POLITICAL THEORY

Dreams of Humanists vs. Technological Development of the West

In his famous essay “Karl Jaspers: The Citizen of the World?” Hannah Arendt deeply questions the philosophical concept of her former mentor and close friend, Karl Jaspers

Homo kybernetes vs. Homo respondens: Is There Still Any Intersubjectivity?

Bernhard Waldenfels and the Other as a Problem of Ontology Abstract In the article, the author attempts to analytically show how, in contemporary philosophical debate, we encounter the problem of the relationship between human consciousness and the technosphere, which synthesizes the scientific construction of a new interobjectivity with the concepts of the body and the Other. Therefore, new figures, rather than traditional ontological-anthropological concepts such as homo kybernetes (Paić) and homo respondens (Waldenfels), necessarily find themselves in a kind of bipolarity in their determinations and actions in the real world. If, for Waldenfels,” intentionality is transformed into responsiveness”, then the path of phenomenology in the new conditions of action of globally networked societies must be designated as a “post-phenomenological path”. It is already evident from this that the answer to the stranger issue does not only hide the communicative potential of human existence in a historical-epochal sense. Considering a new ontological status of communication with the Other is simultaneously a necessity: abandoning the concept of intersubjectivity in favor of networked relations in the constitution of the body and the Other as existential structures of freedom. Keywords: homo kybernetes, homo respondens, technosphere, intersubjectivity, Other, stranger Introduction After Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas introduced into contemporary philosophy the “spirit of reversal” of all metaphysical categories, abandoning its original starting points in the problematization of the relationship between Being, beings, and the essence of Human, phenomenology was left without a signifier ─ Husserl’s program of returning to the natural attitude. The question of consciousness and self-consciousness, which was so crucial to the entire philosophy of the modern age, was redirected to the conditions for the possibility of thinking about that which is not only a part of human existence but also the primary meeting point of thought and the matrix of Western metaphysics. Heidegger rightly called it the onto-theological framework of history. The reason is that thinking begins with the question of Being and the first cause or origin as the source of all beings (arché). In constructing the artificial mind and life, suppose phenomenology lacks the object of its focus, such as the forms of human consciousness. In that case, the only remaining area of its “resurrection” can be discerned in the analysis of the body and the Other. By analogy, since the concept of the subjectivity of mind marked the metaphysics of the modern age, the return to the body in the post-metaphysical thought of the 20th century should not be understood as a return to materialism and physicalism, much less to some dark psychologism. In contemporary philosophy, the body represents an enigma, as consciousness does, but on entirely different foundations from those established by the metaphysics of mind. However, Husserl’s critique of the Cartesian legacy in contemporary thought genuinely developed the concept of the Other. It did not radically break through the framework of subjectivity and self-consciousness; it did not wholly leave the environment of egology and anthropology. The first approach is found mainly in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. In contrast, the second approach is shown to be derived from Lévinas’ most important book, Totalité et Infini (Lévinas: Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorite). There are multiple overlaps. For French thinkers, the body and the Other simultaneously mark the path into the labyrinth of feelings and the ethical call for freedom and justice in the community. In the contemporary situation, however, the new approaches can be concisely defined as the phenomenological analysis of the body, with Hermann Schmitz as its primary representative, and the phenomenological analysis of the Other, with Waldenfels as its primary representative. (Schmitz: System der Philosophie III.) 2. Der Gefühlsraum)  In the lecture “Homo respondensʺ he showed the reach of different definitions of Human throughout the history of metaphysics (homo sapiens, homo erectus, homo faber, homo ludens, etc.). All these definitions start from what has always had the feature or transcendental condition of human existence in history, or has been historically attributed to him, such as something that determines the structure of action, such as work, for example, or play. Responsiveness or the possibility and necessity of answering questions that are posed to him as challenges or as mysterious events that must be solved, as if they give the Human some transcendental “essence” which is reduced to what in cybernetic theory belongs to the concept of substitution of everything from the traditional ontology of causality. How do we reach communication if not by mediating the source or cause of the emergence of intersubjectivity in dialogue and discourse with the body of the Other, whether it is physical, directly given, or only indicated using the image of a contingent and singular body? The reflections on this problem in Bernhard Waldenfels’ thinking are highly stimulating because they introduce into consideration, post-phenomenologically, a new way in which the Other, so to speak, is inter-subjectified through the experience of our changed view and narration not about him as the Other, but about what enables the coexistence of the Self and the Other in a community that is constantly changing and losing the characteristics of ontological permanence. What challenges me to question the possibility of any further phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis of the Other stems from the impossibility of its ontological determination in modernity, already determined by the rule of the technosphere. Questions are no longer answered only by us as humans but also by them as posthuman bodies of artificial intelligence. As Bernhard Waldenfels clearly shows, responsiveness cannot be what is reduced in one way or another to the environment of humans and non-humans in the sense of living ꟷ Human and animal. (Waldenfels: “Homo respondens”, 6-16.) Hence, it is foreign or alien, that uncanny Other as Stranger, no longer in the sense of that powerful title of Albert Camus’s novel, or that actor in Plato’s Sophist who questioned the universality of the ethical-political horizon of the recognition of the Other in Athenian democracy. Can homo respondens still be an appropriate name for the issue of the body and the Other “here”

Achievements of Politics of Friendship: Derrida's Upcoming Community

The problem with the disappearance of absolute sovereignty from Bodin to Schmitt, as Derrida sees it in the act of his late (ethical-political) deconstruction, is that there is no longer a sufficient reason for any effectiveness of representing the Other. Reasons are reducible to this or that form of violence. Everything must be dismantled and disassembled. What remains of sovereignty becomes the contingency and singularity of the space between power and freedom. In this space, Derrida begins with the view of the Other and unconditional hospitality as a deconstruction of previous metaphysical politics of hospitality. The Other must be emancipated from the perspective of the subject’s metaphysics and its inherent violence. In the discourse of politics of friendship lies the ground for democracy to come as a final soteriological solution for other headings of history.  Keywords: politics of friendship, upcoming community, Derrida, deconstruction of sovereignty, violence, Other 1. Deconstruction of Sovereignty What Lévinas has taken from Heidegger and endeavored to “overcome” by ethically thinking as a starting point for the critique of metaphysics as an ontology, Derrida continued in an articulated and even more radical sense. In the analysis of ethics of hospitality and guest policy concerning Lévinas settings we often encountered Derrida’s critical interpretation of central concepts of post-metaphysical condition ‒ foreigners, refugees, and asylum seekers in the discourse of receiving the Other as a guest in “my” home and the emergence of a new one perspective for the subjectivity of the subject. One of the constant motives we encounter from the early works of Derrida is the corpus of the modern theory of state and law, until the 1990s which marked books like Spectres of Marx, The Politics of Friendship, and The Beast and the Sovereign. The notion of sovereignty refers to the logic of the metaphysical establishment of the rule of the subject in philosophy and the humanities. The main intention of Jean Bodin in political thinking ‒ justification of the rule of monarchies based on the absolute power of the kingdom as a source of popular sovereignty ‒ was also the task of Descartes in the ontological-philosophical sense. The question of the two bodies of divine and popular sovereignty (theology and politics) had its metaphysical origin in the Cartesian duality of mental and bodily substance (res cogitans and res extensa). The opinion of the subject in the statement cogito ergo sum establishes the power of the supremacy of the mind over the body so that the separation between them becomes a matter of the functioning of the whole building of metaphysical concepts such as “infinity”, “being”, “substance”, “idea”. That gap represents far-reaching consequences for the European formation of political identity from culture as such. Sovereignty denotes the autonomy of the mind and the heteronomy of the body. So, it is logical to assume that Derrida must reckon with the legacy of this metaphysics of rationality and occasionalism from Malebranche to Rousseau. The main reason is that the subject of self-establishment denotes the power of the modern age when the rule of the mind appears as enlightening systematic madness of absolutism. In contemporary French philosophy, the critique of the Enlightenment was most radically carried out by Michel Foucault. (Foucault 1984, 2-50, Paić 2013, 181-211) It is interesting that from there one can even genealogically reconstruct history before and after the French Revolution as an event of radical cut with linear history. From Descartes to Hegel the creation of the absolute subject becomes a matter of thinking process which tries to achieve a peak of modern metaphysics. Sovereignty does not mean freedom by the act of constituting the external world of objects (nature in the sense of natura naturans and natura naturata) starting from the act of foundation of mindful substance. It rules the body even after its disappearance. How is that possible? Logos in the tradition of Greek-Jewish onto-theology is always inscribed in the body by transcending it, and not the other way around. In the gap or rift between God and man (mind and body), the emergence of modern anthropology was already determined in Kant by the necessity to find a consensus between the fundamental world of the Law (noumenon) and the empirical world of facts (phenomenon). Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity aimed to establish just that place “in-between “, that empty meeting place between the two. The moment when the act creates the new thought and action that arises with modern sovereignty is already recognized from its structural or ontological violence. That is why in the brilliant analysis of Lévinas’ ethics of the Other in the essay “Violence and Metaphysics” included in the collection of essays entitled Writing and Difference (L’ecriture et difference) from 1967 Derrida could say that what belongs to the structure of thinking subject we might claim as “totalitarianism of the same“. (Derrida 1978, 91) The concepts of cogito, subjectivity, sovereignty, a nation-state, and modern Europe as the cosmopolitan order of mind Derrida tried to deconstruct. Suppose we want to clarify the controversy that is so abused in contemporary discourse not only in the social sciences and humanities. In that case, it is worth first recalling what Derrida himself self-ironically said about it in the book Positions. At one point he noted that he was dealing with the translation of the key concept of destruction from Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) in French. It is well-known that Heidegger’s intention before turning in 1930 focused on the “destruction of traditional ontology“, and Derrida had insurmountable difficulties in his translation. What this term refers to in German cannot be the same as in French, where it has the explicit meaning of destruction and annihilation. So, he opted for what would be just like destruction, but what would be more appropriate to Heidegger’s thinking.  When, therefore, he chose the word deconstruction despite destruction, the whole horizon of new meanings appeared to him, and thus the possibility of an internal “critique” of Heidegger. We think from language, and language denotes a riddle of the trace of that event, which has the possibility of changing the essence of Being. The rest belongs to the history of the post-metaphysics of Otherness (alterity) because the Other and difference direct the history of thought. In addition, deconstruction means disassembly and dismantling with the intention of permanent rebuilding.  (Derrida 1982) When the age of modern sovereignty of the people loses its power, the subject of the representation of the Other in all existing systems of thought and reality disappears, from philosophy, science, art, culture,

