Rational language as the basis of communicative action and aesopian language in the late-soviet humanities: case of LM Batkin

Considering both the research and essays of Leonid Batkin, the author of this article analyzes the interest of late-Soviet scholars of the humanities in rhetoric, which was understood as ambiguity and complexity. This topic has not only historiographical significance, but also methodological perspectives, which arise when Batkin's ideas are compared with the contemporary theory of rhetoric as the bases of the public sphere. Most often associated with ideas of modernity, argumentation, discussion, and conviction (by Jurgen Habermas and Quentin Skinner, for example), rhetoric can be also interpreted in the sense of dialectical criticism and the problematization of language as the basis of contemporaneity (by Walter Benjamin and Georges Didi-Huberman, for example). The interpretation of the Renaissance as the foundation of modernity plays an important role in this dichotomy, as well as an indication of the paradoxical nature of Renaissance rhetoric. The article shows that in the late-Soviet context, Batkin's texts developed this dichotomy with the help of ideas about "artificiality" and "culture."