The paper taps the agency of the imaginary interlocutor in the _Mūlamadhyamakakārikā_ of Nāgārjuna to delineate _existential anguish_ in the Madhyamaka. The paper asks whether the protestations of the imaginary interlocutor cannot be recast as _anguished_. It claims that an objection to emptiness (_śūnyatā_) can be voiced even after the metaphysical commitment to _intrinsic existence_ (_svabhāva_) has been relinquished. By interpolating _anguish_ into the Madhyamaka, the paper posits an unorthodox phenomenological objection to _śūnyatā_.

This guidebook contains all the information needed if you are planning to live and work in Riyadh. From finding a place to live and making it a home from home, to choosing the right school and doctor, this handbook offers hints and contacts needed to take the strain out of relocation. travel, hotels and restaurants, a brief history of the city plus advice on things to do and see, details of sports facilitites and parks and activities for the children, this (...) should be a useful companion. (shrink)

In this paper I probe the narratively constructed self as a _proper object of negation_ in the Madhyamaka. The paper borrows idioms and tropes from Western theories of the narrative self to illuminate and contemporize the discussion. Since Mādhyamikas reject the two-tiered interpretation of the Buddhist two truths, they are philosophically unobligated to reduce the self. Although both Mādhyamikas and Ābhidharmikas would accept the conceptually constructed self as conventionally real, they would disagree about its ontological significance. For the latter, the (...) narrative self as a conceptual construct necessitates reduction. Mādhyamikas, who reject the _svabhāva-dharma_ architecture, can be less dismissive of the conventional self. Their conventional self is a narrative construct, but of what kind? The paper tries to answer that question by bringing Mādhyamikas into interlocution with select modern narrative self theorists. It divides into two sub-sections. Each pivots on a theme about the narrative self in contemporary discourse. The first asks how important is ethics for the constitution of the conventional self. The second discusses fictionality of the self in the Madhyamaka. (shrink)

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00239-5.

Bad faith is commonly conceived as lying to oneself or self-deception. This folk definition is too simplistic as it undermines the rich ontological underpinnings of bad faith. While both simple self-deception and bad faith are opposed to the general phenomenon of lying (to others), for Sartre bad faith is also meant to explain both the working of consciousness and the ubiquity of pre-judicative nothingness. Together, consciousness and nothingness supply the special ontological foundation required for bad faith to operate. To enter (...) into bad faith is to escape from the anguish of the experience of insubstantiality and freedom into deterministic attitudes about the self, such as the deceiver/deceived bipolarity of Freudian psychoanalysis. Sartre rejects the thesis that there can be hidden motivations in consciousness by arguing for the reflexivity and the translucency of consciousness. Further, he would take the ubiquity of nothingness to explain the wide prevalence of bad faith as a state-of-being in the world. Bad faith cannot be equated with simple cases of self-deception as bad faith is sustained by a unique mix of ontological postulates. Sartre argues for this point cogently through his examples of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. In these examples, Sartre shows that sincerity, the purported anti-thesis of self-deception, causes one to fall even deeper into bad faith. (shrink)

Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and (...) the Soviet Science Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy. (shrink)

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 has long been attributed to errors by Joseph Stalin, yet a revisionist position known as the Icebreaker hypothesis has also emerged alleging that Stalin is not to blame. This essay examines why the Icebreaker theory is erroneous based on its lack of concrete facts. The reasons why Operation Barbarossa was so effective are also examined, leading to the conclusion that Stalin should still shoulder most of (...) the blame for Soviet disorganization prior to the invasion. (shrink)

Los historiadores queery los activistas tienen una relación particular con la historia de la Unión Soviética. Un vínculo que ha sido moldeado por las políticas de la Guerra Fría y el ascenso, en primera instancia en el mundo anglo-americano, del movimiento de liberación gay. Para los militantes de izquierda, saber que el primer Estado socialista del mundo sancionó políticas sexuales radicales ha sido un talismán y una guía. La despenalización de la homosexualidad masculina, caratulada como sodomía, en los primeros años (...) de la Rusia revolucionaria, fue uno de los cambios más radicales en las leyes criminales, familiares y de propiedad que marcaron la llegada de los bolcheviques al poder. La eliminación de las regulaciones religiosas y reaccionarias del régimen zarista sobre la sexualidad ha sido presentada como el punto de referencia de las políticas sexuales progresistas. Siguiendo esa lectura, la re-penalización por parte del gobierno soviético de la sodomía durante 1933-34 es interpretada como una “tendencia reaccionaria” de la mano del régimen de Joseph Stalin, una degeneración del presumiblemente socialismo legítimo de Vladimir Lenin (o León Trotsky). Nuestras narrativas también presentan al cambio en la legislación de la homosexualidad masculina durante los convulsionados años de 1930 a través del prisma de las relaciones internacionales. Esta perspectiva recurre fuertemente al trabajo del reformista sexual freudiano y marxista Wilhem Reich, quien en 1936 publicó una acusación de la represión de los homosexuales soviéticos. (shrink)

