Over the past decade, there has been growing positive interest in nuclear technologies as a sustainable source of clean electricity for the West and as a factor of industrial and social growth in Southeast Asia. Both developed and developing countries face the need to meet growing energy consumption needs, which is especially difficult in the context of gas market shocks and large-scale green transition plans. The social dimension of this problem, especially in the reactor-building countries, often remains “behind the scenes”. Russia is one of the oldest countries with a powerful nuclear plant system, but even here the public’s attitude to the “peaceful atom” is ambiguous. Socio-political radiophobia has accompanied the development of the nuclear industry since at least the Chernobyl accident, and sociological publications that would topicalize the mood of Russian citizens, their level of anxiety and trust in nuclear energy are still sparse. The article examines Russians’ perception of nuclear technology in general and specifically regarding the “Development of Engineering, Technologies and Scientific Research in the Use of Nuclear Energy in the Russian Federation” (DETSR) program and the Rosatom state corporation’s activities. Based on two waves of representative surveys conducted in April-May 2023-2024, we assess the factors that contribute to the formation of trust in the industry. Using factor regression analysis, structural equations, and nonparametric tests, we outline a demographic profile of a Russian “nuclear optimist” — such optimism being typical primarily for the well-off segments of the population. A key role in the interpretation is given to the awareness factor, the increase of which (in the long term) should smooth out the inequality in support for the industry. The issue of (dis)trust in the state and its impact on this support is also discussed.

The article focuses on the integration of a frame-analytic approach into the research field of the biography of material objects, whose main representatives were originally situated in classical anthropology and archaeology. The main aim of the article is the introduction of a sociological perspective to the study of the history of things. To achieve this goal, frame analysis is used as a tool of conceptual translation, based on a synthesis of key assumptions of existing approaches. The article is divided into two parts. The primary part undertakes a review of existing biographical concepts in disciplines related to sociology. Among their shortcomings is the anthropomorphizing of the biography of an object, which leads to linearity and the desire to establish the beginning and end of its ‘life’. We argue that a thing can have ‘a number of different simultaneous lives’ without specific dates. In addition, in the presented approaches, exchange appears to be the primary means of endowing an object with meaning, although it is not the only possible way. In contrast, we highlight the concept of ‘itineraries of an object’ as a preferable alternative. The first part of the work also formulates the epistemic horizon of a frame-analytical biography of the material. The unit of analyzing the history of a thing — its biographical event — is the transformation of the frame of the social situation given by the object under study. In the second part of the paper, the conceptual points are illustrated by the ‘life’ stories of several telephone booths: their transposition into a city Wi-Fi hotspot, their reframing into a work office, and their transposition into a complex facility at a scientific conference. It is argued that frame theory has a conceptual apparatus relevant for explaining changes in biography, which considers the relationality of meaning-making, the qualities of a thing per se, and the dispersed (as opposed to linear) nature of these changes.

The article analyzes the dysfunctional effects of the interaction between the education system and the labor market in modern Russia. It is shown that this problem is being actualized due to the shortage of personnel in particularly important sectors of the domestic economy, and that the existing system of training and retraining of personnel cannot cope with the elimination of the deficit. An administrative survey of Russian faculty conducted by IPEI RANEPA (N=21164) showed that a quarter of Russian faculty assess the employment chances of their graduates as “satisfactory” — and this despite the record shortage of personnel in the domestic labor market. The survey data, supplemented by the graduates’ own view of their employment (qualitative research, ten in-depth semi- structured interviews with students/graduates of Moscow universities), allowed us to draw conclusions about the primary factors preventing the effective use of youth personnel in the interests of the country’s economy. Among the macro-level factors are a lack of a well-thought- out system for converting university graduate competencies into qualifications required in the labor market (both in the humanities and natural sciences), as well as a lack of interregional forecasting of demand for certain specialties; as a result, labor force mobility is reduced. At the micro level, the lack of competencies for a competent job search among young people leads to the loss of valuable time for a career start and ineffective interactions with potential employers. A new national project “Personnel” has the potential to be an effective tool in addressing these challenges.

The article examines the significance of “postmetaphysics” as a continuation of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction for resolving the philosophical conflict between the transcendental and dialectical traditions of thought. The “postmetaphysical” trend seeks to rethink the relationship between language and power, trying to find a way to talk about power in a way that does not theoretically reproduce the power of metaphysical discourse. It also seeks to avoid the mistake of systems that criticize metaphysical discourse, which is that the criticism itself often takes on a sophisticated form of metaphysics, the source of which is hidden as much as possible. The central phenomenon that is deconstructed in Christian postmetaphysical philosophy in the text is “political ontotheology”, that is, the powerful metaphysical discourse used to build a political ideology. At the beginning of the article, the author examines two ways of formulating onto-theology in philosophy — transcendental and dialectical. It is argued that both directions in the modern era are confronted with their own impasse: transcendentalism cannot conceive of theory as a practical realization of thought, dialectics cannot get rid of the formulation of transcendental supra-historical truth in its practice. The text synthesizes the concepts of Caputo, Vattimo, and Desmond in order to propose a political-religious project that continues Derrida’s philosophy. It is concluded that post-metaphysics as a “weak thought” can change and weaken political structures without completely dialectically moving into political onto-theology, but it cannot be a field completely independent of metaphysics or replace it.

