexistence between the poetic and communicative functions of language. The notion of "double life in two attitudes" uncovers the role that ostranenie can play in the philosophical transformation of the subject based on variety and essential mobility of the affective components involved. Proposing a phenomenological interpretation of a passage from Samuel Beckett we show how the radicalization of ostranenie can lead even to "meta-estrangement": to estrangement of the everyday "lack of estrangement." We conclude with a remark on the productivity of this form of estrangement in the phenomenological context.
This paper explores how Levinas redefines the traditional notion of prophecy, shifting the emphas... more This paper explores how Levinas redefines the traditional notion of prophecy, shifting the emphasis from the content of prophecy to the figure of the prophet, thus making prophetic inspiration a key feature of ethical subjectivity. The principal aim of the paper is to analyse the resulting triangular structure involving God and the Other. This structure is inherently unstable because God is incessantly stepping back in kenotic withdrawal. I show how this fundamental instability is reflected in the structure of the phenomenalisation of God’s glory, the structure of obedience to God’s order, and the structure of the authorship of prophecy. The prophetic experience is marked by heterogeneity; it can never be completely appropriated. Responsibility for the Other brings the subject to light as a witness of the glory of the Infinite, but not as the subject of self-identification.
Metamorphoses of the Subject: Kandinsky Interpreted by Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney, 2018
In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky's heritage. Henry... more In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky's heritage. Henry's phenomenology is based on a distinction between two main modes of manifestation: the ordinary one, that is, the manifestation of the world, and the " manifestation of life. " For him, Kandinsky's work provides a paradigmatic example of the second, more original mode of manifestation, which is free from all forms of self-alienation. Henry claims that this living through the work of art is transformative; it is akin to ascetic practice or mystical experience that goes beyond the distinction of the subject and the object. Maldiney acknowledges Kandinsky's work as an attempt to provide access to an a-cosmic and ahistoric experience of one's inner self; yet for him this is not a positive characteristic. For Maldiney, the key distinction is not between modes of phenomenalisation, but between the dimensions of meaning (sens). For him there is no radical self-transformation which is not a transformation of one's being-in-the-world and one's meaning of the world, and so Kandinsky's a-cosmic paintings cannot induce a true transformation of the self. I conclude that the disagreement of Henry and Maldiney on Kandinsky does not unfold on the level of phenomenological description of concrete aesthetic experience, but on the level of metaphysics.
There is a close proximity between contemporary phenomenology and art. In this paper the phenomen... more There is a close proximity between contemporary phenomenology and art. In this paper the phenomenological activity is analysed from the standpoint of aesthetical theory. More precisely, I suggest an interpretation of Marc Richir’s phenomenology using the conceptual framework of Russian Formalism. I argue that the radicalisation of phenomenological reduction by Richir (the so called “hyperbolic reduction”) is similar to the “artistic technique laid bare”, a term coined by Jakobson and Tomashevsky. Its aim is to make a worn-out philosophical technique effective again. The artificial and illusionary character of the new reduction makes visible the artificial character of self-identical ego. The unity and identity of the self are neither given nor invented: the status of the self is similar to that of a work of art, constantly oscillating between being and non-being, between reality and illusion, as observed by Shklovsky.
В настоящей работе мы рассмотрим интерпретацию августиновского выражения facere veritatem у двух ... more В настоящей работе мы рассмотрим интерпретацию августиновского выражения facere veritatem у двух современных философов: Деррида и Мариона. Различия в прочтении Confessiones X, I, 1 отражают различия в понимании истины; несогласие по поводу одного места из блаженного Августина в данном случае служит не только предлогом для философской дуэли, но и позволяет поставить вопрос о природе “действия” в тех речевых актах, которые вызывают преобразование самого говорящего субъекта.
