Beyond Desire

In the winter of 2020 the transgender science-fiction author Isabella Fall published a story that reimagined a pervasive transphobic internet quip—that one’s gender identity may be an attack helicopter—into an engrossing tale of a woman physically and mentally transformed into a multimillion-dollar piece of military hardware capable of providing close air support to ground troops and delivering antitank and antiair missiles. Fall’s story demonstrates how the most intimate aspects of ourselves—our gender, our sexuality, and our desires—are not necessarily liberatory but indeed malleable according to the dominant forces in our societies: economic systems and the states that govern us.Two recent academic studies by Keti Chukhrov and Bogdan Popa pose a similar question, examining the role of Cold War ideology in shaping Western critical theory’s perspectives on the “libidinal economy,” desire, gender, and sexuality. Both authors seek to critically reexamine the dismissive attitude of leading Western social and critical theorists toward Soviet and Eastern European Marxist epistemologies in constructing their own anticapitalist thought, with special attention paid to the relationship between gender, sexuality, and systems of private property. Chukhrov and Popa, in their own distinct idioms, demonstrate how a wide range of leading thinkers—Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, and others—have rooted their anticapitalist critiques not in the context of concrete experiences of building socialist society, as in Eastern Europe, but in a latent desire for capitalist alienation itself as a disruptive and therefore positive force. Thus, they argue, Western anticapitalist critiques themselves need and desire that which they ostensibly repudiate, all the while projecting and affirming Cold War dichotomies. This second point of critique has clear antecedents in the writings of Mark Fisher, Boris Groys,1 Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, to name just a few, but Chukhrov and Popa’s books offer a truly impressive breadth of cross-cultural readings between Western theory and Eastern European Marxism, cinema, object design, psychology, and aesthetic theory. Despite sharing similar critical foundations, however, Chukhrov and Popa take different approaches. Practicing the Good casts a wider net, analyzing political economy, sexuality, aesthetics, and the “ontics” (PG, 9) of communism, whereas Popa trains his focus through the topic of sexuality and interrogates the origins and political assumptions of gender and queer studies in the West, a phenomenon he terms “Cold War gender.”Keti Chukhrov is a poet, philosopher, and theorist of art at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her work covers literary analysis, poetry, contemporary art, Soviet philosophy, and Soviet and post-Soviet gender and sexuality. She has been called “one of the most important theoretical voices to emerge from post-Soviet Russia” and was previously shortlisted for the Bely Prize.2Practicing the Good exemplifies the full range of Chukhrov’s scholarly and critical breadth, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with thoughtful readings of Soviet literature and film.Chukhrov’s thesis in Practicing the Good is twofold. First, she argues that since the 1960s Western theorists, in their attempts to formulate their own anticapitalist ideas, have neglected, misunderstood, and even dismissed Soviet and Eastern European experiences under socialism as well as the contributions of key Marxist theoreticians in the region, along the lines of the Cold War. Second, she maintains that in doing so, they have located their anticapitalist thought in distinctly capitalist experience, namely alienation. Boris Groys, in his foreword to Practicing the Good, summarizes this phenomenon bluntly, writing that “one might describe this time [i.e., the decades after the collapse of the USSR] as a transformation of the Cold War rather than [its] end,” and that “today the Western Left still wants to remain inside the West—and, thus, it is still defined by Cold War divides” (PG, 11). Chukhrov demonstrates this point throughout the book effectively, exploring how Western theorists’ uncritical dismissal of “really existing socialism” curtails their own anticapitalist imagination. She writes: “Historical socialism is exactly that ‘outside’ from which one can see how the aberrations and fallacies in the critique of capitalist subsumption are overlooked by the token of their own entanglement in the logic of capital” (PG, 21). In other words, the Soviet socialist experience serves as a lens to challenge or correct the capitalist underpinnings of Western theory. Where Chukhrov’s book excels is in the breadth, depth, and insight of its readings of the superstars of Western theory vis-à-vis Soviet philosophers, psychologists, theorists, novelists, and filmmakers.Chukhrov begins by exploring the political and economic assumptions of major Western poststructuralist and psychoanalytic thinkers. Early on she introduces one of the book’s major arguments: that while Western anticapitalist theory nominally denounces the phenomenon of capitalist alienation, it simultaneously, and perversely, desires it. Chukhrov cites