Ivan Shcherbakov

Junior Research Fellow / Invisible Graduate School

Am Planetarium 7

I was born in Berdiansk, Ukraine. In 2023 I received my bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the National University of Ostroh Academy. There I wrote a diploma project about the researcher’s position in contemporary university, as this topic was my main academic interest at that time. In 2025 I received my master’s degree in philosophy from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Throughout my MA period I narrowed my research focus to linguistic philosophy, namely speech act theory and French structuralism. In my master thesis I argued that there is a separate instance of meaning in speech called enunciation, which is different from the content of the speech itself. Since 2025 I am a PhD student in philosophy at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In my PhD thesis I am analyzing the regimes of public speech produced by a figure of political activist in late 20th and early 21st century. I am trying to investigate how the concept of political dissensus has distributed itself in language in late Soviet and contemporary Western dissident communities, and how those speech regimes contributed to a specific concept of an activist (or a dissident). 

Research Project at the Kolleg

The basic presupposition of my research is that any type of contemporary political activism has its origins in the concept of performativity, and any activist narrative today is structured according to this concept in one way or another. Practically, this concept suggests that any social, political, or cultural phenomena that a political activist finds unsatisfactory is a result of a certain culturally preserved linguistic condition, so the activist’s task should be to eliminate this linguistic condition and impose a different one. This leads to a fundamental misconception of what a political action is, as the above-mentioned position is in itself an act of confusion between morality and politics. I want to prove this on several grounds. Among other cases I work on, I rely strongly on one particular period of late Soviet history – the Era of Stagnation, focusing on the literary culture of this period and the social class that maintained its functionality – the class of late Soviet intelligentsia. The generation of late Soviet intelligentsia, up to my recent conclusions, has shaped the hereabove mentioned confusion between politics and morality in Eastern Europe. This is due to the special status the official Soviet ideology has had in this period – the status of something that nobody (neither officials, now opposition) believes in, and something which both officials and opposition conform to. Consequently, for the late Soviet intelligentsia, political position was replaced with moral position, the position of the “decent man”. I try to investigate how this conceptual character of the decent man emerged as a specific regime of speech. I work primarily with products of late Soviet literary culture of Brezhnev's period of rule.

Main Areas of Research

history of university
Lacanian psychoanalysis
linguistic philosophy
structuralism
speech act theory
Soviet history