Whether Ideal Can Be Material: On Soviet Marxist Thought - Dr Keti Chukhrov

Lecture abstract:

The ideal is traditionally regarded as the metaphysical category that eludes reality and resides in the realm of spirituality and sublimity. Its role, therefore, in continental philosophy, politics and culture was considered after the World War II mainly in the context of the history of philosophy. Since Althusser the ideal was dismissed as the category that stands for ideology, power and hegemony over immanence of life and cannot be applied for emancipatory practice, political agency, materiality of being, or even thinking procedures. Yet in the Socialist philosophy, in the Soviet Marxist thought particularly, the concept of the ideal acquired completely converse function. The ideal became the practical operator counter to vulgar materialism and positivism to define the social dimension of reality, of matter, of activity, - in short to unravel the validity of the generic and common within finite material phenomena. The lecture will try to question to what extent the eviction of private property and the political economy of use value could have influenced such insistent application of the ideal in the theory and practice of historical socialism.

About the speaker:

Currently a Marie S. Currie Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton, Keti Chukhrov is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Theory, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow (2012-2017) and Head of the theory department at National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow. She has authored numerous texts on art theory, cultural politics, and philosophy, published in Afterall, Moscow Art Magazine, Artforum, Brumaria, Documenta magazines, e-flux journal, Voprosi Philosophii, Problemi, Stasis, etc. Her book-length publications include: To Be – To Perform: ‘Theatre’ in Philosophical Criticism of Art (2011); Pound & £ (1999), and a volume of dramatic writing: Just Humans (2010). With her video-play “Love-machines” she participated at the Bergen Assembly and “Specters of Communism” (James Gallery, CUNY, NY, 2015). Her Latest video-play “Communion” was at the Ljubljana Triennial U-3 “Beyond the Globe (2016, cur. B. Groys). She is currently finishing a book on the interpretation of the notion of “the ideal” in the Soviet Marxist philosophy of 1960-s and 1970-s.