The Poetic and the Political in Valery Podoroga’s Analytical Anthropology

Abstract

The article is devoted to an analysis of the creative work of the Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga. It focuses on the special discipline he created, namely, “analytical anthropology”, and the book “Anthropograms”, in which Valery Podoroga sets out the basic principles and analytical tools of his philosophical work. Examining the books of the philosopher that preceded the creation of analytical anthropology and those that were written later, it is possible to single out two important lines of his research. First, the philosophy of literature and second, research in the field of the political. Podoroga’s understanding of literature is broader than that of a cultural practice or a social institution. For him, it is the space of the corporal experience of contact with the world, in which the affective aspect of thinking is realized. This line of analysis points to the “poetic” dimension of the experience of thinking, since the emphasis here is on what Jakobson called the “poetic function of language”, its orientation toward itself. It is precisely the literary aspect that becomes important when analyzing the texts of philosophers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger); however, what is even more important is that in the very experience of fiction Podoroga is trying to find new means for philosophy. His “poetic line” is closely connected with the poetics of space (Bachelard) and the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, Henry). It is the combination of poetics and phenomenology that allows Podoroga to overcome both the orientation of poetics exclusively toward language and the categorical apparatus of philosophy. The main result of Valery Podoroga’s work is the creation of an “anthropogram”, a special kind of scheme in which the action of the Work (a literary work, but not only) is immanent to the dynamics of the world. Is it possible to create such anthropograms outside the field of literature? Podoroga does not specify. The article attempts to show how Podoroga’s ways of working with literary texts correlate with his works dealing with the technologies of power and violence, transforming separate political and ethical terms into anthropograms, that is, forms of thought immanent to life itself.