Dmitry Popov

The idea of the police as a “good order” from the Polizeiwissenschaft of absolutism was developed in the biopolitical model of caring for the population of the Modern era, engaged in ensuring safety and well-being. Being a product of mass society, the modern state has focused on influencing public opinion. In the XIX–XX centuries, there was a counter-movement of police supervision and art which gave rise to ‘police aesthetics’. Cinematography was an effective means of forming a desirable image of the Soviet militia in the post-war period of normalization of public life. By contributing to the Soviet myth of developed socialism, militia cinema contributed to a screen-to-life transfer of a new norm of trust between representatives of power and citizens. This constructivist cinema involved the viewer in the cinematic reality by likening them to the main character, a militiaman who acts as a moral guide. In addition to forming the image of the ‘familial militia’, intellectual militia cinema—with its focus on professionalism—is actively developing. The most popular version of the latter is militia cinema that thematizes the moral rightness of militia officers fighting crime in the name of Soviet citizens. Involvement in the cinematic reality through assimilation, novelty, memory, and imagination included the romanticization of the historical events of the revolution. Militia cinema was inverted during the years of the perestroika. It exploited the effect of novelty associated with the viewer's immersion in emerging market relations. The viewer's interest was focused on the wrong, criminal, side of public life. Crime is romanticized, the militia is stigmatized. From constructing the myth of cooperation between the government and the population, militia cinema moves on to deconstructing the myth, achieving an effect of denigration. The fashion for American cinema brings elements of action, thriller, horror. The viewer is no longer included in the imperious project of transforming reality; they are attracted by the illusion, the spectacle. The latest police cinema, overcoming total deconstructionism, is busy reconstructing the spirit of Soviet militia cinema in modern settings. Oscillating between the intention to generate positive images of the police and the demonstration of the “truth of life”, modern police cinema contains the natal shoots of a new cinema in which the image of the police is important for the normalization of public life.

The discourse of political theology developed by Schmitt makes it possible to identify a secular religion in Marxism. Marxism is aimed at achieving an “earthly paradise”. In the Soviet project, based on the “dictatorship of the worldview” (Berdyaev), its own political theology is being formed, including apophatic and cataphatic elements. The apophatic content is connected with the totalization of the denial of the ideals, laws, and order of the old world. Hobbes sees in the state a Leviathan — a powerful mortal god, whom God is able to catch and tame at any moment. Taking the side of the Behemoth in the fight against Leviathan, the revolutionary forces are focused on the negative ontological connection that arises during the collapse of the state between Leviathan and God, whose place in the revolutionary consciousness is occupied by the laws of history. The apophatic theology of the Soviet project is built in the logic of increased attention to revolutionary upheavals, punishing Leviathan for unworthy behavior. As a result, the Soviet revolutionary project is deconstructing and destructive in nature. Revolutionary forces, personifying righteous anger, radicalize the fight against the discovered “social evil”, entering an area of the escalation of violence. A necessary condition for building a “new world” is the consistent destruction of the old one “to the foundations”. However, at the moment of gaining power, the revolutionary forces abandon the apophatic and enter the cataphatic path. The main dogma for social construction is the position of communism as the inevitable future of human history. Blind faith in the inevitability of communism is ill-suited to see what God, or the laws of history, allows Leviathan to do. The struggle against the dehumanizing essence of capitalism gradually contributes to the construction of an equally dehumanizing society (Berdyaev) — an ideological, bureaucratic, planned-distributive total state. Rampant communal forces (Zinoviev) create new hierarchies and a new social division. Ideology takes frozen “hypernormal” forms that do not correspond to reality. In the end, the mismatch of social and ideological projects during the “performative shift” (Yurchak) entails the collapse of the USSR, illustrating the new revelation of the divine pacification of Leviathan.

The article deals with the mythological creativity of G.R.R. Tolkien as a socio-cultural phenomenon associated with the values of European culture. The author proceeds from the hypothesis that the myth is the embodiment of social identity, this function it retains after the loss of its ideological functions. The revival of literary mythology in the XIX-XX centuries there is an attempt to update this feature of the myth. The success of the literary myth is due to the fact that he was able to absorb and Express the basic values of society. Tolkien’s work is one of the successful examples of the literary embodiment of socially significant values, combining both traditional values and value formations characteristic of the modern era. The article shows that Tolkien’s work has organically absorbed the pagan basis, the Christian attitude, and the values characteristic of the XX century. Pagan heroic principle, Christian mercy, the idea of freedom, democracy-all this is organically intertwined in the works of Tolkien, their success is due to the harmony of the whole range of social attitudes represented in the European consciousness of the mid XX century. Currently, the decline in interest in Tolkien is a reflection of the change of value preferences of European culture.

The scope of the study is the virtue of magnanimity that reveals not only a moral but also an epistemological dimension in the context of the history of philosophy. The paper analyzes the actualization of this virtue in the works of Aristotle, Descartes and Nietzsche, where it appears at the intersection of ethics and theory of knowledge, characterizing the pursuit of truth both in science and philosophy. The relevance of such a study of the concept of magnanimity correlates with the subjects and methods of contemporary virtue epistemology that emphasizes the role of values and virtues in cognition, as well as with the modern philosophical reflection of the foundations of science in general.