Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer
The cultural space of Russia has narrowed like shagreen leather. And a week ago, the Facebook feed turned into a continuous obituary for Yura from the country of connecting rods. Meanwhile, the Soviet pop-music spawned good industrial remixes. "Die Schwarze Katzen - Weißen Rosen", for example. The absolutely narrowed tunnel vision of a post-Soviet person attracts attention. It’s as if he doesn’t remember and doesn’t see anything but the simplest imprint trends - kindergarten semolina, nesting dolls, balalaika, space, Gagarin, white roses, bears in the forest of the artist Shishkin, retirement, old age, death. World culture is falling off the attics of consciousness like mold. Modernity crawls away in horror.
Further, the tape began to deliver something in the genre of necrophilic feuilleton. For example. Yegor Kholmogorov apparently heard “white roses” as “Aryan”, therefore, having learned the sad news about the death of Yura from the country of connecting rods, he hastily made something like a will. Wagner must certainly play him at the funeral. Well, this is such an infantile eclectic vulgarity in the spirit of "Children bury a hamster in a box from under Adidas sneakers".
The average person is naturally afraid of death. And it exists on the other side. So he approaches her on tiptoe, cautiously, and as if not for real. This, and not just “political immorality”, can explain the crowd at the Troekurovsky cemetery, where the pop singer was buried against the background of the almost complete absence of reflections on the victims of the global tragedy that is now taking place in the world.
Heidegger introduced a wonderful term that describes what everyone understands, but not everyone can, and most are afraid to formulate - “promotion into Nothingness” (promotion into death is more understandable for the layman). This is an understanding and a state so familiar to me that does not raise any (already) philosophical or metaphysical questions. On the contrary, I am surprised by the phenomenon — “Pushed into Life” — people who are overly vital, actively living their “here-and-now”, overly active, and even fussy. For me, being "here-and-now" is limited to experiencing, or stating (already) one's own death. That is, literally - to live "here-and-now" is equal to - to die "here-and-now".
No one is able to survive the horror of non-existence, nothing can humble a person with death. But many are trying to exploit this topic with the most vicious goals. Like, for example, the pseudo-philosopher Alexander Dugin. Although with all his pseudo-academicism, with the image of an Orthodox good-looking old man, Dugin is a schizophrenic, namely, a necrophilic existentialist. That is, he literally wants to sit on two chairs - being and non-being. Which is simply impossible. Man differs from animals in that he strives for development. Dugin is a pseudo-intellectual creature moving backwards.
What do traditionalists play? In reverence for philosophy. But in exactly the same way, the post-Soviet intelligentsia feels and makes others feel reverence for culture, disproportionate to its real influence. Piety before culture, and not even culture as such, but before official culture, is a purely Soviet phenomenon. Therefore, the moralistic demands on the director of the Hermitage, the scandal with which occurred not so long ago, are the same Soviet demands, only from the other side. In general - how long to reflect - there is only a way to do nothing, and to express moralistic claims to third parties - to relieve yourself of responsibility. What is the Hermitage? Yes, just the Imperial Palace of Culture.
Any attempt to revise fundamental values will lead to the collapse of worldviews. And people cling to worldviews literally more than to life. Accordingly, losing lives. The desire to cling to the past deprives you of the future. The local traditionalists, despite their declarative and real political destructiveness, are, I repeat, “grassroots beings”. They don't want to die. But they want to kill you. And your children will be settled in dirty Khokhloma pens. They launched the mechanism of self-maintenance of the outdated matrix, which plunged the world into the abyss of regression. Therefore, there should be no dialogue with them. And modernist concepts should be completely abandoned in principle. Only neoliberalism.
A socialist post-Soviet person, subjectively failed, accustomed to living in society (but, of course, secretly desiring comfort and alienation), now cannot even express existential despair. He articulates only the general, suffers "like everyone else." Does the global geopolitical catastrophe cancel personal tragedies? No, it doesn't cancel. But he can't say it. At best, he writes about loneliness. By the way, loneliness is an absolutely modernistic state. Some strange complex of feelings from French novels of the 19th century. Modern man, it seems to me, cannot even feel it. It is interesting that we talk en masse about feelings that we have not experienced for a long time.
Now Adorno is quoted on business and without. Also, in essence, a common place and vulgarity. As if writing is drinking coffee in a coffee shop on the waterfront. As if it were a form of leisure, and not a torture business, not a serious job. Writing is also being Auschwitz, a nightmarish Burroughs machine, inside which the author and the victim and the executioner are at the same time. In this context, and in the blissful (sic!) postmodernity, it becomes happiness not to write, but “not to write” (sic!). And Adorno's statement becomes even more ridiculous. Here, using a specific example, I show an example of not only an outdated feeling, but also an outdated statement.