Bulletin Philosophy and Society 2022-4

The fourth and the last issue in 2022 of the journal Philosophy and Society (Philosophy and Society 2022-33/4) brings us two thematic sections: The Violence of War, Global Ethics and Politics of Care: Tracing Gendered Vulnerabilities. Additionally, this issue also contains original scientific papers about the “Monster Dilemma”, structural criticism, political and world-historical courage in Hegel’s philosophy, historicism and architecture, paradigm of victimhood, and Eurocommunism from the Yugoslav perspective.

The first thematic section titled The Violence of War includes papers which are dealing in a peculiar way, with the theme of war, violence and war from the perspectives of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literary and film theory.

In his article, “Punished Death,” Igor Smirnov interprets violence as a struggle against death. From one side, man cultivates nature, thus creating his own universe of socioculture. But, there is no substitution for death. According to the author of this paper, through violence, man fights with death as the Other, that constantly threatens us.

In discussing Plato’s understanding of man’s relationship to death in the dialogue “Phaedo” and its influence on Christian theology, Alexander Brodsky discusses in his paper “The Last Enemy. On Some Receptions of Plato’s “Phaedo” in 18th-20thCentury Philosophy and Literature” the problem of the relationship to death on three levels: the metaphysical, the phenomenological, and the syntactic. Through three levels of analysis, the author of this paper indicates their interdependence: the “syntax of fate” determines the phenomenology of death, and the phenomenology of death determines the metaphysics of Eternity.

In his article “Kant’s Substantiation of Liberalism as a Social Theory: War, Law, Morality,” Oleg Nogovitsin starts from the theoretical basis that the Kantian metaphysics of morality, law, religion, aesthetic conditions and sensibility represents one of the first historical forms of a comprehensive social theory. In his analysis, the author starts from the interpretation of Kant's understanding of war and the enemy as the background of all forms of practice, which according to Kant have a transcendental basis.

According to the author of the paper “What Prevents Our Utterance on Current Events... (in One, Two, Three Steps),” Oleg Nikiforov, explosive changes in the historical, conceptual and existential context make it impossible for the subject to express their own attitude towards current events, i.e. the “post-modern” “war” as a “subversive event”. At the moment of finding a new existential-historical context, it will be possible to formulate a “clear” subjective position. In that sense, the author examines the complexity of the above mentioned situation, which makes it difficult to make a statement, as well as the way in which it changes the conceptual grid of the one making the statement and his existential-historical context.

The analysis of the explication of the positive epistemology of the victim of war in the article “History Is Written by the Undefeated, or Once Again about the Partisan” by Igor Chubarov is based on the works of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. By reconsidering the deconstruction of the figure of the victor in the work of Petar Bojanić, the author of this study gives his own definition of the figure of the partisan through the critique of Carl Schmitt, the ethical theory of just war, and the left-liberal critique of unmanned military technology.

“Ethical Aspects of Military Leadership in Modern Warfare (Memoirs of the Commanders-in-Chief in Afghanistan and Chechnya)” by Andrey Menshikov reexamines through an anthropological approach the ethos of commanders in modern warfare: moral experiences and dilemmas of individuals and their value system. The research is based on the personal confession of generals, who commanded troops  in Afghanistan (B. Gromov) and in Chechnya (G. Troshev). It shows that military operations are inextricably linked with political aims. It follows that commanders must evaluate the justification of those political goals.

What is the world of the twentieth century, seen from the point of view of violence? What are the possible practices of non-violence, as an alternative to repression, war and violence? These questions are raised by Ksenia Golubovich in her text “In the End... Wanderlust.” The central topic of this text is the analysis of the concept of "violence" as a potential key term of the 20th century, through the analysis of the works of Svetlana Alexievich and Leo Tolstoy, René Girard, Merab Mamardashvili, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx and Alain Badiou.

In “Conscience in Gaslight,” Georgy Chernavin provides a hyper-cartesian strategy in ethics, considering the question: How is ethical self-consciousness possible when you cannot be certain whether your conscience is talking or an unauthentic semblance of conscience? In that sense, the main topic of the paper is the consideration of the problem of ethical gaslighting.

 Vasilisa Šljivar in her article “The dead body of/in the poetry of Gennady Gor’s Poetry” studies the phenomenon of the corporeal in the poems of Grennady Gore. This phenomenon, the author points out, is the main instrument in grasping the absurd, extremely dehumanized, apocalyptic anti-world. The desintegration as well as the transformation of the dead body are discussed through the prism of the topic of death and violence.

Kornelija Ichin’s article “Poetry against Violence: Sergey Zavyalov’s Poems,” argues that the story of the victim becomes the main document of the tragedy of human existence at the time of the collapse of humanism. The author analyzes Sergey Zavyalov's cycle of poems “Christmas Lent” as a polyphonic text, and discusses whether poetry is possible after Auschwitz.

