Journal of Applied Philosophy

On the basis of a wide range of sources the author offers an original interpreta- tion of world history, considering as its key events episodes of approaching to the understanding and realization of love, followed by periods of retreat, repulsion from it with subsequent discovery of other ways. The first such episode in the course of Homo sapiens evolution was the emergence of love as an unpredictable affec- tive connection to a specific, unique person, first through looking (thanks to mirror neurons) and then bodily (in connection with procreation). The reaction to this phe- nomenon and the suffering it generates was the social institution of marriage, uni- versal for humanity and built on guarantees (according to calculation and the choice of relatives or the community), in which love was, as it were, put out of the equa- tion. The second episode is connected to Christianity, when the appearance of the incarnate and personal God, who not only preached but was personally understood as love, caused a backlash — a mixture of love and lust, devaluation of marriage, hos- tility toward the body as the source of evil. The paradoxical solution was the uncom- promising prohibition on divorce, established in the West thanks to Saint Augustine, that is, the idea of eternal love, but not Platonic and abstract, but inscribed in the very concrete, corporeal level of social life. On this foundation, love first became the key theme of Western culture and then, in the course of the Romantic Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, the main criterion for choosing a spouse and the basis of the family. The radical idea of mar- riage for love spread around the world for 150 years along with globalization, but in the last 50 years it has been rapidly eroding. This process intensified with the spread of contraception and the shift from monogamous marriage to serial monogamy and/ or free relationships that can break up at any moment. The result was the third rejec- tion: while in traditional cultures protection from the unpredictable power of love and the suffering associated with it was sought in arranged and forced marriages, in the 21st century it is sought in the withdrawal from serious relationships, in the dis- placement of love by contractual relationships on comfortable terms, and the prac- tice of “living solo,” where any relationship (even purely sexual) is seen as too dangerous and traumatic.

The first Russian translation of the Letter 5 from the correspondence of Abaelard and Heloise is based on the recent critical edition of Latin original, it is accompanied by an exhaustive literary and historical commentary. In his letter Abaelard exhorts Heloise to follow the path of quotidian ascese in order to expell their common sins, he stylizes him self as a kind of new Jeronimus, and his wife, and mother of their son, becomes a “sister in Christ.” Thus, the “rhinoceros indomitus” him self, the logi- cian and philosopher known to us by his treatises, is presented by his letter more like a preacher of monastic values. The translation gives to Russian readers the possibil- ity to look anew on the relationship between the two famous philosophers, as well as to appreciate stylistic peculiarities of love and friendship correspondence in the latin medieval West, in the moment of great flourishing of epistolary genre and spread of love lyric.

This article focuses on the way in which cinema in recent decades has been listening to the operatic voice and exploring its perception. It is suggested that this interest has been stimulated by Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970), which, like Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrazin, centers on the moment when the listener encounters and admires the sing- ing (operatic) voice. The connection of this S/Z fragment with the chapter Admiration in Fragments of a Love Speech and with Barth’s experience as a listener, reflected also in his other works (The Grain of the Voice), is emphasized. Barth’s S/Z is considered in line with the reflection on music set by Søren Kierkegaard in his treatise Either/Or (1843). In this line, the author includes Charles Baudelaire’s letter to Richard Wagner (1860) and its analysis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Musica ficta (1982–1991) to indicate the “operatic climate” of the 1980s and the intensity of the discussion of the phenomenon of opera in which the cinema has become involved. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) is considered as an example of a response to Barthes’ text; the criterion for the selection of other films (by Fellini, Herzog, Szabó, Russell, Demme, Darabont, Almodóvar) is the captured encounter between the (operatic) voice and homo audiens. It is a cinema that observes “the gaze of our hearing” (Alexander Mikhailov), reaches a new level (a new depth and intimacy) of relationship with opera and looks for ways to the very core of operatic magic, exploring the point of erotic encounter between voice and hearing. The article dis- cusses the opposition of the “intellectual vs sensual and erotic” in the performance, perception and exploration of music (Roland Barthes, Caroline Abbate, Vladimir Yankelevich) and the ability of cinema to offer the listener in front of the screen a musical experience similar to that of the listener on screen and allow the listener to be “delighted” himself — passive and “captivated,” according to Barth. The process of listening unfolds in time, structured by the musical form, which cinema is also able to reflect in its movement, that is, it is able to convey “the tensions of feeling” (Lacoue-Labarthe).

We draw the parallel between Proposition 22 of Part III of Ethics by Benedict de Spi- noza and Catch 22 from the film of the same name by Mike Nichols. There is a dif- ficulty in interpreting this theorem: why the emotion of jealousy cannot arise in the dynamics of pleasure described here. We believe that this difficulty is the same as the task facing the spectator of the film: why is a catch, which in itself is just a logi- cal construction, clearly appears as a sign of all-destructive action, as evil? To solve the difficulty, the concepts of condivision (distribution) and inescapability are intro- duced. Condivision is the property of things (and affects) not to diminish when shared. Inescapability is the belief that this shared thing cannot be exhausted. Essential for our analysis is the fact that division itself is diverse. Offered a brief classification of condivision and explores the genesis of inescapability. We can resolve the difficulties given that: firstly, as Spinoza points out a typical mistake in perceiving a God’s love (the fact that I can love God, does not follow that God is capable of loving me), so the quantitative interpretation of inescapability leads to the misleading perception of it as an inexhaustible resource. Secondly, the identity of intellectual love for God and intellectual love of God, grammatically emphasized by Spinoza, does not mean the condivision of this love between finite beings and God. The main thesis of the article is: the misleading identification of inescapable things and infinite resources can be avoided by relying not on moral and ethical, but on rational, structural considerations.

The paper is concerned with the exploration of romantic love in two noticeable cin- ematic works of the recent decade: Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012) and Love (Gaspar Noé, 2015). The suggested analysis employs Alain Badiou’s philosophy of love, which enables to explicate the configuration of concepts structuring romantic love as a field of experience and being thus a priori relevant to its cinematic representations. The methodological presupposition of the article concerning the more-than-illustrative philosophical significance of the reading of films, capable, as it is claimed, to radi- cally transform the conceptual framework applied in their reading, is based on Badi- ou’s understanding of the essential cinematic operation as “the passage of an idea.” Specifically, it is shown that each of the films develops some necessary structural ele- ments of Badiou’s model to the effect of deconstructing its most fundamental onto- logical matrix: the Two-scene. To articulate these cinematic trajectories of love, the article puts Badiou in dialogue with other thinkers. The interpretation of Haneke’s Amour focuses on the ethical dimension of love and its relation to death, while intro- ducing into the discussion the voices of Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger. The exploration of the dialectics of love and sex in Noé’s film makes recourse to Roger Scruton and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

This article attempts to identify and describe the ability of cinema not only to speak about the world in the language of cinema, which in film theory is invariably analogous to verbal or written language, not only to represent the world in signs and images, but also to become the very site of experience communication, which does not fit into the categories of language or representation. The effort to take the analytics of cinema beyond the paradigm of representation can be traced in various authors. What this paper attempts to show is that these lines of thought, though unfolding from different perspectives, nonetheless bring us back to the idea of “cinema in itself,” which regards the category of the cinematic as self-valuable, independent of the mediating procedures of theorizing, narratizing, institutionalizing, and critical evaluation. The action of which cinema is then capable can be described as the creation of simulacres (as interpreted by Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski) or as a gesture (as described by Giorgio Agamben). The rejection of the representation of cinema as one of the techniques of representation allows us to leave behind the annoying duality and tired opposition of “cinema — reality” that has haunted theoretical thought about cinema for decades. Not trying to universalize cinematography’s capacity not to show and not to be language, the author aims to provide the reader with a conceptual framework and concrete examples in which this capacity to present the experience that does not fit into language, the gesture of the machine, becomes evident.

