Literary and Philosophy

The text reveals the reckless human attempt to skip the a posteriori – a priori gate and on the side of the finiteness and immediacy of the occasional existence, to deny the infinity of the divine being. Two remarkable authors ‒ Friedrich Nietzsche and Emiliyan Stanev ‒ take this road and frustrate in their efforts to establish the moral rightfulness of the antichrist, including via loading themselves with this ungrateful existential role.

The radicalisation of Kant’s critical philosophy by the Jena Romanticism and, above all, by Novalis, is decisive for the understanding of the modern relationship between philosophy and poetry (i.e. literature or, more generally, art), which is both a relationship of continuity and rupture: such is the starting hypothesis of the study. The shared horizon, but also a matrix of the ambiguous relationship of philosophy and poetry, is the turn I venture to describe as a transition from ontology to ontogony. After Kant, ontology became a field of modal orientation: the world is a necessary world. The world is becoming a task. The study delves into the conceptual depth of this turn, respectively of the relation between philosophy and poetry, based on the reading of Kant’s critical philosophy proposed by Gilles Deleuze. The analysis sets itself the task of highlighting unexpected yet crucial dimensions of the complex relationship between philosophy and literature, established in modern terms only in the second half of the 18th century. The figures of “Reason” and “Madness”, expressing the immanent tension of Kant’s productive power for imagination, will occupy a central place among them.

In his study “Metaphor and Myth: Percy, Ricoeur, and Frye”, Hugh White aims to question the traditional dichotomy between the cognitive and affective dimensions of metaphor by proposing a theory of metaphor that brings these two dimensions together on an intersubjective level. Criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s theory, White draws on Walker Percy's definition of “catachrestic metaphor” in order to clarify Northrop Frye’s understanding of the ecstatic metaphor and its role in religious myth. Here is the place in advance to ask the question to what extent it is appropriate to equate the metaphor with an error (in the case of the catachrestic metaphor) and to what extent the believed absurdity in the myth can be defined as a metaphor. I propose an alternative to White's vision of metaphor, referring to Douglas Bergren's study “The Use and Abuse of Metaphor”. I will also refer critically to individual passages by Frye to show the steps taken to bring the affective and cognitive aspects of metaphor closer together in the perspective of “metaphorical construing”.

The article focuses on the battle against modernism by the Marxist theory of reflection in Eastern Europe. The term reflection was in circulation as one of the key concepts of the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and especially of Todor Pavlov’s theory of reflection, in which literature is seen as an authentic reflection of reality, it requires the correct mirror of sober realism. The confrontation between Isaac Passy and Todor Pavlov in the early 1960s demonstrates the mechanisms of subverting the ideological state. 

In the context of western utopian philosophical and literary tradition from Plato to Dostoevsky, Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987 and 1988) demonstrates not only its utopian character, but simultaneously tempts one to come with theoretical and practical dystopian objections. This essay analyzes six key utopian features of the book and their dystopian metamorphoses. First, the utopian postulate assuming all people are philosophers and, therefore, embrace perestroika’s only possible truth is an abstract philosophical concept, but not a practical possibility. Second, glasnost is the new garb of the old utopian requirement for a cataphatic language fully expressing the truth; language, however, can lie, too. Third, utopian self-criticism of Soviet dignitaries fosters incredulity and hatred in their subjects, who detest them as either weak leaders or self-serving hypocrites. Fourth, utopian belief in a future true and flourishing socialism is undermined by the paucity of real socialism. Fifth, perestroika as a utopia presupposes an idealistic temporality, which, however, contradicts perestroika’s claims to historical materialism and dialectics. Finally, following in the footsteps of utopia, which is an oxymoronic closed-open world not allowing imports of imperfection but exporting perfection, perestroika proclaims its self-sufficiency, but also lays bare its latent imperialism and militarism. Perestroika’s contradictory utopian-dystopian essence results to a great extent from the naïve quasi Marxism enjoying an unchallenged status in the USSR. Paradoxically, but also inevitably, pseudo Marxism smothers all other philosophical alternatives and thus leads not to strengthening, but collapsing of the USSR and its own philosophical and practical suicide. 
Keywords: perestroika, utopia, dystopia, philosophy, literature