RUSSIA

How Old Magic Does the Trick for Modern Politics

Claudio Sergio Nun-Ingerom
CNRS, Paris

and Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Buenos Aires

This article attempts to interpret the insurrection led by Razin in the seventeenth century as the beginning of modern politics, because it was founded on the immanence of the social in contrast to the transcendent conceptions of power maintained by the court and church. This advance was made possible by the working of magic. Through performative speech, magic permitted the creation of a verbal presence for the non-existent tsarevich Alexis, who, however, was never given material form. In keeping the self-appointed heir invisible and by declaring his father’s rule illegitimate, the rebels reduced the role of the tsar to a pure signifier. The proof that this uprising represented a turn toward modern politics is that it did not rely upon the invocation of an intangible philosophical or spiritual ideal (as in the West); it was built instead upon an armed people, expressing itself in a language that was still archaic but already oriented toward a new representation of power as socially legitimatized. This analysis opens an important line of argument that has power beyond this specific case.

Keywords
Razin Rebellion; self-appointment; Invisible tsarevich; magic; political expression; modernpolitical formation; immanence

Пусто место свято не бывает

No empty place is ever sacred.

(Variations on a Russian theme.)

The Devil Stole His Mind: The Tsar and the 1648 Moscow Uprising

Author(s): Valerie A. Kivelson

Source:
The American Historical Review,
Vol. 98, No. 3 (Jun., 1993), pp. 733-756

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

Accessed: 12-09-2017 19:27 UTC

"Revolts" in the Kuranty of March–July 1671

Ingrid Maier

Stepan Shamin

2014, Malte Griesse (ed.): From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War. Premodern Revolts in their Transnational Representations

116 ViewsPaperRank: 1.923 Pages

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Early Modern History,

Russia,

Early Modern News Culture,

Vesti-Kuranty,

Revolts and protests

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More Info: Authors: Ingrid Maier, Stepan Shamin

Publication Date: 2014

Publication Name: Malte Griesse (ed.): From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War. Premodern Revolts in their Transnational Representations

On the Cusp: Astrology, Politics, and Life-Writing in Early Imperial Russia

Robert Collis

Ernest Zitser

Published 2015

469 Views35 Pages

2 Files ▾

History,

European History,

Russian Studies,

Early Modern History,

History of Science

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More Info: pp. 1618-1652

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Event Date: Dec 2015

Journal Name: American Historical Review

Publication Date: Dec 2015

Witchcraft, Religion, and the State Apparatus: The Witch Craze Revisited

EZROURA Mohammed

36 Pages

Cultural History,

Early Modern History

This paper revisits the phenomenon of witchcraft in relation to religion and the state apparatuses. It addresses the following questions: 1. How did the ISAs function during the witch hunt trials in Europe’s and USA’s witch craze? 2. What were the reasons behind the rise and fall of the witchcraft “epidemic”? Various scholars have attributed the rise of witchcraft to economic crises leading to a catastrophic rise in poverty and food shortages, to meteorological conditions brought about by the “little ice age,” which destroyed crops leading Europe into a period of famine, to the European religious wars, to some diseases that caused collective hysteria. As the majority of witches were poor women, some feminist argued for structural misogyny rooted in Christian religious doctrine. The persecution spread even to the New World. Social and natural catastrophes were attributed to witches who were perceived as wielding satanic powers that they gained through a covenant with Satan and the powers of the Anti-Christ. Both the Church and the State institutions worked hand in hand to rid their Christian societies of witchcraft, using the worst means available: torture, hanging, and burning victims at the stake. Both Catholics and Protestants had a share in this odious practice. It is still a mystery why the State and the Church suddenly stopped their trials over witchcraft accusations, despite the fact that it is still thriving as a belief system and secular entertainment. Some scholars attribute that shift to the early emergence of rational enlightenment ethos and the rise of the scientific worldview. And last but not least, 3. What are the implications for a critical study of witchcraft as a (counter)religious practice governed by the complex working of the ISAs?

https://www.academia.edu/37142506/Witchcraft_Religion_and_the_State_Apparatus_The_Witch_Craze_Revisited

