Publisher: Beogradski krug

Deconstruction after 9/11 (manuscript)

Tekstualni aktivizam

Author(s): Martin McQuillan / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: Tele-Technology; Derrida; Europe; hospitality; sovereignty; spectrality; international law; justice; democracy; New International; war

Martin McQuillan brings Derrida's writing into the immediate vicinity of geo-politics today, from the Kosovo conflict to the Iraq war, following both Derrida's writing since Specters of Marx and the present political scene through the former Yogoslavia and Afghanistan to Palestine and Baghdad. His 'textual activism' is as impatient with the universal gestures of philosophy as it is with the complacency and reductionism of policy-makers and activists alike. This work records a response to the war on thinking that has marked western discourse since 9/11

Experience of Freedom

Iskustvo slobode

Author(s): Jean-Luc Nancy / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: being-in-common; Heidegger; Kant; Hegel; shared freedom; singularity of being; community

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.

Voyous

Odmetničke države

Author(s): Obrad Savić,Jacques Derrida / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: democracy to come; Europe; sovereignty; nation-state

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.

Europe: History of Political Concept

Evropa: istorija političkog pojma

Author(s): Tomaž Mastnak / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: enemy; Europe; Turkic people; Christianity; Islam

The Jew, the Arab – A History of the Enemy

Jevrejin, Arapin – istorija neprijatelja

Author(s): Gil Anidjar / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: theological enemy; political enemy; Christianity; Islam; Judaism; Europe; law; Derrida; Schmitt; deconstruction

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.

Avant-garde and Politics

Avangarda i politika

Author(s): Marina Gržinić / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: media; IRWIN; NSK; postsocialism; spectralization; museum; video art; politics

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.

Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective

Svođenje računa – tranziciona pravda u istorijskoj perspektivi

Author(s): Jon Elster / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: amnesty; negotiated transitions; transitional justice; church property; lustration; judges; justice; retributive emotions; courts

This book offers an analysis of transitional justice - retribution and reparation after a change of political regime - from Athens in the fifth century BC to the present

New & Old Wars – organized violence in a global era

Novi i stari ratovi – organizovano nasilje u globalizovanoj eri

Author(s): Mary Kaldor / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: Bosnia-Herzegovina war; Cold War; security; Dayton Agreement; old wars; ethnic cleansing; globalization; modern war; negotiations; new wars; nationalism; peacekeeping; total wars; virtual war; war crimes; sovereignty

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.

The Gulag Survivor

Preživeli iz Gulaga

Author(s): Nanci Adler / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: Stalinism; monuments; Communist party; Gulag; victims; memory

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.

Dream Nation

Sanjana nacija

Author(s): Stathis Gourgouris / Language(s): Serbian

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation’s dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. The author argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the current internal predicaments of the European Community or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts.

Losing Control?

Gubitak kontrole?

Author(s): Saskia Sassen / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: economic citizenship; globalization; sovereignty; geography of power; territoriality

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.

The Malaise of Modernity

Bolest modernog doba

Author(s): Charles Taylor / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: self-fullfilment; freedom; authenticity; social atomism; recognition; individualism; Instrumental reason; fragmentation

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.

The End of Utopia

Kraj utopije

Author(s): Russell Jacoby / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: capitalism; communism; Cold War; ideology; utopianism; intellectuals; liberalism; multiculturalism; pluralism; Soviet Union;

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.

Postmetaphysical Thinking

Postmetafizičko mišljenje

Author(s): Jürgen Habermas / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: communicative action; assertoric sentences; communication; forms of life; intersubjectivity; lifeworld; speech acts; postmetaphysical thinking; semiotics; reason; pragmatism; meaning

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.

Prosthesis

Proteza

Author(s): David Wills / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: deconstruction; Derrida; literary theory; Freud

Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyzes and performs certain questions about the body as an “artificial” construction. The book deals with the mechanical in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic – in order to demonstrate to what extent a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction, it finds an artistic or cultural pretext for each of its expositions – a line from Virgil, a painting by Conder, a theory by Freud, a film by Greenaway, a text by Derrida, novels by Roussel or Gibson, a sixteenth-century rhetoric – that connects thematically or theoretically with the question of prosthesis.

We, the People of Europe?

Mi, građani Evrope

Author(s): Étienne Balibar / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: borders; citizenship; postnationalism; sovereignty; nation; nation-state; nation-form; immigrant; globalization; Europe; democracy; constitution; law; international law; nationalism; power; rights

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)

Words of Light

Reči svetlosti

Author(s): Eduardo Cadava / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: history; Benjamin; photography; fascism; aestheticization of politics; image; reproducibility; memory; eternal return as photographic principle; death and photography

Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin’s discussion of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entirely trajectory of his writings, including the historical and political consequences of technology, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning.

The Division of Literature or the University in Deconstruction

Univerzitet u dekonstrukciji ili Podela književnosti

Author(s): Peggy Kamuf / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: deconstruction; literary theory; literature; politics of language; university; Melville; humanities; method of history; Derrida; art

The inclusion of literary study is a distinctive trait of the modern, scientific university. But this legitimation of a ¨division of literature¨ has been from the beginning a tenuous, ambivalent, and divisive affair. Why and what effect? These questions guide Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the complex history of literary study in the modern university and orient her critical reading of developments from the French Revolution through the nineteenth century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon – Melville's The Confindence- Men – to show academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past. By enganging a future readership to which it applies for credit, Kamuf argues, literature cannot serve as a stable object of study. It locates, rather, a site of ¨the university in deconstruction¨.

Captives of Evil: Legacy of Hannah Arendt

Zatočenici zla: zaveštanje Hane Arent

Author(s): / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: totalitarianism; freedom, responsibility; banality of evil; guilty; political; anti-Semitism; human rights; public realm; authority;

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century. This collection examines the themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism, revolution as a ‘new beginning’, conception of freedom, responsibility, guilty, and her controversial idea of the ‘banality of evil’. Each chapter examines the political, philosophical, and historical concerns which shaped Arendt’s thought, and which promoted her to become one of the most unapologetic champions of the modern political life in the Western traditions.

Karl Kraus: Figures of Lingual Suspicion

Karl Kraus: figure jezičke sumnje

Author(s): / Language(s): Serbian

Keywords: Die Fackel; satire; aphorisms; language; socialism; Freud; Modernism; culture

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.