That is probably the reason for the results of the recent elections in Georgia, with the pro-Kremlin oligarch taking over the former president’s team and the neoliberal technocrats defining their political program as pro-Western democratic modernization.
Boris Buden, Zone des Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (Zones of Transition: On the End of Post-communism), (Zuhrkamp, 2009).
Such epistemological incompatibility marks the gaps not only between historical socialism or Western democracy and Western left theory. It is also the kind of epistemological rupture that exists between Hegel and Deleuze, Badiou and Virno, Marx and Heidegger.
P. Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 169–189.
Evald Ilyenkov, Soviet-Russian philosopher (1924-1979). He used Marxist theory to develop materialist interpretations of Hegel. See English translations at →. Among his works are “Dialectics of the Ideal” (ca. 1960), Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete (1960), and The Universal (1974).
E. Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” in Philosophy and Culture (Moscow: Political Literature, 1991), 229–270, 262–267.
In the English translation, this notion of “vseobshee” (or, in German, “Allgemein”) is translated as “the Universal.” However, “the genera” or sometimes “the common” would fit the Russian notion of “vseobshee” (as well as Hegel’s “Allgemein”) better.
The difference with Virno here is that Virno, while locating the common in the sphere of neurophysiology and reflexes (as the pre-linguistic and pre-rational category) interprets it in favor of pre-rational, pre-cultural physiological and instinctual contingency, while for Ilyenkov the pre-linguistic realm can be symbolic and ideal.
Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev, Soviet psychologist (1903–1979), disciple of A. Luria and L. Vygotsky. Author of the books On the Consciousness of the Learning (1947), Intellectual Development of a Child (1950), Activity, Consciousness, Person (1977), and Will (1978). Alexander Ivanovich Mesheriakov, Soviet psychologist (1923–1974), disciple of A. Luria and I. Sokoliansky. In 1960 he founded a laboratory for the research of teaching methods for the deaf, blind, and mute children at the Institute of Defectology in the Academy of Sciences, and in 1963 opened a school for deaf, blind, and mute children in Zagorsk. He is the author of The Image in the Psychics of a Blind and Deaf Child (1960), Psychic Development in the Conditions of Sensor Defects(1965), and The Dimension of Probability in the Signal Perception of the Deaf and Blind Children (1970).
E. Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” 263.
Ibid., 250–251. Ilyenkov claims that even such Hegelian modes of the ideal as the form of thinking, or the syntactic form, or Marx’s form of cost in the economy didn’t appear or develop dependent on the individual consciousness and psychics, but were molded in the objective outer world, although with the participation of human consciousness. Like present day speculative realists, Ilyenkov insists that there is a material world as it exists, independent from its mediated correlation with the social and cultural forms of the experience. But if for speculative realists such assertion means that all other elements—human, cultural, social—should be separated from the contingent immanence of the matter, Ilyenkov thinks that the material independence of the world is dialectically intertwined with the socially organized world of human culture.
E. Ilyenkov, “On the General,” Philosophy and Culture (Moscow: Political Literature, 1991), 320–339.
This is the stance that Deleuze would never accept, because he would reject the molar definition of any activity and would not agree with superimposing any notion or term over the process of production. He would also never define any creative production as labor.
E. Ilyenkov, “On the Materialist Understanding of Thought as of a Subject of Logic,” in Philosophy and Culture (Moscow: Political Literature, 1991), 223.
Paolo Virno, when juxtaposing the notions of the general and the universal, says that the general for him means contingent concatenation and sharing between separated singularities. Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, “The Dismeasure of Art,” interview with Paolo Virno, Foundation Art and Public Space. See →.