Ontological Crisis Research Articles

Стратегия ресентимента в эпоху онтологической неопределенности

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of ressentiment, which has aroused interest in a number of humanities in connection with new interpretations of the crisis state of society. The socio-philosophical analysis of the strategy of ressentiment as an existential modus actualized in the era of ontological uncertainty is carried out. The subject of the study is the strategy of ressentiment, as a form of unexpressed feelings of hostility, vindictiveness, latent hatred and impotent envy that can reconcile an individual with the existing reality. The aim of the article is the philosophical analysis of this phenomenon and the definition of new facets, including the existential experience of the subject, aimed at accumulating destructive emotions that form the victim complex. The methodological basis of the study was the elements of historical and philosophical reconstruction, as well as the methods of hermeneutical and psychoanalytic analysis. Such a synthesis of approaches allows us to consider ressentiment from the perspective of its ontological and existential characteristics, and not only as a “fatal” strategy in the period of ontological crisis. Uncertainty in human existence becomes an increasingly relevant component of existential dread and, as a consequence, manifests itself in various forms of marginality. Thus, ressentiment, as an unhealthy form of aggression that generates impotence, becomes an urgent topic of philosophical reflection again. The authors conclude that overcoming the strategy of ressentiment is a worldview problem, where the revision of modern values is the most important step towards its solution.

Ontological Crisis and the Compartmentalization of Insecurities

Abstract This article explores state responses to a major ontological crisis, which produces insecurities requiring contradictory foreign policy responses. I propose that leaders in such dire situations may respond by compartmentalizing insecurities, articulating distinct narratives relevant to different insecurities. Such a split might seem inconsistent for leaders within the same government, but it can enable them to navigate a precarious crisis by exploiting the state’s internal complexity to address the contrasting insecurities that a crisis generates. I explore this approach by analyzing Georgia’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which created a major ontological crisis in Georgia. Its two most prominent leaders (the president and the prime minister) reacted by consistently voicing contradictory positions about the country’s foreign policy. This divergent messaging becomes comprehensible when we see them as responses to different concerns: one responding to deep ontological insecurities over Georgia’s relationship with other states, its place in the international system, and the coherence of its dominant autobiographical narrative; the other responding to the threat of war and related existential concerns at the individual and collective levels. Problematizing the state as a unitary actor, this article demonstrates how unpacking its constitutive agents can help us better understand how leaders navigate complex ontological crises.

Correction to: Ontological Crisis and the Compartmentalization of Insecurities

Correction to: Ontological Crisis and the Compartmentalization of Insecurities

Architectural design and ontological crisis

The state of permanent crisis has become almost a norm for contemporary humanity. However, one cannot deny that for modernist tendencies in art, literature and culture in general, crisis is the most comfortable state: it raises the stakes for innovation, allows radicalism, and demands strong methods and strong personalities. The trend, alas, is not limited to modernism as a period. Architecture, prone to expressive ‘beautiful gestures’ and aimed at acute emotional impact, even today fosters the spread of ontological crisis, while cluttering the mental sphere.

Midrash and sophism in the context of transformation scientific and educational traditions in the 21st century

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st cen-tury is characterized by multiple crises in most aspects of human existence, among which the education crisis is one of the most noticeable. The usual logic of problematizing and seeking ways to overcome the education crisis is linked to changes in the nor-mative-legal and economic conditions of educational activities, and much less attention is paid to the ontological problems of education. In this regard, the first task of this study was to con-ceptually formulate a request regarding the resources and tools for overcoming the ontological crisis in education. In the context of studying the main stages and results of three decades of re-forms in the field of Russian education, three interconnected re-quests have been identified: 1) Individualization and differentia-tion of the content of education while maintaining basic value-semantic unity; 2) Ensuring the social and economic relevance of the content of education, ensuring its demand and feasibility; 3) Rooting the content of education in social and humanitarian tra-ditions that are capable of influencing and transforming modern social and humanitarian practices. The categories of “midrash” and “sophism” emerged at roughly the same time (around the 5th century BCE) and represent complex phenomena of oral cultures that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean: midrash in the con-text of the Jewish religious tradition, and sophism (as well as the syllogism that gave rise to it) in the ancient city-state tradition. Moreover, each of these phenomena fully corresponds to the re-quirements listed above. 1) Reconceptualization of the educa-tional attitude as a means of ensuring intergenerational connec-tion and continuity; 2) Inherent duality of cultural and education-al traditions in their relationship with “text” and “language” (to which modern culture adds “visible image”); 3) The need to modernize the system of educational standards based on dia-chronic traditions and synchronic cultural-anthropological mod-els; 4) Actualization of issues and tools for ensuring dialogue and "openness" of traditions, identifying their contextual meanings and requests addressed by current socio-humanitarian practices; 5) Integration of projects, socio-educational initiatives and prac-tices around identified scientific and educational traditions and cultural-educational models underlying them.

