Merab Mamardashvili: Thinking in the abyss

“History is the drama of freedom—there are no guarantees in it, no mechanism that advances it on its own. Every moment is surrounded by chaos. If one loses the tension of thought, one falls into the abyss—and this abyss is not somewhere else; it surrounds us now, at this very moment.” This is how, at the end of the 1980s, the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) described a present, whose fragility is once again becoming tangible today. In a Soviet Union that still appeared stable to the outside world, he interpreted the workings of totalitarian ideology not simply as the rule of a political apparatus, but as the slow erosion of consciousness, as the surrender of the individual's capacity to think: freedom is neither a possession nor a historical automatism. “Merab Mamardashvili: Thinking in the abyss” is a film and debate event conceived by Zaal Andronikashvili as part of the conference “Merab Mamardashvili: Ideology, Consciousness, Freedom” organized by the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The main focus will be GZA SHINISAKEN – MERAB MAMARDASHVILI (The Way Home – Merab Mamardashvili), a 1990 film by Nikoloz Drozdov, which is more than a portrait. It is a dense cinematic and philosophical reflection on Georgia’s struggle against Russian and Soviet hegemony, and on the question of what intellectual self-assertion means in a space marked by violence, empire and dependency.

Films:

• THE POET IN THE ORANGE JACKET – ZVIAD RATIANI   Salomé-Nutsa Alexi   Georgia 2025   Digital file   Georgian OV with English subtitles   8'
• GZA SHINISAKEN – MERAB MAMARDASHVILI (The Way Home – Merab Mamardashvili)   Nikoloz Drozdov   Georgian SSR 1990   DCP   Georgian OV with English subtitles   19'
• and other films