Mamardašvili’s ‘classical’ paradigm of knowledge is seen to be minimally based on extrapolations from Descartes’ classical philosophy to which Mamardašvili attributes features that rather anticipate his own post-classical ontology. The latter is oriented towards the primacy of perception as a subjective process, in which the self-conscious subject constructs the world, not as illusion, but as a ‘picture’ or ‘model’ (Wittgenstein’s Bild). By examining Mamardašvili’s definition of the ‘phenomenon’ against the␣background of Husserl’s ‘reduction’, Wittgenstein’s ‘object’ and the Freudian and post-structuralist psychoanalytic (...) model of subjectivity, the paper arrives at the inference that Mamardašvili is essentially a post-Structuralist thinker who appropriates concepts from various critical and philosophical disciplines to construct his own multi-disciplinary theory of consciousness and perception. (shrink)

The philosophical works of Merab Mamardashvili are part of the emergence of phenomenological thought on the “margins” of the Eastern European sphere, appropriating and mediating a version of French poststructuralism in the “Soviet” 1980s, in which deconstruction constitutes both method and content. More specifically, Mamardashvili uses Descartes as the point de repère for his investigations into the phenomenology of the object of knowledge and the structure of consciousness, which come to model Mamardashvili's phenomenological Self, anticipating a modern, post-ideological Subject. Mamardashvili's (...) paradigm of the object constitutes the “linguistic” turn in late Soviet Georgian philosophy. Mamardashvili's phenomenon or “fact” makes its appearance in an ideologically determined regime, like a “Centaur,” as a melange of myth, belief and “physical” event, as something unseen, not as an unmediated experience of the world, yet neither as pure “thought from outside.”. (shrink)

The philosophical works of Merab Mamardashvili are part of the (re-)emergence of phenomenological thought on the “margins” of the Eastern European sphere, appropriating and mediating a version of French poststructuralism in the “Soviet” 1980s, in which deconstruction constitutes both method and content. More specifically, Mamardashvili uses Descartes as the point de repère for his investigations into the phenomenology of the object of knowledge and the structure of consciousness, which come to model Mamardashvili's phenomenological Self, anticipating a modern, post-ideological Subject. Mamardashvili's (...) paradigm of the object constitutes the “linguistic” turn in late Soviet Georgian philosophy. Mamardashvili's phenomenon or “fact” makes its appearance in an ideologically determined regime, like a “Centaur,” as a melange of myth, belief and “physical” event, as something unseen (in both senses of the word), not as an unmediated experience of the world, yet neither as pure “thought from outside.”. (shrink)

Amongst the most treated questions in Western research on the works of Svetlana Aleksievich is the question of the genre of Aleksievich’s prose works, followed closely by the question of the historical authenticity of her method of collecting oral information about the Soviet period of history from witnesses of that history. The questions treated, such as the problem of genre, aesthetic authenticity and the relationship of history and fiction, can be distilled into the question of the authority of the literary (...) text. If the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded on the assumption that Aleksievich’s work is literature—and no one, including the author, has questioned that assumption—then it is justifiable to pose the question of the authority of the literary text as an aesthetic message—as literary truth—using the tools of literary analysis, not of historiography or sociology. In this essay, the claim that Secondhand Time [Vremia second hend] is a novel will be examined in the context of the narratological model of the literary text of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism and by applying the test of “artistic quality” (khudozhestvennost’), which validates the aesthetic value of texts of the literary canon. This examination will allow us to answer the question about what kind of text has been created using oral testimonies as material for a work of fiction. (shrink)

While the traditional boulevard novel of Eugène Sue wants to entertain and sell, Umberto Eco's boulevard novel wants to entertain and educate the contemporary reader in Italian history and in a form of modern semiotic theory. However, Eco's educational mission does not transform the low genre of the boulevard novel but remains bound by its limitations of “rhetoric and ideology.” Eco's reader is left with a representation of history as pastiche and a populist misconception about the potential of semiotics to (...) relativise the perception of reality. Both history and semiotics are ultimately used by Eco not as heuristic devices but as instruments of seduction directed at a modern middle-class reading public with intellectual aspirations. (shrink)