Cornelius Castoriadis’s Imaginary Institution of Society, Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and Foucault’s History of Sexuality as primary examples, examining how they conflate Marxist concepts with the psychoanalytic notions of “desire” and “libidinal economy.”3 Her reading of these texts using Marx and Engels’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is convincing, arguing that the concept of “surplus value,” signifying the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, as it is taken up in poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory, is “ontologized and seen as an innate force of the libidinal” in poststructuralist theory, conflating the material and libidinal (PG, 29).4 While these thinkers often accurately diagnose the negative effects of capitalism, she contends, they subconsciously accept its conditions when their primary mode of resistance to capitalist alienation is to exaggerate and intensify its most alienating features. Chukhrov contrasts this translation of Marx’s thought with the concrete anticapitalism of the Soviet state, namely the criminalization of private property, surplus economy, fetishized consumption, and thus the ethics and aesthetics of libidinality. Thus, Chukhrov writes, “in the very act of repulsion there is a fascination with the repulsive” for these thinkers (PG, 28). Capitalism, in other words, is the toxic partner they cannot quit.One of the more interesting applications of this idea is found in Chukhrov’s exploration of Soviet thinkers to attempt to create a materialist theory of language, focusing on the works of Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Leontiev, and Evald Ilyenkov through the applied lessons at the Zagorsk Internat, a school for deaf-blind children founded in 1963 and the site of linguistic and pedagogical research and experimentation throughout the 1970s. Alexander Mershcheryakov, the founder of the school and a student of Vygotsky, and Ilyenkov were interested in the students’ severe alienation from all they deemed human, existing in a world “where there is only matter, but not mind, spirit, psyche, and consciousness, volition, thinking, speech, [or] image and idea of an outer world.”5 Researchers and instructors developed a tactile language for students as well as techniques for them to use everyday items and attain a degree of self-sufficiency. Chukhrov examines how a materialist philosophy of language, one which is not abstracted from reality and materiality as in poststructuralism, guided the pedagogy at Zagorsk. Unlike the famous example of Helen Keller, who was taught to repeat words before associating them with external stimuli (a priori), students at Zagorsk built language on their sensations a posteriori, reflecting Vygotsky’s notion that “the word is ready when the concept is ready” (PG, 51). Chukhrov asserts that the school made strides in proving that “pedagogy in the social context of communism was capable of constructing a full-fledged social subject with social consciousness, even despite gravely impaired physiological and sensory capacities” (PG, 49); she cites a particularly emotional statement by Alexander Suvorov, a student, that “we see and hear by the eyes of all our friends, all people, all humankind.”6Though Chukhrov’s examination of the Zagorsk Internat would be enriched by including work from disability studies, particularly given these psychologists and philosophers’ use of students’ experiences as a metaphor of consciousness, her reading of Ilyenkov and materialist theories of language is cogent. Her enthusiasm for the experiment—as well as Ilyenkov’s—shines through and serves as an intriguing case study not only for materialist conceptions of language, but indeed as an almost utopian model of transcending one’s physicality through community with others. The section encapsulates Chukhrov’s fascination with cosmism—a cultural and philosophical movement originating in nineteenth-century Russia that sought to synthesize natural philosophy, spirituality, and an unwavering belief in the spiritual and scientific future of humanity—which greatly influenced the Soviet avant-garde and efforts to build a distinct proletarian culture and society, and which defines much of her writing. Chukhrov returns throughout Practicing the Good to the Marxist notion of the “productive body,” which emphasizes the role of the body in realizing society’s emancipatory (and often transhumanist) potential and stands in contrast to theories of libidinal economy and Western gender theory that posit the body as primarily a vehicle for articulating one’s desires and individuality. While her critique of Western theories of desire and the body are compelling, they would be served by further critical examination of the “productive body” as a category, a topic addressed frequently in the works of disability theorists.Another highlight is Chukhrov’s chapter on Soviet films, titled “Too Much Socialism: the Non-cinema of Soviet Film.” She asks why the Western, libidinally conditioned subject finds the idea or representation of life in a planned, nonlibidinal economy dull, weaving observations about daily life under Soviet socialism with thoughtful analysis of the aesthetic-political sensibilities of