The article is an attempt to identify the basic models of Hannah Arendt’s thinking, which can be described either as a binary structure (where relations between sub- jects are reduced to stable binary models of “abuser — victim,” “good — evil,” “mas- ter — property”) or as a ternary structure based on the free communication of subjects. An analysis, including a philological and psychological perspective, of her major works is produced: Shadows, The Concept of Love in Augustine, Rachel Farn- hagen, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Human Condition, On Revolution, Life of the Mind, as well as various papers and private letters. The author tries to show that the formation of these structures and the transition from one to the other is deter- mined by Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger, her significant Other, by the ruptures and renewals of the relationship with him. The binary optics is formed in Arendt’s very first texts created in the process of parting with Heidegger in the 1920s, and it finds its ultimate embodiment in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Conversely, in the periods when Arendt’s love and open conversation with Heidegger is realized, her thought comes to a system that assumes a place for a Third, be it a third opinion or a third participant(s) in the relationship. Arendt sees the example of such a system of communication of equal politi- cal subjects in the democracy of the polis (in Human Condition). The transition from binary oppositions like “abuser — victim” to a communicative (ternary) model became possible thanks to the experience of reconciliation with Heidegger in 1950, and the three-way communication with his wife, just as the transition to more dis- tanced forms of communication with him in the 1960s led to a return to binary models in Arendt’s later work. At the end of the article, a suggestion is made as to why Arendt’s thought has been in such demand in recent decades: the binary struc- ture of the perception of social relations, which distinguishes most of Arendt’s works, turned out to be consonant with the culture at the turn of the 21st century (a view of morality, history and politics, relations with the state, relations between man and woman, parent and child through the prism of “abuser — victim,” “the side of good versus the side of evil,” etc.). A polarized picture of the world has taken root in soci- ety, probably for the same reasons as in Arendt’s case, i.e., as a result of the sys- tematic divorces, ruptures from relationships with the meaningful Other that are peculiar to our epoch.

The article attempts to identify a new type of attitude to time, which appears in the cinema of recent decades and is connected to the presentation of the process of changing the past and moving the hero into an alternative temporal series, with the past with its events being subjected to an optimizing correction. The films of Christ- offer Boe and Hong Sang-soo are the central object of the analysis, but the new modus operandi of the relation to the past revealed here can also be traced in popu- lar cinema. Particular attention is paid to the changing representation of the manip- ulation of the past in science fiction cinema. Examining the “strange” films of recent decades in a broader historical context and comparing them to previous attempts to represent alternative versions of real- ity (for example, the films of Akira Kurosawa and Alain Resnais), allows us to iden- tify “unplacedness” as the main characteristic of the new kind of cinema, when the change of past is not placed in the minds of characters, is not presented as a sub- jective interpretation of reality and is not relegated to the field of the fantastic and the fictional. It is presented as an ontologically real fact, dealing with everyday real- ity. The typology of the image developed by Gilles Deleuze in his book on cinema and the question he posed about the third type of the image make it possible to cre- ate the concept of the ”image-correction” uniting the phenomena in question. As an alternative to both “image-movement” and “image-time”, “image-correction” charac- terizes a new epoch in the history of cinema and creates conditions for its retroactive revision as a history of “corrective manipulation of time.”

The question of the limits of representation has long gained significance for the the- ory and practice of cinema, but in recent years the critique of representational strat- egies has given way to concrete projects unfolding in a different logic. This article attempts to find a theoretical basis for these new cinematic statements in the clas- sical ontological opposition of Plato and Aristotle. The appeal to the fundamental philosophy does not seem to be accidental, since the most famous film-theoretical concepts steadily go back to Plato’s thought and to the visual metaphor of cognition that dominates in the Greeks. At the same time, the phenomenological shift in con- temporary culture and the increased ontologization of the cinematic event leads us to the Aristotelian concept of essence, which allows us to speak of cinema in terms of possibility and reality as that which is not yet visible and that which is no longer visible. The experience of the visible is placed within these boundaries and acquires a quality of obviousness. The cinematic event here not only maintains a connection to truth, but also becomes the center of affects that sustain and cherish all that is alive.

