The Woods. Vladimir Bibikhin

of Philosophy and in a special autobiographical book dedicated to his conversations with Losev). As for Heidegger, Bibikhin became interested in his work, as, belatedly, did many other Soviet intellectuals, in the mid-1970s, when the German philosopher of ‘being’ was all but banned in the USSR.² Bibikhin became one of Heidegger’s first Russian translators, with his rendering of Being and Time (1996) as a crowning achievement. This was after the fall of the Soviet system, at which time Heidegger became fashionable. When Bibikhin first started lecturing towards the end of the 1980s (late in life), the philosophical establishment had formed a stereotypical image of him as a ‘Russian Heidegger’. This was gradually seen not to be the case: if some of Bibikhin’s Russian concepts are close to Heidegger’s (‘the world’, ‘the event’), others are not. For one thing, Bibikhin is not particularly interested in ‘being’, ‘death’, or ‘anguish’. He most readily takes from Heidegger everything related to event, particularly, the term ‘other onset’ from the Introduction to Metaphysics,³ which became the title of one of Bibikhin’s own books, devoted to the historical destiny of contemporary Russia. The entire tonality of Bibikhin’s thought is different, however. In contrast to the ultra-serious and edifying ontological prose of Heidegger, I see his philosophy as centred rather on aesthetics, or, more precisely, on the aesthetic interpretation of phenomenology. This is a direct effect of Losev’s teaching. Losev, after being politically persecuted for his philosophical work, camouflaged it under a multi-volume History of Classical Aesthetics. There was method behind this choice of disguise. For Losev, symbolic expression was the indispensable culmination of ontology. In retrospect, it seems clear that he had much more influence on Bibikhin than did Heidegger (whom Bibikhin read only as a mature adult). Bibikhin’s notes on his conversations with Losev were published during his lifetime, with discussion of topics such as the primacy of aesthetics, the holistic act of linguistic utterance, the role of etymologies, the value of harsh authoritarian systems from a philosophical point of view, and the philosophical relevance of colour. These topics later featured in Bibikhin’s own oeuvre.

      Subjectively, there was a third figure of major importance for Bibikhin, and that was Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, in my view this is less a case of following a tradition and more a case of an interpretation, and idiosyncratic reading, of the Vienna–Cambridge philosopher in an existential-phenomenological context. Bibikhin read Wittgenstein in his own way, disregarding most of the reception history and context of Anglo-American neopositivism. Wittgenstein is important for Bibikhin as a philosopher of intuition, of the this-ness of things, and of the inaccessible, aesthetic self-showing of the world. Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect change’, a sudden Gestalt switch, is understood as the formula of a phenomenological event close to a conversion.

      This said, Bibikhin’s system of thought boils down to the following. There is an event, the ‘lightning’, which suddenly reveals the world in a new light and mobilizes the living being for near-to-impossible achievements. (In contrast to Heidegger, death is barely mentioned.) The event is thus a pure, festive effect whose ontological content consists primarily of unravelling and separating the contrasting aspects of being (the regular and the chaotic, the light and the matter, the masculine and the feminine). The event ‘captivates’ humans, entrances them, and forms a mission that gives them meaning. The event of captivation is not under our conscious control. We only become conscious of it retrospectively, which gives a special role, in the process of knowledge, to attention: the moment we notice something is the moment when our relation to the world, our mission, is decided. Captivation also allows the human being to capture things and lands, which grounds ‘property’. Property, however, works both ways: things captivate people who capture them. (Before there was private property, there had already been property as such, where a thing opened itself up to a human in its uniqueness and its essential possibilities.) ‘Energy’, which the contemporary world exploits and longs for, comes from the capacity for a standstill, or an idle celebration (the ‘energy of rest’). Against Modern activism, Bibikhin values careful attention to the event, which must come before any serious activity.

      The event is, however, not all there is. It plays out the contrasting poles of the world which, taken together, constitute what he calls the ‘automaton’ of the world (Aristotelian spontaneity or the Leibnizian machine of machines) and equates it with ‘Sophia’, the central concept of Russian religious philosophy. Being rather critical of Russian religious philosophy, and particularly of its recent, nationalistically motivated, resurrection in Russia, Bibikhin nevertheless accepts and esteems Sophia: in Orthodoxy, a force of facticity and plurality in God. The rhythmic automaton of the world is Sophia, because it is a way of gripping contraries together, and because it is, and should be, beyond human control or calculation.

Both Sophia and the event have, for us, two faces: the freedom that inspires enthusiasm, and the iron, authoritarian law that governs the essentials. Bibikhin is consistently attentive to, and sympathetic towards, the phenomena of law, discipline, and grammar, which he derives from the ‘harshness’ (zhestkost’) of the event’s imperativeness. He therefore values the Western culture of ‘early discipline’ (rightly understanding that the difference of Western culture from Russian is its respect for law) and contrasts it with an anarchic unpreparedness but attentiveness to an event, which he attributes to Russian culture. However, even in the Russian and similar cultures, there are ‘harsh’ phenomena, such as krepost’ (a system of peasant serfdom) or, later, ‘totalitarianism’, which Bibikhin understands, neutrally, as a society with an unusual level of regulation and control. Thus, in the present book also, the irrational element of ‘the forest’, or matter, a phenomenological form of being, not a thingly substance (a reading which reminds us of Losev’s Neoplatonic ‘meon’), only makes sense in interaction with the harsh, iron formatting of the gene-based ‘eidos’.

      What does this all mean in the present historical context? Bibikhin started his public teaching, and most of his writing, in a revolutionary period when the Soviet Union was undergoing democratic reforms, before collapsing and heading into a period of neoliberal changes led by a weakened state. This revolutionary situation created a space of freedom for new ideas and initiatives, and hunger for new, unofficial and non-Marxist, philosophy. (Marx and Lenin are barely mentioned in Bibikhin’s writings.) This is the window of historical opportunity which provided Bibikhin with his platform and his mission. But the ideological content of the revolution and the reforms was an alloy: liberal and democratic ideas were mixed, often in the same media and books, with a conservative and even traditionalist message. This is reflected in Bibikhin’s thought: without ever designating his ideological stance, it is clear that, politically, he is navigating somewhere between liberalism and conservatism. Property (in things and industries) and energy (of oil and of creative labour), even if they are deduced back to their onto-aesthetic origins, are the words of the day, a concern of the new economy and new lifestyle. The interest in Wittgenstein (and, in the present book, in Darwin) reflects Bibikhin’s deep empathy with Western rationalism. There are, however, obvious conservative elements too. Bibikhin writes The Law of Russian History and, later, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, in which he discusses and essentializes a specifically Russian historical trajectory and destiny. Orthodox religion, understood in a philosophical way as a religion of an absent God beyond rational discourse, is very present in his writings, particularly in the present book, where the Cross becomes an epitome of the forest. Bibikhin also shares Heidegger’s disdain for activism. Conservative, and typical of the time in Russia, are his views on gender (where he values a contrast between a marked masculinity and marked femininity).

Bibikhin’s main interest was in German philosophy, but he also knew and cherished the contemporary French tradition. He read, and even translated, Jacques Derrida, arguing against some of his interpretations. His strategy of writing books in the form of lecture courses targeted at a wide audience may have been a conscious emulation of the strategy of such great French public intellectuals as Lacan and Derrida.

Accordingly, when Bibikhin addresses the current moment, he refers to it, in awe, as a ‘revolution’ or ‘renaissance’. Reminiscences of Peter the Great’s reforms, or of the Italian Renaissance