Local
Global
Cloud
This conversation with Boris Groys reconsiders the work of philosopher Alexandre Kojeve and the place of Russia in world history
The "end of history" in 1991 was, in many ways, a Russian affair. Seemingly overnight, Russia was transformed from "the most progressive society on earth" into the defeated arch-nemesis of the free world, thus ushering in a new era of post-history—quite an accomplishment for a country that supposedly entered "world history" only in the eighteenth century. Of course, Fukuyama's cosmic, geopolitical vision was hardly the first time that Russia has been cast in such a grandiose role. Since Peter the Great's heavy-handed transformation of "medieval" Rus' into a Western-styled Empire, Russia has presented a tempting playground for theorizing and applying European conceptions of history, enlightenment and progress.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals, influenced by German Idealist philosophy of history, fought over the place of the "Russian Idea" in the civilizational economy of the world. In the twentieth century, generations of European thinkers struggled to understand the meaning of the Soviet experiment. Finally, in our ostensibly post-historical twenty-first century, the experience of post-socialist Russia continues to pose meaningful questions for the ideologues of the Western political, economic and social establishment, as well as for those who wish to resist their hegemony.
This event, and "Russia, in theory," the larger conference of which it is a part, aims to examine and complicate the idea of "Russia" and its role in both local and global philosophical discourse. What place does Russia hold in the imaginations of Western philosophers, from Hegel and Marx to Žižek and Badiou, and how did it come to do so? What meaning does standing with or apart from the West hold among ideologues of the so-called "Russian Idea," from Gogol to Limonov? What does Russian philosophy, art and political practice, from Chaadaev to Podoroga, from Karamzin to Pussy Riot, from Catherine to Lenin, to Surkov— have to contribute to our understanding of the past, the present and the future states of world history and its discontents?
Boris Groys is a key contemporary German thinker and writer who lived in Russia until the early 1980s. Groys has taught at universities around the world, including the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe ("Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design") in southwest Germany near the Franco-German border. Groys' work first focused on Russian avant-garde artists as well as the different successive artistic movements of the twentieth century. Groys eventually broadened his reflection, on contemporary art, analyzing the legitimacy of works in public spaces and analysis of new media. Groys' work maintains a constant dialogue with texts of several contemporary, modern, and post-modern philosophers such as the French thinker, father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the French sociologist and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and the German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).