Sorry Contra, just got off plane and have buzz. What Putin’s game is, is not really his own game. It is the game the old politicchicks have not forgotten to play,albeit with the twist, which their philosophers support. just as, Obama has his advisors, writers,. I think he is a really smart guy who has his mind wrapped around the pulse of this new social world .
Marxism has been bankrupted , but the ideological certainty relating to among other things, societal welfare, political certainty, nationalistic ambiguity, has not been successfully erased from the face of the world. To give an example, the supposed foreign aid given to victim/nations of natural disasters, end up in the pockets of unethical leaders of such nations, uncaring of the hardships of their constituents. This is old and the ever recurring dictators of banana republics, of middle Eastern kingdoms, including the late Sha of Iran, exemplify the political insensitivity of the hidden catch and motive for procurement of such foreign aid .
This endemic process has consequences, which an ex KGB man like Putin must be aware of.
These and other ‘soft’ political processes undermine any progress which the so called economic recovery has attained since the last Great Recession.
What Deleuze and Guattari were doing with ontology was to try to rehabilitate it by describing the symtomological with what they called schizoanalysis. The point they were making was, that the ontological certainty of prior times in terms of the dialectic have been replaced by the Marxian dialectic, which have transformed the personal-social relationship into functional definitions. They refer to Leibnitz’s use of correlating quantified function with the utility of Western Capitalism. This is the crux of the argument, which not only Putin, but his advisors and think thanks are not oblivious to. With Snowden sitting there, giving them some pointers, he has help.
The weakness of Obama is tangential to this functional inadequacy of forming cohesion,which is centerpiece of the French gentlemen referred to.
The redundancy of Marxian ideology, has been defeated, thereby allegedly disqualifying the kind of synthesis he promoted. Therefore further decompensation or entropy of this idea have Kantian-Heglelian overtones. In other words, the world has become too crazy, in then utilitarian-capitalistic market, not to fall or implode into an abyss of a dysfunction. Here comes the neo Kantians, putting the idea of dialectic as a foundation, albeit one without the trappings of materialism, which have supposedly succumbed , due to the superior mechanism of free enterprise. Putin, is aware of this weakness, is paying lip service to it, and is not afraid to use Capitalist weakness to overcome it's self.
This is a war of ideas, disreputing such as the above notions brought forward by the two French thinkers mentioned. They want to reassert the war of ideas, as formative and definitive, and thereby negating any central position promoted by them, such as functionalism. The new idea was that the social political process which capitalism bore down on the individual ,creating functionally untenable social psychological positions. They are using the material dialectic critique , to defend against Popper, (open society and it’s enemies) by, pointing out the inadequacy of an attack on the dialectic materialism as asserting an identification with a synthetic solution between ideology and materialism. They do this by replacing it with a difference(ial) in the correlation between ideology and material .This difference replaces the dialectic, by quantifying the difference between personal and societal value.
This is what I see as the idea behind the myth of trying to understand Putin other then ashallow thinker, but one who has the old Soviet Academy behind his bold actions. This is how Obama’s reticence can be understood, it is not simply a war of irresolute conflict, but a sustained struggle of an ill defined ideas.
At the same time, the West is struggling to maintain this struggle within the confines of what has come to be defined as the New World Order. The West here is at a certain disadvantage, do to this underlying weakness of the marketplace of ideas of utilitarianism.