Perpetual ontological crisis: national division, enduring anxieties and South Korea’s discursive relationship with Japan

The broad agenda of ontological security scholarship in International Relations is to examine states’ (in)security of Self-identity and the implications for their international conduct. While ontological security may be an illusory goal, states vary in their levels of ontological insecurity, with more extreme levels producing acute defence mechanisms. Such ontological crises are therefore an important area of focus gaining increasing attention. Thus far, however, they have generally been conceptualised as ‘critical situations’: unpredictable, transient and practically resolvable ruptures of routinised practices. I argue that such a conceptualisation neglects the possibility of a more fundamental, long-term crisis of Self-identity, which I term perpetual ontological crisis. Such crises stem from inherent contradictions within dominant constructions of identity that may have always existed – rather than exogenous shocks to a hitherto secure Self – and are therefore irresolvable within the bounds of those constructions. I develop the example of nation/state incongruence: when a state’s territorial boundaries do not accord with the national spatial imaginary dominant in that state, resulting in an inherent and enduring contradiction. I then illustrate these contentions with a case study of South Korea, whose borders have never matched the imagined spatial bounds of the Korean nation. To demonstrate the implications of this crisis, I conduct a discourse analysis evidencing a nexus between enduring ontological anxieties concerning Korean division and South Korea’s persistently antagonistic relationship with Japan. In doing so, this article has important implications for how we understand ontological crisis and offers a novel account of its empirical case.

Development of Science and Technology: Goal or Means of Progress?

The article deals with the topic of inconsistency of the consequences of technological progress, the relationship between science and religion. The views of various philosophers on this question, their proposals regarding the prevention of the uprising of machines are analyzed. It is concluded that science should be based on moral values, be organically integrated into life and interact with all spheres of life, and not replace religion. The development of technologies should not be the main goal of progress, as is enshrined in the current strategic documents of the Russian Federation. This approach leads to negative consequences, gives rise to an ontological crisis, casts doubt on the existence of the person himself due to his possible replacement by artificial intelligence. Now only the Conceptual Manifesto of Akademgorodok 2.0 in Novosibirsk emphasizes the need for human orientation in the development of science and new technologies, the preservation of traditions, the integration of science into all spheres of life, as one of its components, but not the main component. This document should be taken as a model for further legal regulation in this area. To overcome the ontological crisis, it should be remembered that the introduction of new technologies is not a goal, but one of the means of progress, obtaining new knowledge, optimizing production and harmonious development of a person and society if they are used correctly.

The Notion of Qualitative Partnership(s): Towards an Understanding of Deep Ecology

The contemporary geo – political climate of the world – order has embroiled the entirety of the human civilization in an ontological crisis. The technological progress of the human race lauds the entitled and privileged neo – liberal worldviews of the intelligentsia, by pretentiously dismissing all forms of environmental responsibility as ancillary concerns. Narratives underscoring the need to strengthen a concerted effort for mobilizing ideals of environmental protection into substantive action are deplorably inadequate. The ongoing climate crises of the world has endangered the totality of the human, sub – human, non – human, natural and animal communities of the planet Earth. The mammoth challenges of mitigating accelerated biodiversity extinctions and jeopardized environmental futurities can be addressed by advancing narratives of intrinsic interrelationalities between all communities of the planet. It is at this juncture that the theoretical deliberations comprising the concept of Deep Ecology may prove to be crucial in the construction of an environmentally sentient posterity. The conceptualization of this philosophical approach to environmental conservation may advance the sole manner of expiation for these ecologically precarious times.

