A Cyprian's Supper
We left off yesterday talking about what Dasein (In-der-Welt-sein) means à la Heidegger and recommending Kolesnikov’s article that compares the ongoing insurrection in Belarus to Carnival (Karneval) - as interpolated by philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin.
The folk tradition of the carnival is preserved: according to custom, girls bring pumpkins as a sign that they do not want to marry a disloyal one. The disliked one is Lukashenko or a very specific security official standing like an idol without a face. "Sasha, you are our ex!" “You can't be cute by force!” “Sasha, we need to leave. It's about you." In general, the Belarusian protest has a woman's face: this is exactly what Lukashenko was moved by during his meeting with Putin in Sochi, even though he earlier used iron cages and a Kalashnikov rifle without a cartridge to protect himself against women, Kolesnikov wrote.
But back to Bakhtin. He studied history and philosophy in Odesa before relocating to Nevel (Pskov region) in 1918. He moved two years later to Vitebsk, which at the turn of the 20th century was a small town of about 65,000 people, half of whom were Jews. The town was a hotbed of intellectual and artistic experimentation that gave birth to a new kind of aesthetics and a significant impulse of post-revolutionary modernism that began with art and paralleled shifts in Neo-Kantian philosophy, linguistics, semiotics and culture. (Black Square, Bakhtin Circle, etc, ad nauseum).
Liebensphilosophie - Art as life, as it were.
One century later, we’re left with this:
cf. Cena Cypriani
(to be continued)