Format: Hybrid
Language: Russian, English
Moderators: Mikhail Kurenkov (St. Petersburg Institute of History RAS research fellow), Ivan Naumov (EUSP PhD student), Mark Belov (EUSP alumni), Nikita Borkunov (Institute of World History RAS research fellow, MSSES lecturer)

«The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born» — this is how the Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci (1971) defined the interregnum or, in Slavoj Žižek’s (2010) interpretation, the «time of monsters» — a liminal condition characterized by the loss of all collective bearings and stable theoretical coordinates, an era of universal anxiety and disillusionment, where familiar political ideas and practices no longer work, and new ones have yet to be formulated and implemented. In such a situation, the very foundations of human collectivity are under threat, and, as Gramsci (1971) put it, «the most morbid symptoms» manifest themselves. This is why, in the current state of multiple and diverse crises, the need to search for alternatives is more urgent than ever, the conversation about the origins of our shared life is revitalized, and the necessity of taking stock of existing political canons, vocabularies, and languages becomes pressing. At the same time, widespread theoretical and practical attempts to debunk the notorious and dominant idea of the «end of history» in recent decades have not led to the formulation of fundamentally new models and concepts for the future. On the contrary, they have only brought to the forefront a multitude of diverse images of the past. References either to a semi-mythical and artificially constructed «golden age» or to restore «normality» and the seemingly endless present of not so long ago, have become obsolete. Should we not, continuing Gramsci’s metaphor of birth, engage in maieutics — the midwifery of thought and collective intellectual work to find new ways out of the current impasses?

The problem of the «new» is one of the most important for contemporary political theory, encompassing several key themes — action, social imagination, freedom, and the collective subject that embodies them. The «new beginning» is one of the central concepts in the political-theoretical vocabulary of Hannah Arendt (2006),, denoting both the birth and unique deeds of each individual and the founding of entire political collectivities, republics, with their inherent multiplicity of human perspectives reflected in memory and tradition. Yet this fundamental significance of the «new» also gives rise to numerous complex dilemmas, both within Arendt’s own arguments and those of her followers, as well as for political theory in general.

How can the spirit of a new beginning be preserved in an already established republic? How can a balance be maintained between the constant re-foundation of the political community and the maintenance of a stable common world? Is violence a necessary condition for the (re)foundation of such an order? Where can we find the experience of truly unique action, rather than a return to already tried-and-tested scenarios?

Equally serious is the interest in the origins of the opposite style of thinking, the political ideas and premises whose triumph has resulted in a state of universal depoliticization, nostalgia, ironic skepticism, and detachment from collective participation. Such disciplinarily and even ontologically diverse but popular argumentative moves as the appeal to the katechon (that which delays the apocalyptic event), the modernization-driven inevitability of liberal-democratic order, or the rhetoric of «common sense» prevalent in conservative thought, seem to represent a common line of critique against political innovation. These arguments emphasize the risks, dangers, and futility of any truly new experience — while also posing an extremely valuable theoretical challenge that demands either justified affirmation or equally robust critique.

Is it possible that only the world of regular politics, established hierarchies, and familiar rules of ancien régime is what protects us from extraordinary chaos and the triumph of the exceptional, or is it precisely the hidden source of these phenomena? Can classical ideas still respond to new challenges, or are they merely a temporary and, moreover, irreversibly outdated solution? Should we hold on to proven intellectual alliances and canonical names, or are they precisely what we should discard without regret?

Our section aims to initiate a conversation both about new ways of thinking and articulating the political and about the problem of the New within the political itself — the reactivation of utopian imagination, practices of extraordinary politics, forms of constituent power, innovations in political language, and everything that enters into lively opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s well-known and almost axiomatic phrase: «There is no alternative»