Vol 33, No 5 (2023)

The gap between fundamental and applied science in today’s world is caused by a number of social, political, and now biological factors related to the challenges humanity faces, such as climate change, international terrorism, hybrid wars, intense inter-country competition, and, finally, pandemics. World governments are responding to the emergence of mixed natural-social formations, including “new wars,” global warming, environmental pollution and COVID-19, with rather brutal biopolitics, not always based on relevant scientific expertise, especially in the context of its systemic crisis. For scientists, these circumstances mean an even greater challenge, forcing them to step out of their usual university and laboratory settings into the “field,” rethinking their relationships with applied scientists and engineers, as well as politicians, doctors, journalists, and non-human agents (viruses, gadgets, programs, etc.). The recent scandal surrounding the French microbiologist from Marseille, Didier Raoul, is most revealing in this context.

A comparative analysis of his case and the case of the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the context of reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, will help to evaluate the scale of the crisis of the global healthcare system, biology and medicine in Europe and the USA, and the difficulties of representation of expert knowledge in the humanities discourse, mass culture, contemporary hypermedialized environment and conflicting political and economic interests. The author sees a possible way out of this situation as involving non-human actors in the dialogue on these issues, rethinking the role of the human being and re-evaluating the possibilities of the mass media and institutions of governance.

The experiment of Chinese scientist He Jiankui in editing the genome of twin girls has generated a new wave of suspicions about biotechnology. In fact, staff biotech labs and influential international figures were under suspicion, because they considered to use our desire to become healthier, stronger, and more efficient for the sake of transforming the world’s population. In their social significance, these concerns go far beyond the wish to reduce the uncertainties associated with the development of new technologies. The image of the threat posed by genome editing has paved the way for the “liquid fear” of displacement and substitution described by the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman. It also overlapped with the immunopolitical anxiety associated with the fear of being infected and losing one’s identity.

At the same time, the suspicion of genome-editing technology clearly mirrors the motives of the violated sacred described by Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas and contemporary cultural sociologists. However, in the case under consideration, these motifs take on a very special meaning. The human genome, which determines how we should live, and therefore has sacred characteristics, is under threat of violation. At the same time, our life, too, turns out to be only part of the evolutionary competition of “selfish genes” striving to spread in space and time. Usually, the danger associated with the sacred lies either in its desecration or in desire to gain its support. We can interpret the suspicion of genome editing as an attempt to form a prescription for the sacred game of “selfish genes,” to recode its internal principles. And since the sacred in this case is contained in every cell of the human body, the object of suspicion is the suspect himself.

Social crises create an atmosphere of uncertainty: established institutions, rules, and social norms disintegrate. When a crisis is structural in nature, this uncertainty can lead to a radical shift in the worldview of certain societies. The conventional foundations of social life become unstable, and in the vacuum that ensues, something new emerges, often co-opted by various political forces for their own interests. In this article, we will explore how, using the perception of witchcraft and witches in medieval and early modern England as a case study, one dominant myth was replaced by another, and the social consequences that arose from this shift. This case illustrates the historical evolution of attitudes towards witches, from uncertainty to power struggles and eventual exclusion from the public sphere.

The main actors in this narrative were not the witches or sorcerers themselves, but European intellectuals who inadvertently became the tools of local politicians. These politicians seized the opportunity to solidify their political dominance using the instruments of civil science and political philosophy. By examining the case of medieval witchcraft and English political thought of the 11^th and 12^th centuries, we will demonstrate how dominant worldviews shifted during times of crisis and the factors that influenced the success of one narrative over another. Based on this material, we will illustrate the transfer of ideas from the academic realm to the political, and then how they trickled down to everyday life. Additionally, we will delve into contemporary research on myths, fairy tales, and urban legends, highlighting the differences and similarities between the Enlightenment and other prevailing myths across different historical periods.

The article offers a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of cringe. It is argued that the concept of cringe has the right to a closer attitude to it, especially if you pay attention to the layers of problems at the junction of which both the cringe itself and interest in it are formed. These problems include, first, the problem of evaluative judgment as a reaction that substitutes for action. Using Deleuzian ideas of the active and the reactive forces, the author argues that cringe exists as a form of the reactive, substituting for action. Second, the problem of interreaction is considered. Based on Robert Pfaller’s and Slavoj Žižek’s concept of interpassivity, the conclusion is made that a similar phenomenon, interreactivity, exists, and its irreducibility to interpassivity is shown. The author proposes to consider cringe as a form close to interreactivity, but still not reducible to it. Third, the problem of cringe intensity and its relation to haptic experience is considered. Based on the proposed problems, the author draws two conclusions, the first of which fixes cringe as a special case of a more general phenomenon called hyperesthesia. The second conclusion speaks about the significance of the cringe concept for expanding the understanding of sensuality.

The article is dedicated to the definition of the term “cringe” placed in the modern ethical and aesthetics discourses. The author claims that camp aesthetic, generally described in Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag, is the closest to cringe. To reveal their similarities, there is a following separation in the actual understanding of cringe, namely, cringe1 as a direct reaction of shame on something external, the basic definition of cringe; cringe2 as a deactivated or sublated cringe, meaning by sublation the moment of cringe being turned onto itself, collapsing and allowing people to stay themselves. Cringe2 is what the author compares with camp as an aesthetic of vulnerability and “failed seriousness,” while cringe1 reveals similarities with kitsch.

Critical analysis of camp indicates that camp as a style still exploits vulnerability, therefore it doesn’t complete the therapeutic work it has started. As an alternative or post-camp aesthetics, the author proposes to highlight the conception of hypo aesthetics (Michael Kurtov) by which one may accept reality as it is. Based on texts by Giorgio Agamben Profanations and The Coming Community, the author comprehends cringe as an agent of profanation and an actor of liberation from dispositives of power. Unlike the other actor — parody, which is based on a distance to its subject, there is a fact of disappearance of this distance at the core of cringe. According to the author, this specificity of cringe allows the radically profane revelation to happen. Thus, transgression by the means of cringe becomes possible. An example of such transgression can be found in works by Georges Bataille and contemporary psychedelic cinema (Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022).

The paper deals with the analyses of “cringe” as a specific affect which us crucial for understanding of the current cultural situation. “Cringe” is situated into the broad historic situation and connected to such categories as “beautiful” and “sublime”, and also with a figure of a double betrayal, which is central for current thought (for instance into the projects of Slavoj Žižek and Reza Negarestani). The central point of the analyses is the appearance of cringe in Dmitry Dyachenko’s Cheburashka (2023). Using the plastic-dynamic analysis based on the recent advances of coincidental theory enables to discover the symptomatic importance of the figure of Cheburashka. The clarification of the plastic and dynamic structures that determine this figure of cringe-bearer enables to connect it to the main topics of the ontologies of recent decades and question its onto-economic meaning.

This questioning results into the discovery of the special place of “the world of cringe” into the onto-economic history of the past two centuries, a history of substance as “Immanent Impossible.” The clarification of the specific features that connect Cheburaska not only to the central themes of “new ontologies,” but also to the heroes of the soviet cinema of 1970s and 1980s, enable to distinguish the epoch of the cringe as a transitional step into the history of the Immanent Impossible: a step of the request for a new onto-economic order, that of holding-together-of-the-distinct. The basic weakness of Cheburashka lies in the fact that he can articulate this demand, but can not follow it. The paper points to a special kind of enlightenment which is needed in order to fulfil what Cheburashka demands.