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    This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series examines one of the most important topics in contemporary political theory: how to conceptualize the relationship between the one and the many. The essays discuss how to reconcile multiple ontologies without subsuming them to a totalitarian unity. While one school of thought seeks to create a new ontology based on the many instead of the one,, another proposes to understand the "one" as the "ultra-one" of the event. In this g…Read more
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    What is an Orientation in History? Openness and Subjectivity
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2009 (147): 121-148. 2009.
    This essay attempts to formulate an ethical program for today's left by showing that such a program should necessarily involve both the insistence on a subjectivity, in the sense of a revolutionary self-determination that would go beyond the liberal pre-established autonomy and an openness to the new and unrecognized that would go beyond all liberal tolerance. I further argue that the only way to understand the co-articulation of subjectivity and openness is to accentuate the event as the origin…Read more
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    The historical meaning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and of the subsequent post-communist transformation remains profoundly unclear. Most observers hesitate to designate these events as a revolution, building on a common-sense notion of revolution as a violent, radical change. My dissertation argues that the post-communist transformation was indeed a revolution and proves this claim by comparing it with the French Revolution, in its political, social, and anthropological aspects. In bot…Read more
  •  69
    Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt on the Jewish question: political theology as a critique
    Continental Philosophy Review 45 (4): 545-568. 2012.
    The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and im…Read more
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    Negativity in Communism: Ontology and Politics
    Russian Sociological Review 13 (1): 9-25. 2014.
    The article addresses the notion of communism with a special angle of factuality and negativity, and not in the usual sense of a futurist utopia. After considering the main contemporary theories of communism in left-leaning political thought, the author turns to the Soviet experience of an “actually existing communism.” Apart from and against the bureaucratic state, a social reality existed organized around res nullius, that is, an unappropriated world that was not a collective property, as in t…Read more
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    This article offers a close reading of Hannah Arendt's book On Revolution. It exposes the ambivalence of Arendt with regard to tragedy and mimesis. This ambivalence is not just her own; it is inherent in the treatment of tragedy and mimesis throughout the history of political thought. In spite of Arendt's argument that privileges the limited American Revolution against the boundless French one, in her rhetoric and in her storytelling Arendt presents a unitary but dialectical picture of revolutio…Read more