Паралогии

Paralogiesconsists of three sections: «Metamorphoses of Modernism,» «Conceptualism and Neo-Baroque,» and «Late Postmodernism.» Each part focuses on texts from different periods of Russian cultural history: the first discusses prepostmodernist shifts in modernist literature of the 1920s-1930s; the second part outlines the development of postmodernism from the late 60s to the late 90s; and the third concentrates on recent transformations of postmodernism in the culture of the 2000s. Each part is constructed as a micro-monograph comprising a theoretical chapter and detailed analytical essays on the most representative texts of the period. Lipovetsky believes that only detailed analysis of literary texts can validate theoretical hypotheses. A distinctive feature of his analytical style is consequently close attention to the aesthetic sensibilities and language of the individual authors. From these chapters, the reader learns, for example, what unifies all thirty «accidents» in Daniil Kharms’ eponymous cycle, why Humbert Humbert was defeated in his struggle for Lolita, who killed Venichka Erofeev, the protagonist of Moscow to the End of the Line;what plots unfold in Lev Rubinshtein’s poetic catalogues; what «generation PS» and «Post-Sots» are; how Akunin’s mystery novel is constructed; and what the «new non-fiction» and the «New Drama» comprise.

The book’s title employs the term «paralogy,» a word coined by J.-F. Lyotard which denotes the kind of reasoning beyond the limits of rational thinking that justifies its findings through paradox, oxymoron, and performance. Lipovetsky maintains that Russian culture of the twentieth century shaped a new kind of representation, a paralogical mechanism he terms «explosive aporia.» The book’s first chapter, «Paralogical discourse» provides a theoretical discussion of this cultural mechanism, which had formed in Russian modernism of the late 1920s-30s and was later developed in postmodernist writings of the 1960s-2000s. Lipovetsky argues that the transformations of Russian modernism towards postmodernism are driven by the simultaneous confrontation of two large-scale cultural paradigms (which contemporary scholarship frequently does not distinguish): logocentrism based on the dominance of the rational over irrational and unconscious; and literature-centrism,a typical East-European phenomenon, which assigns fundamental significance to the irrational — emotional and (quasi) religious — experience. «Explosive aporia» emerges as a cultural hybrid of the emphasized binarity of Russian cultural rhetoric derived from literature- centrism(according to Yurii Lotman and Boris Uspensky) and the deconstruction of binary oppositions (the foundation of logocentrism) inherent to the postmodernist way of thinking. As a result, in many Russian texts gravitating toward postmodernism, binary opposition is transformed into an unstoppable oscillation of meaning between opposite poles. That this process remains unresolved is what, in Lipovetsky’s opinion, distinguishes Russian postmodernism from its Western counterparts. Russian postmodernist texts do not playfully neutralize the conflict, but instead preserve it in the space of discursive explosions.

In ParalogiesLipovetsky outlines the logic of historical development of the aesthetics based on explosive aporias. Part One, «Metamorphoses of Modernism» provides detailed readings of Osip Mandelstam’s Egyptian Stamp(1927), Daniil Kharms’ Accidents(1933–39), Konstantin Vaginov’s The Days and Nights of Svistonov (1928), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita(1955). Each of these texts is interpreted as the deconstruction of a foundational category of modernist aesthetics: history in Mandelstam, the author in Vaginov, writing/creativity in Kharms, and the other in Nabokov. All these categories are removed by the writers from their privileged or marginal position in the cultural oppositions of modernist discourse, and transformed into aporias producing endless chains of aesthetic, stylistic, and philosophic explosions.