Epistemic Rupture andHaptic Resistance in the Visual Language of Yurii Illienko

The article provides a theoretical and analytical interpretation of the visual language of the films of Yurii Illienko through the prism of the concepts of epistemic rupture and hapticity. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the hypothesis that the creative legacy of Yurii Illienko constitutes an integral decolonial project in which the artist appears not only as a film director, but also as a “philosophical cinematographer”—an active subject in whose hands the camera istransformed from an instrument of impartial fixation of reality into a genuine tool of thinking capable of generating new knowledge. Relying on a conceptual framework that combines visual anthropology, decolonial studies, and poststructuralist philosophy, the article substantiates Yurii Illienko’s artistic strategy of approaching cinema as a bodily experience. The concept of “haptic resistance” isinterpreted as a form of destabilization of optical control and ideological transparency, opening the way toward alternative modes of cognition. The study identifies shifts in the modalities of hapticity within the filmmaker’s cinematic oeuvre as an intensity of interaction between the screen image and the viewer, particularly in situations of epistemic transformation. The evolution of the means of “epistemic disobedience” in the director’s films is analysed within the framework of the paradigmatic inversion of modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism. The involvement of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework has enabled the research to move beyond the boundaries of purely art-historical inquiry into the dimension of philosophical ontology. In this context, Yurii Illienko emerges as a philosopher-director whose artistic work organically corresponds to the epistemic ruptures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.