Plakhin, V. T., Korosteleva, O. T. ‘WHOM SHOULD BE THANK FOR BEING ALIVE? (Vital Forces in Mythological and Advertising Pictures of the World)

Abstract: The present article is based on the philosophical-cultural approach and is a part of the research program aimed at explication of the substantial antagonism of the archaic myth as an ‘early mirror of the world’ and modern advertisement which is almost naturally thought to be the phenomenon with mythological features. The topic of vital forces, their preservation and accumulation is one of the central ones in both classical mythology and advertising discourse which allows to view specifics of the prehistorical and contemporary market vitalism as a topical area to be studied in detail. The present research is based on the comparative method that involves the comparison of the prehistorical concept of vital forces modeled by using the ethnographic cross-cultural analysis with the most typical features of advertising vitalism. The author of the article shows that archaic views and practices represent human as a key element of the universal circulation of vital forces and a subject possessing, allocating and consuming vital forces. On the contrary, the advertising concept of vital forces turn an advertising hero into a plain buyer of a ‘packaged’ simulative dose. Extreme forms of such reductive approach makes the subjective existence to be an exclusive attribute of a marketable substance while a consumer deprived of his own vital potential represents a personification of a subjective nothing.

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