This article is a review of some of the circumstances of the emergence, circula- tion, and reception of the letters of Peter Abelard and his (former) beloved Heloise. Although these circumstances have long been studied and the correspondence itself is among the most famous monuments of the Latin literature of the 12th century, its contradictory readings show the ambivalence of the texts and the relationship of the famous thinkers behind them. The first Russian translation of the Letter 5, in which Abelard reminds Heloise of the sins of her youth, for which, the author assures her, he is justly punished, is appended to this article. This exhortation becomes an occa- sion for him to describe to Heloise the image of a “sister in Christ” instead of a lover, a wife, the mother of his son, an image that seemed to him himself the only true one by that time, between 1130 and 1140. Many historians of the 20th and 21st centuries see in this correspondence a literary game, a kind of “sincere hypocrisy” (Peter Godman), that is, a pretense. If Abelard has taken on the image of Hieronymus, a persecuted and misunderstood intellectual and mentor of pious women of the 4th and 5th centuries, Eloise in her letters appears as a new “heroine” abandoned by her lover, or as a repentant sinner, a new Magda- lene seeking her Christ. All this literary “self-modeling” is certainly present in the correspondence. But does it explain everything in their relationship and in the poet- ics of the texts that interest us? Eloise is known to have written little, but all of Abe- lard’s work in the last years of his life, according to his personal testimony, is related to the spiritual needs of the Paraclete. Abelard responded to his wife’s requests. The phenomenon of the monastic friendship that bound the monasteries of the time explains much of this, as it also explains their relationship. History of My Calami- ties is important to consider simultaneously within the framework of the collection of letters created at Paraclete and ending with the monastic charter, as well as in the context of those writings that Abelard wrote at Eloise’s request.

The article is a transdisciplinary study of cinema as a medium of thought and truth, love and pleasure, attraction and desire at the intersection of film criticism, media theory, psychoanalysis, and inherent self-analysis with reference to several films. The first scenes of the article trace the origins of the love of cinema, the awakening of desire directed at the movie screen, desire as desire for another. The cinema is a machine of desire, and one of the truths it carries is related to the industrial nature of its production and its technical reproducibility. This truth was sought to be con- veyed by French avant-garde filmmakers such as Able Gance, Jean Epstein, and Ger- maine Dulac. The truth of cinema is in the fiction, which carries the truth within it. And not only the truth about cinema, but also the truth about reality, about the subject. Jacques Lacan’s thesis that truth is structured as fiction is clarified both through the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and through the affinity between the cinematic dis- position and the psychic apparatus. The formula “truth in fiction” gives rise to the peculiarities of cinema thinking as such, cinema thinking as a particular form of thinking. Cinematic thinking is an instrument of cognition. An example of this is Anemic Cinema, Marcel Duchamp’s optical experiment which deconstructs cinema as a medium and shows on the screen exactly how cinema works. The last frame of Duchamp’s film experiment refers to the question of eros, to which the final part of the article is devoted. The analysis of the relationship between love, truth, and ethics is brought to life through the example of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

The article offers a socio-philosophical reflection on Otar Iosseliani’s cinematogra- phy. The thesis is expressed that the key theme of the director’s films is the construc- tion of a certain true form of life of human communities. This form of life can exist within both socialism and capitalism, and is qualitatively different from both. The space in which it is realized is designated in the article as Enotria (“land of wine,” as the ancient Greeks called Southern Italy). The image of the “country of wine” emerges when watching many of Iosseliani’s films, and his 1999 film Adieu, plancher des vaches! even received the title Truth in Wine in Russian distribution. The way of life of this country’s population is examined by analogy with the notion of “idiorrit- mie,” which Roland Barthes devoted his 1976–1977 course at the Collège de France to analyzing. Iosseliani identifies a utopia that is immanent to the existing social order. The question remains open, however, to what extent such a utopia problematizes rather than sustains that order, because, as Alexei Tsvetkov has shown in his book Cin- emarxism, it is often based on romanticizing the past. Nevertheless, as the article shows, this utopia is not reduced entirely to a conservative position. For example, Ioseliani’s most recent film to date, Winter Song (2015), strongly evokes the theme of class struggle. The images in this film bear an unexpected resemblance to the content of Friedrich Engels’ notes on his journey from Paris to Bern.

