Интерпелация и/или субективация: социалистическият субект между Фуко и Алтюсер
Interpellation and/or Subjectification: the Socialist Subject between Foucault and Althusser

Summary/Abstract: The general problem field of the article can be summed up in this question: what is the subjectivity that produces socialist societies and what research techniques can help objectify it? The article starts from a topical issue in historical studies of socialism: the dilemma of resistance and/or submission of individuals within these societies; it then focuses on the work of historian Jochen Hellbeck, who attempts to take a stand with respect to this dilemma by mobilizing Foucault’s concept of subject. Hellbeck has studied unpublished personal diaries from the time of Stalinism in Russia, in order to show that individuals, instead of being reduced to atomized homunculi in situations of total domination of the Party and government structures, or instead of being crafty manipulators of these structures while pursuing their own interests and goals, can be viewed as „effects“ of power; as such they actively take part in the (re)production of power but inevitably add to it certain changes due to their specific situations. The article problematizes the viewpoint of Hellbeck on the socialist subject by demonstrating the insufficiency of his analyses with respect to concepts such as „ethical care“, „problematization“, „technologies of self“, and „constructing the self as a moral subject“, which we find in the later works of Foucault. Instead of objectifying the different problematizations of subjectivity and technologies of the self in Soviet society in the 1930s, and hence deducing the individual practices of subjectification and their proximity to or distance from the basic moral-political code of construction of Soviet (revolutionary) subjectivity, Hellbeck turns directly to the individuals and their self-construction through socialist ideologemes, in order to show how, through individual experience, the ideological matrix of Stalinism comes to life and functions. The thesis of the article is that Hellbeck abandons the methodological field of subjectivity as understood by Foucault and implicitly uses Althusser’s concept of the subject as produced by and producing the ideological apparatuses of the state and thus leaves undiscussed some important elements of socialist subjectification.

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