SUMMARY:

In his response to critics, Oushakine registers disagreement with Lipovetsky’s emphasis on the “valorization of violence” in communities of loss, and suggests instead that themes of sacrifice and past violence are the only available forms of representing individual trauma as a collective phenomenon. Oushakine also cautions against seeing post-Soviet cultural practices as a direct continuation of Soviet ones, and points out new contexts for symbolic representations of the social. Responding to Douglas Rogers’s criticism, Oushakine points out that it is not productive to create a cartography of topics and issues absent from a study. He suggests that his understanding of discursive constructions involves mechanisms of mediation between the individual and the social, and protests against a Marxist reading of his work. He argues that discursive forms and regimes of affection are not less social than classes. Oushakine also engages Rogers’s understanding of the social and suggests the latter is reductionist in its attention to the circulation of capital and the Marxist understanding of “false consciousness.” Oushakine argues that structuralist Marxism has no suitable apparatus for describing societies undergoing a dramatic collapse of their social, cultural, and political structures. Responding to Maya Nadkarni’s review, Oushakine agrees with her reading of traumatic accounts as means of communication that are self-perpetuating. Oushakine also agrees that the “cultural logic of despair” can be potentially productive. Oushakine disagrees with Ilya Kalinin’s notion that the patriotism of despair characteristic of the 1990s is genetically connected with the official patriotism of the 2000s, and suggests the presence of ruptures and disconnections reflected in the increasingly absent role of the state or nation from cultural representations of the post-Soviet period. Finally, responding to the contributions of Gradskova and of Gapova, Oushakine suggests that the perceived failure of political mobilization of mothers may be read as a successful realization of the classic slogan of feminism in the 1960s–1970s: the personal is political. The politics of soldiers’ mothers was based on a rhetorical tradition that did not presuppose any divisions between personal and public.