Other relevant keywords:
Helen Petrovsky (b. 1962)
Helen Petrovsky (Elena Vladimirovna Petrovskaia) is best known for her work in contemporary philosophy and visual culture, particularly the philosophy of photography. She is the author of several monographs and published lecture courses, including in collaboration with Oleg Aronson, and has edited and compiled volumes by Rosalind Krauss, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida in Russian. She is the founding editor of the philosophical journal Blue Sofa (Sinii divan). Petrovsky is a laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize (2011), the Innovation Prize (2012), and the Alexander Pyatigorsky Prize (2021). She holds degrees from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO, 1982) and the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1988). Between 1997–2011, she was a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Post-Classical Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Valery Podoroga. Since 2011, Petrovsky has headed the Department of Aesthetics at the Institute of Philosophy.
Petrovsky’s philosophical approach is characterized by intentional fragmentarity; critiques of wholeness, universality, and representation comprise a foundational premise of her reasoning. Her work demonstrates the openness of any text, both thematically, through the content she discusses, and also performatively, through the deliberately fragmentary and incomplete format of her analysis, which allows for multiple readings. In this regard, it is difficult to offer an overview of her philosophical project, which is better understood as a series in the Deleuzian sense rather than as a unified theory or system.
Text and the Non-Existence of Metalanguage
Although Petrovsky is better known as a researcher of the visual, her earliest monograph—Part of the World (Chast’ sveta, 1995)—is devoted to American literature, including Puritan diaries, Moby Dick, and Gertrude Stein. Petrovsky does not conduct her analysis from a meta-position; instead, she co-participates in the texts that she analyzes, entering into direct dialogue with the works under discussion, for instance by choosing not to use quotation marks or other punctuation to separate her own writing from primary source citations. Part of the World further reflects Petrovsky’s rejection of a meta-position in its experimental structure: it does not look like a conventional academic text and offers no introductory explanations for the reader, who upon opening the book, finds it already unfolding. By intentionally blurring the distinction between her authorial position and the primary sources she analyzes, Petrovsky opposes the notion of interpretation as meta-representational explanation in favor of the dynamic experience of reading. This experience of reading includes the reader in the text, thereby forging a relationship between the two.
The metaphor of landscape is crucial for Petrovsky’s work. In Part of the World, she juxtaposes the two Russian words for “landscape”—peizazh (from the French paysage) and landshaft (from the German Landschaft)—seeking to elucidate not the peizazh of American literature, which presupposes an exhaustive, generalizing, and static picture, but its landshaft, in which the reader participates in the action of the text. She writes:
This text has neither a beginning nor an end. It can be continued infinitely. It can be started from a completely different place.
And still, it will not encompass the American landscape [landshaft]. For as soon as it attempts to do so, the landscape [landshaft], having become narrative, will immediately turn away from it.
And it will reveal its other face.
Then, having understood its cunning, someone will hurry to an exhibition to view an American landscape [peizazh]. But the landscape [landshaft] will no longer be there. (Petrovskaia, Chast’ sveta, 8)
For Petrovsky, the texts she engages are woven into the landscape and history of the American continent. They do not represent the landscape but are always connected with its places and events. For instance, in part I of Part of the World she analyzes the diaries of Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan woman living in captivity during the King Phillip’s War. The heroine dreams of returning home, which Petrovsky associates with semantic depth—a zone of fixed territoriality and stable meaning (home), sustained by the existence of God, to whom Rowlandson constantly appeals, and which is contrasted to the wanderings of the Native people, which correlate to Deleuze’s notion of the plane. Rowlandson is absorbed by the pulsation of the “wilderness”—an important signifier in the text that Petrovsky leaves untranslated, and into which th subject (Rowlandson) eventually dissolves. By entering into the process of reading Rowlandson’s encounter, we experience not just a description of it, but encounter its repetition.
For Petrovsky, the image of the whale from Moby Dick connects to these same motifs. The double meaning of the whale, as a creature that can move between depth and surface, is introduced with an epigraph from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a creature that “seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” For Petrovsky, “the epigraph, clearly, is meant to capture the dual nature of the whale. The whale is water and land, fish and beast… The point that connects inhalation and exhalation—the inhalation of land and the exhalation of water” (84–85). The dual nature of the whale is then challenged by the unambiguous definition of the whale in the novel as a fish. For Petrovsky, the gap in the connection “whale—fish” marks the text. The same is true for the novel’s opening reference to the importance of the silent “h” in the word whale: the “h” is not pronounced but written, containing within itself all the meaning of this word, and indicating a gap between writing and speech. For Petrovsky, the novel is a description of the conditions of reading and writing.
