Stasis

Introduction

2025-06-19T21:56:56+00:00

Introduction

Capitalism and Degrowth: Dialectic of Opposing Fantasies

2025-06-19T19:51:00+00:00

The Entropy Law, the theoretical inspiration for the ecological movement known as degrowth, describes an irreversible transition from a state of heat to a state of cold associated with energy dispersal. However, it is not entropy that interests us here, but rather the phantasmagorical images associated with it, such as the heat death of the universe, time’s arrow, and cold decay, that could explicate the fantasies behind two opposing economic principles: capitalism and degrowth. As Slavoj Žižek suggests, fantasy is the means of escaping the unbearable Real. In this article, the capitalist compulsion to burn is posited as a response to the traumatic encounter with the Real, the imagery of cold decay, or, in its ultimate form, the heat death of the universe. The capitalist fantasy of escaping cold decay by burning fossil fuels is opposed to the degrowth fantasy of extinguishing global fire. These two opposing fantasies intertwine and reflect each other, producing the dialectic of fantasies.

Nation and Community in Relation to War: A Philosophical Investigation into the Frontier

2025-06-19T19:55:03+00:00

The language of war, especially the legal one, is state-centric. However, there are possible analytical approaches that could center around other actors and aspects of war that are otherwise overlooked and disregarded. In this article, I analyze two of such approaches: collectivity and territory. Combining these two languages of war can present a more holistic view that creates a unified front against the state-centric method of studying and understanding war. The article starts by explaining territory and its discontents, arriving at the idea of how a frontier interconnects different non-state phenomena in the most explicit way. Then, I analyze collectivity in several forms: nation, community, and no/us, a term introduced by Frédéric Neyrat based on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. These forms are ordered in their scale of representation of different subjects and non-subjects, and are based on the paradoxes at the heart of ideas, which result in the inability to include the multiplicity. I conclude with an example of no/us being used to make the language of territories and the language of collectivity cohabitate.

Phenomenology of Reflexive Nostalgia: On the Cultivation of the “Lost” and the Fan of Memory

2025-06-19T19:56:33+00:00

In Modern European culture, nostalgia is not just a literary motif or affect, but a peculiar technique of subjectivization. The popularity of nostalgia was first provided by medical discourse (at the end of the eighteenth century, nostalgy was considered a deadly disease), and then by the romantic poetics as an irresistible craving for one’s land. Considered as a fundamental mood (Grundstimmung), nostalgia acquires a special meaning in Martin Heidegger precisely as a preoccupation with philosophical questioning, proceeding from a specific situation of being “not at home everywhere,” which philosophy seeks to overcome. The article proposes to critically revise the concept of nostalgia, highlighting the main aspects of nostalgic consciousness and identifying the specifics of nostalgia’s temporal synthesis by using the concept of “memory fan," which is rooted in the expression by Walter Benjamin. Suggested phenomenological analysis makes it possible to identify a special type of reflexive nostalgia,which, consciously appealing to some specific emotional experience of the “native” and “homeland,” universalizes the nostalgic motive and at the same time claims to be an affective component of the motivation of theoretical inquiry. The research is based on the arguments of Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Jean Starobinsky, Paul Ricoeur, and Svetlana Boym. It also refers to fragments of philosophical essays by Jean Amery and Oxana Timofeeva, as well as Vladimir Nabokov's short story “Cloud, Lake, Tower”—these texts were used as phenomenological descriptions of the experience of “nostalgia in the first person” as examples of texts combining theoretical reflection with the explication of autobiographical experience. It seems that clarifying the technique of cultivating a “nostalgic subject” allows not only to distinguish between pathological and non-pathological, "true" and "imaginary" forms of nostalgia but also to outline possible ways to rethink the cult of nostalgia itself.

