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Introduction to the issue

The essay explores Bataille’s general economy as the theory of nonproductive expenditure and its implications for a new politics of nature. It suggests that this theory, elaborated by Bataille in the 1940s, can be valid today and applicable in the analysis of the most urgent problems of contemporary humanity such as the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change. The reading of general economy that is presented in this essay evokes the Bataillean notion of violence, which allows the political aspects of the human/nonhuman divide to be exposed. The essay begins with the metaphor of the sun as the source of both destructive and productive energy, continues with the reflections of the two kinds of violence, as well as two kinds of economies in Bataille, defines a passage between general economy and a possible general politics, and finally proposes to critically reconsider Bataille’s opposition between labor and nature in order to overcome it.

This essay analyzes Marx’s materialist understanding of spirituality within the context of the Marxian conception of the essence of the human developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o...

The chapter approaches Hegel’s idea of reconciliation with reality, focusing on the figure of enjoyment presented in the Preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and the voice of reason as the source of an insight that elevates reason to the peak of enjoyment. The voice is theorized as what connects Hegel’s imperative of the enjoyment of reason with two other imperatives—the Kantian imperative of reason and the Sadean imperative of enjoyment. Hegel’s absolute freedom is interpreted as the form of consciousness where the opposites of Kant and Sade, i.e., moral and immoral, reason and enjoyment, intertwine. From this perspective, Hegel’s philosophy of the French Revolution and the revolutionary terror is considered as a turning point between the solitude of consciousness and the ethical community, or the “we” that creates a utopian horizon within the post-apocalyptic political-theological situation of the death of God and the end of the world.

Based on the discussion that took place on November 7, 2018 in European University at St. Petersburg

Nikolay Oleynikov and Oxana Timofeeva are members of the Saint Petersburg–based collective Chto Delat, a group of nondogmatic Marxist artists, philosophers, and activists. Members of the group are in continuous interdisciplinary dialog. This artwork is an example of the circulation of ideas, images, and practices that flow from the members of the collective, influencing the singular studies of each artist, and back from the singular exercises of each artist, enriching the practices of the collective. Combining the images of Oleynikov and a text by Timofeeva, the artwork analyzes a collective dimension of spirituality that through artistic political practices uncovers a series of transformations of animal bodies, addressing the nonhuman aspects of the phenomenon of comradeship. In this uncovering, questions of solidarity, pain, and utopian community are raised and actualized in the encounter between text and image.

This essay addresses the metaphor of the animal kingdom as applied to a philosophical analysis of human society, particularly in the work of Karl Marx and Michel Serres. It creates a virtual dialog between Marx, Serres, and Hegel about the parasitic structure in nature and society and analyzes the dialectics of animal multiplicity, capital, spirit, mediation, and universality. This analysis focuses first on the animal/bestial aspects of social ontology. It historically problematizes the question of the encounter between nature and history. Referring to the writings of Russian communist writer and intellectual Andrey Platonov, the essay further investigates the Marxist origins of Russian avant-garde culture and its politics of nature.

The paper proposes an original approach to the analysis of the sexual economy of war and, together with Donna Haraway’s claim “We have never been human,” reconsiders Lacan’s formula “There is no sexual relation” proceeding from the idea of sex as a humanizing practice. This idea is opposed to popular metaphors of animality and the naturality of human sexual life. Thus, according to Georges Bataille sex, or rather eroticism, is what transforms not human beings into animals, but animals into human beings: just like labor in Engels, it presents a central principle of anthropogenesis. For Bataille, this transformation is an event that marked the passage between pre-history and history and the appearance of historical humanity. The paper places this argument into a paradoxical twist by suggesting a hypothesis that such a transformative event has not yet happened, and that, instead of sex, in today’s capitalist society people rather practice, to quote Žižek, “masturbation with a living partner,” where the integrity of a person is replaced by partial objects. This argument finds support in Platonov’s satire on masturbation and his critique of the Anti-Sexus, the latter being both masturbatory and antisexual (i.e., something that prevents sexual relationships). The paper shows that there is a remarkable gap in Platonov’s writings between two understandings of sex—as “the soul of the bourgeoisie” which is to be overcome by the consciousness of the proletariat, and as what is to be postponed until a communist society will be built. It analyses the constitutive character of this gap, or ambiguity, for Platonov’s radical revolutionary asceticism.

