Authors

Discussion

This paper represents a part of a larger project entitled “Writing and Thinking at the Margins: A Philosophical Strategy to Resist Totalitarianism in Post-War Eastern Europe”. The overall aim of the project is to examine how non-dissident philosophers living and working in the post-war Communist bloc engaged in an opposition of thought and developed a notion of resistance that was not primarily political or dissident, but instead sought to escape the restraints of totalizing thinking. In this talk, I focus in particular on the Georgian Russian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili's lectures from the 1970:s and 1980:s on what he called The Aesthetics of Thought and especially on the lectures on Proust, entitled A Psychological Topology of the Soul. The purpose is to show how Mamardashvili with important impulses from phenomenology and existentialism treats literature as philosophy for the way that it opens a different perspective on the experience of thinking. In the lectures on Proust, he examines a notion of engagement in philosophy and literature, which, entirely different from Sartre’s idea of littérature engagée, means truthfulness to the living experience of the world as if from the moment of experiencing it. And with images from Proust and Dante, he draws for us a map of inner experience as an in-between in the topology of thinking. Thus, I argue, Mamardashvili sketches images of resistance through thinking with literature, as a resistance of thought that is informed by his personal experience of totalitarianism, and points towards means of escaping totalising tendencies in philosophy.