Authors

Sergei Akopov¹;  ¹ Freie Universität, SCRIPTS, Germany

Discussion

Engaging with the Althusserian approach to superstructures such as culture and ideology, my paper explains how the Russian militarised sovereigntism is mediated through vertical, masculine, and imperial codes of the “politics of loneliness.” The novelty of my approach consists of enriching the feminist ontological security theory literature with insights from Russian existentialist philosophy. Specifically, this paper finds a passage to introduce concepts of “loneliness” by opening the space of debates already existing in contemporary ontological security studies (OSS). By doing so, I also aspire to contribute to a narrower discussion between the OSS and existentialism and specifically use the loneliness concept to address and untangle the emerging discussion of “normal” and “existential” anxiety in social and international relations theory. Connecting loneliness studies and research on ontological anxiety requires building a theoretical overpass. I open the haptic space for such a traverse by pointing to an overlooked metaphor in the description of anxiety by OSS scholars. This allows me to theorise a new conceptual metaphor for “the ocean of anxiety.” I then rely on cognitive science's representational theory of the mind to merge “oceanic anxiety” with the concept of “loneliness.” These mutually supportive concepts, I claim, can be amalgamated into “the oceanic tidepools of loneliness” that mediate contemporary ideological “superstructures”. I will then discuss the existing differentiation between “Self” and “identity” in OSS and link the former to “the tidepools” of loneliness anxiety and the latter to the transformative potential of the Self for building “smooth” and non-striated (Deleuze and Guattari) spaces of solitude. I draw conceptual apparatus for theorizing from the silenced within OSS intellectual heritage of Russian personalism. I firstly explore the metaphor of the ocean in the ontology of “existence as being and becoming” by Semyon Frank and relate it to contemporary debates on the nature of the self between the “Lacanian” and existential “schools” of OSS. I then draw on Nikolai Berdyaev’s models of overcoming loneliness and show their relevance to the “tidepools” of national, civilizational, and transnational political imaginaries. Finally, I illustrate the “tidepools of loneliness” theory with three examples from contemporary politics, art and music. Firstly, I discuss “cartographic anxieties” of Russia’s geopolitical loneliness and Alexander Dugin’s neo-Schmittian juxtaposition of “land” vs “sea.” Secondly, I consider Russian anti-war contemporary art from Marat Gelman’s residence in exile project. Thirdly, I look at the We-Exist” transnational music project and Berlin in exile musical group AloeVera and their song “The News” about the war in Ukraine. I show how the two latter projects can be revealed through self-narratives of transformative “lagunes of solitude” amongst the anti-war Russians in exile after February 22, 2024.