Kirill Chepurin

Kirill Chepurin received his PhD in Philosophy in the joint doctoral programme of the Faculties of Philosophy and Theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2022. He has held positions and fellowships at the University of Hamburg, Free University of Berlin, HSE University Moscow, and University of California, Berkeley. He is a scholar of German Idealism, philosophical and literary Romanticism, political theology, philosophy of religion, and critical theory, and an incoming Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Bilkent University.

His current research interrogates the concepts of modernity, theodicy, and beatitude or bliss, as well as the relation between the human, the planetary, and the cosmic. He is the author of Bliss Against the World: Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity (2024) and co-editor of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology (2021) as well as Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France (2023). His articles appear in journals including Angelaki, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crisis & Critique, European Romantic Review, Philosophy & Rhetoric, The Journal of Religion, and Theory & Event.

This project turns to a recurring image in the Western imaginary, from Scipio’s dream to space photographs such as Earthrise and Pale Blue Dot: The Earth diminished or reduced to a point. In its modern technological form, as seen in such photographs, this planetary image has been criticized as a ‘view from nowhere’ and is inseparable from the colonial and racialized ordering of the globe by what Sylvia Wynter refers to as the normative modern subject, ‘Man’. However, in ‘The Ceremony Found’ (2015), Wynter embraces the ‘revelatory, extraterrestrial perspectival view of our planet Earth’ as one of modernity’s emancipatory achievements. At the same time, the horizons of this achievement remain foreclosed by the domination of ‘Man’.

Reading this cosmic view as an ambivalent form of autoreduction produced by Man’s technological upscaling, which reveals the smallness and contingency of Man’s world, the project asks why Wynter sees it as capable of opening a decentered, ‘Copernican’ perspective on humanity. The project explores this ambivalence by tracing how Wynter connects the technological planetary image to poetry and ceremony, and by situating her thought within the Space Age, the Whole Earth imaginary, and theories of cybernetics and autopoiesis.

In dialogue with Sylvia Wynter, Afrofuturism, and speculative realism, this project develops a political theology of scale via two hypotheses: first, that ‘humanity’ is a modern cross-scalar construct; and second, that scale (de)legitimates. The project approaches the post-Copernican, post-1492 humanity as a Western-centric and racialized real-ideal apparatus of cross-scalar mediation and upscaling, and modernity as the geophysical process of this upscaling, driven by the contradiction between the posited central position of the Christian-European subject and the decentred and contingent abyss of reality disclosed in the joint event of 1492 and the Copernican Revolution.

The project thus seeks to push back against overly humanist or individualist accounts of modernity, and to trace the counter-trajectory of the cross-scalar delegitimation of humanity, which runs from Romanticism to Russian Cosmism to the Afrofuturist reclamation of the planetary and the cosmic against the world of ‘Man’.