The author analyses the problem of truth as it is presented in the interpreta-tions of Martin Hei... more The author analyses the problem of truth as it is presented in the interpreta-tions of Martin Heidegger and Alexandre Koyré, covering Plato’s Republic. Heidegger reads it primarily as a poetic myth of concealment and disclosure, revealing the intellection of Being. The space of political is a space of a his-torical manifestation and at the same time of the concealment of truth. The history of manifestation of truth is also a history of hiddenness and oblivion. Thereafter the untrue, being a privative mode of the true, no more opposes it; the true and the untrue do not make up a hierarchical pair. Koyré gives a completely different treatment of the Republic, reading it as a dramatical piece, forcing the reader to take sides. The truth is self-referring and placed at the high end of the hierarchy of values ladder, whereas the untrue (as distinct from the plain error) is always a deception, designed to disrupt the horizontal bonds between the citizens that constitute the political space as such. While for Heidegger the paradigmatic example of Dasein relation to Being is a poet who is sort of privy to God, Koyré keeps in place the hierarchical deference of the untrue world of the religious and mythopoetical to the true world of science. The author of the article demonstrates the inseparable link between the aesthetic visions and the political conceptions entertained by Koyré and Heidegger.
Phenomenological reduction assures the scientific standing of the phenomenological investigations... more Phenomenological reduction assures the scientific standing of the phenomenological investigations. But it is also an existential situation, where philosophizing subject finds out that he is put into question. The splitting of the I generates not only “original phenomenon of the world” as well as transcendental subjectivity that constitutes it; it is also a recursive act of auto- affection which irreversibly transforms the agent.
While the Anglo-American tradition (Austin and Searle) approaches speech acts mainly through the ... more While the Anglo-American tradition (Austin and Searle) approaches speech acts mainly through the philosophy of language, Derrida relocates the field of analysis and considers speech acts within the broader context of political philosophy as well as the philosophy of subject. Instead of asking ‘how and under which conditions certain speech acts change the state of affairs’ (as Austin did), Derrida questions the very nature of social links in order to reveal the ‘condition of possibility’ of performative acts in particular and of verbal communication in general. He shows that this condition is the primordial trust between interlocutors. The primordial trust is based on twoheterogeneous types of experience: experience of relation to the absolute Other and experience of a sacral universal law that ensures stability of society. The speech act as based of the trust is twofold: it is both an event and a reinstatement of an automatic process. This juxtaposition of the event and the mechanical forms of social life links Derrida’s political thought to that of Arendt. Their agreement, however, does not continue into the realm of the philosophy of subject. Derrida insists on the importance of the hidden conversion of the speaker who privately addresses the Other, whereas for Arendt the self has no genuine access to itself outside of the public domain of the political.
The article offers an overview of the main 20th century philosophical notions of death (Heidegger... more The article offers an overview of the main 20th century philosophical notions of death (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida). The main point of the article is that thinking about death individualizes the subject; however, in case of one's own and another's death this individualization proceeds in different ways. Death as my very own opportunity reveals me to myself as irreplaceable, whereas another's death and my unrestricted responsibility in the face of that death means that my identity consists in another's demand to replace him with myself in his death. The paradoxicality of this dual demand on the subject — irreplaceability and the need to replace — constitutes the nucleus of subjectivity. Similarly, the subject's speech is defined through the same aporia: death is absolute absence (of meaning); however, this gap in meaning can and must manifest itself in the subject's speech — precisely as the absence of meaning.
In his “Sein und Zeit”, and in corresponding lection courses as well, Heidegger transforms the me... more In his “Sein und Zeit”, and in corresponding lection courses as well, Heidegger transforms the methodological gesture of Husserl. Now the method doesn’t determine the object, alternatively, the object of phenomenology, as the way of the meetingness of ontological structures, determines the phenomenological method – as the method of their “reading-out” or “clearing-out”. The legitimized area of the philosophical work turns to be not the phenomenon, seen in the mirror of reflection, which is always late, but the way this method is exposed to Dasein, the way it corresponds to it. “How” turns to new “what”, the paradigm phenomena turn to be the affective states of Dasein (anxiety, concern), and not the perception of the extended thing.
