Troubled Identity and the Modern World

by Donskis, Leonidas

• ISBN13: 9780230607705
• ISBN10: 0230607705
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The book maps what Leonidas Donskis terms the troubled identity, that is, the identity that constantly needs assurance and confirmation. It is on why and how the search for identity becomes everything for a postmodern person, an identity builder and shifter. Our infatuation with it replaces the former search for the meaning of life, becoming a mode of discourse, self-discovery, self-interpretation, and a perfect chance to reshape ourselves as the other in our country. Identity protects and hurts us. Through an identity-building-and-shifting process, argues Donskis, we can move from political majority to cultural minority, or the other way around.

Author Biography

Leonidas Donskis is a philosopher, historian of ideas, political commentator, and critic. Currently, Leonidas Donskis serves as Professor and Dean of Vytautas Magnus University School of Political Science and Diplomacy in Kaunas, Lithuania. In addition, he acts as Docent of Social and Moral Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and also as Extraordinary Visiting Professor of Cultural Theory at Tallinn University, Estonia.

Table of Contents

Preface * Acknowledgments * 1 An Identity in Need of Assurance and Confirmation * 2 To Be or to Forget: Politics of Remembering vs. Politics of Forgetting * 3 Identity and the Emergence of Modern Sensibilities: Liberty, Tradition, Anger, and Incessant Change * 4 Us and Them: Nationalism and Patriotism Revisited * 5 Fear and Loathing in Liquid Modernity * 6 Forgetting the Ends and then Redoubling the Efforts: Fanaticism * 7 Nowhere at Home * 8 Making and Unmaking History: Identities in Ruins * Works Cited * Index