The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and implicit in Arendt, but both develop the Hegelian criticism of liberal (...) state which shows its reliance on the abstract law, on the one hand, and on the egotistic abstract individual, on the other. The theological undercurrent of the argument is both sign of its limitations, and of the subsisting relevance of the politico-theological framework, even in the similarly novel circumstances of the twentieth century. It is only within and through the theological critique and critique of theology that these issues would stand a chance of resolution. (shrink)

The article addresses the notion of communism with a special angle of factuality and negativity, and not in the usual sense of a futurist utopia. After considering the main contemporary theories of communism in left-leaning political thought, the author turns to the Soviet experience of an “actually existing communism.” Apart from and against the bureaucratic state, a social reality existed organized around res nullius, that is, an unappropriated world that was not a collective property, as in the case of res (...) publica. The alienation from things and from the state resulted not only in the sense of oppression, but in a new culture of a paradoxical “communality”, where the “Other,” be it a thing or a person, appears rather as ground, not figure. This culture of a non-thematic gaze led to a formation of a communality as a given, and not as a utopian desideratum. I claim that this is a major difference between the current Western society and a post-Communist society. The former is more solidary and collectivist, but only consciously and deliberately so, operating from an individualist ontology, while the latter is individualist, but with an assumption of the “Other” as a pre-given fact. In this chiasmus, both “communisms” are problematic, so that an alternative model of individuation, rather than the atomization of an assumed collectivity, would be preferable. (shrink)

This article discusses the 2022 war from the point of view of its well-documented savagery. It addresses philosophical discussions of barbarism and gives a dialectical explanation of this phenomenon through the gradual polarization between the forces of Enlightenment and the obstinacy of the subject. This clash has a double shape: formality versus materiality and morality versus happiness.

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. (shrink)

Lenin’s State and Revolution is not only a project for imminent revolutionary policy and not only a legitimization argument for a revolutionary dictatorship, but also a theory of state and theory of democracy. Lenin points at the reduplication of state organs that is inherent in a democratic state. While the Russian revolutionary thinks of this reduplication as something transitory, we today increasingly see it as a durable condition coterminous with the late-modern democratic state. I use Lenin’s treatise as a point (...) of inspiration to briefly characterize my dialectical theory of state. (shrink)

This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series examines one of the most important topics in contemporary political theory: how to conceptualize the relationship between the one and the many. The essays discuss how to reconcile multiple ontologies without subsuming them to a totalitarian unity. While one school of thought seeks to create a new ontology based on the many instead of the one,, another proposes to understand the "one" as the "ultra-one" of the event. In this groundbreaking (...) work, leading thinkers explore these debates and offer alternative concepts. Building on Jean-Luc Nancy's essay who proposes an ontology of "singular plurality," contributors aim to synthesize the one and the many and suggest different ways of forming collectives, beyond the dominant representative political forms. An original and challenging work, Politics of the One addresses new possible ways of bringing people together, integrating philosophy with theoretical and practical problems of politics. (shrink)

This is the Q&A portion of the roundtable that focuses on the crucial issues of individual and collective guilt of the intellectual class in the face of war. The participants address the stratification of Russian society, possibilities and obstacles of dissent, and the eschatological tendencies of history by engaging with each other’s claims and ideas and seeking answers to direct questions.

The historical meaning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and of the subsequent post-communist transformation remains profoundly unclear. Most observers hesitate to designate these events as a revolution, building on a common-sense notion of revolution as a violent, radical change. My dissertation argues that the post-communist transformation was indeed a revolution and proves this claim by comparing it with the French Revolution, in its political, social, and anthropological aspects. In both historical cases, the quick and easy victory of society (...) over the "old regime" was followed by a long period of internal struggle, threat of stagnation, and widespread melancholia. ;Based on this historical parallel, I turn to the theoretical analysis of the concept of revolution. Our recent historical experience allows for a new perspective on the history of this concept, as it has been developed in the Modern philosophy and political theory. The present study focuses primarily on two points in this history. The first is Immanuel Kant's treatment of the French Revolution in his late political texts, The Conflict of the Faculties and The Metaphysics of Morals. The second is Hannah Arendt's work On Revolution. The close reading of these texts allows me to outline the structure of the concept of revolution as centered around the logic of negativity. ;Kant interprets the French Revolution as an irreversible event. The revolution repeatedly returns to the imaginary, impossible point of self-foundation only to recoil again from the abyss it opens. Arendt also emphasizes the two sides of revolution, the infinite self-destruction and the new beginning. Although Arendt attempts to separate the "positive" American Revolution from the "negative" French Revolution, the dissertation shows that her conceptual reading of the two is identical and that it heavily depends on the narrative structure of tragedy. ;Revolution is the central concept of the Modern philosophy of history. It is far from being outdated but must be updated and renewed to provide meaning to our present historical situation. This dissertation makes a step towards this renewal. (shrink)

This article offers a close reading of Hannah Arendt's book On Revolution. It exposes the ambivalence of Arendt with regard to tragedy and mimesis. This ambivalence is not just her own; it is inherent in the treatment of tragedy and mimesis throughout the history of political thought. In spite of Arendt's argument that privileges the limited American Revolution against the boundless French one, in her rhetoric and in her storytelling Arendt presents a unitary but dialectical picture of revolution, where suffering (...) and foundation are inseparably intertwined. The founding public action of revolutionaries implies a crisis of mimetic passions (of fear and pity) which threatens to undo, but also set the stage for, revolution. This negative, passionate and passive side of revolution helps us to come to terms with the non-productive but emancipatory revolutions in the Eastern Europe of 1989-91. (shrink)

The state has been a dominant political form for at least the last two hundred years. This is a multi-authored volume exploring the transformation of state as it experiences historical and conceptual crisis and envisioning how it could be re-constituted.

This essay attempts to formulate an ethical program for today's left by showing that such a program should necessarily involve both the insistence on a subjectivity, in the sense of a revolutionary self-determination that would go beyond the liberal pre-established autonomy and an openness to the new and unrecognized that would go beyond all liberal tolerance. I further argue that the only way to understand the co-articulation of subjectivity and openness is to accentuate the event as the origin of open (...) subjectivity. Moreover, borrowing a motif from Kant,1 I will speak of the “orientation” in history that an event provides…. (shrink)