Authors

Egor Sokolov¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

In this paper, I look into Alexey Losev’s strategies, both theoretical and political, of using Marxism to navigate Soviet academia and defend his research stances. Losev is one of the most curious figures in the Soviet philosophical landscape. His philosophical career spanned the whole ‘short 20th century’ from the mid-1910s when he graduated from Moscow University and started writing articles, to his death in the late 1980s when he attained the status of an undisputable philosophical authority. His already exceptional intellectual biography was apparently substantially mythologised by his disciples and followers. In particular, the members of Losev’s circle and scholars close to it share one important premise: Losev only used Marxist terminology, but never Marxist methods as he was ‘the last philosopher of the Silver Age’ who managed to carefully preserve the traditions of ‘Russian religious-philosophical Renaissance’ and pass them down to new Russian philosophical generations.

I would like to put Losev back into Soviet philosophical context by discussing how he used Marxist rhetorics, concepts and method. In my analysis, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger’ which offers a method of ‘double reading’ to approach philosophical texts. It is based on double refusal – of ‘reductionism’, a straightforward reduction of the author’s philosophical thought to his class position (‘Neither Marx…’), and of the assumption that such thought is autonomous and is related only to a certain intellectual tradition and not to its social context (‘…nor Hegel’).

I will examine Losev’s book ‘Aesthetics of the Renaissance’ (1978) to describe his three strategies of using Marxism. Firstly, he used it in a complex intellectual game in which Marxist rhetorics, often reduced to absurdity (stiob), simultaneously had to be taken seriously as it was aimed at preventing ‘ideological’ critique from Soviet historians of the Renaissance. Secondly, he used, developed, and transformed Marxist concepts as well as implemented them in his critique of Modern subjectivity which combined features of Russian religious philosophy and Communist doctrine. Thirdly, Losev engaged with materialistic dialectics to develop his original conception of the Renaissance culture.

Thus, Losev’s example clearly demonstrates that the attitude of late-Soviet intellectuals towards Marxism was by no means reduced to ‘the resistance of the week’ (use of Aesopian language, ritual quotation, etc.). A closer analysis reveals different strategies even within a single text. It shows that there was no single authoritative discourse, but rather a space of complex and creative attempts to use and reconfigure the official Marxism.