Mikhail Epstein’s Culturology: A Meta-Discipline of Transculture / Transculturality

Abstract

In this discussion of the concept of transculture, which originated with the Russian-American critic Mikhail Epstein in conjunction with the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (who unofficially introduced post-structuralism into Soviet thought in the 1980s), the present author places the concept into a wider context of European thought on the production of meaning in culture. The concept of transculture is defined by difference which is privileged as the arche of meaning and self-reflexive thought in poststructuralism (Derrida), and which resonates with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “outside” (vne-nahodimost’). This leads to the deduction that the the position of the “outsider” is the ideal transcultural position of meaning. For Epstein, transculture is “a mode of being” at the “cross-roads of cultures”. The effect of this is that transculture frees humanity from culture itself. It is, according to the present author, from such a position of freedom that the transculturalist resembles Hegel’s phenomenologist, whose starting position in Bildung (education) is a double negativity. For, according to Epstein and Mamardashvili, the “centre” of transculture is the notion of “non-belonging”. Thus, all forms of identity (identity politics, nationalism, racisms, ethnicities, etc.) are alien to the mode of being of transculture. Ultimately, it is concluded, transculture is a transcendental concept irreducible to an empirical dimension such as a methodology or a discipline (for example, World Literature or Cultural Studies).