The article compares and analyses two approaches to the production of subjectivity — Foucauldian and Girardian — within the context of contemporary political philosophy and philosophical anthropology. These two theories—which are arguably dominant in their respective fields—are compared due to their shared focus on the role of power and violence in the formation of the subject. Both approaches acknowledge the importance of power in shaping the self, but they differ in their emphasis on specific aspects of this process. In the Foucauldian approach, power is seen as a pervasive and complex force that permeates all aspects of society, while in Girardian theory it is understood as a more localized and intentional form of domination. Despite these differences, both approaches share a common understanding that the subject is shaped through the application of power techniques, including the use of violence. However, each approach places a different emphasis on the role of these techniques in the formation of identity and agency. Thus, in Foucauldian thought, violence internalized and instrumentalized by power through its localization in institutions is external to the individual — who appears to be a passive recipient of subjectifying practices; this also reflects the “political capture of the body” by biopower as the infection of the individual by power and self-control, and, consequently, becoming a mediator of power oneself. In contrast, the Girardian perspective—in which mimesis is the primary condition for the formation and operation of society—asserts the supremacy of violence around which institutions form, due to which violence is only partially removed from the individual. Thus the role of being violence’s operator is imposed upon them — though in a depoliticized form not directly linked to power structures. Both theories of the reproduction of subjectivity, in one way or another, diagnose and describe the crisis of the individual. They therefore propose their own solutions for overcoming this crisis. However, they share the common understanding that subjectivity is rooted in the individual. As a result, the strategies proposed by Foucault and Girard, such as self-care practices and radical Christianity, which are not formed by external power, do not transcend power or mimesis.

The article examines the concept of utopia in its post-Marxist context. Since the 1970s—against the backdrop of the failures of May 68, the self-exposures of the USSR, and the decline of the workers’ movement, as well as in accordance with the immanent history of the logic of the history of philosophy itself—the concept of utopia has been running through new areas of meaning and is extremely dialectical in two modes: temporal and ontological. The first transforms utopia from never-being into “past”, the second provides two inversions, considering it as 1) a dystopia, the other of utopia, which is declared to be the hidden truth of utopia; and — when it is fundamentally possible according to its own concept — 2) as impossible, in connection with which utopia and its concept return to the discourse as a kind of empty place around which modern pessimism circles, correctly believing that the future is unimaginable. The time of ends, from the end of the grand narratives of disappointed radicals (Lyotard) to the end of politics (see Rancière’s analysis), is, however, picked up by Marcuse, who suggests considering utopia as ahistorical. The author introduces this strange ahistorical or even anti-historicalism as historical, relying on the conceptualized phenomenon of the desynchronization of the “base” (the development of productive forces to the degree necessary for social revolution) and the “superstructure”, which runs into a limit, since it cannot represent the restrained base, which has broken out of the formational “scientific” logic. When Marcuse writes that a utopia in the strict sense can now be called a project that violates the laws of nature, he means the “impossible” into which utopia turns after the catastrophes of the 20th century, betraying the truth of its concept contained in the simple possibility of another world. More than 50 years after “The End of Utopia” and almost 30 years after the ontological turn in philosophy, we can say that utopia is still unimaginable — in the strict sense is what violates the laws of logic. This thesis opens up the possibilities of a new dialectic and its alliance with transcendentalism, which the author considers as a critique of plastic reason in the spirit of Malabou, constructing time and time again the assumptions-concepts that it needs and which are “practically necessary” according to Kant.

The article raises the question of the theoretical and cognitive foundations of sociological observation in the system-communication theory of Niklas Luhmann. Observation of society in its entirety is possible only from within itself, and therefore its observer (sociologist, artist, writer, moralist, politician or participant in a social movement) is necessarily included in the observed object itself. This circumstance gives rise to the paradox of self-applicability or self-reference in their social specification, since generalizing statements about society, if they claim to be universal in description, are always applicable to the statements themselves. It is substantiated that the paradoxes of self- applicability and self-reference, without receiving their resolution, are never- theless performatively realized both in social reality itself and in its theoretical representation, and ensure the function of the social system — reflection of the system and the possibility of comparing one’s own observation resources with the methods of observation of adjacent communication systems. Following logic of self-observation, social theory is supplemented by a self-referential theoretical complex (sub-discipline), called “Self-Descriptions” (the fifth book of N. Luhmann’s fundamental work “Societies of Society”). This additional theory specializes in reconstructing the semantics of the concept of society, how society — in its communications, religion, mass media, art, politics, but today primarily in the optics of science — looked and looks at itself. Such inclu- sion of “Self-Description” (“shorthand”, “scene description”) in the corpus of social theory, as its integral and equal part with the function of describing the formation, semantics and theoretical resources of the theory of society itself, has become an important theoretical innovation in the field of social theory.