Issue #25

Abstract: The article discusses Cosmology of the Spirit, the early work by the outstanding Soviet philosopher Ewald Ilyenkov, which has been written in the first half of the 1950s and published only posthumously. The article tackles the intellectual and historical contexts that were crucial to the ideas of Cosmology, and scrutinises the key arguments and hypotheses of this early but anomalous work. Addressing the idea of the “entropic death of the universe” and using a combination of materialist dialectics and Spinoza’s concept of attribute, Ilyenkov claims that thought is a necessary attribute of matter as it is able to prevent the “thermal death” of the universe. The article argues for the relevance of Cosmology for contemporary debates in continental philosophy. It suggests a number of interpretations of this work, considered as a bright symptom of post-WWII and the post-Stalinist momentum, and as an expression of the Soviet subjectivity, grasped in terms of late Michel Foucault’s work on “technologies of the self”. The early work of Ilyenkov can be also read with respect to his later and mature oeuvres, such as his interpretation of Spinoza’s legacy. The article draws a parallel between the interpretation of Spinoza, that emerged in Cosmology, and recent Alain Badiou’s work on Spinoza that suggest a “torsion of event” in the latter’s ontology. Another way to single out the speculative force of Cosmology is to compare it with recent work After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux that reveals similar cosmological scales and aspects that, however, resolved in the way opposite to the Soviet thinker’s.