2014. vol. 13. No. 2

While the Anglo-American tradition (Austin and Searle) approaches speech acts mainly through the philosophy of language, Derrida relocates the field of analysis and considers speech acts within the broader context of political philosophy as well as the philosophy of subject. Instead of asking ‘how and under which conditions certain speech acts change the state of affairs’ (as Austin did), Derrida questions the very nature of social links in order to reveal the ‘condition of possibility’ of performative acts in particular and of verbal communication in general. He shows that this condition is the primordial trust between interlocutors. The primordial trust is based on two heterogeneous types of experience: experience of relation to the absolute Other and experience of a sacral universal law that ensures stability of society. The speech act as based of the trust is twofold: it is both an event and a reinstatement of an automatic process. This juxtaposition of the event and the mechanical forms of social life links Derrida’s political thought to that of Arendt. Their agreement, however, does not continue into the realm of the philosophy of subject. Derrida insists on the importance of the hidden conversion of the speaker who privately addresses the Other, whereas for Arendt the self has no genuine access to itself outside of the public domain of the political.

Reconstruction of Emile Durkheim’s views on collective memory is the focus of the article. Durkheim had not created the completed concept of collective memory and his main attention was concentrated on its concrete form, that is to say the commemorative ritual. Thereby he laid the methodological foundations for further development of the concept of collective memory and influenced on later memory studies. Durkheim’s sociology leads with the necessity for a conclusion that for the support of stability of a community, its members have to remember certain things in a certain way and to forget, in an orderly way, other things. The general theme of Durkheim’s sociology is that a community needs a certain degree of intellectual, moral and emotional conformism of its members. This provision results in a more particular conclusion about the social necessity of the “memorial conformism”. The paper explores Durkheim’s work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life which takes a special position in the logic of Durkheim's research program. This book demonstrates the way to development of the general cultural theory of social, constructed on the basis of the category of sacred. However, for a long time this work, on the contrary, has been considered as less significant, almost marginal, written on a secondary ethnographic material. Only recently, in the context of the general cultural and anthropological movement in modern sociology, the “later Durkheim” was read anew.

This article is devoted to demonstrating the capabilities of sociology in the measuring of certain aspects of family life. The study of different aspects of human activity has always been the subject of heated debates across various sciences. Sociology is not an exception. Most often, social scientists study human activity in order to predict social behavior and to build models of these processes. Also, the development of incentive programs which stimulate the growth or the decline of certain indicators in a proper manner has gained popularity in recent times. In the spotlight of this article is mating behavior as one form of human activity, using the concept of marital satisfaction as an empirical referent. The author considers marital satisfaction as a fundamental component of the family-complex study, and proposes to examine the basic sociological methods that are used to investigate this area. For a better understanding of mating behavior, the author touches upon the problems of attitude-measuring in the use of Likert scale, demonstrates ideas of the R.Udry sociological test, describesthe Whitfield’s R. «altruistic pyramid», illustratesthe scale of love and sympathy, developed by Zeke Rubin, and the Soviet researchers of family as a social institution are also mentioned in this article. Scientific and technological progress also helps in the development of measurement techniques. This kind of measuring procedure is also represented in this article. The idea of ​​developing Data Mining is positioned by the author as a major step in the development of analysis without subjectivity. The conclusion to this article highlights the importance of using multiple methods for a representative study.

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a wave of the so-called “turns” — “linguistic turn”, “narrative turn”, “biographical turn” and “visual turn”, which have led to an obvious shift in research interests and methodological choices in humanities and social sciences. The researchers from various disciplinary fields have admitted that, to understand the logic of different forms of knowledge, we have to examine their “textual” (narrative, storytelling) nature; that any research in the social, political, psychological or cultural sphere turns out to be focused on linguistic issues; that social reality is inherently textual and that all social practices are constituted and structured by discourses and intense struggles of different discourses. Sociology did not stand to the side of such methodological changes: at least for two and a half decades the concepts “narrative” and “narrative analysis”, “discourse” and “discourse analysis”, “text”, “context”, “intertext”, etc. have been extremely popular at the theoretical and empirical levels Nonetheless, we still have not received their precise definitions and they are interpreted quite arbitrarily, being based on the conceptual and methodological preferences of the researcher, as well as the goals and objectives of the particular applied or fundamental research project. The article identifies the key themes of the ongoing and, unfortunately, missing methodological discussions in the field of textual analysis that would be quite useful to clarify at least the criteria for the correct naming of different formats of analytical work with textual data.

Tsaritsyno: attrakcion s istoriej [Tsaritsyno: An Attraction with History] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoye obozrenie, 2014), Edited by Natalia Samutina and Boris Stepanov

Review: Van Dijk T. A. (2014) Diskurs i vlast': reprezentacija dominirovanija v jazyke i kommunikacii [Discourse and Power: Representation of Domination in Language and Communication] (in Russian), Moscow: Librokom, 344 p. ISBN 978-5-397-04375-5