Rats, Witches, Miasma and Early Modern Theories of Contagion

Lucinda Cole

26 Pages

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English Literature,

Early Modern History,

Animal Studies,

Literature and Medicine

This chapter from Imperfect Creatures is an expanded version "Of Mice and Moisture," published in Journal Of Early Modern Cultural Studies. It explores the role of rodents and putrefaction in early modern theories of disease--mimetic contagion--by focusing on a wide variety of works, including drawings by Jacques de Gheyn and Shakespeare's Macbeth.

https://www.academia.edu/32937020/Rats_Witches_Miasma_and_Early_Modern_Theories_of_Contagion

Human, Animal and Machine in the Seventeenth Century

Lucinda Cole

Robert Markley

16 Pages    https://www.academia.edu/19821130/Human_Animal_and_Machine_in_the_Seventeenth_Century

In his 1695 letter to John Dennis on comedy, the playwright William Congreve confesses his dislike for satire that smacks of the “Degeneration of [that] God-like Species” – “man.” Having conceded that he is disturbed by “seeing things, that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature,” Congreve then admits he “could never look long upon a Monkey, without very Mortifying Reflections; tho [he] never heard any thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species
”(Hodges 1964: 183). 

Congreve’s “mortifying Reflections” stem from his culture 'snagging fear that anatomy may be destiny – that the physiological similarities between humans and monkeys may undermine the philosophical and religious principles that grant our “God-like Species” dominion over the rest of creation. Because it unsettles distinctions between instinctual behavior and intelligent self-awareness, Congreve's monkey calls attention to a crucial set of problems in seventeenth-century thought: the difficulty of trying to distinguish humans from animals, animals from inanimate objects, and humans from machines.

 As Francis Bacon declared in Of the Wisdom ofthe Ancients (1609), “there is no nature which can be regarded as simple”: “Man has something of the brute; the brute has something of the vegetable; the vegetable something of the inanimate body” (Bacon 1860: 13, 96; see Fudge 1999: 94–98). To try to make sense of the complexity of nature and its hybrid forms was the centralproject of seventeenth-century science – or what was then termed natural philosophy........

Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life 1600-1740 (University of Michigan Press, 2016)

Lucinda Cole

392 Views249 Pages

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Philosophy of Science,

Eighteenth-Century literature,

Animal Studies,

History of Science,

Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture

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This is the full, published version of Imperfect Creatures, made available through the open access program Knowledge Unlatched. It contains chapters on George Wither, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Shadwell, John Wilmot, and Daniel Defoe, among others, read within the context of early modern science and ecology. Introduction Reading beneath the Grain Chapter 1. Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion Chapter 2. Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley Chapter 3. “Observe the Frog”: Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human Chapter 4. Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay Chapter 5. What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding, Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe’s Island Afterword We Have Never Been Perfect

https://tinyurl.com/ybjmykvu

"Male Witches and Gendered Categories in Seventeenth-Century Russia"

Valerie Kivelson

2003, Comparative Studies in Society and History

563 Views27 Pages

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Anthropology,

Gender,

Witchcraft (Magic),

early modern Russia (Muscovy),

Historical Studies

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... If female magic differed at all from male magic, it was more in being geared more toward ameliorating domestic situations, but the differences are too minor to allow one to describe distinct male and female languages of magic along the lines of Labouvies Saar witches. 

https://tinyurl.com/y7brczfc

Prosaic Witchcraft and Semiotic Totalitarianism: Muscovite Magic Reconsidered

Author(s): Valerie Kivelson and Jonathan Shaheen

Source:
Slavic Review,
Vol. 70, No. 1 (SPRING 2011), pp. 23-44Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; CambridgeUniversity Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.70.1.0023

Elena Smilianskaia. Fortunetellers and Sorcerers in the Service of a Russian Aristocrat of the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Chamberlain Petr Saltykov 

Russian History. 2013. Vol. 40. No. 3-4. P. 364-380.

https://tinyurl.com/ya6ju2y2

"Decriminalizing Witchcraft in Pre-Emancipation Russia," in Späte Hexenprozesse: Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem Irrationalen, ed. by Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2016), 281-308.

