In recent years, we have seen a resurgence in the practice of public branding, a process in which members of a society express moral indignation at the views or behavior of an individual or a group. This stigmatization is especially common on social media, but it can also take other forms (meetings of Academic Councils and ethics commissions, the so-called cancel culture, and so on). The splitting of the public into opposing groups, the fury of the accusations, the severe consequences of stigmatization for social status, the reputation of a person, the often revealed interest of the state and certain institutions in unleashing or using stigmatization — all this makes it an important phenomenon of modern public life. Stephenson’s article examines the practice of prorabotka, a ritual of public shaming that took place in schools, universities and workplaces in the Soviet Union. It argues that rather than being events dedicated to moral improvement and re-education of individuals by the collectives (as they were seen in the official discourse), these were repressive rituals that led to social degradation of the victims of shaming. It shows that in addition to an official script, the meetings had a supplementary script that unleashed negative moral emotions and affects but also generated guilt and fear.

For about sixty years, feminism has been in a complicated relationship with psychoanalysis. On the one hand, psychoanalysis deals with topics important to feminism, and many of its ideas could be rethought. On the other hand, the substantive contradictions between feminism and psychoanalysis hinder their productive collaboration. This article proposes that the problems faced by the project of feminist psychoanalysis arise not so much from the differences as from the similarities between these two discourses. The feminist view is based on the basic foundations of psychoanalysis. The structure of society in feminism is understood in the same fashion as the psychoanalytic unconscious. Feminist discourse aims to “capture” a symptom and offer it up for interpretation. At the same time, the interpretive apparatus of feminism differs from psychoanalytic theory for it is based on an internally coherent system of prescriptions. So long as the symptom is successfully interpreted, political involvement is something that feminism has hopes to achieve. Thus individual cases are taken as analogous to the “conscious” in psychoanalysis and the system of prescriptives the “unconscious”. In such a way a “collective” political subject can be formed. Since psychoanalysis and feminism find the causes of the symptom in different areas that do not intersect they come into conflict.
The introduction briefly describes the context of the study. The first section introduces the concepts of description and prescription and analyses feminism’s theoretical foundations. The author comes to the conclusion that the foundations of feminism could be thought of as a system of prescriptives. The second section examines the structures that feminism and psychoanalysis share and how they come into conflict. In the third section, feminism is compared with queer theory, and the differences between the two are used to bring together the idea of a collective political subject. In conclusion, the main strategies for strengthening feminist discourse are considered. Particular emphasis is given to the project of feminist epistemology. The materials used in the article are academic and journalistic articles written by feminists, blog posts and comments from discussion platforms, and a single public interview.

This article deals with the dramaturgical and musical patterns of modern Russian television biopic series about Soviet pop artists. The concept of psycho- and sociobiography as developed by the Polish researcher Eva Mazerski is used as a means of analysis. The first section describes the regularities of particular dramatic models and traces their development in late Soviet cinema. The second section examines the convergence and integration of these dramatic models on the basis of extensive material drawn from Russian TV series dedicated to Soviet pop music stars. Special attention is paid to two series: Anna Herman. The Mystery of the White Angel (2012) and Born a Star (2015) with elements from the biography of Edita Piekha. In the final part of the article the soundtrack of these two series is analysed making use of the psycho- and sociobiographical model. On one hand, one can identify how the songs played in these series correlate with the dramatic collision of the episodes in which they appear. On the other hand, one can also identify the principles behind the selection of repertoire. These can be traced, in particular, to the ratio of songs related to civil and lyrical subject matter. The article concludes that, if in the late Soviet period the models of psycho- and sociobiography still exhibited some autonomy, an autonomy inversely proportional to the ideological consistency of the film, then the current stage is determined by the active convergence and integration of two models that no longer exist in their ‘pure’ forms. As for the musical dramaturgy and selection of repertoire in the soundtrack, Soviet pop star series continue to develop an active lyricisation of the Soviet scene, replacing civil and patriotic themes with foreign hits. Nevertheless, playing Soviet pop songs serves to reconfigure the cultural and historical context of the past.