post-Stalin cinema. As anyone knows who has taught nondissident Soviet fiction and film to nonspecialists (often, even specialists!), the most common complaints are that they are boring, lacking in recognizable conflict and character development, and austere or even ascetic. Chukhrov argues that the function of Soviet film is not aesthetic innovation but “finding out how the already established noncapitalist modes of production can be fully incarnated and inscribed into the texture of social production” or, in other words, “how reality can be realized as real” (PG, 93). While the Western subject, conditioned to capitalist alienation, may find these films boring because they lack legible conflict, it does not mean that they are artless or devoid of action. Using Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of metanoia and halo, Chukhrov asserts that Soviet cinema possesses “too much socialism,” requiring protagonists to “exert almost superhuman ethical deeds posited by de-privatized social systems and infrastructure” (PG, 94). Her arguments bear similarity to aspects of Katerina Clark’s “modal schizophrenia”—referring to the need of Soviet art to simultaneously depict a positive, realistic present and evoke a utopian future—and to E. A. Dobrenko’s assertion that Soviet cinema’s aesthetic was to produce socialism itself through representation;7 but Chukhrov presents a convincing explanation of why Soviet cinema’s characterization plots, to borrow a modern idiom, are to “do better,” and why this is so difficult to understand through the lens of Western critical theory.Chukhrov’s film interpretations, particularly of the Ukrainian Soviet director Larisa Shepitko’s films Wings (1966) and You and Me (1971), are well written but fairly conventional and echo the work of Clark, Dobrenko, Groys, and others on Soviet art. What makes this section interesting, however, is its use of “boring” Soviet films to deconstruct erroneous assumptions about Soviet society as lacking, informed by theories that conflate private property, fetishized consumption, alienation, and sexual desire. The section also serves as an effective counterweight to the more futurist and transhumanist elements, demonstrating how the Cold War mindset of Western theorists failed to comprehend not only the utopian elements of Soviet ideology but its prosaic realities as well.Popa’s critique of Western theorists of gender, sexuality, and queerness in De-centering Queer Theory unfolds along lines similar to Chukhrov’s, but the author differentiates his project from Chukhrov’s, which, in his words, “suggests a total rejection of queer performativity” by attempting to “generate a new Marxist queer model that captures the progressive potential of a queer critique” (DQ, 14). He does not reject Chukhrov’s analysis, indeed affirming much of it, but does orient his project in a distinct, activism-informed direction. Popa, a senior researcher in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at Transylvania University of Brasov, has published two earlier books, Sexul şi capitalul: O teorie a filmului românesc (Sex and the Capital: A Theory of Romanian Cinema, 2017) and Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century (2017), which examine the political and labor dimensions of gender, sexuality and race and carefully explore the aesthetics and practices of In De-centering Queer Theory he an critique of queer theory, arguing that the materialist of its and theoretical production” and of Soviet and Eastern European (DQ, Popa that queer theory its in and in the and aesthetics of and that this has studies of gender and sexuality in and While the of the as and the capitalist as is for critical Popa to recent efforts to Marxism, and queer studies by and who lack in Eastern and the Soviet begins by a convincing about the Cold War itself as “the social for as gender and (DQ, He on the of the of identity and that Western social theory in gender and sexuality studies This the conflict of the Cold Popa the an attack only on the economy of but also on the of and sexuality by Soviet (DQ, He that focusing on the between gender and when toward the of and an important theoretical to the academic study of gender as well as a in the of and his concept of “Cold War by and socialist conceptions of a “productive than as a vehicle for articulating one’s as in the Western concept of gender, he asserts that the Marxist of a body it as a that a and to (DQ, This key of Chukhrov’s that a socialist economy new conceptions of and and different between gender, sexuality, and desire. Popa, to the thought of the Alexander and the who all that the and of the would create not only a new proletarian culture but indeed a new Soviet This model of the “productive body,” Popa stands in to the Western notion of the body,” which rather than the conditions of demonstrate this Popa interesting case studies from socialist cinema, most the Soviet film and In the her and to remain in she can and but to and in there are to the by the conflict between and the it is the people, from the economy, who the to a As Popa the film the from a desire of to a socialist in which a is given by her rejection of a (DQ, 51). her and and in her own and finds in an of building Popa’s analysis