Анархическая этничность

Abstract

The chapter “Anarchist Ethnicity” makes an attempt to consider the concept of ethnicity as part of the modern politics of values. The topic of ethnicity, which arose as a scientific response to a politically discredited racial theory, nevertheless, as the author shows, does not leave the political space. Both primordialist and constructivist concepts of ethnicity retain the priority of ethnic identity (separation of oneself from another, and in political form, attitude towards the enemy) in relation to that archaic (pre-political) community, which can also be extracted from the very idea of ​​ethnos. The author proposes to consider ethnicity not as a tool for dividing communities, but as one of the forces of bringing together the weak, different, and incapable of political solidarity and mobilization. This reveals a unique ethics of ethnicity, which the author calls “ethical mythology,” since here the action of myth and ethics are inseparable. Using the example of the polemics of Derrida and Lévi-Strauss regarding preliterate societies, it is shown that the myth in which a community manifests itself in opposition to various forms of imposed political community (be it a people, a nation or an ethnic group) is a variant of arche-writing in the form in which it described in the concept of deconstruction. In fact, ethnicity contains signs of resistance to the “common meaning” and “political will”, peculiar traces of ritual, non-government practices of heterogeneous communities. The attempt made in this chapter to present such communities as the elusive source of ethnicity and as a distinguishing unit of modern political thinking, like a phoneme in linguistics, reveals the anti-authority and anti-social layer of ethnicity, which is therefore called here “anarchic”. In the chapter “Maidan: Redefining Democracy,” through an analysis of the events that occurred in Ukraine in 2013, which resulted in a change in political power in the country, the author attempts to offer a different version of democracy. It was on the Kiev Maidan, in his opinion, that the event of depoliticization of protest took place, as a result of which many words, such as “freedom”, “justice”, “trust”, “dignity”, ceased to be moral and political tools for manipulating society, but they acquired the concreteness of practical action, not reducible to politics, morality, or economics. The article shows the Maidan effect from the side of its resistance to politics, where the dominance of affective trust exceeds possible political disagreements. It is this that Spinoza, and later Antonio Negri, describes as the “multitude” (multitudo) that underlies democracy. It is this kind of democracy that realizes “freedom”, “equality” and “justice” not as political concepts, but as affects of community, allowing for the realization of both trust and risk in a world filled with political falsehood and disinformation.