Thanatopolitiсs in russia of the 1900s-1920s: legitimization through the search for social diseases and decay
https://doi.org/10.26907/2079-5912.2023.3.73-78
Abstract
Thanatopolitics is a concept that emerged in the 2010s and has been appearing more and more frequently in the scholarly literature over the past decade, but still there is no clear definitions for it. Thanatopolitics is referred to in articles on political philosophy, fiction, jurisprudence, and the media. Desire to discover universal connections between the articulation of new meanings and the legitimization of violence is what unites these works.
We propose to consider thanatopolitics as a variant of the dispositif of power, which is based on the production of knowledge about the threats immanent to life itself ("bare life").
We believe that in the 1905s and 1920s, Russia attempted to construct a dispositif of power based on the search for zones of decay of the social body. The emergence of the space of public politics and the medicalization of academic language determined the relevance of thanatopolitics in that period. The figure of the full-fledged expert hygienist became the role model of the new politician. However, with the establishment of the Soviet system, the fundamental meanings of thanatopolitical discourse began to conflict with the final values of Marxism. In the genealogy of Russian thanatopolitics we found a universal condition for this power dispositive - the impossibility/unwillingness of the final recovery of society.
About the Author
I. M. Rotov
Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Rotov Ivan Mikhailovich, postgraduate student,Institute of Social and Philosophical Sciences and Mass Communications, Department of Social Philosophy
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Review
For citations:
Rotov I.M. Thanatopolitiсs in russia of the 1900s-1920s: legitimization through the search for social diseases and decay. The Kazan Socially-Humanitarian Bulletin. 2023;(3 (60)):73-78. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.26907/2079-5912.2023.3.73-78
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