The associative chain between the personality of Joseph Stalin and his role in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 remains stable among the historical consciousness of Russians from the end of the war until now. Traditionally, high schools devote a large amount of time to study the history of the war, including a range of the events dedicated to remembering the war. As a result, a stable and positive attitude toward the war and its significance to the Russian (...) nation has been achieved, while the attitude toward Stalin remains ambivalent, ranging from assessing him as a perpetrator, who initiated genocide and terror against Soviet people, to national hero and great ruler, who led the country to victory. In 2017, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation introduced three new national history textbooks based on the single goal of teaching Russian history in schools, but in practice has actually returned history back to a uniform standardized historical education across the country, similar to the Soviet education system. In this regard, the historical comparative research based on content analysis of Soviet, Russian, and newly issued textbooks is deemed topical and aimed to track the evolution of the image of Stalin and to understand how the historical representation of Stalin and his war policy has changed over the last 70 years in school education. There is also the goal of identifying the main reasons for the diverse attitudes toward Stalin currently inherent in different generations and rooted in stable ambivalent assessments of his war policy among Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society. (shrink)

The term “dictator” may have a strong impression on many of us because it is usually associated with destructive consequences, like the Holocaust directed by Adolf Hitler and the Great Purge ordered by Joseph Stalin. Yet, little is known about how a dictator-to-be can harness the power and rise into power. This chapter proposes a psycho-political mechanism that enables a dictator-to-be to harness the power generated from disinformation-induced hysteria. The conceptual framework is constructed using the mindsponge-based analytical framework (...) and the SM3D theory (Serendipity-Mindsponge-3D). The framework can help examine cases of dictatorship and prospect potential dictators, which gives our societies insights and preparations to reduce the possible rise of dictatorship in the future. This chapter is placed at the end of the book to wrap up the process of describing and discussing the mindsponge thinking approach in the book from simplicity to complexity. (shrink)

This article seeks to understand the origins of the Soviet concept of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’, a diagnostic category that was used to imprison political dissidents in the post-WWII era. It focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, a period when Soviet psychiatrists attempted to find ways to diagnose schizophrenia at its earliest stages. The new Soviet state supported these efforts, funding new institutions where clinicians encountered types of patients they had not previously studied. Conceptual disagreements arose about what symptoms could be used (...) to diagnose schizophrenia, and how it could be differentiated from other ‘borderline’ mental disorders such as neurosis and psychopathy. Several research groups used their findings to propose new clinical concepts, including ‘mild schizophrenia’ and sluggish schizophrenia. By the early 1930s Soviet psychiatrists no longer shared a basic consensus about schizophrenia. At the same time, the priorities of the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin ceased to support preventative psychiatry. The result was a 1936 ‘discussion’ at which the concept of mild schizophrenia was criticized and sluggish schizophrenia was held up as a model for how the discipline should develop in the future. (shrink)

Music is an inescapable part of social, cultural and political life, and has played a powerful role in mobilising support for popular movements demanding social justice. The impact of David Bowie, Prince and Bob Dylan, for example, on diversity awareness and legislative reform relating to sexuality, gender and racial equality respectively is still felt; with the latter receiving a Nobel Prize in 2016 for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The influence of these composers and (...) performers reached far beyond the concert hall. Conversely, musical propaganda has been a common feature of many dictatorships, most notably Nazism’s Adolf Hitler and Communism’s Joseph Stalin, and is still instrumental in the election campaigns of political parties. US President Donald Trump’s winning retro classic rock campaign playlist conveyed an idealised version of the past which aligned with the tastes and interests of his core constituency, and evoked feelings of nationalistic pride and patriotism. The eclectic selection of upbeat music effectively masked the underlying capitalist initiatives, corporate greed and allegations of financial impropriety that characterised both the Democrat and Republican campaigns. Although unable to impart meaning with the same level of precision as language, music has a potentially broader semantic capacity due to its greater elasticity. It constitutes a common language which has the ability to create a community of people that sings, speaks, reasons, votes and even feels the same way. Accordingly, this article explores the symbiotic relationship between music and law, identity politics and social justice, via the lens of musical semiosis. (shrink)