with Chukhrov’s reading of Soviet cinema through while providing of socialist concepts of the between desire, and writing also with and to Chukhrov’s critique of gender studies and queer theory. In her section on sexuality, Chukhrov begins by that the major theorists of gender and sexuality in the Butler, and so not fully into the conditions of the socialist economy in analyzing gender in to how the economy of and sexuality the concepts of private and surplus (PG, Her critique of is that major and a capitalist logic in which the and their experience remain the primary Chukhrov makes the case that idea of rooted in its when applied to the Soviet of the body the surplus economy sought to gender “in terms of as a of the (PG, Thus, while Soviet society gender it posit a in which the gender identity was ostensibly to their role in constructing the conditions of gender the or sexual the social of (PG, as their anticapitalism in experiences of capitalist alienation, Chukhrov so does theory of gender She further this with post-Soviet on and sexuality, in which the of a sexuality that was by the and the state, and that the of one’s sexual desires or identity is with and these assumptions have been as in that and more under socialism because of the lack of material and on in Soviet While Chukhrov’s writing the of it makes an intriguing theoretical to pervasive assumptions in post-Soviet gender Popa presents Western to Marxist of his most interesting the work of research on gender, gender sexual in and was and He the terms gender role and sexual that still in common speech, and the in Popa cites works by and have how writing and posited the of and in his of gender and that and disability as that was by in to the and of children and a most by the case of was in but because of a his the to at and to as a the as a demonstrating the of gender, as a and to Popa does not into the case but cites theories as the of social which that one’s of is and therefore that is He presents a reading of gender one has a identity at the the Cold War of and other why and his and as that need to be or and into existing Popa’s analysis that even Cold War gender the of and these have to and sexuality on the of the desires of the most and in the of the as he from Eastern European Marxist to contemporary queer theory, queer and Western He from the queer theorist theory of which as and simultaneously and dominant cultural as well as from the works of and to that art demonstrates a in to its of a world private Western anticapitalism and in its and on the internet (DQ, A reading of The and The two Romanian films on in and makes a case for the of socialist cinema, it would be by reading of in Western cinema which, as Popa argues often with the and representation of is the chapter which on of and in to vis-à-vis two different films, from and Popa’s reading of from is examining how the in the film is often not only but as to and of or on their The analysis of a film about two and their Popa’s observations on from The film and has just been from after the for her and she however, that on her and her out of and she Popa makes the case that and much the of socialist cinema, seek to their desires to their labor with he argues that this demonstrates the of socialist aesthetics for building and as by the between and and with their The of these two films is but as is Popa’s film analysis as a the Good and De-centering Queer Theory highlight the of Western scholarly for Eastern European and Soviet and socialism particularly desire, gender, and sexuality. Both Chukhrov and Popa the important that notions of which Western critical theory, have their own cultural and in that be particularly when applied to notions of gender and sexuality in Chukhrov and Popa, however, at in and Chukhrov’s writing is more on theorists and theory from a philosophical whereas Popa’s makes a in this about the of Eastern European Marxist thought and art for contemporary queer books present effective would from further exploration and In Chukhrov and Popa much more to examine transgender and which have a major political point of in and in recent While Western have and queer as a often the language of the Cold War in doing so, this has as Western to Russia as an of and phenomenon that interesting for makes of does she with recent writing on it from or other contemporary queer While this subject is the of her it does offer an interesting point of to her exploring the of and in Marxist as well as an to more contemporary Western queer theorists and who often to Cold War and erroneous conceptions of gender in Russia and the Soviet while and Popa the subject of and this he further into the materiality and realities of While the on and are well they would from on how the material reality of gender What is after not an the of gender production for however, Practicing the Good and De-centering Queer Theory are and scholarly contributions that synthesize work from philosophy, critical theory, literary studies, and academic works most these books voices that are between these in with one

Aesthetics · Alienation · Context (archaeology · Deleuze and Guattari · Human sexuality · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology

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