In the proposed article I will address the issue of calquing in the Russian language from a philosophical/psychoanalytical point of view and from that of algorithmization/ cybernetization of the human culture. I will touch upon the problem of interrelationship between body and language, which underlie subjectivity and transform in space and over time. I will try to highlight structural characteristics indicative of subject’s transition to another, post-anthropological quality “by means of” calquing of one’s mother tongue. Corporate culture and the consumption of popular translated literature in a simplified language and dubbed mainstream films keep diminishing expectations from an individual in relation to his mother tongue and, hence, to one’s personality as such, while making the latter giving up on “baroque extravagances” and shifting one’s symbolic reference points from within the philology of one’s mother tongue and canonical cultural texts to a utopian “arithmetic mean” of sense-production which eliminates the idiosyncratic space of language as that which opposes translation and comprises the core of culture. On the one hand, language turns into a rudiment, a dead load, while on the other hand — into an instrument of an alienated labor of information exchange, while representing a fundamental cultural phenomenon the problematics and meaning of which I will debate here. In an attempt of exposing the symptoms of subject-calque having lost organic touch with the mother tongue and the living speech, I will turn to Jacques Lacan’s comments on the phenomenon of delusion, as well as to Boris Groys’ thoughts regarding the linguistic pathologies emerging as a result of contemporary subject’s dealing with the search engine Google.

The main patron and actor in the politics of memorials is the state. It is the state that takes care of compiling a standard list of significant historical events and significant historical figures.
In this regard, the following questions arise. How did the set of historical events that were to be perpetuated and propagandised look in Soviet and post-Soviet times? How and by what criteria was the selection of historical personalities and events made? What features of state policy put the emphasis on these images? How did this memorial policy express the attitude of the authorities to the role of individual and collective in history? How did they reflect the gender element? Finally, what influence did the attitude of the authorities to religion have on the process of memorialisation?
Vivid examples of the official policy of memory are the gazebo in Neskuchny Gardens, which was erected in 1951 in honour of the 800th anniversary of Moscow, and the design of Borovitsky Square with the adjacent Alexander Gardens, which appeared already in the 2010s. What are the similarities and differences between these two examples of memorial policy? It is shown that they share an emphasis on solving political problems with the help of the armed forces (war or revolution), a pronounced masculinity and emphasis on great military victories. This, of course, indicates the government’s positive attitude to war, the military, and the militarisation of history. These monuments are distinguished by their respective attitudes toward history, religion, revolution, war and the role of the masses in history as well as how exactly this characterises the politics of these two different states. These examples serve to explicate Soviet and post-Soviet memorial cultures. Emphasis is placed on the archaisation of thinking and public discourse characteristic of the post-Soviet period.

This review is devoted to several events that took place in the field of the study of the materiality of reading at the round table of the Higher School of Social Research (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), held at the Alcazar Library in Marseille. The organisers of the round table designated its topic as “Reading Time” (Le temps de la lecture). The second element of the review was the recent publication of a book by André Frejomil “Art of the Poacher: a Material history of reading according to Michel de Certeau” (Arts de braconner: une histoire matérielle de la lecture chez Michel de Certeau). The material history of reading, an activity rather perceived as immaterial, comes methodologically from analysis of Michel Foucault’s discourse. As such it is sensitive not only to the materiality of the signs placed on the page, but also to the context of the publication that determines the meaning of what is being read (and not only written and “programmed” by the author). It restores the rights of the material bearers of texts and considers them, along with the techniques of the body-at-reading, as factors involved in the deployment of procedures of comprehension. The material history of reading allows us to see our object as an empirical, social and historically contextualised practice involved in certain communities — not only “interpretative” communities but also in those that could be called “motor”.