The seagull of loneliness in the ocean of international anxiety
Insights from Russian existential philosophy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12190885 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sergei Akopov (0000-0002-8883-4856, Freie Universität Berlin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studies in East European Thought (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0925-9392 • E-ISSN: 1573-0948 |
| Publisher | Springer Nature (PUBLISHER • SG) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s11212-025-09766-2 |
| OpenAlex | W7115925949 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 26 |
The article is innovative in the way it brings the history of Russian existentialism into dialogue with current debates in two approaches to world politics: “global International Relations” and “ontological security studies”. Both approaches seek to decentre modern politics, dismantle its hegemonic structures without essentialising new borders, and disentangle the individual Self from the traps of national and imperial ontological insecurities. My article advances these debates by introducing a novel conceptual metaphor of the Lonely Self in the oceanic tidepools of international anxiety, unpacked through ideas from twentieth century Russian existentialism and personalism. To theorise such the Lonely Self, I look at four existential dimensions of being: space, time, the authentic Self, and significant political Others. These correspond respectively to the spatial symbol of an ocean in the philosophy of Semyon Frank, Pavel Florensky’s idea of petrified time, the loneliness of the authentic Self in Lev Shestov’s “Robinsonade” philosophy, and Nikolai Berdyaev’s personalist critique of social conformism. The research outcomes challenge the nation-centric critique of war and facilitate the construction of transnational oceanic theory of world politics
Existentialism · Hegemony · International relations · Loneliness · Political philosophy · Politics · Symbol (formal · Central Asia Education and Culture · Humanities and Social Sciences · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies
Affective Communities in World Politics
Hunger for certainty’
Global international relations and the essentialism trap
Integrating anxiety into international relations theory
Anxiety, time, and ontological security's third-image potential
The Concept of Anxiety in Ontological Security Studies
[Our] age of anxiety
State personhood and ontological security as a framework of existence
Dugin’s masks
Lev Shestov’s philosophy of freedom
Guilty of goodness? Or innocently good
Explaining Russia’s war against Ukraine
Russia and power
Hegemonic metronome
States of ambivalence
The problem of change in constructivist theory
Feeling at Home in Europe
Je suis en terrasse
The Dark Matter of World Politics
Ontological Security in World Politics
Returning to the roots of ontological security
(Re-)imagining the 'Self' of Ontological Security
Madonna versus 'Mother Russia?' Visual Anthropology of Loneliness and Gendered Nationalism on Russian 2021-2023 Political Posters
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |