This study examines how the United States, Russia, and T & uuml;rkiye utilize large-scale military ceremonies as instruments of political communication to construct and legitimize national identity for domestic and international audiences. Through a comparative analysis of three cases, the 250th anniversary celebration of the US Army under President Trump, Russia's commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, and T & uuml;rkiye's 2023 Republic Centennial, the research reveals the strategies of symbolic power production in the twenty-first century. Employing Jeffrey Alexander's social performance theory and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), the study investigates the interplay of visual, discursive, and auditory elements to deconstruct these carefully staged spectacles. The findings indicate that while all three states employ militarized rituals to reinforce collective belonging, they articulate distinct security-oriented narratives: the United States emphasizes technological prestige and deterrence, Russia mobilizes historical memory to securitize its political order and project resilience, and T & uuml;rkiye synthesizes republican heritage with neo-Ottoman symbolism and naval power to assert regional sovereignty. Ultimately, the study concludes that these ceremonies are central to contemporary political practice, functioning as pivotal media events where sovereign identity is performed, militarized norms are normalized, and geopolitical standing is visually communicated and contested on the global stage.
The article proposes a conceptualization of "ranger philosophy"as a mode of thinking that emerges on the periphery of the institutional academic environment. Proceeding from a critical revision of Gilles Deleuze and F & eacute;lix Guattari's nomadology, Graham Harman's guerrilla metaphysics, and Vladimir Bibikhin's "forest" ontology, the authors substantiate the transition from individual philosophical experience to collective social action. Engaging with Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of intellectual fields, studies of academic communities in the symbolic interactionist tradition, and Jeffrey Alexander's theory of cultural trauma, the authors demonstrate that the classical scenarios of intellectual success - the "gang" (a cohesive group taking over institutions) and the "struggle over legacy" (interpretive wars around a key figure) - are invariably oriented toward the center and its resources. As an alternative, a "third path" is examined: ranger philosophy, not oriented toward the center but toward local "drop zones," horizontal networks, and long-term existence in the perpetuum mobile mode. A system of concepts is introduced to describe the social mechanics of peripheral existence: social hydrodynamics, social scar, social survivability, chrono-guerrillas, and social friction of micro-conflicts. Using three case studies - the Udmurt school "Proxima," the Perm independent publishing house Hyle Press, and the Volgograd-Kazan network of public philosophy - the article demonstrates how these concepts operate in real practices of knowledge production. The concepts of social resonance and the submerged (chthonic) class are outlined as prospects for further research.
The article examines the political views, biography and discursive legacy of Jonathan Bowden, a British far-right ideologist, writer and artist. Bowden belonged to a small circle of Anglophone intellectuals who drew upon the continental philosophies of the "Conservative Revolution"and the European New Right, particularly the ideas of Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. The article traces the relationship between Bowden's political radicalism and the psychological traumas of his youth - specifically, the mental illness and early death of his mother - which, it is argued, made him highly receptive to the biological reductionism prevalent in far-right thought. Bowden's eccentricity and self-identification as a "bohemian" placed him in opposition to mainstream bourgeois conservatism, which he considered too moderate to be politically effective. Rejecting Christianity in favor of Nietzscheanism and neopaganism, he embraced metapolitics as the primary area of struggle: the promotion of far-right ideas through culture, including literature, painting, and cinema. The article also draws on testimonies from Bowden's associates regarding his psychological instability. It concludes by demonstrating how Bowden's ideas were later appropriated by such alt-right figures as Greg Johnson and Richard Spencer, cementing his posthumous role as a precursor to the contemporary far right.
Carl Schmitt develops his project of a'sociology of legal concepts' primarily in terms of historical knowledge. Although his historicism does not usually get due attention, the peculiar elaboration of this principle in his attempt to overcome certain shortcomings of classic German Historismus can be shown to form a foundation of Schmitt's political theology. The'concrete'way of political thinking fully formed by 1922 remains consistent throughout his following oeuvre despite its topical diversity and lack of architectonic cohesion. It is appropriate to characterize Schmitt's approach as political historicism, since he considers political concepts of the past in their polemical context, that is, as means of political confrontation. Furthermore, he argues that the current use of these concepts is also inherently polemical and their current meaning is determined by one's attitude to the history of the concept. Thus, history of legal and political concepts itself becomes political history. Historical knowledge is thought of as a weapon of political confrontation. Such approach is based not only on the concept of the political as defined by Schmitt, but also on his 'pragmatic' view of human nature. The unavoidably problematic character of the human being, its natural inclination to enmity and antagonism rather than friendliness and cooperation is postulated by Schmitt to be the basis of transience, instability, and thus historicity of all social, legal, and political institutions. Abandoning the decisionism and other aspects of Political Theology, Schmitt nevertheless adheres to its core political-historicist principles in later work, which can be seen in his'concrete orderthinking'of1930s, the'nomothetic method'of1950s, and in his return to political theology in late 1960s. Therefore, a certain unity of views manifests throughout his oeuvre, in which a specific development of historicist principles plays a key role.
This article examines the transformation of political theology, or political ontotheology, in the era of late capitalism. The author first analyzes the specifics of nihilism as interpreted by Nietzsche and Heidegger, then moves on to a consideration of epistemological, ethical, and political relativism, the general essence of which consists of a nihilistic rejection of a unified value-based worldview. The author then concludes that nihilism is a bulwark for the implementation of a particular type of 21st-century political theology: the neoliberal disposition is characterized by the increasing "economization"of governance, leading to a particularly "psychoticized"type of political exercise. It is suggested that this disposition develops from an extreme form of nihilism - value relativism. Nihilistic thinking in the socio-political sphere, lacking strict semantic guidelines, seeks meaning in the very freedom of meaning-making, in the dynamics of free market relations, where very processes of interaction become a source of unstable legitimacy. The article's central thesis is that relativism, as a nihilistic worldview, not only rejects the transcendental power of thought and political theology/ontotheology, but builds a unique, "immanentized" ideological regime of neoliberalism on this rejection. Neoliberalism is understood in the article as a holistic political-theological paradigm, where market logic, media, the internet, individualized responsibility, and mechanisms of political "demonization" perform functions analogous to religious ones, yet have undergone a "secular" transformation. The author demonstrates how the sacred core of power in the contemporary world is immanentized, and the legitimization of sovereign power is transferred to the economic and digital sphere. As a result, the ontotheological "residue" of value-based thinking manifests itself not in the transcendent figure of the sovereign, but in impersonal, networked, and economic mechanisms of governance that, masquerading as pluralism and freedom, reproduce the nihilistic devaluation of meaning and maintain the status quo.
