This article serves as an introduction to central ideas and thoughts formulated by Valery Podoroga. The author undertakes a task of interpreting “anthropogram,” a key tool and procedure developed in Podoroga’s analytical anthropology. In order to clarify this notion, the article discusses a highly original conception of mimesis, first introduced in Podoroga’s book of the same name, as well as Podoroga’s own method of analysis, based on the experience of Russian literature. Examining the important function that the concept of death (...) has in Podoroga’s systematic, the author points to essential links between the philosopher’s mental strategy and the ideas of Russian formalism and deconstruction. The death becomes directly related to the mimetic capacity and deprived of its negative component. This is one more way to overcome metaphysics: to turn death into an analytical tool, which in the space of literature revives the archaic layer of sensuality, where thought and action come to be indistinguishable, and a sign of their plexus is anthropogram. (shrink)

This article analyzes changes in the relationship between society and money that are not yet reflected in economic and social theory but have already manifested in cinematic images. Interpreting th...

The article discusses the relationship between a government and a protest movement, and takes as its chief example the protest movement of Kiev's Maidan. Analyzing the affective logic of community, which is manifested in a crowd, the author argues that this logic is a necessary component of democracy. The argument implies that what are commonly considered democratic values, such as “freedom” and “justice,” are not values, but the effects of the process of resisting any government, the political manifestation of which (...) was described as far back as Hobbes in his description of the state. Having derived the political from these ethical affects, one can produce a nonpolitical definition of democracy in which “freedom,” “justice,” and “dignity” cease to be tools of political rhetoric, pointing to those community relations that cast doubt on the prevailing understanding of the state and politics. (shrink)

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.

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.