Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be defined as the philosophy of the transcendent event. An event is at once extremely concrete and extremely abstract. It occurs in an act of a special kind: an autonomous act which is not the realization of any pattern of transcendental historicity, is not attached to any teleology, that is, its meaning does not consist in the realization of a goal. It is, plainly speaking, purposeless and therefore indeterminate. However, this is not a variety of actionism, (...) not an outburst of absurdity subverting all order. An act turns out to be the realization of the “ontological abstraction of order” by means of a symbol actualized by the very event of the act. The article examines various aspects of the event from the aesthetic to the meta-historical. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the thought of Hannah Arendt and the work of Osip Mandelstam from a unified conceptual stance. Arendt provides the grounds for this in her remarks about Mandelstam (alongside Rilke and Auden) in two major fragments from her final work “The Life of the Mind.” Arendt (here following on from Heidegger) speaks of the unity of poetry and praise, which, in turn, illustrates the affinity between thought and gratitude. However, the great modernist poets (...) that Arendt mentions perform their praise within an existential and historical context in which praise proves a kind of impossible, paradoxical event. We attempt to discern Mandelstam’s poetic thought through the optics proposed by Hannah Arendt and to describe several aspects of his “poetics of praise.”. (shrink)