Y a-t-il un art communiste? was given as a talk at the Grand Palais in Paris on 10 April 2019 on the occasion of a special exhibition, Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets (Rouge: Art et utopie au pays des Soviets). The exhibition ran from 20 March 2019 to 1 July 2019. Red displayed works produced in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. This covers (...) early experiments by avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayokovsky and Kazimir Malevich, the grand-scale construction of public monuments, and the mass-produced art of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Like many of Jacques Rancière’s recent publications on art, this article closely engages the material of its source exhibit, and, in it, he addresses the full range of art staged by the Grand Palais, offering a direct and provocative confrontation with the question of whether there can be a communist art. (shrink)

This article penetrates the idealistic, Marxist concept of the 'new Soviet man', linking it with the notion of eugenics. Departing from a reconstruction of the history and specificity of the eugenic movement in Russia since the late 19th century until the installation of Joseph Stalin as the only ruler of the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism paradigm of Soviet natural sciences is being evoked as a theoretical frame for Soviet-specific eugenic programme. Through referring to a number of chosen – both (...) theoretical and practical – issues and cases, the concept of the 'new Soviet man' is being confronted with an original reading of eugenics, understood in neo-Lamarckian terms of direct shaping human beings through environmental conditions and intergenerational transfer of acquired traits. (shrink)

The rapid and dramatic changes that have marked contemporary history inspired one of the most notable operas of the late twentieth century. Philip Glass's Akhnaten - an elegy on the theme of intolerance - gives a symbolic treatment to a well-known story of suppression and counter-suppression in Ancient Egypt. The visionary pharaoh Akhnaten overthrows the established order, religion and priesthood, abolishing in the process the images of the old gods. Soon, however, he himself is toppled from power; the images of (...) the gods he venerated are destroyed, along with his own portraits, and the old regime he had subverted establishes itself anew. Strategies of repression and suppression frequently involve eliminating the images of undesirables and obliterating their names. Recent history contains many examples of such tactics which still sometimes echo in the collective memory. A series of well-known photographs shows Joseph Stalin posing with the cream of the communist leadership – the Executive Committee from the early days of the Soviet Union, when it appeared to promise so much. As the Soviet regime grew ever more totalitarian and Stalin became more and more like the autocratic ruler of a vast empire, the portraits of various “troublesome” Committee members were airbrushed from the photos, just as they themselves disappeared from the political scene. The fate of Stalin's own images was no different, toppled and destroyed by the angry mob after the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. (shrink)

Summary This essay offers an overview of the three distinct periods in the development of Russian eugenics: Imperial (1900–1917), Bolshevik (1917–1929), and Stalinist (1930–1939). Began during the Imperial era as a particular discourse on the issues of human heredity, diversity, and evolution, in the early years of the Bolshevik rule eugenics was quickly institutionalized as a scientific discipline—complete with societies, research establishments, and periodicals—that aspired an extensive grassroots following, generated lively public debates, and exerted considerable influence on a range of (...) medical, public health, and social policies. In the late 1920s, in the wake of Joseph Stalin's ‘Great Break’, eugenics came under intense critique as a ‘bourgeois’ science and its proponents quickly reconstituted their enterprise as ‘medical genetics’. Yet, after a brief period of rapid growth during the early 1930s, medical genetics was dismantled as a ‘fascist science’ towards the end of the decade. Based on published and original research, this essay examines the factors that account for such an unusual—as compared to the development of eugenics in other locales during the same period—historical trajectory of Russian eugenics. (shrink)

