The paper reacts to the following themes of the symposium:

Marxist methodology and the dialectics of nature, society and thought
Ilyenkov’s contribution to contemporary theories of cognition, knowledge and representation
Soviet ‘Hegelianism’ and/or ‘Spinozism’.
A common trope in the scholarship on the history of late Soviet philosophy distinguishes between official dogmatic “Soviet philosophy” of the party cadres on the one hand, and unofficial creative “philosophy of the Soviet period” on the other. Evald Ilyenkov’s work, which offers a radical criticism of the Soviet doctrine of dialectical materialism, is often considered as representative of the latter current.

While this reading is substantiated by actual historical conflicts between different Soviet philosophers of the time, such a binary opposition serves a constructed memory and by disregarding the connections between “dogmatic” and “creative” authors, distorts the multidimensional history of late Soviet philosophy.

In our presentation, we will try to recover some of that history by considering Ilyenkov’s relation to Soviet philosophical culture (Van der Zweerde, 2000) through a double optic: an externalist approach, which uses sociology of knowledge to shed light on the various administrative mechanisms of the regulation of knowledge production (Bikbov, 2014) and an internalist one (Lewis, 2019), which privileges theoretical arguments over biographical information. This method will allow for an understanding of the intersections between the author’s historical position and his thought, which is particularly useful for the study of Soviet philosophical culture.

The first part will discuss the new tasks that the party nomenklatura set for philosophers after the death of Stalin and try to describe Ilyenkov’s position in relation to them. It will be argued that while Ilyenkov recognizes – not without giving his own definition – some aspects of the party’s new conceptual apparatus (like the notion of personality), he wages a theoretical struggle against other aspects of the same apparatus (as with his criticism of “neo-positivism”).

The second, internalist part will focus on the notion of ontologism as a defining trait of Soviet Marxism (Oittinen, 2009) and argue that while Ilyenkov reproduces the ontologizing tendency in his theory of cognition, the synthesis of ontology, epistemology and ethics that results from his reading of Hegel and Spinoza offers an open perspective that goes beyond the Soviet doctrine of diamat and the technocratic ideal of the Soviet State.

Giorgi Kobakhidze is a lecturer in political and moral philosophy at the university of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France). He is currently working on a doctoral thesis titled “Épistémologie clandestine : le problème de la dialectique dans l’œuvre d’Evald Ilyenkov” at the university of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and the Ca’Foscari university in Venice (Italy). He obtained his master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Toulouse Jena Jaurès and the university of Coimbra (Portugal) with the work titled: “Les hérétiques dans le marxisme : la Logique du Capital dans les lectures d’Evald Ilyenkov et Louis Althusser” and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Ilia State University (Georgia). He is also engaged in translation projects of Evald Ilyenkov’s works into French. His interests include the history of Marxist thought, the philosophy of the Soviet period and the history of workers movements.

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