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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Keywords: secularism; colonialism; human rights; Islamic law; nation-states; sacred; law; sovereignty; morality; Egyptian law; judicial process; Europe; United States; Enlightenment
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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Keywords: Russia; socialism; war; sovereignty; violence; terror; Stalin; Modernity; imperialism; historical progress; political imaginery; NKVD; nature; Lenin; Industrial production; French Revolution; enemy; dreamworld; cinema; Bolshevism; avant-garde
»The Construction of mass utopia was the dream of the twentieth century. It was the driving ideological force of industrial modernization in both its capitalist and socialist forms. The dream was itself an immense material power that transformed the natural world, investing industrially produced objects and built environments with collective, political desire.« (From the Preface)
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Keywords: Balkan; Orientalism; Identity; Balkanism; Europe; Balkanization; Byzantium; South Slav identity; Yugoslavia; gothic imaginery; Romanian identity
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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Keywords: colonial discourse; colonialism; hybridity; postcolonialism; poststructuralism; Foucault; mimicry; cultural difference; colonial power; Fanon
In The Location of Culture, Hommi Bhabha sets out the conceptual imperative and political consistency of the post-colonial intellectual project. In a dazzling series of essays he explains why the culture of western modernity must be relocated from the post-colonial perspective. Bhabha discusses writers as Morrison, Gordimer, Conrad and Walcolt. And Bhabha rethinks questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation. In doing so he provides a theory of cultural hybridity and the ‘translation’ of social differences which goes beyond the polarities of Self and Other, East and West.
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Keywords: deconstruction; subaltern; subalterity; postcolonial discourse; neocolonialism; third world; sexual difference; feminism; binary oppositions; Asiatic Mode of Production; colonialism; cultural studies;
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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Keywords: media; simulation; reality; image; simulacrum
In this book, author turns detective in order to investigate a crime considering the ¨murder¨ of Reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the technological and social processes by which our world is becoming a thing of (empty) transparency and visibility, a place where reality, swamped by the ¨real time¨ of the news media, has quite simply vanished. But author is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as ¨the most important event of modern history¨, nor even to meditate upon the paradoxes of reality and illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crime is also the work of a great moralist: it is a penetrating examination of vital aspects of the social, political and cultural life of the ¨advanced democracies¨ in the (very) late twentieth century.
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Keywords: Lacan; Marx; Hitchcock; Lenin; communism; Communist party; objet petit a; human rights; victims; Psycho; capitalism; proletariat; jouissance; point de capiton
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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Keywords: the absolute space; reason; epistemology; George Berkeley; optics; imaginary space; real space
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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Keywords: civil society; community; nationalism; modernity; communitarianism; liberalism; public sphere
I am very pleased that this collection of my papers, edited by Obrad Savic, is appearing in Belgrade. Work of this kind positively calls out for translation and publication in a new context. I hope that the fact that I come at familiar questions from an unfamiliar angle might be helpful to some readers. And even more, I hope that the reactions to and criticisms of this highly partial work will eventually help me to think about these matters more effectively. I think of this publication as one move in an ongoing exchange, which I hope we will one day be able to continue through meetings and other publications. I am of course aware of the difficult times and struggles which Serbian society is now going through, and I know that the experience of those who are working there for democracy and human rights, however dismaying to them, will have something to say to all of us. (Charles Taylor, Introduction)
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Keywords: responsibility of the philosopher; Foucault; Dewey; Derrida; hermeneutics; praxis; Hegel; democratic ethos; humanism; Heidegger
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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Keywords: hyperpolitics; community; Heidegger; humanism; culture; politics
Here Sloterdijk analyzes some of the basic concepts of political philosophy. These are: origin of culture, and cultural conflicts in contemporary societies; the status of community, emergence of the people, of nation and nationalism, problem of the masses; question of humanism, etc. Entire analysis is carried out, as the author puts it, from the standpoint of “hyperpolitics”.
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Keywords: war; peace; conflict; military; history; Europe; modern age; 20th century; politics; political theory; philosophy; discourse; religion; political philosophy; gender; Gulf war; semiology; ethics; simulacrum;
Prva zamisao ovog filozofskog zbornika o ratu njegovom diskursu nastala je početkom devedesetih godina. Ta zamisao nije bila lišena, tako da kažem, mirovnjačke diplomatije. U pozadini ubrzanih i veoma dramatičnih dogadaja u Jugoslaviji, postepeno koncepcijsko uobličenje zbornika poprimilo je didaktičke tonove. Ono što je ovaj zbornik nastojao da rekonstruiše u području teksta, ponovo je, u svoj žestini, progovorilo kontekstualno. U ranim devedesetim, javni diskurs su nasilno kolonizovali upravo oni elementi govora rata za koje sam verovao da su odavno otpisani i nepovratno arhivirani. Neprosvećene i sasvim primitivne forme militarističkog diskursa nezadrživo su provalile u svakodnevni život. Uprkos neobično čestom iskustvu rata, s kojim smo se ovde i sada ponovo susreli, iznenadio me je nizak teorijski nivo ratničkog diskursa. Pod naletom gole sile, procedura raćionalnog argumentisanja sasvim je izostala: atavizam ratnih sredstava ponovo je preuzeo mandat kultivisanim inicijativama.
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Keywords: Psychoanalytic Theory; Psychoanalysis; Freudism; Sigmund Freud
The obligation of any fruitful and creative interpretation of psychoanalysis consists, among other things, in the philosophical revival of Freud's thinking. In the very extensive and growing literature on Freud, conventional strategies of obfuscation generally predominate. In the early, predominantly scientific and academic discussions, Freud's thought was hastily and often mechanically, interdisciplinary cataloged. Each scientific region offered its own image of Freud in accordance with its parent topic. The interdisciplinary alignment of Freud's thinking on the basis of regional ontology is the main feature of the prevailing reception of the psychoanalyst. The deep core of Freud's thinking was relegated to the background and forgotten for some time...
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