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, having previously obtained a Russian doctoral degree in the History of Philosophy at HSE University Moscow. 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.

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 (2025) 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 have appeared in journals including Angelaki, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crisis & Critique, European Romantic Review, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Theory & Event.

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’.