Chomsky's media phenomenon and its reception in Russia: rhetoric, semiotics, translation

The paper accounts for ethics and philosophy principles which underlie the contents of Noam Chomsky’s essays analyzing and discussing American foreign policy as well as the credibility of information about it given by the mainstream media. His major features are defined as humanism, rationalism, skepticism, and resistance. Thepurposeis, first, toshow how these principles, outlined yet in The Responsibility of Intellectu als and The Political Economy of the Mass Media shape the rhetoric and discourse of his writings. It also describes in a more detailed way lexical, semantic and semiotic peculiarities of Chomsky’s texts which are important to take into account all kinds of ethnosemantic refractions and conceptual shifts, which may distort an adequate understanding and reception of Chomsky’s social and political thoughtin Russia as far as its media space is concerned. This task required to describe in detail, first of all, the conceptual shifts proper in the Russian language context to the key items of the Chomski an ethos such as truth, post-truth, Cartesian common sense, lies, fake news, propaganda. All of these are essential to understand the difference between the rational (Cartesian) intellect, on one hand, and the emotional intellect, on the other, with relation to their role in categorizing social reality. Are also discussed links between the primary social reality and the secondary informational reality of media which is referred to by Chomsky as definition of reality. Categorizing social, political, and cultural coordinates of the Chomski an critical attitude towards what he call an exus between power and the mainstream American media is also a problem to be discussed. In modern Russia he is often considered to represent the American Left which is not so true: in the communist Soviet Union his social woks were entirely ignored or hushed up. The paper suggests to regard his public activity as a manifestation of a new postcolonial cultural «translation» theory which leads to a reformulating of the former cultural oppositions and requires their deconstruction. The postcolonialde-Americanizing markers are rather frequent in the media discourse of N. Chomsky. They are more in formative to understand his true role in the analyzing the place of the mainstream American media and their dominant presence in the global informational context. Special attention is paid to reasons which explain the splitting in the Russian media of the last name Chomsky into [ʧɔmski], which is being used now by experts in Social and Political Science, and [hɔmskij] which refers to a linguist and has always been used by Soviet linguists.