Neoliberal Paradigm in Light of Experimental Poetry

Let’s start by clearly delineating the space of discussion. Yes, it’s a matter of spacing – a phenomenon to be elaborated in more detail later –, a matter of topos, topography etc. Any discussion on reality necessarily opens up a question of being-in-the-world, of Being as such, its manifestation as happening, as situatedness. But what exactly is happening here, what is being situated? Poetry in its original sense is related to the openness of Being as the event of freedom. The descent into the spacing of writing manifests itself in the form of a disclosive, illuminative (written) record (os alethes). What situates this record also maintains it, reveals it, exposes it in the openness of this coming-to-be emerging at the horizon of the event. Language itself is in perpetual flux, and poetry is language as such, language overflowing the utmost recesses of Being and permanently running up against its own limits where it breaks into silence (and vice versa). To remain silent is to be. Poetry, the act of writing about poetry and neoliberal paradigm intersect in the process of spacing, in the openness of the event. No creative thinking about revolution can dispense with the situatedness of the event conceived as an intersection of covertness/truth (aletheia) of Being. The revolutionary turn taking place in the world nihilistically dominated by neoliberal paradigm can be realized only through the situatedness of Being, for otherwise it is not a genuine turn/descent, but merely a reproduction, a recycling of nihilism/destruction/death. Poetry in its original sense – poesis as the act/realization of the openness/truth* of Being in its emergence/persistence as a historical truth of the Western world – is thus a manifestation in the present of what is yet to come, of the utopian Being of post-revolutionary world characterized by the turn/descent into being of nihilism. It is the being-in-the-world of our children. The only real revolution, i.e. a revolution conceived as a utopia of an already realized future (in the Husserlian sense of protention), discloses itself as a creative openness of experimental poetry, as an openness of Being in the sense of an “alternative” to nihilist neocapitalist practices and their destructive/exploitative approaches to life as such. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote: “Language is the house of Being”.  Allow me to bypass certain phases of my thinking, and state clearly: it is not that Being is hidden inside of a house, i.e. that one needs merely to open up the house and bring out what is hidden within. Far from it – the treasure chest is empty, there is nothing inside. Transcendentality consists of the presence of the non-present/non-existent/imaginary. Being is the treasure chest itself: language as the trace (Derrida); poiesis as spacing, as opening, as revealing; verbalization as naming (nennen) and therefore as Being as such, as the event beyond things, beyond the reality of this “now”, the clearing of worldhood basking in the truth of disclosure as the existential abyss of freedom. I borrowed an idea and turned it upside down. It would be easier to draw out an argument on experimental poetry in light of neoliberal paradigm, but that is not what I’m after. Quite the contrary, what I’m pursuing is the idea that it is possible to understand neoliberal paradigm only against the background of what is being exposed (la poésie ne se impose pas, elle s’ expose, as Paul Celan once said /cf. Sloterdijk 1992: 5) by means of experimental poetry in the process of global neoliberalization, in light of what a well-known ideologist of neoliberalism called the end of history. The same phenomenon could be referred to as a suppression or elimination of history as historical thinking. A careful reflection on post-historical destiny of experimental poetry might shed some light on my own embeddedness in one of the ghettos constructed by the neoliberal newspeak and by the eradication of human beings perceived as human societies within the context of a discursive/cybernetic machinery of global, profit-oriented economy and social, political, economical, financial, military etc. relations it establishes, enforces and develops. The nature of these relations is reflected in the Greek word stasis denoting conflict, crisis, instability, and struggle in both living social communities as well as in ourselves. It is also reflected in the Greek word kinesis referring to (according to Thucydides) “a general state of uncertainty, danger and uprootedness” (Kalan 1983: 10). Some might find this an exaggeration, but the term crisis, which has gained a widespread popularity among neoliberal ideologists, points precisely in this direction. In this particular context, of course, the term crisis has to be understood as an ideologeme, a symptom of a certain strategy, whose main goal is to functionalize the machinery of profit accumulation based on existential interests and needs of people. It is a stasis between “profit and people” (Chomsky 1999), human society and all other forms of life, including the planet as a whole. The main attempt of our discussion on the meaning and role of experimental poetry, on its suppression as a stratagem concocted and spread by the neoliberal profit machinery, is to show the following: in the realm of poetry, language transcends its designated role as a means of communication for mediating specific, strictly limited messages, and thereby sets itself outside of the neoliberal, cybernetic machinery of information control and management (Heidegger 1999: 137); as such, it becomes a medium in which what Greeks called henargeia (lat. evidentia) takes place – “henargeia, which has the same root as argentum (silver), means that which in itself and of itself radiates and brings itself to life” (ibid.). It is important to realize that what we’re dealing here is a perpetual, on-going being-in-the-world. There is no need for silver to take on the role of an element symbolizing market value; it is not something that has to step out of language conceived as a cybernetic means of communication, as it is already outside of it, already in front of it – it speaks and discloses something else and is

