Istočno evropska paradigma i rat na Balkanu
One always searches for some symbolic point from which one can claim that something ended and something else began, even though there are no beginnings and no endings.
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Balkan. Somewhere between a tragedy and a myth, a place and a condition, the term is perhaps best understood as a metaphor. It has been used and abused in academia by proponents of opposing political views. Multiculturalism has appropriated it, as have postmodernism and postcommunism. It is used pejoratively to refer to excessive specialization and nostalgically to refer to Europe’s lost people—its wild warriors and passionate geniuses. This book explores the idea of the Balkan as metaphor and the meaning of Balkan identity in the context of contemporary culture. Focusing on Balkanism both as a body of knowledge and as the critical study of that discourse, this book does for the Balkans what Edward Said’s Orientalism did for "the Orient."The sixteen authors, most of whom were born and educated in the Balkans, apply the Western academic tools of postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and critical multiculturalism to topics as varied as the rhetoric of Balkanization, the war in Kosovo, Western demonization and erotization of the Serbs, Balkan film, human rights legislation, Byzantinism, the vampire as an image of Balkan violence, envy of the political and moral capital of victimhood, the tendency of the Balkan psyche toward depression, Serbian machismo and homosexuality, and wartime rape. The book both lays the groundwork for a new field of study and serves as an act of resistance against the many forms of representation that break the Balkans into fragments such as NATO army bases and digital maps in order to wire them into the global market.
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As the public voice of the Belgrade Circle NGO, the editors of this journal will attempt to draw clear distinctions and borders between themselves and the anachronistic and unmatured Serbia which is tired of its years, of its past, of its heritage. Our starting point will not be the old and spent Yugoslavia, even it commands respect; it will be the idea of a new Europe which does not yet exist, but which we could all build together.
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In this book Taylor observes the conservative-liberal debate in America from an outsider’s position. His concerns are threefold. First, radical individualism has disavowed most moral absolutes, eroded the meaningfulness of life, and resulted in a centripetal self-orientation that denigrates relational connectiveness. Secondly, Taylor is concerned that modern thought has become dominated by a reason that finds the highest good in the economic maximizing of ends. This »instrumental reason« demeans others as mere means to an end, disregards important perspectives that are not integral to the cost/benefit equation, and creates a technological supremacy that may cost us our humanity. Thirdly, Taylor is concerned that institutions have embraced instrumental reason as supreme and creating a power-base that may stand in the way of reform.
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Hrišćanstvo, Islam, Modernost
Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.
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Suverenitet u doba globalizacije
What determines the flow of labor and capital in this new global information economy? Who has the capacity to coordinate this new system, to create some measure of order? What happens to territoriality and sovereignty, two fundamental principles of the modern state? And who gains rights and who loses rights? Losing Control? examines the rise of private transnational legal codes and supranational institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and universal human rights covenants, and shows that though sovereignty remains an important feature of the international system, it is no longer confined to the nation-state. Other actors gain rights and a kind of sovereignty by setting some of the rules that used to be within the exclusive domain of states. Saskia Sassen tracks the emergence and the making of the transformations that mark our world today, among which is the partial denationalizing of national territory. Two arenas in particular stand out in the new spatial and economic order by their capacity to set their own rules: the global capital market and the series of codes and institutions that have mushroomed into an international human rights regime. As Sassen shows, these two quasi-legal realms now have the power and legitimacy to demand action and accountability from national governments, with the ironic twist that both depend upon the state to enforce their goals. From the economic policy shifts forced by the Mexico debt crisis to the recurring battles over immigration and refugees around the world, Losing Control? incisively analyzes the events that have radically altered the landscape of governance in an era of increasing globalization.
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This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant’s second »Critique« and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. One could call it a fundamental ontology of freedom if freedom, according to the author, did not entail liberation from foundational acts and the overcoming of any logic that determines, in the way ontology does, by positing being either as self-sufficient position or as subjected to strictly immanent laws.
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Is there a concept of the enemy? To what discursive sphere would it belong? Or, if there is no concept of the enemy, what are the factors that could have prevented its articulation? Following the reflections of Carl Schmitt and Jacques Derrida on the theologico-political, and reading canonical texts from the Western philosophical, political, and religious traditions, the author seeks to account for the absence of a history of the enemy.The question of the enemy emerges in this book as contingent on the way Europe has related to both Jew and Arab as concrete enemies. Moreover, the author provocatively argues that the Jew and the Arab constitute the condition of religion and politics. Among the many strengths of the book is the timeliness of its profound study of contemporary actuality: the volume provides a basis for a philosophical understanding of the forces at work that produced and kindled current conflicts in Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East.
