Modernity in eastern Europe tends to be seen either as the partial opening up of a region characterized by traditional forms of societal self-understanding, or as a disfigured and radicalized adaptation of western modernity that prioritizes closure. Paul Blokker, in an article focusing on Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Hungary, argues that both views need to be combined.
Some common notions about analytic philosophy – that it is uniformly anti-metaphysical or indifferent to the history of philosophy – are clearly misconceived. However the impression that analytic philosophers are essentially linguistic philosophers is not entirely false and hence less easy to refute, writes Pierre Wagner.
Asked to compare the Hungarian city of Pécs to his own birthplace, author Peteris Puritis is at a loss: he was only there once. Instead, he gives an unofficial guided tour of the many Soviet-era monuments in the Latvian town of his childhood, recalling some of the cheeky uses he and his friends found for them…
Viktor Horváth’s novel “Török tükör” [Turkish Mirror] portrays everyday life in sixteenth century Hungary, when it was a suzerainty of the Sultan Suleyman. The narrator, an old Muslim man, addresses the reader throughout as “my heir to the true faith”, assuming that by the time his words are read, the Hungarians will have assimilated with their conquerors – an ingenious reversal that runs throughout the book and gives it its special charm. The excerpt translated here describes the market town of Pécs.
Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one’s mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of fiction that sum up the New York attitude.
The “open society” to which Soviet existence is often claimed to have been opposed resembles the old idea of “the free world”. A non-moralistic approach to group relations in the Soviet Union moves beyond the simplistic link between modernisation and openness, writes Catriona Kelly.
Marx’s comment that history advances by the “bad side” has inspired an apocalyptic strand of anti-capitalism that supposes history is “on our side”. Benjamin Noys takes issue with the “accelerationist” view that welcomes apocalypse as the decisive moment.
Attacks on scientific consensus employ the simulacra of scholarship and a deceptively readable idiom. Those who debunk the deniers tend to be old-fashioned rationalists or committed activists. Neither group are particularly well suited to looking at the deeper reasons behind denialism, warns Keith Kahn-Harris.
Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist control and domination. Machines, not human bodies, are now the subjects of the text.
When newspapers die it can be a slow and painful business. Many of its current problems – loss of revenue and falling readership among them – are of the newspaper industry’s own making, but there are signs that some in the business are finally getting the message and shaping up to the future.
Where hard physics combines with traders’ animal passions, the bestiary of financialized civilization becomes imbued with the relations between hunter and hunted, writes Brian Holmes. Systemic corruption has produced the fundamental disconnect between the informational sky above our heads and the existential ground beneath our feet.
Suspended between negation and anticipation, post-socialist societies are a beginning with no end, writes Ozren Pupovac. A neoliberal order underwritten by the science of transitology ensures that the sole constant of post-socialism is inequality.
The Slovak author and journalist Martin M. Simecka and Hungarian architect and former samizdat publisher László Rajk are not only former dissidents of the younger generation, but also the sons of well-known persecuted communists. László Rajk sr. was the most prominent victim of the Rákosi show trials of 1949; the writer Milan Simecka sr. began his career in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and became a dissident after 1968. In the first debate in the Eurozine series “Europe talks to Europe”, held in Budapest, they discussed the still unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of their fathers’ generation in post-war communism, and the failings of today’s debate about the past in the former communist countries. Moderated by Éva Karádi, editor of Magyar Lettre Internationale.
Is accepting the Foucaultian claim that the subject is constituted by power tantamount to denying the possibility of emancipatory resistance? Not necessarily argues Amy Allen, taking a Habermasian detour to articulate a politics of opposition to gender subordination that is both individual and collective.