Christine Worobec

207 Views36 Pages

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Russian Studies,

European Witch Trials,

Russian History,

Early Modern European Witchcraft

https://tinyurl.com/yd3uo23r

Belief and Practice: Ideas of Sorcery and Witchcraft in Late Medieval England

Esther Liberman Cuenca

Published 2007

137 Pages

This thesis analyzes fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sorcery and witchcraft cases from England and argues that witch-beliefs were developed and spread at the community level. Unlike the 1324 trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in Ireland, there were no inquisitional authorities in England that could have influenced ideas about sorcery, which can be found in legal records from London and Durham. The ideas found within these records reflect medieval laypeople's beliefs about magic, as well as their concerns about urgent social problems.

https://tinyurl.com/ya564qns

The Road to Heresy and Witchcraft: Women in Medieval Europe, 1000-1500

Makenna Mall

1483 Views42 Pages

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Medieval History,

Medieval Women,

History of Religion (Medieval Studies),

Heresy and Inquisition,

Women and Gender Studies

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Please excuse the formatting errors. I am currently working to figure out why these issued occurred upon uploading the paper. Edits are in progress.

https://tinyurl.com/ya564qns

Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms

Laura Knight-Jadczyk       43 Pages

Historical Materialism: Social Structure and Social Change in the Middle Ages

Stephen H Rigby

2004, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

4000 Views50 Pages

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Marxism,

Historical Materialism,

Middle Ages,

Karl Marx Theory of the Mode of Production,

Marxist History, Philosophy and Theory

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This article sets out Marx and Engels' views on medieval society and examines how they have been used by modern Marxist historians. It shows how key Marxist concepts, including the productive forces, relations of production, surplus labour, class conflicts, base and superstructure, the state and ideology, have been applied to medieval history. Finally. it offers a critique of the Marxist approach, arguing that the implicit pluralism of much Marxist historiography has been at odds with Marxism's own explicit claims for the causal primacy of particular aspects of the social structure, whether these are the productive forces, the relations of production or society's so-called economic 'based'. It is this explanatory pluralism which allows Marxist approaches to be reconciled with non-Marxist historiographical traditions.

https://tinyurl.com/ydf62ez2

Zen After Zarathustra: 

The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche

and Buddhism

Bret W. Davis

https://tinyurl.com/y8pcq6dc

Is Nietzsche’s affirmation of the world and oneself as “the will to power—and nothing besides "the path to a self-overcoming of nihilism; or is it, as Heidegger contends, the “ultimate entanglement in nihilism”?

Is Buddhism the purest expression of a “passive nihilism,” as Nietzsche claims; or does it teach a radical “middle path” that twists free of both the life of the will to power and a pessimistic negation of the will to live? Does the Buddhist path go so far as to intimate a great affirmation of living otherwise than willing?

From the outset, one thing does seem certain: venturing out to sail on the "open sea”

 (GS343) of Nietzsche’s thought, we confront Buddhism as one of the most interesting and challenging “foreign perspectives” from which to "question one’s own.”

And yet, rather than let his exposure to this other tradition call into question his own philosophy of the will to power, Nietzsche him-self more often used his interpretation of Buddhism as a “rhetorical instrument” for his critique of Christianity, crediting the former religion in the end only with the dubious honor of representing a more honest expression of a more advanced stage of nihilism. Recent studies on this theme often begin by emphasizing Nietzsche's limited knowledge, his misunderstanding, and the distortions involved in his appropriation of Buddhism. Many then go on to develop what Robert Morrison has called the “ironic affinities” between Nietzsche and a Buddhism correctly understood.

Although Morrison and others have pursued these affinities with respect to the Theravada tradition, profounder resonances may in fact be found with the Mahayana tradition, of which Nietzsche remained unfortunately ignorant.

ERIC HOBSBAWM

 

https://tinyurl.com/y8xop5v9

 

   

https://tinyurl.com/ydc9x95m

 

Work, Bodies, and the Emerging Politics of Alienation - PhD thesis

Paul McFadden

252 Pages              https://tinyurl.com/y794vwxj

Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied character of alienation renders the labour process and the sphere of reproduction as critical spaces for anticapitalist politics. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis directly collides with the domination of value. The capacities and potentialities of bodies to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, consumption, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are concepts that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial economy: ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sidedness of these abstractions – their contending characterisations of the labour process, its relations, and their representations of the politics of emergent forms of labour – with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work. The factors of alienated body work are reciprocally related across productive and reproductive spheres and therein they bind articulations of capitalist politics together with the production of political subjectivities. This form of the organisation of labour creates a contradictory inner connection between the politics of production and modes of reproduction. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction results in the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body, foreclosing on the subversive potential of indeterminate labour-power, and simultaneously brings embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.