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Mikhail Lifshits’ logomythy: “the art of discrimination”

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Abstract

The article reconstructs an original concept of myth developed by Mikhail Lifshits. He invented the term “logomythia”, as the “art of discrimination”, to show the ambivalent nature of creative work, where archaic myth dies as a historical nonsense and resurrects as a human meaning. Logomythia demonstrates the overcoming of the irrational element in the life of societies by linking it to the rational or meaningful content of artistic images. And, on the other hand, the concept contains more than a hint of the crisis of rationalism in the twentieth century which destroyed the harmony of man with nature.

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Notes

  1. First published in the anthology Ideji esteticheskogo vospitanija, vol. 1 (Moskva: Iskusstvo 1973, pp. 7–113). Here quoted according to re-publication in Lifshits 1984.

  2. Lifshits borrowed the expression “historical madness” from Alexander Herzen.

  3. “Das Ganze, wie es im Kopfe als Gedankenganzes erscheint, ist ein Produkt des denkenden Kopfes, der sich die Welt in der ihm einzig möglichen Weise aneignet, einer Weise, die verschieden ist von der künstlerisch-, religiös-, praktisch-geistigen Aneignung dieser Welt”.

  4. V. G. Arslanov uses Lifshits’s mention of the concept of the “gap” to stress the proximity of his ideas to post modernism and the concept of difference introduced by Jacques Derrida (see: Arslanov 2009, pp. 93–107). I am more inclined to think that by “gap” (schel’) Lifshits meant the elusive point of balance between opposing forces of life and consciousness, nature and society in a period of transition to a new type of social organization that highlights the logical threads of any mythology rather than the battle against “logocentrism” with J. Derrida and various discriminations used in Deconstructivism. Lifshits did not mince his words in expressing his attitude to such “fiddling” with French words by the “Derridas” of his time: “The American ethnologist Paul Reidin writes that it is hard to explain why such notions as representations collectives, participation mystique, mentalité prélogique, mythisches Denken have met with such universal enthusiasm. To be sure, the reason is the times we have been living in for two generations already. The latter is absolutely true of course” (Lifshits 1984, 351).

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Correspondence to Svetlana Klimova.

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Klimova, S. Mikhail Lifshits’ logomythy: “the art of discrimination”. Stud East Eur Thought 68, 283–293 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-016-9268-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-016-9268-3

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