Translated material
Mikhail Epstein. The gift of words. Issue 21
Projective Dictionary of the Russian Language
Mikhail Epshtein
Publication date: April 7, 2003
Ambi-prefix
(1)Having examined the ambiguous, ambivalent prefix “under” in previous issues, let us now move on to the international prefix denoting ambivalence itself. Ambi expresses human nature more fully than “pro” and “contra,” and allows us to discover the deep reversibility of those phenomena that we are accustomed to superficially contrast.
AMBI- (gr. amphi - around, about, on both sides) is a prefix indicating the duality or reversibility of this phenomenon, which also includes its opposite.
The word “ambivalence” has already entered the philosophical language - a combination of opposite attitudes towards one object (praise and blasphemy, crowning and ridicule). The term was introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist E. Bleuler (1910) to describe opposing feelings and attitudes towards the same person (love and hatred, desire and reluctance, activity and passivity, etc.). In 1912, S. Freud described the patient’s ambivalence in his work on the Rat Man: “In our lover a struggle raged between love and hate, which were intended for the same person.” This term was introduced into the Russian humanitarian language by Mikhail Bakhtin, who loved it and used it on almost every page of his book about Rabelais : “folk-festive ambivalent laughter”, “ambivalent image of a woman”, etc. “These swear words were ambivalent: while reducing and killing, they simultaneously revived and renewed. It was these ambivalent swear words that determined the nature of the speech genre of swear words in carnival-square communication” (“ The Work of Francois Rabelais... ”).
But the prefix " ambi " is not firmly attached to the base "valence". It is occasionally used in other words (sometimes in the form “amphi-” - amphibian , amphitheater ). The same prefix can be regularly combined with other concepts, revealing the commonality or reversibility of those phenomena that are usually thought of as mutually exclusive. For authors who want to draw a line under previous disputes in one fell swoop and reach a new level of understanding, the prefix “ ambi- ” is the most suitable technique.
In this issue:
Ambition
ambipat
ambimarxism
ambipatriotism
ambimentality
Ambipation is a combination of sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion.
Ambipate - a person torn apart by opposing feelings and aspirations.
Perhaps for the first time, ambipathy was expressed consciously, as a property of a highly developed personality, by the poet Catullus in his famous poem addressed to Lesbia (fragment 85):
I hate you and I love you. Why, you ask?
I don’t know myself, but this is what happens, and I suffer.
Dmitry Karamazov in Dostoevsky says that man is “too broad”; he is equally attracted by two abysses: the upper and the lower, the ideal of Sodom and the ideal of the Madonna. In this sense, Dmitry, and probably Dostoevsky himself, are the brightest representatives of this universal human ambipathy .
Well, do you like him? He's really a nice guy, isn't he? - I do not know what to say. I seem to like it, but I can’t stand his jokes and gags. I have ambipathy towards him.
The prefix " ambi -" can be applied to those opposing social movements and schools of thought that use a similar range of concepts.
Ambimarxism ( ambiMarxism ) is a common component of Marxism and anti-Marxism, which revolve in the same circle of ideas: “society” and “labor”, “history” and “personality”, “revolution” and “progress” - although they give them an opposite assessment.
The misfortune of many dissidents was that, like their ruling opponents, they were tightly locked into ambimarxism with its archival system of categories ("base" and "superstructure", etc.).
Marxists and anti-Marxists are still playing leapfrog: history - personality, personality - history. All this is dull and decrepit ambimarxism . It is as if there are no other factors, such as language and the unconscious, that determine the configuration of the entire social-personal field.
ambipatriotism - a contradictory feeling towards the fatherland, a combination of love and hatred.
It is naive to believe that society is divided into patriots and anti-patriots. Deep and contradictory feelings rage in the chest of a true citizen; he is always an ambipatriot . P.Ya. Chaadaev is the clearest example: in “Apology of a Madman,” he extols Russia for the same thing, for which he condemns it harshly in “Philosophical Letters.” This ambipatriotism made him simultaneously the father of both Westernism and Slavophilism. Even such a simple mind as Nekrasov understood and simply expressed this commandment of ambipatriotism :
That heart will not learn to love,
Which is tired of hating.
Ambimentality - reversibility of ideological aspirations, change of beliefs up to the complete opposite.
