Book chapter
Introduction: Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation
This editorial introduction at once surveys and makes an intervention into the main problematics of the volume, charting an unorthodox trajectory of German Idealism as a political-theological thinking of nothingness, immanence, and world-(de)legitimation -- and a key genealogical resource for the present and future of political theology.
In book
Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume’s contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.
Articles and materials, gathered in this collective work, were presented in international scientific and educational seminar “Eschatos: Philosophy of history in context of “the Limit-conception” (Odessa, September-October 2011). Historians, philosophers, culturologists from Ukraine, Russia, Israel, France and Uzbekistan were involved in the discussions. Researches in this collective work are devoted to the concepts of disruption of time in Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and in Modernity. Especial block consists of materials of the round table devoted to the problem of “intellectual contraband”.
For a wide range of humanitarians who are interested in the problems of theory and philosophy of history, place of historical knowledge in contemporary world.
This paper provides some comparison of Herzen’s and Hegel’s notions on philosophy of history and claims to represent Herzen, anatomizing the situation of European riots of the mid. 19th century, as а thinker of current interest. While Herzen asserts that history is a development process with no predetermined goal, Hegel (whose works were very important for Russian intellectuals of Herzen’s generation) proclaims that history has already ended with the Napoleon’s Empire and his own — Hegel’s — philosophy.
This article explores how actor-network theory has redescribed the concept of modernity. B. Latour provides a radical critique of modern rationality by undermining its basic opposition between nature and culture. What he offers instead is relational approach to techno-science. From this point of view, all the actors are initially hybrid entities, and the ontological regime of modernity emerged as an unsuccessful attempt to purify and to divide them into clearly defined 'subjects' and 'objects'. The main paradox of modern rationality is that while it was trying to produce an illusion of two different realms (nature and culture), the number of hybrids was increasing dramatically. To tackle this problem, Latour offered a quite utopian alternative - the Parliament of Things. In the end of the article, it is stated that there is a danger for ANT of being modernist itself. And it is rejection of reductionism that distinguishes actor-network analysis from the other theories of modernity.
This paper outlines peculiarities of the use of organicistic allegories by representatives of the German historical school of law — F.K. Savigny and G.F. Puchta. On the wide range of texts on the philosophy of history and the history of law written by contemporaries (Fichte, Hegel) and precursors (Herder, Vico) it is shown how the comparison between history with human life can perform different functions depending on the methodological presumptions of the authors.
In this article the author attempts to explain the events occurring in the country taking into account the specificity of the Ukrainian political culture. From the point of view of the author, a key player in the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 was the Ukrainian society itself, and any attempt to comment the situation of modern Ukraine, first of all, should take into account civil conditions of the society itself. Qualitative state of civil society in Ukraine outrun the quality of the ruling elite, which inevitably provokes new confrontations and conflicts.
The article discusses several approaches to the study of Soviet society drawing on Max Weber’s theoretical models or following a broadly-understood Weberian tradition in historical sociology. Weberian perspectives have been used for the analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. The early Bolshevik Party has been characterized as a community of “ideological virtuosi” while its further development has been described either as “incomplete rationalization” or as a re-traditionalization. In the article, it is argued that employing the post-Weberian multiple modernities approach allows us to overcome some of the difficulties that have emerged in this case. In particular, the article focuses on Johann Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet model of modernity. For Arnason, the Soviet model incorporated both the legacy of imperial transformation from above and the revolutionary vision of a new society. He claims that communism represented a distinctive version of modernity rather than a deviation from the modernizing mainstream. In recent historical studies of the Soviet period, two approaches have been formed stressing the modernity of the Soviet regime or its neo-traditionalist aspects. The distinction between these approaches has been discussed by Michael David-Fox. The article considers the parallels between the new historical studies of Soviet society, on the one hand, and both Weberian and post-Weberian sociological perspectives, on the other.