From binarism to ternarity: Yuri Lotman's theoretical vision of the post-Sovietism

From binarism to ternarity: Yuri Lotman’s theoretical vision of the post-Sovietism

This paper refers to the culturologist Yuri Lotman’s latest political-philosophical reflections on the future of Russian culture in the post-perestroika period.

In the early sixties, the Jewish-Russian philosopher gave life in Estonia – where he was exiled because of his origins – to the academic axis Tartu-Moscow, becoming one of its maximum theorists and impressing in it an ethical habitus based (not coincidentally) on the concept of otherness.  

Crossroads of theoretical and methodological instances and particular historical conditions (previously the Soviet regime, afterwards the perestroika), Estonian experience gave, as its ripest fruit, the so-called “semiotics of culture”, meant as an open discipline in continuous dialogue with the other human and social science: in primis, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies –: Lotman’s ultimate aim was, in fact, to establish a culturology based on the interdisciplinary method.       

The attitude towards dialogue and for adopting the distinction between “own” and “other” (svoe and čužoe), as a method of research and discernment of cultural dynamic, resulted in the last Lotmanian writings in a more and more stressed attention for the cultural mechanisms of translation, ri-semantization of memory, semiosis of collective passions, for the heterogeneity of human language, for the alterity as building component of the culture.   

Hence, the topic of this paper: the “last” Lotman’s focus on the history dynamic. These reflections, arisen after the perestroika experience, engaged finally the cultural process in the historical dimension, presenting it as a mix of graduality and unpredictability, linearity and cyclicality, where the discontinuity is as important as the continuity, otherwise the endorsement of the Hegelian “superior unity”, as synthetic resolution of the difference, often translated in the ideology of the single though and in the heteronomy.