The last text in this thematic section, entitled “Politics and Perversion (Pier Paolo Pasolini’s De Sade Today)” by Oleg Aronson, seeks an answer to the phenomenon of reanimation of fascism in contemporary society through the analysis of the film “Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom” by Pier Paolo Pasolini. According to the author of the paper, this film consistently contradicts the key principles of cinematic expressiveness of Pasolini's theory itself, in which “reality” reveals itself (acting as life itself).

The second thematic section in this volume is Global Ethics and Politics of Care: Tracing Gendered Vulnerabilities. This thematic issue brings reflections on the concept of care in modern society, its connection with current problems, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, but also its historical importance as part of public discourse in past times.

 Ljiljana Pantović and Zona Zarić in their paper “Care in the Anthropocene: Acting with Compassion” point out the importance of researching the concept of care, and show us that the period we are currently living in is characterized by a lack of compassion and understanding of our environment. Through a philosophical and anthropological perspective, the authors approach the analysis of care in the Anthropocene as well as its connection with the notions of vulnerability and compassion.

In the article entitled “Institutional Ethics of Care in Serbia during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study on the Effects of the Lockdown Measures on Girls and Women Trafficking Survivors,” the authors Jelena Ćeriman, Jelena Hrnjak and Andrijana Radoičić examine the institutional ethics of care during the Covid-19 pandemic in Serbia through the analysis of the adequacy of lockdown measures and their effects on girls and women trafficking survivors. The research data collected through interviews show that the basic elements of institutional care were not fulfilled during the pandemic in Serbia, as well as that the logic of institutional care has had a politicizing character.

In her text “The Ethics of Care in the Late Antique Christian Discourse: (Trans)historical Perspectives on the Social, Political and Philosophical Value of Care,” Larisa Orlov Vilimonović studies the historical context of the ethics of care in early Christian discourse. As a case study for the ethics of care serve Emperor Justinian’s laws in the Byzantine Empire, which proclaimed social justice. It shows that ethics of care was part of political ideology and public discourse in the Roman world.

The last paper in this thematic section entitled “Ethics and Politics of Care in Times of Crisis” is based on a round-table discussion which was held in June 2021 and organized by the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade: Sarah Clark Miller, Estelle Ferrarese, Guillaume Le Blanc, Fiona Robinson, Marko Konjović and Zona Zarić. The text discusses some of the basic problems which arose during the Covid-19 pandemic within the framework of the ethics of care.

 Petar Bojanić in his study “‘Unjust Enemy’ or ‘Monster Dilemma’ Revisited. On the Conditions and the Paradox of a Theological Fiction” points out the substantive incompleteness and weakness of the term “enemy”, as well as the impossibility of symmetric use of force through the classification of various forms of hostility protocols. Accordingly, the text reconstructs the “figure” within public and international law and, at the same time, the theologized construction of an evil-doer who must be destroyed in the conflict or war.

In the paper “Return to Structural Criticism: Is the Synthesis of Criticism and Crisis Possible again in ‘Late’ Capitalism?,” the authors Alpar Losonc, Pavle Milenković and Mark Losonc examine the renewal of the discourse on criticism/crisis and its effects, with a special consideration on the possibilities of structural criticism. In the work, they take into consideration several authors of recent analyses, as well as the viewpoints that lead to a reconsideration of the historical and analytical dynamics of the categories of structure and conjuncture, as a form of analysis of current structural processes in terms of structural analysis and criticism.

The topic of the article “Political and World-historical Courage in Hegel’s Philosophy” by Djordje Hristov is the developing of the differentiation between two types of courage in Hegel’s philosophy: political and world-historical. Through the analysis of these two types of courage, the author highlights the limitations of the first concept, that is, the concept of political courage represented in Hegel’s political philosophy.

 Milica Madjanović’s article, “‘Building for the Age’ According to the Principles of Holism, Individuality, and Development: Historicism and Architecture,” contributes to the theoretical framework for the analysis of architectural historicism. Accordingly, it is shown that the historicist outlook marked wider creative achievements of an epoch and that the architecture of the period from the 1750s to the 1950s did not evade its influence.

The article “Forfeiting the Paradigm of Victimhood” by Aleksandar Fatić and Behzad Hadžić presents a philosophical metadiscussion of the current culture in psychiatry and psychotherapy that focuses on trauma as the source and predominant determinant of a large number of psychiatric complaints. The authors propose different approaches to psychiatric and psychotherapeutic interventions, which are not lead by the idolatry of trauma, that is, the use of trauma as a universal alibi and explanation for psychological dysfunction and the suffering connected with that. Such approaches could reduce the clinical occurrence of traumatization as a syndrome, in cases of negative life experiences that do not threaten the psychological existence in a radical or extreme way.

The last scientific article in this issue is the article written by Milivoj Bešlin, Petar Žarković and Srđan Milošević entitled “The Third Road Policy: Eurocommunism and Its Yugoslav Assessment,” which is focused on the analysis of the Soviet Communist (Bolshevik) Party’s domination in the Communist commonwealth. The authors state that the movement and the idea of ​​Eurocommunism, although belated and a purely ideological concept, has remained an important testimony of an attempt to find new paths in the fight for a more just society.