Summary

"THE LOVER TAKES THE FLOOR"

One of Roland Barthes' most renowned works, Fragments d'un discours amoureux (1977) resulted from two years spent directing a seminar at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris (1974—1976). Thirty years after the release of this book, six hundred pages of materials from the seminar were published as Le discours amoureux (2007) and supplemented with prepared texts that had been excluded by Barthes from the final version of his book. Indeed, in the transition from manu­script to the first printed version, Barthes for unknown reasons excluded twenty of the one hundred initially prepared figures, and also radically shortened and reworked the preamble ("Argument") and, in particular, the expansive "methodo­logical" conclusion ("Comment est fait ce livre"), condensing them into a short foreword that retained the latter title. These, we repeat, entirely completed texts served as an appendix to the seminar materials. Our section presents the first part of these materials: the twenty figures not included in the final corpus, and a short preamble.

"Qu'est-ce que l'amour?" is a chapter from Conditions, by the French philo­sopher Alain Badiou, written on the basis of a paper, "Love as a site of sexuated knowledge" given in 1990 at the College International de Philosophie (Paris) as part of a colloquium, "The work of knowledge and sexual difference." For Badiou, love — like science, politics and art — is a "truth procedure," whereby the human subject itself is formed. Love is the experience of sexual difference, or the twosome, the initial disunity, whereby the subject can communicate with Truth and access the universality of humanity. Badiou analyses love, desire, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and fidelity using mathematical formulae and schemata.

 

PLATO — HERO OF OUR TIME

An article from Lorenzo Chiesa ( University of Kent), "Le ressort de l'amour: Lacan with Plato" addresses the connection between psychoanalysis and Classical phi­losophy. Chiesa analyses the commentary to Plato's Symposium given in Jacques Lacan's 8^th seminar ("Le transfert"). In Lacan's interpretation, this dialogue demonstrates a paradigmatic case of a situation of transference, the participants of which include Socrates (the proto-analyst) and Alcibiades (the proto-analysed). Lacan's reading of Plato is not focused on the abstract, philosophical concept of love as such, but rather on love in its relationship to the empirical experience of transference in psychoanalysis. In "The philosopher and the tyranny of desire: the Marquis de Sade as mirrored by Plato," Irina Protopopova (Russian Anthropo­logical School) illuminates unexpected parallels between Plato's "topoi of desire" and the understanding of desires and human nature of the Marquis de Sade. Her analysis of the relationship between reason and the passions, between pleasure and pain, good and evil, ethics and politics reveals points of intersection between Plato's "Republic" and the Marquis' "Republic of Evil." Aaron Schuster (ICI, Berlin) presents "The Double Perspective. Reflections on Plato's Definition of Pleasure," in which he places Plato's understanding of the pleasures in the context of contemporary philosophy. Although Plato's compositions do not provide a simple defnition of pleasure, and although his discussions of pleasure are scatte­red throughout various dialogues, the philosopher's approach to the question remained unchanged for the duration of his entire life: Plato defines pleasure nega­tively, as liberation from burdens, relief from suffering or the satisfaction of an insistent desire. One of the most powerful attacks against the Platonic definition of pleasure from a contemporary philosopher belongs to Gilles Deleuze, who does not so much oppose positive desire and growth to Plato's negative pleasures as "turn Plato inside out." In his article, Aleksandr Jakobidze-Gitman ( VGIK) com­pares various trends in film theory that develop themes of the Platonic dialogues like the dualism of things and ideas (first and foremost — from the Cave myth) and the phenomenon of desire that carries its object from physical gratification to love to divine wisdom. Jakobidze-Gitman shows that the "Platonic line" in film theory has developed from the condemnation of film as an imitative art that dis­torts the perception of reality, to its justification as a mechanism for revealing to us our nature as desiring subjects. An article by Arkadii Kovelman (MSU, Institute of Asian and African Countries) and Uri Gershowitz (Hebrew Univer­sity of Jerusalem, Open University of Israel) presents an analysis of the Talmudic Tractate Ta'anit against the background of Jacques Derrida's article, "Plato's pharmacy." The dual oppositions of the tractate (poison and medicine, joy and suffering) are sublated in its conclusion. Their resolution, according to the metaphorical logic of the tractate, takes place at the end of time.

