Civilizational Racism and Reasonability of Historical Research Based on the Civilizational Approach

The article considers the influence of civilizational racism ideas on the universal­ist and civilizational approaches to historical studies. According to the author, the Anglo-American hegemony in the sphere of culture, politics and science serves to devalue both approaches and disagrees with the requirements of pure science. Civilizational racism is viewed as the result of the secular transforma­tion of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and its interaction with colonial practices. According to the logic of the article, the Anglo-Saxon version of racism is seen as a model for the entire Western society. It is distinguished by the myths of civi­lizational superiority, the principle of extraterritorial cratocracy, sacred violence with the sacred sacrifice chosen from among “non-conventional subjects” and the idea of civilizing mission. Civilizational racism is seen as a cultural metanar­rative and ‘a privileged entity’. In the future we are going to witness the increas­ing importance of the civilizational approach in connection with the trend in­volving the macroregionalization of world processes.

Disney’s Reel Doubling of Violent Desire in J. J. Abrams’ Mimetic The Force Awakens

Abrams’ spectacularly distended infantilising manipulation of the saga embeds a form of cognitive resonance with a state of perpetual war and a politically thanatising mythos fitted out as a politically containing moment within what cultural commentators are referring to as “post-9/11 American cinema”, a form of cinema reacting to a cultural trauma and that normalises a hegemonic political reactivity in a perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ in “the social embodied” in an age marked by what Terry Eagleton describes as “holy terror”. As cultural philosopher Douglas Kellner argues, movies of apocalyptic or catastrophe cinema can “be read as allegories of the disintegration of social life and civil society, and the emergence of a Darwinian nightmare where the struggle for survival occurs in a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish, and short.” The contention is that if George Lucas developed Star Wars to struggle with, among other things, an America that had elected Richard Nixon and engaged in the culturally traumatic Vietnam War, Abrams and his co-writer Lawrence Kazdan have relocated the franchise in a context marked as “post 9/11 cinema”. It is unclear quite how The Force Awakens could offer a distinctively interrogatory function for conceiving political subjectivity in the contemporary fractured and self-assertive space of global geopolitics, expressing, as it does, the classificatory coding that figures innocent selfhood in a conflictual relation with the evil terrorist other. Abrams’ movie, accordingly, is ill equipped to refuse to naturalise the innocence of the politically regulative messianic monomyth of the exceptionalist nation that instils a sensitivity conducive to violence against the foreigner when it is perceived to be under threat. It is, in other words, ill-equipped to resist being captured by the Girardian framing of myth within an identification of “sacred violence”. Consequently, The Force Awakens provides a resource for the critic’s reflections on the cultural difficulties of learning about our learning, of the disciplining of desire through monomythic intensification, and of sustaining reaction to cultural trauma through the hostility of sacrificial disposal of the other that requires the instrumentalised rationality of the self-secure national subject.