Mikhail Yampolsky and Anna Yampolskaya discuss how the distinction between various types of norms... more Mikhail Yampolsky and Anna Yampolskaya discuss how the distinction between various types of norms, e.g., semantic, conventional, and essential, can be applied to describe the current social context in Russia. They both agree that while the normativity of social ties in today's Russia is weakened, normality, especially in sexual behavior, is highly cherished and praised. The confusion of the normal and the normative leads to a crisis of trust and personal commitment, which is identified as one of the characteristic features of modern Russian society.
Юбилей Бергсона предоставляет редкую возможность сделать радость темой философской статьи. Тема р... more Юбилей Бергсона предоставляет редкую возможность сделать радость темой философской статьи. Тема радости возникает у Бергсона на стыке его философских и мистических устремлений. Радость для него — не узко-субъективное переживание, но проявление той вселенской жертвенной любви, что «движет солнце и светила», а с ними — и самое историю. Анализ роли радости в бергсоновской философии приводит нас к необходимости обратиться к его мессианской концепции. Своеобразный неэсхатологический мессианизм, которым отмечены «Два источника морали и религии», предполагает, что хотя в истории нет определенной цели, конца времен, но историческое развитие обусловлено присутствием в ней «героев и святых», своего рода мистических гениев, и им делегируются те же функции исправления мира, которые в традиционном мессианизме берет на себя единственный Мессия. Все это позволяет нам сопоставить философию радости Бергсона с трактовкой радости у одного из ярких представителей бергсонианства во Франции, Владимира Ян...
Ежегодник по феноменологической философии [VI]. Москва: РГГУ, 2021. C. 24-38., 2021
Lockdown puts our everyday life on hold; in this sense it deautomatises it. As deautomatisation, ... more Lockdown puts our everyday life on hold; in this sense it deautomatises it. As deautomatisation, the experience of lockdown can arguably be seen as an analogue of estrangement, or even as a motivation for phenomenological epoche. In this paper I challenge this analogy. Lockdown makes manifest the habitual structures of ordinary experience, but it also distorts them. Our home world, as a region of shared safety, shrinks; its intersubjective character is deformed. Virtualisation of human contacts leads to partial loss of deictic dimension of shared sense experience; the lived space of social interaction is replaced by objective impersonal universe. Lockdown does not entail the reinterpretation of everyday experience, as one established form of experience simply gives way to another. I conclude that lockdown does not result in estrangement and thus should be qualified as a non-productive deautomatisation.
Статья посвящена интерпретации святоотеческого наследия в трудах веду-щего французского феноменол... more Статья посвящена интерпретации святоотеческого наследия в трудах веду-щего французского феноменолога Ж.-Л. Мариона. Парадигмой богослов-ствования для Мариона служит икона: задача богословия заключается в яв-лении Бога в качестве невидимого и недоступного. Богословие Ареопагита не является в строгом смысле примером «апофатического», или «негатив-ного», богословия, поскольку богословский дискурс не ставит своей целью производство позитивных или негативных высказываний о Боге: такой дискурс оставался бы в плену онто-теологии и носил бы не иконический, а идолопоклоннический характер. Однако Ареопагит не просто именует Бога, он воспевает божественные имена в молитве, что позволяет Мариону ин-терпретировать его богословие как своеобразный перформатив: воспевание действенно, поскольку оно трансформирует самого говорящего. Этот пер-формативный характер неотделим от своеобразной феноменализации Бога в богословском дискурсе, однако способ этой феноменализации отличен от апофансиса. Божественные имена не описывают Бога, а воспевают Его как Взыскуемого, являя говорящего как взыскующего. В более поздних ра-ботах Марион интерпретирует «божественные имена» как «насыщенные феномены». Тот, кто богословствует, не может быть описан как агент фено-менализации Откровения; однако он остается получателем и посредником этой феноменализации, приобретая служебный статус свидетеля феномена-лизации или же «наделенного собой»: того, кто участвует в феноменализа-ции Божественного откровения, получая себя самого от того, что является в этой феноменализации. Божественное имя взывает к говорящему, кото-рый в своем ответе-именовании являет сам этот зов. Откровение открыва-ется богослову-но оно же и открывает самого богослова. Ключевые слова: Жан-Люк Марион, Дионисий Ареопагит, феноменализа-ция, икона, идол, насыщенный феномен.