This article refers to the famous question of the politicization versus aestheticization of art, recently discussed by Boris Groys in terms of usefulness and uselessness, or “design” and “art proper,” and, by criticizing Croys’ dualist approach, shows that in the biopolitical framework of contemporary ideology, the usefulness and uselessness pass into each other and thus create a circle within which any art is presented as individual or social therapy, or a sort of pharmakon that is both poison and cure. In search for another conception of art, the article addresses to some radical avant­garde conceptions of theatre, such as Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, and, reflecting through the ways of recombining elements and principles of what Alain Badiou characterized as a “leftist threat” for the theatre, demonstrates a rational political kernel of their destructive force.

The question of what the community should be is a question of value and what ought to be; any attempt to answer this question leads us to discordant models of social organization, to an ideological quarrel about how to rebuild humanity. The community appears as a gathering of people, large or small, but certainly different from a group, a collective, a society – in terms of its density or the character of its objectives, its anatomy or teleology. As we are told, the community is not a group, not a collective, no – and it is not a nation, not a people – but it is also not a crowd or a mass. The specter of communism hangs in the common and unappropriated air. The very name swears an oath of allegiance to the idea of the community. Communism is the society of the community, what is common and belongs to no one, but we will never agree on the subject of whether this principle coincides with or opposes democracy. Thus the specter of communism, having appeared out of the air, disperses into it as well. Communism is humanity’s memory of what has not yet happened. In this way it resembles a dream – you never know when the idyll might turn into a nightmare. Author(s): Oxana Timofeeva Title (English): Unconscious Desire for Communism Translated by (Russian to English): Jonathan Brooks Platt Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2015) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje Page Range: 32-48 Page Count: 16 Citation (English): Oxana Timofeeva, “Unconscious Desire for Communism,” translated from the Russian by Jonathan Brooks Platt, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2015): 32-48.

MODERNISM IN THE ANIMAL TRAP? Stalling the Subject: Modernism and the Animal by Carrie Rohman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp 208. $90.00 cloth, $29.50 paper.It's interesting to observe how animal studies, or, to be more precise, critical animal studies, occupies a more and more significant place among what is broadly called human sciences. This is a part of a massive twentieth-century tectonic shift, where the very core of human sciences, i.e., the human itself, meets its limit. The human subject bids farewell to its dream of autonomy and attempts to define itself from without, through various figures of the nonhuman, the latter thought of in terms of radical alterity. This move tries to embrace the unstable domain beyond the border of humanity and, among nonhuman others, the animal is the most insistent and striking. The animal accompanied humanity, as its mirror twin, from its very birth in Paleolithic caves, and the animal is still here, still promising to reveal something that humans cannot grasp about themselves.Long after the Cartesian formula, linking the subject and the thought, the philosophy of animality turns to the question of how to think about this mode of existence that supposedly does not think itself. As opposed to the classical philosophical tradition characterized by an almost general disregard towards animals as a being deprived of thought, language, consciousness or subjectivity, contemporary thinkers working at the crossroads of animal studies, critical philosophy, and human and natural science are mainly trying to think about animality as another kind of subjectivity either by pragmatically locating this question in the domain of ethics, politics, and science or along the lines of a theoretical and critical deconstruction of classical philosophy and the metaphysical tradition. The animal turn in human sciences, most generally inspired, perhaps, by Peter Singer's practical ethics and animal liberation movement, but also by the theoretical interventions of Deleuze and European post-Heideggerianism, shapes a peculiar crossing point between philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, literature, and other arts.Carrie Rohman's Stalling the Subject is a good example of interdisciplinary academic research in this field. It applies posthumanist theory to literary studies - namely, to studies in British modernist literature. Rohman thus does not speak about modernism in general, or the subject in general, or the animal in general; her work consists of critical analysis of works by T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes that focus on the figure of the animal or animality. Such a clear framework, however, allows the author to make rather deep observations about socalled human nature as it is represented in this specific historical and cultural context, and to interrogate the most universal questions about the limits of humanity as tested by various experiences of sexuality, violence, poetry, etc.Rohman emphasizes that her work is mostly inspired by Gary Wolfs philo&oophy, but work by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Deleuze, George Bataille, and Jacques Derrida - authors who deal with the human rather than with the animal, properly speaking - are other primary references. If Gary Wolf is searching for a "proper" nonhuman animal, Rohman addresses instead the experience of the human animal, exploring the thresholds and the borders, the places whereof the human and animal encounter each other within the world of the human rather than in the realm of the supposed animality per se. The question here, then, is not about what constitutes the animal, but how the animal makes humans think about themselves. Literature is taken as a place of such encounters because as the world of words, the domain of an extremely cultivated language, it tends to meet its opposite, the nonspeaking animal, as its very ontological limit.Modernist literature gives especially wide room for rethinking subjectivity through its relation to the animal. …