‘예술의 종말’ 그리고 ‘종말의 예술’: 아서 단토의 《9/11의 예술》전시에 대한 소고

Based on The Art of 9/11 an exhibition curated by critic Arthur Danto in 2005, this paper inquires how Danto’s well-known theory about ‘the end of art’ can be reinterpreted in the current socio-political milieu and therein explores art’s new status quo and formal validity in this age of global disaster. For this inquiry, Danto’s theoretical spectrum will be broken into two parts: first, the earlier ‘end-of-art’ period, roughly between 1980 and 2000 in which Danto discussed art’s ontological crisis and its historical end through his half analytic and half Hegelian methods, and second, the later ‘art-of-the end’ period, after 2000 in which he emphasized art’s subjective yet universal aspect and its formal inertia in pursue of Kantian sublimity. This paper then delves into their theoretical polarity in order to see how Danto’s earlier ending story with post-narrative art, transfiguration of commonplace, indiscernibility, embodiment of meaning, etc. reveals its true face in culture’s another dead-end caused by 9/11. Through this, the paper aims to crystalize the formal peculiarity and reflective, remedial value of ‘the art-of-the end’ that has not been fully discussed in Danto study.

Well-Wrought Black Thought: Speculative Realism and the Specter of Race

This essay presents a method for analyzing literary and cultural texts that I call black thought. Black thought reveals how changing the skin color of a protagonist in modern Western literature would result in an ontological crisis of coherence within the text because its historically contingent racial codes, genre-based discursive conventions, internal plot structure, and governing registers would summarily fail. At this point of collapse, we can ask questions such as “why couldn’t this character be read as legibly black (or white)?” at the given historical moment or, “what elements of this work’s governing structure would have to change so that a particular character could be plausibly read under a different racial category?” Through exemplifying the practice of black thought in the writings of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, as well as Arthur Laurents’s 1946 play Home of the Brave, Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle, and the artwork of Diego Velázquez vis-à-vis Kerry James Marshall, I show how students and scholars would benefit from seeking to determine why changing the race of a work’s protagonist would necessitate the creation of a fundamentally different text or historical context, which brings the study of literature into conversation with other fields, such as political theory, history, sociology, and psychology.

Chicken Soup for the Postmodern Soul: Philosophizing Spike Jonze’s Her Through the Lens of Evolving Modernity

Spike Jonze’s Her is a dystopian fiction that envisages a world wherein machine sentience has achieved the capacity to replace human experiences thereby leading to an ontological crisis of emotions and the inability to ground one’s thoughts in objective reality. While on the surface, the cinema displays the characteristic traits of a melancholic romantic drama with subtle futuristic elements, this article, however, explores the darker side of Jonze’s screenplay and the dominant political and philosophical ideas that come with it, thereby deciphering the nuances of what Jonze strives to put forward: a forewarning of the times that are approaching. This article also attempts at characterizing the world of Her by identifying the trajectory of late capitalism, alienation, and the realm of the simulation, all of which are critical themes that must be taken into account so as to make sense of the ethical dilemmas that technologically developed societies will have to face in the future. This research has been carried out through the analysis of articles, journals, interviews, reviews, and other secondary data sources available.

Making memory work: The SARS memory and China’s war on COVID-19

In the global fight against COVID-19, a “pandemic memory thesis” emerges. This thesis argues that nations with memories of past pandemics, such as East Asian countries with SARS memories, can better control the COVID-19 pandemic today. Yet, if this thesis holds, why hadn’t the SARS memory helped China prevent the outbreak of COVID-19? Why, however, can China swiftly contain the pandemic in its later stages by exploiting the SARS memory? To address this contradiction, I treat the pandemic as an ontological crisis and put forward a theory centering on the construction of ontological consensus by the state and society. By studying symbolic events in China’s war on COVID-19, particularly the Li Wenliang and Zhong Nanshan cases, I argue that the state’s acknowledgment of the crisis, society’s awareness and cultural preparedness, and the re-fusion of state-society relations are crucial for memory to work in the fight against a new pandemic.

Left behind? Internally migrating children and the ontological crisis of formal education systems in South Asia

ABSTRACT In-country migration is widespread in South Asia, and the region hosts the world’s largest number of out-of-school children. Yet the relationship between internal migration and inclusion in formal education has received only limited academic and policy attention. The Agenda 2030 pledge to leave no-one behind prompts us to argue that when it comes to migrating children, formal education systems in South Asia are in ontological crisis. Cases of mobile pastoralists and seasonal labour migrants illustrate that being ‘left behind’ is produced by intersecting norms of modernity, which formal education systems reproduce, via logics of rights, human capital and ‘terms of inclusion’. Formal education systems are antithetical to mobility-dependent livelihoods, discount situated learning, and perpetuate unequal social relations. ‘Alternative’ education has done little to contest these norms and their productions. Terming this an ‘ontological crisis’ signals both the disjuncture between realities and Agenda 2030’s moral exigencies, and the opportunity to act.