We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phe-nomenology us... more We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phe-nomenology using Viktor Shklovsky's theory of "estrangement" (ostranenie). In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenologi-cal experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art "forces us into" the aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomeno-logical epoché drives us into the phenomenological one. The change of attitudes is a condition of possibility of aesthetic and/or phenomenological experience. Estrange-ment is an artistic device that breaks the routinized forms of perception: one sees the thing as new and does not just "recognize" it automatically. Shklovsky insists that it is possible if one experiences or feels the form of the work of art-in an affective and even sensuous way. We claim that this is similar to the phenomenological seeing , or intuition, which, according to Husserl, should be devoid of all understanding. Phenomenological epoché can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to arrest the "ready-made," "taken for granted," "pre-given" meanings in order to access a new meaning which is not yet stabilized, the "meaning-information ." It is not enough to turn from what appears to how it appears; one has to oscillate between these conflicting attitudes, or rather to keep them both at the same time thus gaining a kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. This double life in two different attitudes (or, following a Husserlian metaphor, "double bookkeep-ing") can be clarified in terms of Roman Jakobson's theory of antinomic coexistence between the poetic and communicative functions of language. The notion of "double life in two attitudes" uncovers the role that ostranenie can play in the philosophical transformation of the subject based on variety and essential mobility of the affective components involved. Proposing a phenomenological interpretation of a passage from Samuel Beckett we show how the radicalization of ostranenie can lead even to "meta-estrangement": to estrangement of the everyday "lack of estrangement." We conclude with a remark on the productivity of this form of estrangement in the phenomenological context.
This paper explores how Levinas redefines the traditional notion of prophecy, shifting the emphas... more This paper explores how Levinas redefines the traditional notion of prophecy, shifting the emphasis from the content of prophecy to the figure of the prophet, thus making prophetic inspiration a key feature of ethical subjectivity. The principal aim of the paper is to analyse the resulting triangular structure involving God and the Other. This structure is inherently unstable because God is incessantly stepping back in kenotic withdrawal. I show how this fundamental instability is reflected in the structure of the phenomenalisation of God’s glory, the structure of obedience to God’s order, and the structure of the authorship of prophecy. The prophetic experience is marked by heterogeneity; it can never be completely appropriated. Responsibility for the Other brings the subject to light as a witness of the glory of the Infinite, but not as the subject of self-identification.
Metamorphoses of the Subject: Kandinsky Interpreted by Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney, 2018
In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky's heritage. Henry... more In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky's heritage. Henry's phenomenology is based on a distinction between two main modes of manifestation: the ordinary one, that is, the manifestation of the world, and the " manifestation of life. " For him, Kandinsky's work provides a paradigmatic example of the second, more original mode of manifestation, which is free from all forms of self-alienation. Henry claims that this living through the work of art is transformative; it is akin to ascetic practice or mystical experience that goes beyond the distinction of the subject and the object. Maldiney acknowledges Kandinsky's work as an attempt to provide access to an a-cosmic and ahistoric experience of one's inner self; yet for him this is not a positive characteristic. For Maldiney, the key distinction is not between modes of phenomenalisation, but between the dimensions of meaning (sens). For him there is no radical self-transformation which is not a transformation of one's being-in-the-world and one's meaning of the world, and so Kandinsky's a-cosmic paintings cannot induce a true transformation of the self. I conclude that the disagreement of Henry and Maldiney on Kandinsky does not unfold on the level of phenomenological description of concrete aesthetic experience, but on the level of metaphysics.
