Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe

by Bradatan; Costica

• ISBN13: 9780415699198
• ISBN10: 0415699193
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The volume maps out the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of "precariousness" as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. Among these misfortunes the failed Communist experiment figures prominently. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and worth studying in its own right, but with the re-integration of the "new Europe" into the "old" one and the emergence on the "Western" European intellectual scene of many thinkers and writers from the "East," this culture will also determine what the European mind will be like in the 21stcentury. Such a voice is indispensable for the ongoing conversation that Europe is. The project aims at exploring and decoding this culture of "precariousness" from the complementary angles of philosophy, political theory, intellectual history and literary studies. The work of authors such as Cioran, Kolakowski, Kert sz, Baumant and Zizek, as well as a wide range of topics (from philosophical martyrdom to collective suffering to geographical fatalism) are covered, or just touched on, in the course of the project. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	p. 1
Introduction: Philosophy, Geography, Fragility	p. 1
Uncomfortable identities
Interwar Southeastern Europe Confronts the West: The New Generation: Cioran, Yanev, Popovic	p. 8
Poststructuralism in Georgia: The Phenomenology of the "Objects-Centaurs" of Merab Mamardashvili	p. 26
What is Eastern Europe? A Philosophical Approach	p. 39
Geographies of pain
On the Meaning of Life in the Age of the Most Meaningless Death	p. 52
Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in Imre Kertész's Fateless	p. 71
On Happiness in Unusual Places: N. Steinhardt's Uplifting Lesson	p. 83
Serving the muses under stress
The Fragility of It All	p. 98
Familiar affairs: Tracing Croatian Theoretical Normality	p. 108
Latin as a sign of life? The reception of the ancient tradition as a marker in the analysis of the Sovietization process in Poland	p. 119
1989
The Revolutions of 1989: Twenty Years Later	p. 128
Marx on 1989	p. 142
Jamming the Critical Barrels: The Legacies of Totalitarian Thinking	p. 157
The New Europe
Voices from Central Europe: Bauman, Kertész and Zizek in Search of Europe	p. 171
Europe in the Mode of As If: Józef Tiseliner's Góral Pliilosophy	p. 186
Europe Speaks: Linguistic Diversity and Politics	p. 201
Index	p. 210
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