Vol 35, No 2 (2025)

The tension between creators and society in Athens in the 5th century BC led to the emergence of ideological phenomena akin to European decadence, but the course of ideas here invariably remained closely linked to the common life of the state. With the rise of Macedonia, Athens loses its true independence, and the space for public life is markedly reduced. However, the new Attic comedy and the work of Menander in particular reveal a development not in the decadent, but in the humanistic direction, which can be partly explained in terms of the deliverance of Athens from the burden of imperialism. In Rome, decadent gestures are characteristic of representatives of power and rulers with a low level of legitimacy — such as Sulla, Caligula, and Nero. In Roman literature, the closest to European decadence is Petronius’ Satyricon, where immoralism and aestheticism appear hand in hand. At the same time, Petronius is in a sense an unwilling decadent; his work is connected with the impossibility of following his own largely classicist ideals.

This article analyzes the relationship between pleasure, guilt, and anxiety as they take shape in contemporary society. The starting point is the indication of their interconnection given by Carl Schorske in his book dedicated to the study of the cultural and political life of fin de siècle Vienna. According to Schorske, this interconnection expresses the reaction of the Viennese educated bourgeoisie to the crisis of liberalism. The article suggests that this configuration of feelings can be viewed more broadly — as a historical a priori of the subject of modernity. What characterizes Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century is also characteristic of a representative of the “digital civilization” of the 21st century.

For critical thought, therefore, the pressing question remains: is it possible to go beyond the form of life in which pleasure is fundamentally inseparable from feelings of guilt and anxiety? As an attempt to answer this question, the article turns to the figure of the “mathematical man” proposed by Robert Musil in his eponymous essay, written in 1913. Perhaps it is Musil’s “mathematical man” that makes possible our de-identification with the “digital man.”

This article aims to examine the transformation of the idea of decadence in Marcel Proust’s creative consciousness through the methods of conceptual history, literary history, social history, and translation studies. These transformations manifested both in the writer’s literary criticism and took artistic forms in specific characters, scenes, and episodes of the novel cycle In Search of Lost Time. The latter is analyzed as a total work of art where the author, life, and literature form a unified whole. The author argues that decadence initially served as an effective model of literary apprenticeship for Proust, which he absorbed epigonically, catching on the fly a cascade of fashionable literary themes tinged with a decadent aura.

However, the paper demonstrates that as the conception of the novel evolved, Proust found both inner strength and corresponding external support to ultimately transcend and overcome decadence (both as a literary movement and as a defeatist mindset) in a kind of relevant sublation (Aufhebung). He proposes to do this through parody, satire, or even theater of cruelty in this sum of anti-decadentism, which can be considered the novel Sodom and Gomorrah (1922).

Italo Zvevo’s novel Zeno’s Conscience embodies the experience of the disintegration of the consciousness of the modern subject, which splits in a situation of traumatic conflict between tradition and modernity. Written at a time of radical social transformation in early twentieth-century Europe, Zvevo’s novel offers an unexpected lens: its political-historical background is tinged with a polemic with the psychoanalytic tradition. The almost synchronous publication of Zvevo’s novel and the work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a turning point for psychoanalysis, as a result of a comparative analysis, allows us to speak not just of a chronological coincidence, but of a conceptual tension with regard to the issues that permeate both Zeno’s Conscience and Sigmund Freud’s treatise.

For Zvevo, the motif of pleasure in life becomes the horizon against which the story of the narrator’s healing is told, filled with an experience of self-criticism that can be extrapolated beyond the scope of the novel. Written as a direct polemic with the psychoanalytic movement of those years, Zvevo’s novel traces how tendencies of decay and destruction permeate not only traditional forms of life, pushed to the margins of history by modernist trends, but also affect the most progressive, including radically modernist practices. The paper argues that Zvevo bases his critique of psychoanalysis on a reconsideration of the role of compulsive repetition for the pleasure principle. It is shown that the narrator’s quest for cure is inextricably linked to an understanding of pleasure that must overcome the fragmentation of the modern subject’s sensory experience. In particular, the analysis of the novel’s protagonist’s relationships with women suggests that the opening of the horizon of the unconscious has an ambivalent character for the experience of pleasure.