There is a close proximity between contemporary phenomenology and art. In this paper the phenomen... more There is a close proximity between contemporary phenomenology and art. In this paper the phenomenological activity is analysed from the standpoint of aesthetical theory. More precisely, I suggest an interpretation of Marc Richir’s phenomenology using the conceptual framework of Russian Formalism. I argue that the radicalisation of phenomenological reduction by Richir (the so called “hyperbolic reduction”) is similar to the “artistic technique laid bare”, a term coined by Jakobson and Tomashevsky. Its aim is to make a worn-out philosophical technique effective again. The artificial and illusionary character of the new reduction makes visible the artificial character of self-identical ego. The unity and identity of the self are neither given nor invented: the status of the self is similar to that of a work of art, constantly oscillating between being and non-being, between reality and illusion, as observed by Shklovsky.
В настоящей работе мы рассмотрим интерпретацию августиновского выражения facere veritatem у двух ... more В настоящей работе мы рассмотрим интерпретацию августиновского выражения facere veritatem у двух современных философов: Деррида и Мариона. Различия в прочтении Confessiones X, I, 1 отражают различия в понимании истины; несогласие по поводу одного места из блаженного Августина в данном случае служит не только предлогом для философской дуэли, но и позволяет поставить вопрос о природе “действия” в тех речевых актах, которые вызывают преобразование самого говорящего субъекта.
The author analyses the problem of truth as it is presented in the interpreta-tions of Martin Hei... more The author analyses the problem of truth as it is presented in the interpreta-tions of Martin Heidegger and Alexandre Koyré, covering Plato’s Republic. Heidegger reads it primarily as a poetic myth of concealment and disclosure, revealing the intellection of Being. The space of political is a space of a his-torical manifestation and at the same time of the concealment of truth. The history of manifestation of truth is also a history of hiddenness and oblivion. Thereafter the untrue, being a privative mode of the true, no more opposes it; the true and the untrue do not make up a hierarchical pair. Koyré gives a completely different treatment of the Republic, reading it as a dramatical piece, forcing the reader to take sides. The truth is self-referring and placed at the high end of the hierarchy of values ladder, whereas the untrue (as distinct from the plain error) is always a deception, designed to disrupt the horizontal bonds between the citizens that constitute the political space as such. While for Heidegger the paradigmatic example of Dasein relation to Being is a poet who is sort of privy to God, Koyré keeps in place the hierarchical deference of the untrue world of the religious and mythopoetical to the true world of science. The author of the article demonstrates the inseparable link between the aesthetic visions and the political conceptions entertained by Koyré and Heidegger.
Phenomenological reduction assures the scientific standing of the phenomenological investigations... more Phenomenological reduction assures the scientific standing of the phenomenological investigations. But it is also an existential situation, where philosophizing subject finds out that he is put into question. The splitting of the I generates not only “original phenomenon of the world” as well as transcendental subjectivity that constitutes it; it is also a recursive act of auto- affection which irreversibly transforms the agent.
While the Anglo-American tradition (Austin and Searle) approaches speech acts mainly through the ... more While the Anglo-American tradition (Austin and Searle) approaches speech acts mainly through the philosophy of language, Derrida relocates the field of analysis and considers speech acts within the broader context of political philosophy as well as the philosophy of subject. Instead of asking ‘how and under which conditions certain speech acts change the state of affairs’ (as Austin did), Derrida questions the very nature of social links in order to reveal the ‘condition of possibility’ of performative acts in particular and of verbal communication in general. He shows that this condition is the primordial trust between interlocutors. The primordial trust is based on twoheterogeneous types of experience: experience of relation to the absolute Other and experience of a sacral universal law that ensures stability of society. The speech act as based of the trust is twofold: it is both an event and a reinstatement of an automatic process. This juxtaposition of the event and the mechanical forms of social life links Derrida’s political thought to that of Arendt. Their agreement, however, does not continue into the realm of the philosophy of subject. Derrida insists on the importance of the hidden conversion of the speaker who privately addresses the Other, whereas for Arendt the self has no genuine access to itself outside of the public domain of the political.