Moby Dick is a dash, emptiness, whiteness, that place (outside all places) where another—bodily—inscription must take place. If the reader manages to fill this gap (an echo of that same whiteness) with their unique experience, and if the inscription thereby occurs, then the “majestic steep-peaked phantom” Moby Dick will appear, whose name signifies only the encounter with text as event. (112)
The chase after the white whale and its colorless emptiness distracts the senses; Petrovsky likens the blinding whiteness of the whale to the emptiness of the blank page, deprived of sensation, but moving towards a particular form of sensation (chuvstvennost’) that is both produced through writing and restored by reading.
In Part of the World, Petrovsky demonstrates a performative alignment between content and form: her arguments are articulated through content and enacted in structure. She argues for a connection between the concepts of “American” and “literary,” where each does not represent the other, but where moments of interaction are present—where landscape is explored through writing and where writing is structured by landscape, performatively demonstrating the process of scholarship as co-participation.
The Sign Outside Linguistics
The Perturbation of the Sign: Culture Against Transcendence is Petrovsky’s most recent major work. The theme of immanence is central, realized through a new type of object that Petrovsky calls the “dynamic sign”—a semiotic sign that she attempts to represent not semantically, but materially and dynamically, outside the framework of linguistics. The book is a collection of essays, structured as an open series of case studies rather than an overarching theory.
Among her case studies, Petrovsky analyzes a series by Polish photographer Zofia Rydet and “Nastia” (2001), a short story by Soviet and Russian postmodernist writer Vladimir Sorokin. In both cases, “signs” (photography and text) are found rather than constructed. Drawing on Augustine’s theory of natural signs, she presents these two cultural objects (photography and text) as found, rather than constructed. Rydet’s archive, which contains some 20,000 photographs employing structures frontal static frames and dispassionate fixation—intensifies the impersonal recording of the visible. “In photography there is no abstract or concrete, it is a cross-section of the visible world, as if this world could be cut—literally stratified—into separate images” (Petrovskaia, Vozmushchenie znaka, 168). Petrovsky argues that in Rydet’s series, the subject (or thing-hero) is connected not with some meaningful classification, but with the frequency of its repetition. In this sense, Rydet’s photographs do not duplicate the visible to which they refer, but are themselves part of it, “as if this world could be cut—literally layered—into separate images” (168).
In Sorokin’s absurdist story “Nastia,” where a young girl is baked as part of a celebratory dinner in honor of her sixteenth birthday, Petrovsky argues that the story functions as a sequential collapse from a hallucination (the images that arise during the act of reading the story) to the physical matter of the printed letters. Metaphor is literalized: a girl described as “freshly baked” is then actually baked; a girl whose hand was asked for in marriage has her hand cut off. Petrovsky points to the landscape of the story, which at first abounds in color, but is described at the end of the story exclusively in black tones (black sky, black clouds, black boats), thereby designating the transition from the colorful hallucination to the black of the printed word (even the “sky” in Sorokin’s text is not blue, but black). For Petrovsky, in Sorokin’s reading strategy, each layer of meaning is reduced to the one below it, until the reader arrives at a flat surface of letters. “The eating of Nastia is, in essence, the eating of letters: when the words are ‘eaten,’ in other words, consumed (the formula of modern reading), all that remains is hallucination” (132–133). Petrovsky’s notion of the dynamic sign marks the abolition of the semiotic hallucination: it is the return of cultural objects to physical matter (e.g. the literary image to the letter), enabling us to consider objects as the dynamics of matter itself.
Photography and Document
One focus of Petrovsky’s research is contemporary photography, where she aims to uncover areas of social or political tension, such that the subject of her analysis is not so much photography itself as what can be problematized through it. In Anti-Photography (Antifotografiia, 2003; later expanded as Anti-Photography 2, 2015), she compares series by Boris Mikhailov and Cindy Sherman, respectively. Mikhailov’s “Dance” (“Tanets,” 1978), dedicated to his parents, resembles a family photo archive, yet his parents do not appear in the photographs, nor were they at the captured dance evening. For Petrovsky, Mikhailov’s series captures an important feature of collective experience: the “unity of the individual and the universal” (Petrovskaia, Anti-fotografiia, 19). What appears to be a unique family photo archive turns out to resonate universally; in the photographs of others, we readily recognize our own lives. “With his dedicatory gesture [of the Dance series to his parents], Mikhailov reveals the full paradox of such ‘ownerless memory’: I see my parents when looking at someone else’s photograph—in other words, at a photograph depicting other people and/or taken from someone else’s archive” (20).
Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–1980), in turn, mimics images from non-existent films—films for which scholars have been unable to identify even prototypes of the featured female characters. Sherman’s series produces an effect that approaches déjà vu: for Petrovsky, this is the effect of memory without an object, or what she calls the affect of memory. “What then will this memory without an object, this pure play of remembrance, turn out to be?,” Petrovsky asks. “Presumably it will prove to be nothing other than the affect of memory itself, that is, memory as a certain supra- or trans-individual state” (38). Through the interplay between the “referential emptiness” of both series and the recognition they elicit from viewers, Petrovsky maps the elusive space of collective sensation [chuvstvennost’]. Her analysis becomes an inquiry into the collective imaginary.
