Our current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One is supposed to create the new and not to care about the things as they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the "creative class" over the rest of the population that is predominantly occupied by forms of care - medical care, child care, agriculture, industrial maintenance and so on. We have a responsibility to care for our own bodies, but here again our culture tends to thematize the bodies (...) of desire and to ignore the bodies of care - ill bodies in need of self-care and social care. But the discussion of care has a long philosophical tradition. The book retraces some episodes of this tradition - beginning with Plato and ending with Alexander Bogdanov through Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and many others. The central question discussed is: who should be the subject of care? Should I care for myself or trust the others, the system, the institutions? Here, the concept of the self-care becomes a revolutionary principle that confronts the individual with the dominating mechanisms of control. (shrink)

Crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, written before and during the Bolshevik Revolution by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism. Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its (...) visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism. Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov's vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov's writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant. Contributors Alexander Bogdanov, Alexander Chizhevsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Boris Groys, Valerian Muravyev, Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood A copublication with e-flux, New York. (shrink)

«Теоретики русского космизма призвали человечество к установлению тотальной власти над космосом и к обеспечению индивидуального телесного бессмертия для каждого живущего или жившего раньше человека. Надо сказать, что телесное бессмертие обычно воспринималось христианской культурой как проклятие. Достаточно вспомнить фигуру Франкенштейна или Голема. «Человеческие» герои романа Брэма Стокера «Дракула» (написанного, кстати, в 1897 году, почти одновременно с «Философией общего дела» Николая Федорова) изо всех сил защищают свое право на естественную смерть. Однако с тех пор в западной массовой культуре к вампирам и зомби (...) стали относиться намного лучше. Лишенное веры в бессмертие души, современное человечество все больше очаровывается перспективой телесного бессмертия. И этот поворот осуществляется не только в массовой культуре, о чем свидетельствуют недавние дискуссии о постгуманизме. В исторической перспективе теории русского космизма представляются началом этой переоценки ценности телесного бессмертия – переоценки, которая не завершена и по сей день». Борис Гройс. (shrink)