Russian writers and thinkers are characterized by ambimentality - a “perverted” attitude towards their own ideas, the ability to turn 180 degrees. V.G. Belinsky radically changed his beliefs every few years: ideological fervor and ambition were combined with extreme ambivalence. Vl. Soloviev in “ A Brief Tale of the Antichrist ” (1900) presents his own cherished ideas in an ironic and demonic form: unity, universalism, ecumenism, theocracy. Alexander Blok, poet and knight of the Beautiful Lady and Eternal Femininity, subsequently laughed at her in the image of a harlot, in “ The Showcase ” and “The Stranger”. All these authors are characterized by a conscious or unconscious gesture of irony, “twisting,” “distorting,” which turns inside out what has been created over decades of work—the determination to part with one’s ideological past.
I. S. Turgenev mockingly brought out this ambimentality in “ The Noble Nest ”, in the image of the eternal student Mikhalevich, who admits lyrically:
I gave myself up to new feelings with all my heart,
Like a child in soul I became:
And I burned everything I worshiped
He bowed to everything he burned.
Previous episodes of "The Gift of the Word"
1. Introduction to the project . One-word is the minimal genre of literature.
2. Self-righteousness . How does it differ from complacency, pride and fanaticism?
3. Love . How to talk “about this” without falling into either bookishness or
vernacular. Prepositions and cases of love feelings.
4. Love . Love is when I love, love is when I am loved. How can you act in love and why dislike is worse than lovelessness .
5. Time-1 . Words about time by Dahl and Khlebnikov. Times , advantageously changing one time to another. Why do people suffer from time madness and fear of time ?
6. Time-2 . The energy of meaning formation. Citizenship and temporality . Why they don’t like eternists . Time addicts are stuck on time. Topical and good .
7. Time-3 . There are two types of writing - time writing and eternal writing . Time as an art form. Who is considered a time bearer ? Temporary people and temporary places. Language is a game of chance. It's time for language creation. One-word competition.
8. Time-4 . Americans' favorite words. The most beautiful Russian words. How to choose gifts. Politics is the art of time laundering. Time-sensitive ladies and modes. Computer time cutting , historical time cutting and Bolshevik time .
9. Time - 5 . The main law of the root. Branches and crowns. Linguistics. Is it possible to modernize Russia? Bends and holes of time. Time periods , time falls , eruption times . Time and seed. Time-wasting childhood and places of memory.
10. Time - 6 . Logos and neologism. New year - new word. Japanese time-love and Karamazov time-passion . The sense of time and ways of expressing it. Who is waiting for the future? Timely thinkers. 8 hours lead time .
11. Time-7 . Monowords by V. Kolmanovsky. Expand your time . Time worship is the most widespread of the sects. Time-loving classics. Time eaters are more dangerous than parasites. To modernize or to detemporize religion?
12. Time - 8 . Last tenses. Alien-temporal, supra-temporal and sub-temporal . Time science as a science. Rules of the times . Leaders and time leaders . Lexical crown of time in Russian: 166 words. Verb of tenses.
13. Chronos-1 . America as Democracy and Chronocracy . Chronos is superior to demos and plutos. Chronomania is a disease of workaholics. Chronema is a humanitarian unit of time. And her laughing double is crap .
14. Chronos-2 . Chronocide is a crime of the 20th century. Diseases of time and eternity. Diagnosis: chronopathy . End of story. Where there is utopia, then there is uchronia . Topochronous civilization. Queue as a topochron .
15. Future participles . Despite the prohibitions of academic and school grammar, they exist. “He who does, who can, who wishes, who sees, who reads...” Relation to the future is an important sign of the present.
16. Future participles (passive) . Meletius Smotritsky - grammatical prophet. “Made”, “created”, “read”... A complete and symmetrical diagram of all participles. Time as a form, the future as a completion.
17. The preposition “v” is the main Russian word. Frequency dictionary and picture of the world. Grammatosophy. "The" and "in". How language solves the fundamental question of philosophy. The Great Chain of Being.
18. Prefix “under-” (1): concept and cultural symbol. The uniqueness of “ nedo ” in the Russian language, its untranslatability and ambiguity. Nedo and dao . Nedo as a social phenomenon in the assessment of Russian thinkers.
19. Nedo (2) . Between the western "do" and the eastern "not". Nedo as a type of civilization and as a religious worldview. “Should” and “wrong”. Gust - break - breakdown in F. Dostoevsky and V. Vysotsky. Nedo and theology.
20. Nedo (3) . Nedo in myth-making and literature. A half-baked and a weakling. Poetry is not enough . Free combination of prefixes.