The article offers an overview of the main 20th century philosophical notions of death (Heidegger... more The article offers an overview of the main 20th century philosophical notions of death (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida). The main point of the article is that thinking about death individualizes the subject; however, in case of one's own and another's death this individualization proceeds in different ways. Death as my very own opportunity reveals me to myself as irreplaceable, whereas another's death and my unrestricted responsibility in the face of that death means that my identity consists in another's demand to replace him with myself in his death. The paradoxicality of this dual demand on the subject — irreplaceability and the need to replace — constitutes the nucleus of subjectivity. Similarly, the subject's speech is defined through the same aporia: death is absolute absence (of meaning); however, this gap in meaning can and must manifest itself in the subject's speech — precisely as the absence of meaning.
In his “Sein und Zeit”, and in corresponding lection courses as well, Heidegger transforms the me... more In his “Sein und Zeit”, and in corresponding lection courses as well, Heidegger transforms the methodological gesture of Husserl. Now the method doesn’t determine the object, alternatively, the object of phenomenology, as the way of the meetingness of ontological structures, determines the phenomenological method – as the method of their “reading-out” or “clearing-out”. The legitimized area of the philosophical work turns to be not the phenomenon, seen in the mirror of reflection, which is always late, but the way this method is exposed to Dasein, the way it corresponds to it. “How” turns to new “what”, the paradigm phenomena turn to be the affective states of Dasein (anxiety, concern), and not the perception of the extended thing.
Mikhail Yampolsky and Anna Yampolskaya discuss how the distinction between various types of norms... more Mikhail Yampolsky and Anna Yampolskaya discuss how the distinction between various types of norms, e.g., semantic, conventional, and essential, can be applied to describe the current social context in Russia. They both agree that while the normativity of social ties in today's Russia is weakened, normality, especially in sexual behavior, is highly cherished and praised. The confusion of the normal and the normative leads to a crisis of trust and personal commitment, which is identified as one of the characteristic features of modern Russian society.
Верно ли, что речь, обращенная к другому –рассказ о себе, исповедь, обещание и прощение - может ... more Верно ли, что речь, обращенная к другому –рассказ о себе, исповедь, обещание и прощение - может преобразить человека? Как и когда из безличных социальных и смысловых структур возникает субъект, способный взять на себя ответственность? Можно ли представить себе радикальную трансформацию субъекта не только перед лицом другого человека, но и перед лицом искусства или в работе философа? Книга А.В. Ямпольской «Искусство феноменологии» приглашает читателей к диалогу с мыслителями, художниками и поэтами – Деррида, Кандинским, Арендт, Шкловским, Рикёром, Данте – и, конечно же, с Эдмундом Гуссерлем.
Review of: Kandinskii, Vasilii. O duhkovnom v iskusstve. (Polnoe kriticheskoe izdanie s dopolnen... more Review of: Kandinskii, Vasilii. O duhkovnom v iskusstve. (Polnoe kriticheskoe izdanie s dopolneniiami i drugimi tekstami o nauke ob iskusstve: v 2 tomah; sost., stat’i i komment. N.P. Podzemskaia). – Moskva: BuksMArt, 2020. ISBN 978-5-907043-58-9.