Homo Kybernetes. From Onto-Genesis to the Posthuman Condition

The author deals with the consideration of what he calls the post-metaphysical complex of the technosphere, for which the ontogenetic framework of classical metaphysics from Aristotle to Hegel is no longer valid. Instead, the question of the essence of man posits his transcendence in the emergence of Homo kybernetes, with which he removes the posthuman condition. To explain how the permeation of human and non-human appears in all areas of contemporary life as a connection and relationship of information, feedback, control and communication, it seems necessary to open the issue of the cyborgization of life itself. At the same time, the analysis of transhumanism in the opinion of Stefan Lorenz Sorgner proves to be stimulating for understanding what the digital age of the technosphere presupposes, and that is the question of the possibilities of freedom beyond its metaphysical framework as it was considered in the speculative thinking by Schelling. Instead of freedom as absolute, the time has come to establish the possibility of thinking about freedom as an experiment of thought and action beyond human reduction and its associated anthropologies that have lost their credibility in an encounter with the complexity of Homo kybernetes. Keywords: Homo kybernetes, metaphysics, information, technosphere, onto-genesis, posthuman condition 1. Metaphysics and Technosphere Without thoughtful reflection on the challenge of the relationship between technology and (post)humanity, it seems impossible to persist in the relationship between technoscience and humanities that would not become non-contemporary in one way or another. Although the prefix post is in parentheses, and humanity is without it, it seems obvious that today there is still something that does not reduce human prerogatives and achievements to the logic of technological singularity. As if this play between what comes after the human and what is here and now human-too-human, to use Nietzsche’s famous statement, points to the necessary difference between what constitutes the essence of posthumanism and humanity at all, which becomes the highest reach of technosphere rule in managing societies and culture with the help of artificial intelligence. But what if this small difference no longer exists or if it is suspended and neutralized? What, furthermore, if a man has never been able to separate from technology in historical development, i.e. what if we have never been humane, as Donna Haraway claims, or what if we have always been cyborgs, as Stefan Lorenz Sorgner puts it? (Haraway 1990, Sorgner 2022) While, namely, there is a relationship between the human and the non-human, the metaphysical structure of thought is at work, even if Being is replaced with the concept of information, and beings with a multitude of pure contingencies. A relationship denotes always a possibility of a union at a distance. Synthesis, therefore, presupposes a real state of analytical separation, for example, of different substances in some hybrid assemblies such as contemporary technoscience with biogenetics, biocybernetics and biosemiotics. When we talk about the relationship between the human and the non-human, we must start from the assumption that the former is always the model for understanding the latter. Man in so-called human nature or its essence cannot be understood within metaphysics in any other way than essentialist. This means that his position within Being and his being are always given to him spiritually and biologically, i.e. vertically, following Aristotle’s famous definition of animal rationale. Furthermore, the relationship between the two, starting from the human primacy, is therefore not only horizontally reduced to biologism, from which psychologism and anthropology follow, which Heidegger in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) tried to eliminate within the framework of the systematic “destruction of traditional ontology”. (Heidegger 2018) The reason should be seen in the fact that he considered that by doing so “man” or being there (Dasein) completely fails in his thinking and thereby reduces to exactly what he wanted to critically overcome, namely Aristotle’s definition of animal rationale. Biologicism denotes the reduction of man to naturalism, thatis, to the so-called biological factors of the whole of his own; psychologism becomes a reduction to the so-called unconscious articulation of language, which reduces man to a pre-and-post-rational living being, while anthropology means the reduction of man to the subjectivity of the subject by which all other beings appear at a lower level of cosmic-biological evolution and thus make him the master of nature as a whole. Heidegger’s critique of the reduction of the meaning of Being to the so-called life processes in their inclusive vitality affects the triad of biology-psychology-anthropology because they think a man insufficiently and inauthentically according to this conceptual-categorical “rationalization” of language. Any reduction of the human in man to the non-human necessarily fragments his integrity and irreducibility as a being among beings. However, every reduction cannot be the same as the annulment of human authentic existence in the openness of freedom. To reach the purity of the human essence, phenomenologically speaking, it is necessary to understand that such an essence comes from the dark core of the non-human, which was already known by pre-Socratic thinkers when they spoke about the relationship between demons and humanity. We should remember that Socrates was also constantly followed and urged to freely express his thoughts in public by his demon. So, we shall see that the question of the relationship between humans and non-humans cannot be simply resolved by a vulgar distinction between the biological and the post-biological when it comes to the relationship between humans and post(humanity). It is not difficult to understand that the problem of this relationship is that both relata in the relationship are derived from the difference against the life force of what comes from the concept of nature (physis), which is life (bios). The human in the metaphysical sense is always rising above the limits of biologically understood life as mere survival at the animal level. Therefore, it seems self-evident that from this every form of animalism will be considered as a loss of the so-called human dignity. This term has its origin in connection with the ethical-aesthetic doctrines of the Renaissance notion