Other worlds: Multirealist writing as a strategy for representing climate crisis

This article advocates for the utility of multirealism for writing about the climate crisis. Seeking to contribute to scholarly debates that have considered realist literary fiction’s capacity to represent climate crisis (Clark, 2015; Ghosh, 2016; Lockwood, 2018; Johns-Putra, 2018), I advocate for a multirealist literary mode. This mode seeks to destabilise the ontological foundations of realism by assembling narratives that draw into focus the other possible worlds that coexist alongside western modernity without resorting to speculative or spectacular digressions that otherwise exceed the bounds of literary realism. In doing so, I advocate for the utility of practice as an imaginative space to radically reimagine the world and our engagements with it without needing to defer to a possible future. My understanding of how the multirealist text represents the ontological crisis wrought by climate catastrophe is informed by my practice-led research as well as the work of other writers and literary scholarship. Specifically, I conduct my discussion here with reference to a range of ecocritical works, before turning my attention to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018), as well as my short story, “A Still Thing Shaken” (2019).

Human security as biosecurity Reconceptualizing national security threats in the time of COVID-19.

Research within security studies has struggled to determine whether infectious disease (ID) represents an existential threat to national and international security. With the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), it is imperative to reexamine the relationship between ID and global security. This article addresses the specific threat to security from COVID-19, asking, "Is COVID-19 a threat to national and international security?" To investigate this question, this article uses two theoretical approaches: human security and biosecurity. It argues that COVID-19 is a threat to global security by the ontological crisis posed to individuals through human security theory and through high politics, as evidenced by biosecurity. By viewing security threats through the lens of the individual and the state, it becomes clear that ID should be considered an international security threat. This article examines the relevant literature and applies the theoretical framework to a case study analysis focused on the United States.

Commemoration, ambivalent attachments and catharsis: David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue at the Abbey Theatre in 2016

This article analyses David play, Cyprus Avenue, in which Eric, a middle-aged Ulster Unionist, becomes convinced that his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. Ireland is a Belfast-born actor and playwright whose works – Can’t Forget about You (2013) and Ulster American (2018) – have recently generated critical acclaim and debate. Cyprus Avenue, directed by Vicky Featherstone, opened in February at the Abbey Theatre Dublin as part of the theatre’s 1916 commemorative programme, before transferring to the Royal Court. With attention to the nuances of these production conditions, the ways in which Ireland’s play unravels a crisis of northern Irish identity in a post-Agreement context in relation to temporality and gender are explored. Particular attention is focused on how ontological crisis is presented through dislocated, non-linear experiences of time that are enacted within a scenographically crafted space. This crisis is at once personal and impersonal – a metaphor for a northern state of being – and is brutally distilled in acts of violence against women. I will argue that the ideological dimensions to the affective mechanisms of the play and its performance at the Abbey Theatre in 2016 and beyond are deeply ambivalent and deserve scrutiny.

The Ontological Crisis of Schooling: Situating Migrant Childhoods and Educational Exclusion

This article emphasises the discord between ‘mobile childhoods’ and ‘immobile schools’ as the fundamental problematic of educational inclusion of migrant children in India. Formal schooling system predicated upon static ideals of age, grade, learning, curriculum and language, fails to accommodate the lived realities of migrant children. By drawing upon field work narratives with migrant children in Bangalore, I show that migrant children’s educational exclusion cannot be understood in terms of their mobility alone, instead it needs to be problematised in the context of dominant spatio-temporal ideals of childhood and schooling.

What is the Future? Weirdness and Black Time in Sorry to Bother You

Most critics trace the inception of the Weird to H. P. Lovecraft, whose infamous racial politics undergird the uncanny representations that constitute the genre. These critical arrangements are evident in Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. This essay argues that Riley's film literalizes discourses that equate black people with animals and thus highlights how the white fantasy about black sub-humanity persists despite a neoliberal progress narrative invested in the notion that racism is obsolete. The Weird in Riley's film at once reveals the perversely uncanny nature of racism itself and rejects the notion that racism is a function of time rather than of a deeper, ontological crisis in white consciousness. If the future is a construct upon which we project our post-racial "hopes for tomorrow," then Riley's film asks, "What is the future?" Because for the black person, as Sorry to Bother You shows us, the past is prologue.

