Elad Magomedov

This paper examines the paradox of performative ideological sincerity within totalitarian regimes by analyzing Noviy Mir’s 1956 rejection of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. Rather than viewing this rejection as merely bureaucratic automatism or cynical pragmatism, the study argues that the editors displayed a form of ideological sincerity rooted in performative adherence, despite clear awareness of Stalinist crimes. Through a critical reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “thoughtlessness” and Victor Klemperer’s insights into propagandistic clichés, the paper introduces “thoughtless thinking” as a form of cognition performatively committed to ideology but indifferent to its substantive meaning. This thought neutralizes factual reality through repetitive, authoritative discourse, converting genuine ideological belief into ritualized performance. By investigating the interplay among memory, propaganda, and reflective judgment, the paper demonstrates how Soviet censorship operated on performative ideological sincerity that corrupted its ability to make sense of both the past and the present.

Section: Article Keywords: Array, Array, Array, Array, Array, Array, Array, Array This paper investigates the relationship between violence, memory, and historical erasure in modernity, arguing that certain forms of political violence aim not merely to shape history but to obliterate its conditions of possibility. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and W.G. Sebald, the paper traces two distinct but converging strategies of silencing the past: the organized lie – a deliberate, state-engineered falsification of factual reality – and equanimity, a cultivated indifference that renders atrocity banal despite the continued visibility of its traces. These mechanisms neutralize the disruptive potential of memory, which otherwise resists the homogenizing force of official narratives. Arendt’s concept of the organized lie is compared to atomic annihilation, wherein falsification spreads through networks of interrelated facts, dissolving the fabric of historical intelligibility. Violence, in this context, is not a political instrument but an apolitical force that undoes the very structure of worldhood and temporality. The paper argues that historiography must move beyond the accumulation of empirical data and toward a reconstruction of the intentional destruction of history—influenced by what Sebald calls a “natural history of destruction.” By shifting focus from world-producing to world-dissolving violence, historiography must recognize that violence is not simply enacted within history but is directed at history itself: at its intelligibility, continuity, and transmissibility. The task is to discern the annihilative force that renders the past incommunicable or meaningless, and to bear witness to what resists re-inscription into the historical record.

This article explores Ivan Kireyevsky’s articulation of Russian singularity (osobennost’) in his 1852 text “On the Character of Enlightenment in Europe and Its Relation to Enlightenment in Russia.” Kireyevsky was among the first Slavophiles to systematically define Russianness (russkost’) as a unique ontological category that separates Russia from European modernity. This paper examines his method of defining Russian distinctiveness by contrasting it with Europe. Through a close reading of Kireyevsky’s text, the study critically engages with his conceptual choices and clarifies his understanding of both Russian singularity and European history. The article concludes that Kireyevsky rejects European universalism as a counterfeit double of the one true universalism grounded in Russianness. Building on the implications of his analysis, this paper argues that Kireyevsky sees in Europe not merely Russia’s conceptual other, but the Antichrist.

This article examines the transformation of propaganda in the digital age through the conceptual frameworks of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. While Arendt’s notion of the “organized lie” exposes the systematic falsification of reality in totalitarian regimes, it does not fully explain how falsehoods become subjectively experienced as truth. By combining Sartre’s phenomenology of the imaginary with Arendt, this article illuminates how propaganda constructs “phantasms”—irreal pasts that appear real and shape lived experience. The phantasm is distinguished by five features: it falsifies the past, conceals its unreality, alters perception without changing reality, resists clear definition, and is disseminated openly. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, including Russia’s use of troll farms and AI-generated content, the article shows how digital media disseminates phantasms through scalable, individualized disinformation that mimics genuine public opinion. This simulation of consensus restructures the conditions under which truth appears and opinions are formed, effectively replacing reality with a phantasmatic substitute. By linking Arendt’s political theory with Sartre’s ontology of the image, the article offers a phenomenological account of digital imposture that clarifies the existential stakes of propaganda today—not merely the obscuration of facts, but the distortion of world-disclosure itself.

Sartre’s thinking in L’être et le néant is driven by a conceptual choice that radically breaks with the philosophical spirit of Sein und Zeit and, in the same gesture, problematizes it. This rupture involves three moments. The first moment appears when Sartre transforms Heidegger’s emphasis on ‘being and time’ into ‘being and nothingness’. The second moment occurs when that transformation effectuates a conceptual shift which results in the inversion of the relationship that Heidegger establishes between anxiety and freedom: whereas in Sein und Zeit anxiety is the precondition of freedom, in Sartre freedom becomes the precondition of anxiety. Finally, in the third moment, the absolute primacy of spontaneity in L’être et le néant ultimately serves as the cornerstone for Sartre’s reevaluation of truth, challenging the fundamental concept of ‘Geworfenheit’ in Sein und Zeit. Unlike Heidegger’s view where truth (alètheia) coincides with existence, in L’être et le néant, truth is portrayed as an ongoing struggle: consciousness must consistently fight against it in bad faith or forcefully liberate it from bad faith. Together, these three moments constitute the primary components of Sartre’s originality in relation to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

Different kinds of fakery and imposture can be differentiated by means of the imaginary regimes within which a performative simulation unfolds. Engaging with Sartre’s analysis of the imaginary, we will identify three such regimes, calling them the objective, the reflective, and the phantasmatic. Each of these regimes involves its own kind of image and accordingly a specific type of simulation. It is proper to the objective image to attain dissimulation of the self by replacing the real with fiction. In the reflective regime, the real is not substituted by the imaginary, but rather contaminated by it. Finally, whereas the objective and the reflective regimes operate within the sphere of intentional simulation, the phantasmatic image carries us beyond Sartre’s findings, as it shapes the very structure of pre-reflective disclosedness which provides the background for our projects.

This paper will revitalize the notion of force in Sartre’s phenomenology by reinterpreting thrown-projection as propulsion. From there, Sartre’s analysis of agency will be explored as regards the constitutive moments pertaining to the dynamics of striving. We will see that such striving relates to Deleuze’s ideas on how bodily forces take consciousness into possession. In the final steps of the analysis, it will turn out that freedom is dependent on a rupture that emerges from self-determination of consciousness, which is itself not of the order of freedom.

Whenever we think of impostors, we tend to think of liars. Yet impostures cannot be phenomenologically reduced to lies. Every lie presupposes a distinction between true and false, and it operates through a negation of reality, presenting falsity as truth and vice versa. An imposture, on the other hand, seeks to erase the distinction between true and false altogether. An impostor constructs a fiction that aims at substituting reality. In this process, an entire network of lies is put to work in order to attain the ontological status of the real. This results in a dynamic that deprives truths of their authority, while making untruths highly potent in terms of their capacity to produce effects.