45pm, 6pm, Thu noon, 8pm Immortality For All: A Film Trilogy On Russian Cosmism
+ Q&A (): Sat 5.
The difference between deconstruction's word-orientated acosmism and the newer versions of thing-oriented cosmism
can be fruitfully explored by comparing Derrida to Serres on the basis of their readings of Plato's cosmogony, focused on the figure of chora in Timaeus.
On the blackboard was written "Lermontov's Cosmism
," and the teacher said that Lermontov had said the earth is blue and, with that, made a great contribution to space exploration, and that she'd read in one magazine that Lermontov was an alien from another planet, and here's why-- he was so close to the sky and was bored and sad on earth.
At CUNY, a second work by Zhilyaev ventured into the milky wilds of cosmism
, a school of thought inspired by the teachings of late-nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.
9) I embraced Cosmism and began deprogramming myself from the spiritualistic doctrines that I had been taught.
Even when one succeeds in replacing spiritualism with Cosmism, one still has to deprogram oneself from all the ideological and psychological remnants of spiritualism.
Young's recent monograph The Russian Cosmists discusses such thinkers, working under the influence of Nikolai Federov, under the rubric of Cosmism, 'a highly controversial and oxymoronic blend of activist speculation, futuristic traditionalism, religious science, exoteric esotericism, utopian pragmatism, idealistic materialism--higher magic partnered to higher mathematics.
These books, like Banerjee's, are the Western reflection of a growing enthusiasm in Russia for Cosmism and other esoteric philosophies, as Russian scholars seek to revive native intellectual traditions that died with Grigori Rasputin or were stifled under the Stalinist yoke.
Without allocating space to cosmism, (13) or to Nikolai Fedorov (who is hardly mentioned, even though he embodied a very important aspect of Russian philosophy), how can one form a thorough idea about Russian thought, about this tension between skeptical humanism and hope for universal salvation?
One may regret the absence of cosmism and fascinating thinkers who obviously were not humanists, such as Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont'ev (who is mentioned only in the discussion about Kozlov )--and Vasilii Rozanov, to whom passing allusions are made in numerous notes.