JournalTOCs

Studies in East European Thought
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.104

Number of Followers: 4

Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 1573-0948 - ISSN (Online) 0925-9392
Published by Springer-Verlag

[2467 journals]

Some notes on The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought
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  Abstract: Abstract These are my comments on The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought at the ASEEES convention (Chicago, November 2022).
  PubDate: 2023-01-18
Review of: Evert van der Zweerde, Russian Political Philosophy: Anarchy,
Authority, Autocracy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022, 280
pages, Paperback ISBN 9781474460378, £85.00
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  PubDate: 2023-01-18
People are born to struggle: Vladimír Čermák’s vision
of democracy
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  Abstract: Abstract During the Czechoslovak normalization era (roughly from the 1970s to the 1980s), the Czech lawyer Vladimír Čermák, who later became a Justice of the newly established Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic after the breakdown of the Communist regime, authored a monumental piece called The Question of Democracy. Although this ambitious work has no equal in the Czech context, no attention has been paid to it in the English-speaking world. The present article aims to fill this gap by analyzing the most original aspects of Čermák’s political thought. First, I present Greek tragedy, Plato, and Augustine as the main influences on his thought, which was further shaped by Čermák’s experience with the First Czechoslovak Republic and the Communist era. Second, I show that the most important category permeating all of his intellectual project is the principle of polarity, combined with the concept of polémos as derived from Greek tragedy. Third, I focus on the consensually anchored value order of society, which is created through an interplay between positive and negative forces. Čermák’s idea that all law must be measured against the value order has deeply influenced the value-based jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. Finally, I position Čermák’s thought in the context of contemporary political theory, arguing that the contrast with the work of the radical political theorist Chantal Mouffe is particularly illuminating. Even though Čermák and Mouffe share a similar attitude to democracy—in that the primacy of strife renders universal rational consensus impossible—I maintain that Čermák’s theory, due to its emphasis on the categories of good and evil, can be more usefully described as “secular Augustinianism”.
  PubDate: 2023-01-09
Review of: Mikhail Epstein, The Phoenix of Philosophy; Russian Thought of
the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991), New York &c, Bloomsbury
Academic, 2019, 300 pages, ISBN 978-1-5013-1639-5, hardcover €147.42,
paperback €52.78, kindle €23.39; and idem, Ideas Against Ideocracy;
Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991), New York
&c, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 264 pages, ISBN 978-1-5013-5059-7,
hardcover €134.38, paperback €43.16, kindle, €32.37
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  PubDate: 2022-12-27
A way out of hell: Dante and the philosophy of personal salvation in
post-Soviet Russia
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  Abstract: Abstract This article examines the transformation of Dante’s image in post-Soviet scholarship. The author shows how Russian philologists Vladimir Bibikhin, Olga Sedakova, and Georgii Chistiakov introduced a new image of Dante to post-Soviet readers in fresh translations of his work, scholarly writings, and lecture courses that revealed previously obscured philosophical and theological dimensions of his texts. The post-Soviet reader came into contact with a more complex image of Dante than previously portrayed in official Soviet literary scholarship: Dante the philosopher, the Christian humanist, the spiritual guide who calls upon individuals to embark upon a difficult but crucial existential journey. The author also shows how the unstable and transitional decade of the 1990s was a time of a particularly active study of Dante’s philosophical and poetic anthropology. Dante’s main themes (personal salvation, activism, living in tradition) resonated profoundly with intellectuals during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet years, which were marked by a special soteriological attitude and a belief that individuals and society not only can but must change.
  PubDate: 2022-12-19
Review of: Diana Gasparyan, The Philosophic Path of Merab Mamardashvili,
Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2021, 176 pages, Hardcover ISBN 978-9004465817,
£95.91
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  PubDate: 2022-12-14
Review of Sofya Khagi, Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics,
Metaphysics, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2021. xi+284 pp.
$39.95; £36.50. ISBN 978-0-81014-302-9
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  PubDate: 2022-12-12
Ota Weinberger’s conception of democracy: reconstructing an
unexplored political theory
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  Abstract: Abstract Ota Weinberger was a Czech-Austrian jurist, whose core academic work on issues of democracy was mostly published in the 1990s. In his writings, he focused primarily on legal philosophy from a positivist perspective. However, there are also significant overlaps with the field of political theory as Weinberger examined the conditions for the functioning of contemporary democracies. In this paper, some of the main features of his conception of the so-called “structured democracy” are clarified. The conception opposed several other democratic theories, especially the elitist (Schumpeterian), the majoritarian, but also the discursive one, as represented by Jürgen Habermas, with whom Weinberger fundamentally disagreed. The paper focuses on several key elements of his theory, such as the leading ideas, the role of institutions, open society, and his critique of marketing methods in politics.
  PubDate: 2022-12-12
Review of Thomas Nemeth, Russian Neo-Kantianism. Emergence, Dissemination,
and Dissolution, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2022, IX + 345 pages, Hardcover ISBN
9783110755350, € 113.95, Ebook ISBN 9783110755404, € 113.95
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  PubDate: 2022-12-06
The crossing of borders
