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Russian Culture 2012: A Battlefield

January 15th, 2013

Today Russia lives through a very unique and difficult moment, when almost the entire society actively transforms and turns into opposition to the autocratic state power. This situation seems to completely transfigure Russian cultural and intellectual milieu, not only politically, but also scientifically: methodological preferences and paradigms in human sciences, cultural studies, philosophy are changing. There is a huge demand and a mutual search for a dialog between traditional humanitarian progressive liberal intelligentsia and the younger generation of radical left, intellectuals and artists. This dialog tends to oppose the dimension of critical knowledge and analysis not only to a blind violence of the state, but also to its growing religious ideology. This lecture aims to track possible turns and dispositions and to expose all the difficulties of such a dialog.

Oxana Timofeeva was born in Siberia in 1978. She currently works in Moscow as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), she is editor of the Theory section of the “New Literary Observer” magazine, a member of the group and critical internet platform “Chtodelat”, author of the books “Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille” (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009 – in Russian) and “History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom” (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012 – in English). In 2010-2011 she was a researcher at the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Holland, an international post-academic institution. From May 2013 she is awarded a Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for experienced researchers (Humboldt University of Berlin).