This article attempts to conceptualize Oblomov’s laziness and apathy as an existential-philosophical project. At its core lies an artistic gesture that envisions existence detached from the paradigm of action — a paradigm that, in Western civilization, is increasingly replacing being itself (Giorgio Agamben). Drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between tragedy and comedy, which is based on the opposition of the categories of action and character, the article argues for Oblomov’s belonging to the comic sphere. His inaction, volitionlessness, and sybaritism manifest a specific form of life, a mode of being rooted in the realm of potentiality. Certain symbolic objects — the dressing gown, dust, and the letter (both as an action and as an object) — function as structural elements around which the force lines of a unique narration mode, devoid of action, are constructed. The predominance of gesture over action is captured in residual forms of life, visually correlating with the Flemish painting tradition: suspension, stasis, and the remains of movement create a space of enigmatic absent presence, imbued with a vague longing for potentiality.

The article is devoted to the conceptualization of the notion of “decadence” as a cultural and philosophical phenomenon that does not refer exclusively to one period in the history of cultural development. The text considers decadence as a special mode of distribution of the sensible (Jacques Rancière), characterized by a state of confusion, obsessive connection with the past and the disintegration of the boundaries of ethical and political. Decadence is often regarded as a fundamentally apolitical phenomenon, escapist in nature. The article attempts to challenge this position, since the distribution of the sensible, characteristic of decadence, is a marker of changes to come, even if from within decadent culture they seem unrealizable.

The concept of decadence demonstrates its own heuristic potential for analyzing various cultural phenomena. For an example, the author turns to the Polish cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s, known as the cinema of moral anxiety, in particular to Andrzej Wajda’s film The Man of Marble (1977). Through this film, the article demonstrates how the aesthetic rupture, or dissensus (Rancière), the impossibility of seeing the present in the past and at the same time their inextricable fusion (Walter Benjamin), paradoxicality (Michael Riffaterre) and the disintegration of the boundaries that provide action with political content within the police order (Rancière), turn out to be manifestations of decadence in a single film.

In the early 16th century, the German painter Matthias Grünewald created an innovative depiction of the Crucifixion, in which Christ’s body was presented with hideous, bloody wounds, ulcers, and pus, and degraded to the state of formless flesh, in shocking detail. The work went unnoticed until the decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans offered an equally shocking description and interpretation of it in the late 19th century in his novel Là-bas. According to Huysmans, Grünewald had discovered a new type of spirituality, a “spiritual naturalism,” which in the novel grows out of the complex relationship between decadence and naturalism; also, he deems Grünewald’s Christ as the truest, most in keeping with the Christ of the early Christians. Huysmans rejects earlier depictions of Christ because of their “beauty” and their relevance to the “rich” classes of society.

Huysmans’s treatment makes serious claims in the field of philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of body. To understand it from a historical-philosophical perspective, one must answer the following questions: How exactly does the “ugly” Christ contrast with his visual predecessors? Why could “spiritual naturalism” only appear in the context of the Crucifixion? In search of answers, we take a path back through the history of philosophy, through Hegel to Plato and his aesthetics, and especially his ideas about the possibility of the Beautiful in the visible world. It is concluded that Huysmans is the author of a crucial philosopheme on the role of the ugly in the history of ideas, which in our historical and philosophical conceptual analysis we designate as the death of the Beautiful. This philosopheme became possible only on the basis of decadence and its ennui, and it brings to a logical conclusion both the history of beauty and decadence itself. It is concluded that Grünewald and Huysmans are thus involved in the “triumph” of the ugly, which, according to authoritative opinions, characterizes our era.

The relationship between art and philosophy represents a complex and multifaceted dynamic in which both domains interact, complement, and simultaneously constrain each other. Artists and philosophers utilize ideas and concepts to enrich their practices, yet this interaction often proves to be tense. Philosophical texts and theories become the foundation for artistic works, while art, in turn, serves as a platform for testing abstract ideas.

Contemporary art faces challenges of primitivisation, where ecological, moral, and political themes prevail over purely creative aspects. This shift in paradigm leads artists to increasingly explore themes of transhumanism, posthumanism, and cyberfeminism. The interplay between philosophy and art opens new perspectives but also demands a rethinking of their interaction. The discussants emphasize the need to transition from a consumerist attitude to one of collaboration, fostering a unified creative space. The synthesis of philosophy and art has the potential to produce unique works that not only captivate audiences but also stimulate profound reflections, bridging the divide between theory and practice.