 

TRANSFORMATION OF THE FEMALE: CORPOREALITY, SUBJECTIVITY, SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

In the article "Garbed in chastity: American erotica of the 1840s," Aleksandra Urakova (RSUH) asks: how did Americans of the 1840s see (or try not to see) the bared, desired, tempting...female body? And in a cultural climate that hardly favoured the erotic imagination, how did rhetoric interact with erotica? In order to answer these questions, Urakova looks to two cultural phenomena: the country-wide tour of Hyram Powers' "Greek slave woman" statue and the publi­cation of George Lippard's novel, The Quaker City. Urakova shows that in the first case, "collective rhetorical efforts were directed towards hiding the potentially obscene sense and, ultimately, to make the body invisible;" in the second case, "rhetoric served as a sort of propaganda tool that allowed the author to introduce forbidden topics and plots into the text while maintaining relative legitimacy." In "The institution of marriage in Anna Karenina," Maria Zalambani (University of Bologna) investigates the reflection in Tolstoy's novel of the crisis undergone by this institution during the second half of the nineteenth century. Correlating the novel with legal materials, Zalambani examines the transition from the patriarchal family model to the bourgeois one, from marriage by calculation to marriage for love, and recalls the mutual exchange between literature and society: reflecting some social changes, literature helps to bring about others. Tatyana Borisova's (HSE NRU, St. Petersburg) article analyses the legislative politics of the Bolsheviks in gender perspective. It is focused on the peculiar style of Aleksandra Kollontai's legal language. Since Catherine the Great, women did not legislate in Russia, hence it seems likely that an extraordinary legislator could probably search for extraordinary means of writing. In "How to make Marina Raskova out of Gaidina the peasant girl, or on the theory and practice of raising Soviet patriots," Olga Nikonova discusses the place of women in Soviet patriotic discourse, the role of the "[female] defenders of the socialist Fatherland," on the theory and practice of transforming ideas about gender in the USSR as influenced by the expectation of war. These questions are examined, on the one hand, in the context of general European socio-political processes characteristic of the inter-war period, and on the other hand, at the intersection of union-wide and provincial "standards."

 

READINGS

In an article from Olga Matich (University of California, Berkeley), "Towards a history of the cloud: Vasilii Kandinsky, Andrei Bely et al.," clouds are analysed as "one of the sources of abstract language" and as a source of metaphor and meta­morphosis. Matich sketches out the history of the cloud in culture (with a view to esoteric literature like the "Thought-forms" of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater), paying special attention to the work of Kandinsky and Bely (though not to the exclusion of others) and reaches the at first glance paradoxical conclu­sion: "communication of visual resemblance is more successful through language than painting."

 

CULTURE BORN OF SUBCULTURE

In "The generic nature and genesis of Russian lgbt-literature. The 'Sappho note'," Aleksandra Ranneva (Moscow) investigates the little-studied phenomenon of Russian-language lesbian and gay literature. At present there are virtually no generalized studies of lgbt-literature in Russian. The primary reason for this is its position between disciplines: it is impossible to discuss this subject at the proper level of understanding without going outside the bounds of philology. Further­more, the concept of gender — a key concept for many other humanities disciplines and one of foundational importance for the topic under discussion — has yet to be adapted to the needs of literary studies. In the context of the interdisciplinary approach, drawing in the tools both of literary criticism and cultural studies, Ranneva examines the generic features and development of lgbt-literature in Rus­sia, paying special attention to lesbian poetry of the last two decades.

 

BRODSKY AFTER "BRODSKY"

This section has been assembled at the intersection of genres and constitutes an attempt at a synthesis of the collected (and in fact, still being collected) knowledge about Brodsky using the analytical process of a close reading of his poetry. In the case of Joseph Brodsky, the interpretation of texts often requires knowledge both of his historical chronicle and of "behind-the-scenes" everyday reality. This approach doesn't surprise anyone studying Pushkin or Mandelstam, but scholars of Brodsky have traditionally moved along by feel, afraid of stepping on the land­mines of half-taboo topics and personalia. One of the reasons for this lies, of course, in the position of the poet himself, who asked time and again for investigators not to explore the details of his personal life. Despite the suspension points, the diary entries in "On Brodsky's last three months in the Soviet Union," published by Tomas Venclova (Yale University, USA) — contains more than what the publisher was willing to reveal just a few years ago and more than what we ourselves were ready for just yesterday. In "Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Tarkovsky (a parallel view)," Yuri Leving (Dalhousie University, Canada) approaches the compilation of Brodsky's viewer's repertoire and palette of cinematic taste, a task that will aid in reconstructing and understanding a certain layer in his work. In his examination "Once again on the inter-linguistic sonic-semantic correspondences in the poetry of Brodsky," Fyodor Dviniatin (SPbSU) inquires into the inter-linguistic sonic and semantic correspondences in the complicated poetic fabric of Brodsky's poetry. The section ends with the article "Love is the foreword to parting. Epistle to M.K." from Valentina Polukhina (Keele University, England), on the poem "You recognize me by my handwriting..." in which Polukhina reveals an important subtext connected with the real facts of Brodsky's biography. The themes of num­bers, telephone numbers, visual associations pass through these four papers as smaller motifs; we leave the joy of recognizing the rhyming themes and inter­twining of figurative threads to the reader.