Michail Ryklin

Born in 1948 the philosopher, writer, and essayist Michail Ryklin is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy in the Moscow Academy of Science and has been the head of the Department of Philosophical Anthropology since 1997. He studied philosophy and aesthetics in the State University of Moscow and took his doctorate in 1978 in the philosophy of history. Ryklin is one of the most acclaimed philosophers in Russia today, and has been intensely active in pursuing a philosophical dialogue with western Europe, particularly with contemporary French philosophy. He is the editor-in-chief and translator of works by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others. In 1977 he edited the first Russian edition of Walter Benjamin’s »Moscow Diary«. In 2000 he was a co-founder of the Walter Benjamin Society in Barcelona. He enjoyed international recognition for his books on Mikhail Bakhtin and Dostoyevsky. His most recent research sojourns have taken him, among other places, to the University of Bristol, the Berlin Center for Literary Research and to the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. Michail Ryklin is a member of the New York Academy of Scientists and has been writing since 1995 as a correspondent for the European cultural journal, »Lettre International«. In addition to philosophical texts he has published numerous essays on contemporary art and literature. Among his most recent publications are »Deconstruction and Destruction. Conversations with Philosophers« (Moscow 2002) and »Spaces of Jubilation. Totalitarism and the Difference« (Moscow 2003). The latter is a study of the collective body in which Ryklin characterizes the hallucination of the post-Soviet collective by examining the Russian drug literature since the 1990s.