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  Abstract: Abstract The article draws a comparison between the Peloponnesian War between ancient Sparta and Athens, on the one hand, and Russia and the West, on the other. Rather than economic and utilitarian ethics, the author proposes that aggression on the part of oppressive as opposed to democratic regimes is driven by the fear of future insignificance. Democracies represent a threat to autocracies not so much by their military power and expansionist politics, but by their very existence, openness, and the freedoms they grant their citizens. This framework is used to explain Russia’s imperialist aggression and oppression of its neighbors and its fear of democracy.
  PubDate: 2022-12-06
Correction to: On the distorted structure of Russian guilt
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  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Intellectuals in the face of the war: between anger and guilt
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  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Review of: Tatyana Popova, Istoriografija, bioistoriopisanie,
bitsillievedenie: teorija, metodologija, praktika [Tatyana Popova,
Historiography, Biohistoriography, Bitsilli Studies: Theory, Methodology,
Practice], Odessa, Bondarenko M.A., 2022, 472 pp., Hardcover: ISBN
978-617-8005-47-4, ₴ 300
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  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Russia as a patient for negative psychoanalysis
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  Abstract: Abstract This paper brings together the late Freud’s concept of the death drive and Dostoevsky’s vision of primordial suffering in order to analyze anti-Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian trends in today’s Russia. The paper encourages embracing the suffering that the death drive entails, instead of escaping it through the narrative of Russia’s ‘greatness’.
  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Guilty of goodness' Or innocently good'
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  Abstract: Abstract This roundtable intervention explores the question of collective guilt in the case of Russia’s war with Ukraine. Psychoanalytic analysis of guilt is added here to the traditional discussions of concrete and generalized responsibility of the individual for the actions of her government. An affirmative, good-oriented ethic is promoted, in contrast to the evil-centered ethic. A group guilt of intelligentsia is found in its cultural and economic domination within the Russian society, which has led to an unfortunate separation between the nationalist and internationalist classes.
  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Review of: Igor Zahrebelny, Evropeiski Khroniky [European Chronicles],
Kyiv: Melnyk M.Y., 2020, 128 pp., Paperback: ISBN 978-617-7838-13-4,
250,00 UAH
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  PubDate: 2022-12-01
On the distorted structure of Russian guilt
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  Abstract: Abstract This commentary offers a concise description of the structure revealed in the discourse about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but that also serves as a condition of the possibility for such events to happen. The points of view that this structure provides are relational, interdependent, and mutually constructed, and they are labeled as the Citizens, the Authorities, and the People. All these positions are structured in such a way that provides their subjects with a source of enjoyment. The positions can be described as follows: fetishism of the Citizens, who almost invent their guilt without being held responsible; sadism of the Authorities, whose urge to make more and more atrocious decisions demand to repeatedly dismiss or shift the blame; masochism of the People, who accept their responsibility for anything without having a clear idea about the contents of decisions that were made in their name. In regards to communal guilt, it is crucial to take this level of enjoyment into account, in order to refuse sinking into emotions and avoiding using the language of guilt and shame. However, to simply switch to the language of understanding and responsibility instead is not enough. The language we need to seek is the one that would allow us to directly address the inadequacy of this distorted political arrangement—not some kind of metalanguage, but, on the contrary, a common language.
  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Empty spaces: empire versus life
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  Abstract: The article analyzes the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war in terms of a colonial seizure undertaken by a fading but aggressive Russian empire. This highly political adventure is translated into more abstract terms, that is, an irresolvable conflict between existence, which is always the experience of coexistence devoid of any essence whatsoever, and imperial expansion, which is an infinite conquest of space indifferent to all forms of life. The dualism in question is backed up by the writings of two important scholars, namely, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the Russian scientist and revolutionary Peter Kropotkin. Nancy’s philosophy of being-in-common is the development of Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein, where the meaning of Mit- (co-, with) is existential and not categorical. Nancy’s philosophy challenges all forms of communal essence, of which empire is one blatant example. For Kropotkin, existence is even more all-embracing, implying a continuity of different life forms. His doctrine of mutual aid is a law that governs both society and nature, as well as evolution itself. Even morality springs from “solidarity” and the joys of social life, while sympathy or love are too narrow a basis for human ethics. Viewed from this perspective, a colonial war would not only be the greatest waste of human lives and natural resources—it would contradict the very order of things.
  PubDate: 2022-12-01
Review of: Fred Leplat and Chris Ford (Eds.), Ukraine: Voices of
Resistance and Solidarity, London, Resistance Books, 2022, 168 pp., ISBN
9780902869257 (print), 9780902869240 9 (e-book), £10
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  PubDate: 2022-11-24
Shame as Sensus Communis
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  Abstract: Abstract Revisiting Jaspers’ critique of the idea of collective guilt, the author proposes to consider the category of shame not as an individual moral experience, but as a sensus communis. Using the Kantian interpretation of the sensus communis to understand the collective character of shame allows us to draw attention to the fact that modern democracy (in contrast to war-oriented fascism) has lost its own main mobilizing resource and that which embodies the energy of community and the establishment of equality: revolution.
  PubDate: 2022-10-07
  DOI: 10.1007/s11212-022-09496-9