Esoteric or buried branches of thought such as Russian
Cosmism are exhumed to provoke wonder and raise questions.
Today, he, Fedorov, is being celebrated as the father of cosmism.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin picked up the relay this past September, when, as part of a four-yearlong project on historical Utopias, 100 Years of Now, Anselm Franke invited Anton Vidokle, Boris Groys, and Zhilyaev to assemble "Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism." For this occasion, Zhilyaev made a great library table in the shape of a star to symbolize the orders of wisdom emanating from Fedorov's recommendations; on it sat stacks of cosmist books in many languages, awaiting future readers.
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....
She asserted the primacy of existence (Cosmism) over the primacy of consciousness (spiritualism-idealism).
Even when one succeeds in replacing spiritualism with Cosmism, one still has to deprogram oneself from all the ideological and psychological remnants of spiritualism.
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?
Indeed the textbooks repeat the most classic nationalist ideas, present Russia as regenerating the whole of humanity and make many allusions to the movement known as '
cosmism'.
"ART WITHOUT DEATH: RUSSIAN
COSMISM" (HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT, BERLIN; CURATED BY BORIS GROYS, ANTON VIDOKLE, AND ARSENY ZHILYAEV) I agree with Anton Vidokle, one of the initiators of the exhibition, that
cosmism, a philosophical and artistic movement that emerged in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, sounds almost too good to be true.
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.