Vladimir Anisimov's Presentation: "Mikhail Lifshits and Western Marxist Criticism of (Post)Modernism. Comparative Analysis"

On October 16, 2023, as part of the regular seminar "Dialogue Between Russia and Europe: the View of Young Researchers", Vladimir A. Anisimov, a graduate student of the HSE School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, an research assistant of the Laboratory, made a report

The report presented a comparative analysis of critical views on (post)modernism, expressed by the Soviet Marxist Mikhail Lifshitz and Western Marxist critics — Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Despite the availability of a huge amount of works on the philosophy of Mikhail Lifshits, nowadays there is no systematic comparative study of his views with similar views of Western thinkers. Mikhail Lifshits's Russian-language research was made by such authors as Andrey Maidansky, Alexey Lagurev, Dmitry Gutov, Viktor Arslanov, Sergey Mareev and Nadezhda Mareeva. In order to define the philosophy of Mikhail Lifshitz, within the framework of criticism of modernism and postmodernism, it was considered how Lifshitz, Jameson and Baudrillard defined modernism and postmodernism, as well as how art related to those concepts. In addition, Vladimir Anisimov identified differences in the definitions of modernism by Mikhail Lifshitz and the American philosopher Fredric Jameson. In his first works, Fredric Jameson attributed to the "new" modernism the art that he later defined as postmodernism. The author drew attention to the fact that pop art was an example of such a change in the definition. Through a comparative analysis of the works of Mikhail Lifshitz, Jean Baudrillard and Fredrikc Jameson, it can be seen that philosophers have strikingly similar opinions about pop art. Given this, it should be said that Mikhail Lifshits expressed his concerns about modernism and its logic before Western Marxist critics paid attention to it.

Whatch the video on the YouTube-channel of the Laboratory.