“The Flower- Faced Wife”: between cyborg and scapegoat

2025-06-19T19:57:41+00:00

The article problematizes the figure of the excluded as a category circulating within the social mechanism and determining the balance of power between the participants of communication. As a case study we use a story from the Welsh epic Mabinogion, in which Llew Llaw Gifs, doomed to celibacy, gets magician Gwydion to make a girl out of flowers—Blodewed—to be his wife. According to the story, Blodewed (Welsh for “flower face”), proves to be an unfaithful and treacherous wife and attempts to kill Llew, after which she is turned into an owl by Gwydion as punishment. In the article, Flowerface functions as a conceptual figure at the intersection of such disciplinary fields as political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, bioethics, and feminist thought. Its history correlates equally with notions of the “machine” that revolts against its creators—the cyborg (that is, an instrument that ceases to be a means but claims the status of an end in itself), René Girard's notion of texts of persecution, and the notion of the excluded, which we take from political philosophy. The authors show the possibilities and limitations of a variety of approaches, of which the Cyborgian and Girardian approaches are chosen as key, in revising and reinterpreting texts that hide behind the mask of the beast of victims. It is argued that Girard has an implicit metaphysics that works not only to detect scapegoats, but prepares the ground through the opposition of the differentiated/indistinguishable for such sacrifice. It is also argued that “anti-historicism.” As a work of new dialectics and political economy, Donna Haraway's Cyborgian abandons the pair of distinguishable/indistinguishable, of “difference”—in favor of contradictions. But at the same time, the text itself turns out to be a pure manifesto that has limited political effects; this is exemplified in the reception of the cyborgian as a “metaphor.”

The Idea of Unlikeness: Kant and Malabou

2025-06-19T19:58:40+00:00

This article examines a relatively recent term in philosophy: the clitoris. In Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris and Thought (2020), French philosopher Catherine Malabou positions this organ as a philosophical concept. The book’s central argument is that the clitoris has been “erased” from the history of philosophy and must be reclaimed, otherwise we risk perpetuating a form of philosophical “clitoridectomy.” This article aims to reinterpret the clitoris as a conceptual metaphor crucial to feminist thought. To explore its epistemic potential, I draw on Kant’s and Hegel’s notions of the minor and the Other, analyze feminist theorist Carla Lonzi’s writings on the clitoris as a site of women’s liberation and her critique of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, and examine the clitoris as an excluded element in Freudian psychoanalysis. The article highlights key points of dialogue between twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers—Carla Lonzi, Oxana Timofeeva, and Catherine Malabou—and the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. By introducing this discussion to the Russian-language academic sphere, the paper interrogates contemporary definitions of the “feminine” and explores how the epistemology of the clitoris might integrate into broader philosophical and social science research.

The Contradiction between the American Women’s Movement and Psychoanalysis

2025-06-19T20:06:39+00:00

The article examines the theoretical premises that shaped the history of tensions between psychoanalytic theory and the women’s rights movement. It argues that the roots of this conflict lie in a distinctly American way of conceptualizing sexual difference as consisting of two relatively independent layers: biological and social. The article traces the genealogy of this conceptualization of sexual difference, from sexology and sociology up to contemporary new materialism. The abstraction of sex and gender as separate entities, while sensible at certain points, creates—as the article demonstrates—conceptual difficulties that Judith Butler and their followers within the materialist turn have attempted to resolve. The article presents arguments from opponents of this conceptual distinction, drawing on phenomenology (e.g., Moira Gatens reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and existentialism (e.g., Toril Moi reading Simone de Beauvoir). It further contends that psychoanalysis offers an alternative way of thinking about sexual difference in its lived concreteness. However, the mismatch in foundational assumptions have prevented the American feminist movement from recognizing this aspect of psychoanalysis, leading to vehement critiques that—as the article shows—often miss their mark.

Stasis

Introduction

Capitalism and Degrowth: Dialectic of Opposing Fantasies

Nation and Community in Relation to War: A Philosophical Investigation into the Frontier

Phenomenology of Reflexive Nostalgia: On the Cultivation of the “Lost” and the Fan of Memory

“The Flower-­ Faced Wife”: between cyborg and scapegoat

The Idea of Unlikeness: Kant and Malabou

The Contradiction between the American Women’s Movement and Psychoanalysis

“The Flower- Faced Wife”: between cyborg and scapegoat