Scholars have argued that transnational networks of right-wing economists and activists caused the worldwide embrace of neoliberalism. Using the case of an Italian think tank, CESES, associated with these networks, the author shows that the origins of neoliberalism were not in hegemony but in liminality. At CESES, the Italian and American right sought to convert Italians to free market values by showing them how Soviet socialism worked. However, CESES was created in liminal spaces that opened up within and between Soviet (...) socialism and Western capitalism after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Scholars from East and West at CESES developed new knowledge about actually existing socialism, which, due to the shifting context of the Cold War, seemed to provoke left-wing sympathies among the scholars and the students involved. CESES in fact required left-wing scholars, who had necessary skills and a fascination with a common project of democratic or market socialism, to create this new knowledge. The new knowledge that developed out of an East–West dialogue not only helped right-wing transnational networks to reorient their hegemonic projects, but also helped those on the left to understand actually existing socialism and what socialism might become. This knowledge could not be obtained without this dialogue and had to travel through liminal spaces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 223-225 [Access article in PDF] Devoirs et Délices d'une vie de passeur: Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin, by Tzvetan Todorov; 395 pp. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2002, €22. Caveat lector. Let the reader beware: this is no leisurely, nostalgic stroll by another Parisian intellectual now ruminating and pontificating over issues and events outside his competence. True to his vocation as ferryman (passeur), Todorov guides (...) the reader over the vast expanses of historical, ideological, and intensely personal terrain that he has explored as an émigré of Bulgaria, a brilliant Structuralist, French citizen, father, spouse, and son caring for his aged father. The resulting mosaic composes a narrative itinerary rich in intellectual history.The exceptional range of Todorov's experience and research affords him a unique perspective. Having first lived and studied under Stalinism, he distinguished himself as a Parisian literary scholar stressing the primacy of the linguistic. Now internationally renowned, his books cover a broad spectrum of human experience, including the Holocaust, WWII, totalitarianism, the ethics of memory, the role and function of the intellectual, race and culture, ethnocentrism and conquest, and, most recently, human identity and a new humanism. Having immersed himself in numerous contexts, Todorov has acquired extensive firsthand knowledge from within. He is nevertheless adept at standing back and assessing them from without, revealing idiosyncrasies and limitations. His uncompromising scrutiny bows to no ideological a priori, nor spares any sacred cow.Some pronouncements will ruffle feathers in a number of intellectual aviaries. He values literature, for example, above philosophy, science, and the social sciences as a source of not only beauty, but meaning and truth. Contrary to the tendency to view literature as an arbitrary construction used to further an agenda of socio-economic domination and political repression, he contends that literary texts can best enrich our vision of the world and our personal sensibilities. Stressing art's essential humanity while challenging the obsession with science and technology, Todorov views language as neither estranged from reality nor subjugated by politics. Hence the impossibility of isolating literature from ethics and existence: writers legitimately seek to come to terms with the human condition, communicating experiences and sensibilities we would otherwise ignore. [End Page 223]Criticism, contends Todorov, should accordingly plunge back into the work's context or thought, as does Bénichou in studying French Classicism, or Joseph Frank in analyzing Dostoyevsky, or else it should explore anthropological perspectives, as does René Girard. Todorov's focus remains squarely on the literary work, not on the genius of theory: we have more to learn from texts of all ages than from contemporary critics who embed them in systems, reducing them to mere examples of theory.Beyond the "ethnocentrism" (p. 124) that he sees in the tendency to approach literary works through current preoccupations, Todorov delivers a severe verdict on the Marxist intellectuals so prominent throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s: "... the thirty years (1945-1975) that were so glorious for the French economy [were] disastrous for political thought. Ideologically, these are years of stagnation and of an intellectual straight jacket in which all discourse was judged by the measure of Marxist-Leninist dogma" (pp. 144-45, translation mine). Todorov thus deplores such irresponsibility: all while enjoying the many material comforts and civil freedoms of a free-market, democratic society, "bobos" (bourgeois bohèmes) advocated the instauration of a totalitarian regime whose economic failures and political repression Todorov had known only too well. Their actions thus were not in keeping with their discourse, for they made no effort to seriously weigh the concrete results of their ideology.Like Tony Judt, who voices similar criticisms in Past Imperfect and The Burden of Responsibility, Todorov prefers Raymond Aron's intellectual rigor and Camus's humane moderation to Sartre's knee-jerk radicalism and futile gesticulations. Given Todorov's experience and erudition, such criticisms can neither be brushed aside nor attributed to being a rear-guard action. He moreover distributes incisive criticisms to the Right, to the Left, and even to the Center. But... (shrink)