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The book “Karl Kraus: The Figures of Lingual Suspicion” , is a collection of 30 essays written by prominent theoreticians and experts on Austrian literature and culture: Georg Knepler, Hans Weigel, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Lucien Goldman, Theodor Adorno to name but a few. The collection attempts to reconstruct international reception of Kraus’ literary work, pointing thus at the connection between language and society which is particularly obvious in times of wars and crisis. The collection consist next chapters: Kraus in Yugoslavia; Kraus and his Thime; Satirist on the Stage; Kraus’ School of Resistance; Figures of Lingual Suspicion; Eroticism of Viennese Modernism; Kraus and Contemporaries.
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Politika i kultura u doba apatija
In The End of Utopia, noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby takes a sobering look at the future of politics and does not like what he sees. Jacoby points to the abandonment of utopian ideals that once sustained dissent and movements of social change; and he call for writers and critics to reclaim the vision and backbone they are losing.
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In the first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri C. Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, attempts to describe a responsible role for the postcolonial critic within the postcolonial enclave. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason track the figure of the ‘native informant’ through various cultural practices – philosophy, history, literature – to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitian hybrid.
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In this book, specially prepared by the author for Belgrade Circle, main topic is contemporary political situation viewed globally. Through sharp criticism author deals with such phenomena as globalization, nationalism, war, still alive Stalinism and Nazism, etc. Using his well-known theoretical apparatus, Lacanian psychoanalysis, author investigates these phenomena as shown in film, media, advertisement, new technologies…
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Reflections on Transnational Citizenship
Articles collected in this volume, written mostly in the past five years, attempt to develop themes already articulated in the Les Frontières de la démocratie. The book deals with historical and political borders, as places where citoyenneté and la civilité are being challenged, as loose or firm battle lines where democracy could be tamed or gain new inspiration. It deals with ambiguity of the term »community«, as community of peoples, community of citizens, national community striving to become trans-national on various levels where it is being constructed and sometimes de-constructed. (From Preface)
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In the context of globalization, this book has shown that what we think of as war - that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence - is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or 'new wars', which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare. An informal criminalized economy is built into the functioning of the new wars.Kaldor's analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations.
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When Obrad Savić approached me about translating some of my writings, I suggested that he select those articles and chapters from my books which he thought would be most thought provoking. He not only organized the material, but also gave the title to the collection. When I received his proposed table of contents, I was delighted that he organized the writings around the theme of responsibility – a theme that has always been central to my philosophic thinking... Philosophy should have a close connection with the rest of human culture. It is the primary responsibility of the philosopher to provide a necessary critical perspective, and to help guide human action... I believe that there is something important to be learned from all of these thinkers – even though they sharply disagree with each other. (Richard J. Bernstein, Introduction)
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(Dva ogleda o umu)
Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "État voyou" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines.
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Neki aspekti Barklijeve teorije viđenja
The entire philosophy of the new age would have been different had the model of reason and rationality been looked for in optics instead of in geometry. Optics offers a possibility to supply a real image-object with status, function and name of a virtual object, without characterizing this change of status as hallucination. The possibilities for the interpretation of the character of reason and the nature of the subject-object relation, i.e. the nature of subject, thus presenting themselves, immediately become apparent. Optics would permit the crossing and linking together of real and imaginary space, but not by turning real space into the imaginary, or vice versa, but rather by keeping, in their being linked together, the difference between these two spaces, at once undermining the very possibility of what the 17th- and 18th- century theoreticians called "the absolute space".
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Filozofski članci
In this collection of essays, Habermas takes up and pursues the line of analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He begins by outlining the sources and central themes of twentieth century philosophy, and the range of current debates. He then examines a number of key contributions to these debates, from the pragmatic philosophies of Mead, Peirce and Rorty to the poststructuralism of Foucault. Like most contemporary thinkers, Habermas is critical of the Western metaphysical tradition and its exaggerated conception of reason. In opposition to the radical critics of Western philosophy, Habermas argues that postmetaphysical thinking can remain critical only if it preserves the idea of reason while stripping it of its metaphysical trappings.
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S one strane sovjetskog sistema
The Gulag Survivor – Beyond the Soviet System is the first book published in Ex-Yugoslavia to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalins victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding their existence evolved from the 1950s to the present.
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