Petrovsky also discusses the idea of “cliché” in relation to notions of community and the everyday. She argues that the banality of everyday life—the impossibility of unique experience—opens the possibility for a form of community existence specific to contemporaneity. The private and the unique exist only in the form of cliché, but it is through cliché that we form community: “[contemporary photography] mobilizes the potential for a certain collective bond that arises around stereotypes widespread in society [. . .] these clichés shape our very sensation” (16). These communities form, in Petrovsky’s view, a new kind of collective subject, which she calls “non-heroic communities,” formed not through heroic narrative but through the banalization of experience, and which resist rather than universalize.
Communities Outside Identity
Petrovsky further explores the idea of community in Nameless Communities (Bezymiannye soobshchestvo, 2012), which addresses community defined through its connection to shared affect, a concept that Petrovsky first explored in Antiphotography. Collective sensibility generates two affective states. The first state is a collective sensation of cliché, or ordinariness, formed in the discursive void where the fusion of the individual and the generic becomes possible. These communities are ghost-like, nameless, and non-heroic—a form of collectivity that does not produce identity. Relying on the work of Susan Buck-Morss, Petrovsky argues that this type of community is anesthetized: perception is dulled, cliché, and immune to affect; personal experience is rendered banal and collective experience is alienated. The second affective state of community is trauma, which overcomes the anesthesia of the first. For Petrovsky, where affect is concerned, contemporary community moves between the atrophy of the sensual (where everything seems insignificant, banal) and trauma.
Petrovsky is concerned with forms of community whose existence resists definition through the language of sociology, political science, or history. She aligns such non-heroic, nameless communities with the concept of “multitude,” as developed by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Paolo Virno—a form of collectivity that stands in contrast to traditional understanding of a group as organized around a fixed function or identity. In this light, areas related to the collective—documentality, testimony, and archive—must be reconsidered in the context of the fragmentary and fluid nature of collectivity today.
Petrovsky often identifies documentality in photographs least presuming the documentary mode. In Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” she points to the “historical imaginary,” or what she defines as the affect of the historical—what makes up the documentary character of the series. In her analysis of Jeff Wall’s photograph “Dead Troops Talk” (1992), for instance, Petrovsky argues that we again encounter “referential emptiness.” Though Wall did not witness the war in Afghanistan and the events that his photograph depicts are fictional, it is precisely through this imaginary quality that the event of war is captured—through the exclusion of the living from the conversation of the dead; through the clear break between the experience of viewing and the experience of war. Drawing on Susan Sontag, Petrovsky writes: “Because ‘we’—and here ‘we’ takes the form of a figure of exclusion—is all those who have never experienced anything like it, who do not understand. Who cannot grasp. Who cannot imagine how nightmarish war is and how ordinary it becomes” (Petrovskaia, Bezymiannye soobshchestvo, 76). For Petrovsky, it is essential to separate documentality from reportage and museum-like authenticity.
Likewise, in her analysis of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah (1985), Petrovsky highlights the film’s “imaginary voids.” The film eschews archival footage, never showing the camps; the film instead opens with a wasteland where a camp once stood. For Petrovsky, Shoah constitutes a new type of archive, where the past is presented not in the form of chronicles or museum documents, but in the form of living memory and acts of return. She draws on Jacques Derrida’s observation that the power of this film is explicitly cinematographic: that cinema does not reproduce but repeats.
Lanzmann constructs the film in such a way that this impossibility reaches the viewer as a form of knowledge—one in which they are included in a non-theoretical way. This is precisely why the reverse side of the film’s speech is silence—not as a result of overwhelming emotion, but as a scar that cuts through speech. (93–94)
Shoah does not create a “picture” of trauma but returns it. Trauma cannot be described, only repeated. In her analysis of Shoah, Petrovsky returns to the idea of the collective sensation of our contemporary moment—a form of sensation that is both affectively and imaginatively impoverished, appearing in forms that are either faded and alienated (cliché) or that overwhelming all imagery and perception (trauma). The interplay between cliché and trauma explains why the idea of “void” is so important for Petrovsky: voids allow us to map the landscape (landschaft) of contemporary sensation, which comes to recognize itself not in representation but in lacunae.
Nigina Sharopova, November 2025
Bibliography
Petrovskaia, Elena. Anti-fotografiia. Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2003.
Petrovskaia, Elena. Anti-fotografiia 2. Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2015.
Petrovskaia, Elena. Bezymiannye soobshchestvo. Moscow: Falanster, 2012.
Petrovskaia, Elena. Chast’ sveta. Moscow: AdMarginem, 1995.
Petrovskaia, Elena. Vozmushchenie znaka. Kul’tura protiv transtsendennogo. Moscow: Common Place, 2019.