Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

While we witness a harsh critique of the notion of culture in seminal works by Freud (Civilization and its Discontents), Benjamin (Author as Producer), Adorno (Dialectics of Enlightenment), we confront, conversely, an overt apology of cultural universalism in works by socialist thinkers – Lev Vygotsky, Evald Ilyenkov (The Dialectics of the Ideal) and Vladimir Bibler (The Logic of Culture). The stake in them is not merely a certain kind of universal culture for all, but they regard culture as the generic condition of sociality - the ultimate mode of being together of human species. In that case, culture is viewed as a generic activity, that surpasses geographic or ethnographic determinations. Rather than looking upon culture as accumulation of values and artifacts proper to one’s ethnic origin or geo-political location, these works explore the concept of culture as a specific mode of trans-logical mentality or even poetics. In such interpretation the destiny of culture is to exist outside its own territory thus detaching from its own belonging, or its own myths of origin. The talk will question how to inscribe such absolutism into various discourses of the critique of modernity.

Keti Chukhrov is a guest professor in Philosophy of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart. She was guest professor at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, in 2022-2023 and 2024-2025. In 2023-2024 she was a Tage Danielsson guest professor at the Linkoping University. Until November 2022 she worked as a professor at the School of Philosophy & Сultural Studies at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow).  Her latest book Practicing the Good. Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) deals with the impact of socialist political economy on the epistemes of historical socialism. Her full-length books include: To Be—To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (European Un-ty, 2011), and Pound &£ (Logos, 1999), and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010). Her research interests deal with 1. Сomparative epistemologies and political economies of capitalist and non-capitalist societies 2. Philosophy of performativity 3. Art as the Institute of global Contemporaneity.