(NEW) Natalya Artemenko (Russia)

What kind of "self-care" does philosophy from ancient times to the present day? It is, first of all, about the method of establishing relations with oneself, with one's own "I". But what does it mean: to enter into a relationship with oneself, to attend to one's own existence as one's own task? It would seem that the theme of "I" is simple, which is given to every sane person along with his birth. But modern man for the most part does not know who he is. The tension arising here manifests itself in a variety of forms and at different levels - from the problems of choosing life paths to the feeling of abandonment and the question of the meaning of life. In the situation of our time there are problems with personal identity, which were unknown throughout most of the history. In this lecture will be demonstrated how from the Platonic "self-care" through Augustinian thinking to the Cartesian method the very practice of subjectivation is formed, which led to the emergence of the concept of a self-identical subject in the 17th century, of which we are all the heirs. From the new European subject we will proceed further to the subject of trauma, conditionally - from Descartes to modern phenomenology. We will trace the history of the subject of the Modern from his birth to his death declared from the middle of the twentieth century. Rudolf Burnet, representative of the new post-phenomenology, says this: "to be a subject means to be the subject of loss of self-identity." What can the subject rely on in order to survive and answer at a time when the idea that he has formed about himself is collapsing, when he does not have enough words about what he has just experienced? We will try to answer this question by looking at the history of practicing ourselves in antiquity, in Hellenism, in Christianity, and, finally, in modern times.

Oral history, remembering practices and the problem of "access" to the traumatic experience (Lecture)

The term of "oral history" is quite widely used today, despite the fact that it came into being not so long ago. The origins of the method of oral history should be sought for in the studies related to interviewing, and with reference to related disciplines, i.e. sociology, ethnology, political science and, partly, linguistics. Quite soon, the disputes over the relation of oral history and historical memory became common for critical literature. The interview method is a very complex way, which requires quite an effort, as wee as the awareness of researcher's subjectivity of a high degree, therefore, some historians sees oral history as a highly unreliable source. Yet, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the method of oral history is in high demand in cases of no other sources except for the evidence of human memory being left. Oral history enables us to study not so much the facts of the past as the very human consciousness and its alteration, transformation, enables us to pose a question on the memory practices from a new perspective. Memory and remembering practices are closely related to oblivion, which, in its turn, indicates the need to eliminate the information that ravages the human psyche and the structure of public consciousness. Oblivion could be entitled "memory trauma" which should be understood as the events, destructive both to personal and social (including national) identity. Consequently, the memory starts to be associated with the concept of trauma. The report delves into the relation between oral history and human memory, the problem of "accessing" the traumatic experience, special aspects of narrative in the traumatic experience.