Le livre récent de Patrick Flack Idée, expression, vécu : la question du sens entre phénoménologi... more Le livre récent de Patrick Flack Idée, expression, vécu : la question du sens entre phénoménologie et structuralisme, paru chez Hermann en 2018, réunit onze études en histoire des idées, mais la portée de ce recueil va bien au-delà du questionnement purement historique. Le formalisme russe comme source d'inspiration pour le structuralisme plus tardif, l'art en tant que mode singulier d'interrogation sur la réalité, la recherche d'un sens nouveau du sensible-telles sont des grandes lignes de cet ouvrage ambitieux et provocant. La combinaison de la recherche historique avec les études théoriques permet à Patrick Flack de repenser l'héritage du formalisme russe et de l'établir comme un courant de la pensée véritablement philosophique et non seulement littéraire. La question du signe comme lieu de l'articulation et la cristallisation du sens, le rôle cruciale de l'expressivité dans l'institution du sens de l'oeuvre littéraire guident le développement du questionnement philosophique de ce livre.
Matthew Ratcliffe's book is not so much a book on depression but rather on the experience of depr... more Matthew Ratcliffe's book is not so much a book on depression but rather on the experience of depression — on what it means to be depressed. The book's subtitle is " a study in phenomenology " , but it targets the general public as well as the academic and clinical communities. It is well written, clearly structured, informative and can serve as an excellent introduction to the phenomenology of mental illness as it illustrates the relevance of phenomenological psychopathology to philosophers, sociologists and everyone interested in the question of what constitutes a human being.
Предисловие //Эго, или Наделенный собой / Жан-Люк Марион ; [пер. с франц. А. Черноглазова, предис... more Предисловие //Эго, или Наделенный собой / Жан-Люк Марион ; [пер. с франц. А. Черноглазова, предисловие А.В. Ямпольской]. М. : Группа Компаний «РИПОЛ классик» / «Панглосс», 2019. С. 7-38.
Interpreting Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: Expositions and Critique of Contemporary Readings. Edited By Ivan Boldyrev, Sebastian Stein. Routledge. 2021, 2021
This chapter discusses Henry Maldiney's critique of Hegel's approach to deixis which lies at the ... more This chapter discusses Henry Maldiney's critique of Hegel's approach to deixis which lies at the core of the analysis of sensuous certainty in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Specifically, it analyses Maldiney's claim that deixis should not be considered separately from common sensuous and affective experience of the shared world and therefore from communication. The first section studies Erwin Straus's influence on Maldiney concerning the communicative character of sense experience. The second section exposes the logical structure of Hegel's experiment with writing down the statement “now is the night”. This experiment is related to the question of whether the adverbs here and now, as well as the personal pronoun I, have a general linguistic function discovered by Husserl, Jakobson and Benveniste. It transpires that Maldiney's analysis is incomplete; missing links to fix his argument are supplied. The last section is devoted to Maldiney's treatment of deixis and his concept of subjectivity that emerges when deictic expressions are used. I show that deictic expressions have certain features of a performative speech act. It is the explosive power of deixis that makes a simple communication exceed the framework of information exchange and become an encounter in which a new subject and a new world are born.
En proposant de penser la rencontre de l’imprevisible, Flora Bastiani et Svetlana Sholokhova ont ... more En proposant de penser la rencontre de l’imprevisible, Flora Bastiani et Svetlana Sholokhova ont rassemble dans le present ouvrage des articles aux analyses variees. Avec la question de l’alterite et de son evenement dans la vie subjective comme toile de fond, chaque contributeur ouvre une voie d’approche pour redefinir et surtout reinterpreter la frontiere entre l’inte- riorite et l’exteriorite, soit la limite qui permet a l’humain de trouver sa place dans le monde. Les concepts fondamentaux de Henry, Levinas et Maldiney qui emergent de facon recurrente dans ce parcours, apparaissent comme autant de reperes qu’il est toujours necessaire d’interroger, de sonder et d’eprouver. Ainsi les themes classiques empruntes a la philosophie francai- se du vingtieme siecle sont ici saisis et mis en question dans la poursuite de la methode phenomenologique, et dans l’ouver- ture de nouvelles questions. Ou situer la relation avec l’autre dans le processus de forma- tion du sujet ? Qu’apporte cett...
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