Ki vagyok én? - Szárnyas fejvadász 2049

My essay focuses on the ontological crisis articulated in the film Blade Runner 2049, the sequel for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This film is based on the conflict between humans and androids called replicants who would like to live equally to humans. In my opinion the root of their opposition lies on the inability to give a proper definition of what we normally call ‘human’. In this writing I present and analyse the nature of this conflict and also the philosophical questions (representation, freedom, self-identity etc.) arising from it based on the ideas of philosophers like Michel Foucault. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Who counts? Ottomans, Early Modernity, and Trans-Imperial Subjecthood

Who counts? Ottomans, Early Modernity, and Trans-Imperial Subjecthood E. Natalie Rothman (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Ottoman Empire, Subjecthood Tucked deep into volume six of Hammer-Purgstall’s magnum opus, the Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, is an anecdote we can summarize as follows: in the summer of 1678, while the Ottoman army, waging campaign against the Tsardom of Russia, laid a second siege on Chyhyryn (central Ukraine), the grand chamberlain intercepted a bag containing twelve Russian letters. Marcantonio Mamuca della Torre, serving as the kaymakam’s dragoman, was charged with translating them but, not knowing Russian, he recruited a slave of the Polish legation to aid him, dragging him into the reis efendi’s tent for that purpose. The slave turned out to be a Jesuit in disguise, who was able therefore to translate the letters into Latin, allowing Mamuca della Torre to then finish translating the Latin into Ottoman within twenty-four hours, as instructed.1 Several aspects of this brief anecdote are worth dwelling on: The interpersonal, distributed, and embodied dimensions of translation, its centrality to inter-imperial interactions, and the multilateral nature of diplomacy (the anecdote then continues with the Polish ambassador’s nephew being required to join the Ottoman military campaign). It underscores the role of serendipity in history (thank goodness for Jesuits in unexpected places!) and, especially, the instability of ethnolinguistic and political fault lines in this borderland (as in the imperial court). An Istanbulite by birth, Marcantonio Mamuca della Torre was the descendent of multiple Catholic Ottoman elite families and a relative by marriage of several Phanariot Orthodox dynasties as well. Shortly after his adventures in the Ukraine he would relocate to Vienna, become a member of the Habsburg War Council, and eventually secure noble title, landed property, and advantageous marriages for his children that would firmly entrench [End Page 58] the family’s place in the Austrian and Hungarian landed aristocracy. His figure may be enigmatic and exceptional, but also emblematic of early modern Ottoman subjecthood. Indeed, his hyper-connected, trans-imperial trajectories raise fundamental questions about the very nature of subjecthood and subjectivity in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It brings into sharper relief the challenge of deciding who “counts” as an early modern Ottoman, from what vantage point, and to what analytical ends. The ontological crisis of “early modernity,” in both its Europeanist, Ottomanist, and “global” iterations now seems to have been lain to rest. Whereas scholars are perhaps more mindful than ever that, conceptually, “early modernity” originates in decidedly Eurocentric epistemologies, the processes that define the period analytically are no longer seen as exclusively, or even primarily, limited to Europe. As newer generations of scholars have come to view Europe as emergent through its manifold interactions with a wider world, fewer scholars wonder whether “early modernity” existed. Clearly, this periodization, like any other, entails a fair degree of arbitrariness, a certain erasure of both internal heterogeneity and significant continuities with an elusive “pre” modern. The contested nature of “modernity” itself, and the teleological assumptions embedded in the “early” designation are all legitimate concerns, even if their elaboration has sometimes led to caricaturizing accounts of what came in its wake. At the current historiographical moment, the temporal boundaries of early modernity, forever porous and contentious, seem to require less policing. Within the field of Ottoman studies, the success of “early modernity” in establishing itself as a standard periodization seems to have been salutary on at least two levels: First, it has allowed the field finally to overcome the long Gibbonian shadow of “Golden Age” and “Decline,” to pay attention not simply to the continuities between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and beyond), but to the myriad ways in which the latter was pivotal in shaping our perspectives on the former. Secondly, it has provided the idiom for an important, and still unfolding conversation about the deep embedding of the Ottomans in a Eurasian system of circulation and meaning-making. This has allowed Ottomanists to pay closer attention to the empire’s global connectivities. Even more importantly, it has facilitated precautious efforts by non-Ottomanists to integrate the Ottomans more fully into broader accounts of early modernity, less in the vein...