The article examines masochism as a concept of continental theory and philosophy, which has a positive potential. In contrast to clinical and psychoanalytic approaches that consider masochism as a negative phenomenon, there are two trends in French philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century: 1) masochism means priv- ileged access to truth (René Girard); 2) masochism is understood as a subversive practice that undermines the law (Gilles Deleuze). Both trends have had a signif- icant impact on modern theory, which applies masochistic logic to a variety of issues: defining male subjectivity, interpreting the concepts of classical aesthetics and describing ontological projects in terms of perversion, etc. The result is a theo- retical consensus that recognizes masochism as an essential concept of critical the- ory, which also brings masochism out of the shadow of the more influential notion of sadism. The critical intuition of this article has its origins in two works — Jean-François Lyotard’s book Libidinal Economy (1974) and Peter Strickland’s film The Duke of Bur- gundy (2014). In both cases, there is an unexpected skepticism about the position that masochism has a positive potential (both political and epistemological). At the same time, it is important that Lyotard and Strickland’s criticism of perversion is not carried out on the basis of a conservative position that defends the boundaries of normativity. Instead, it is proposed to clarify the hidden contradictions inherent in radical thought and art, inspired by the rehabilitation of the phenomenon of per- version. The main focus of the article is on the aporias of Deleuze’s theory of mas- ochism. The influence of the work Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967) makes it especially important for the present study. The article focuses not on the innova- tive approach to Deleuze’s masochism, but, on the contrary, on the lines of thought in which Deleuze inherits traditions. It is these premises that in many respects dem- onstrate the problematic nature of his approach. Analyzing these premises in the context of Lyotard’s work and Strickland’s film reveals the groundlessness of the expectances that modern theory associates with masochism.

The article observes the latest ethnographic research on modern warfare, which sheds light on interconnected internal security regimes, military invasions abroad, and so-called hybrid or rhizomatic warfare. The paper critiques two analytical categories: notions of hybrid warfare and the “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben). Hybridity in the context of modern warfare is generally used to describe the enemy or threat, rather than self-description. The author of the article proposes the notion of “hybrid peace” in the dual meaning of peace as space and peace as the opposite of the state of war. This notion points to the ontological uncertainty of the world at the beginning of the 21 st century as a state of undeclared wars, and this state of uncertainty is no longer a “state of exception.” The new normality of the hybrid world is examined in terms of those zones where the use of military force is possible and military violence is justified, and those where it is not. Examples of the study of such military interventions include works on drone warfare in the Middle East, the extraterritoriality of garrisons and guerrilla movements in Central and West Africa, and the rhizomatic operations of the Israel Defense Forces. To understand these and many other cases, the author finds productive the notion of Carl Schmitt’s “nomos of the Earth” and his “theory of the guerrilla.”

The article develops the possibilities of several philosophical concepts to ground a philosophy of nature that would be capable of withstanding correlationist critics. The author refers to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and exposes productivity of the concept of self-productive Nature by the means of contemporary speculative capabilities. Precisely, the traditionally evaded by process philosophy and “naive” realism issue of production of thought of the one that is being produced itself. The means for the new philosophy of nature the author finds in weird fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and in “non-philosophy” of François Laruelle as read by Ray Brassier. Lovecraft’s unnameable and Schellings’ unconditioned eternal not only stand against metaphysics in the process philosophy. They also provide the means to formalize the thought that emerges out of Nature. The author criticizes Meillassoux’s metaphysical hyper-Chaos and Deleuzian virtuality for their prioritization of thought. He confronts them with the thought about the horrible as a challenge, with the escalation of thought up to the ontology which is incomparable to humane. Schelling’s Nature becomes the basis for the possible realism beyond the limits of common sense. Deep, endless objects do not contradict Nature but are being produced out of it against our epistemological restrictions. Schelling’s transcendental realism and naturalism turn out as a Lovecraftian-Schellingian realism, the result of horribly speculative reason. This reason operates in the Real, it is produced from the very Nature itself. Its formalizations point at the objects of deep Nature’s cosmic processes instead of descending to the limits, established by Kant. An object in such a philosophy of nature is a representation of the suspension of boundless Nature. Nature that produces itself and explores itself in such suspensions. The Nature that is shrouded in long timescales.