The End of War

This paper is a general assessment of the reasons for, and proceeding of, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  I argue that the political order established by Vladimir Putin at the beginning of his tenure is now crumbling due to his very desire to preserve and expand it. Among the issues discussed are the ideological background of Putin’s conception of power, Germany’s attitude towards Putin, the Russian struggle for recognition by the international community, and the problem of moral symmetry between Russia and US military interventions. In conclusion, I argue against the interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war as a proxy war of two imperialisms and suggest the present form of imperialism is now on the wane. Putin’s order The unfortunate period of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency is known among the Russians as smuta, or despair. Some of that time I have spent in the company of young people from the post-Soviet bloc. The Soviet habit of heavy vodka drinking had not yet been then superseded in Central Europe by the liberal wine-sipping. In the alcohol-induced frankness, one of the Russians bitterly said: „На что мена такая великая родина, когда в нее порядка нет?” („Why should I need such a great homeland, if there is no order in it?”) In this straightforward way, he pointed out two main, closely related Russia’s problems: its size, and its endemic disorder. Soon after, Vladimir Putin found a solution to these problems, establishing the order much longed for by Russians. Though at the top of the political hierarchy this order turned out to be a system of organized crime, it brought some relief to all. After more than two decades of despotic rule, Putin decided to expand the Ruskij mir he founded. As a result, the Russian order has just begun to disintegrate and, together with it, the global order as well. The Invasion In a public lecture on his geopolitical ideas, delivered to a worldwide audience shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin reiterated his long-held position. He used a twisted interpretation of history to claim that Ukrainian territory is an integral part of Russia. He questioned the statehood and cultural distinctiveness of Ukraine and denied its sovereignty. It was a historical mistake to grant Ukraine the status of a separate Soviet republic within the Soviet Union. He dismissed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by Leonid Kuchma, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, and John Major, which guaranteed Ukraine the „respect for the independence and sovereignty of the existing borders” and its security in exchange for the renunciation of nuclear weapons located on its territory during the Soviet era. He accused the West of breaking the promise given to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east of the East German border and would not deploy in the Central European countries the weapons that might endanger Russia’s security. He interpreted the subsequent political evolution of Ukraine as dictated by the leaders of the West bent on undermining Russia’s security by bringing NATO closer to its borders. According to Putin, Russia cannot trust Western countries because they have broken numerous pledges given to Russia after 1989. The ring of independent former Soviet republics surrounding Russia in Europe and Central Asia, which politically gravitate towards the West, is seen by him as a noose tightening around Russia’s neck. In the face of this betrayal, and out of concern for the country’s security, Putin wants to reclaim the areas lost by Russia: Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as the sphere of its former influence. The first step towards these goals is to change the government of Ukraine, America’s errand boy. During the decades of his reign, Putin disciplined Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Georgia. He began disciplining Ukraine in 2014, by annexing Crimea and supporting the Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. The time has come to take over the rest of Ukraine. His goal is to de-Nazify and demilitarize Ukraine and protect the 12 million Russians living in Donbas from Ukrainian Nazism. By Ukrainian Nazism Putin means the party Right Sector which originally evolved from a movement of supporters of the Metalist Kharkiv football club. Its militant extreme-right and neo-Nazi members, many with a criminal record, adopted as their own the Nazi symbol of Wolfsangel. The Ukrainian government granted them the status of a National Guard unit which was transformed in 2014 into the Azov Battalion, now the Regiment. Azov uses a crest that dangerously resembles the crest of the Nazi 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. Azov took part in military action for the first time in Mariupol, recapturing the city from the Russian army during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and fought against separatists. Russia accuses Azov of violent repressions against the Russian-speaking population in the present Donetsk quasi-republic. In the most chilling part of his speech, Putin threatened that any country wishing to prevent him from implementing his plans in Ukraine would have to take into account the consequences that no one had seen in history. The Russian mir The ideological foundation of Putin’s geopolitical vision is the nationalist philosophy of Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin, now the most widely read Russian philosopher. His ideas won the sympathy of such Russian figures as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Kremlin court philosopher Alexander Dugin, and the popular film director Nikita Mikhalkov, who proposed to bring Ilyin’s remnants from Switzerland. Since 2005, twenty-three volumes of Ilyin’s writings are being published in Russia. Ilyin was born in Moscow in 1883 to an aristocratic German-Russian family. Influenced by Pavel Novgorodtsev, a law professor at Imperial Moscow State University, he rejected his youthful anarchism, turned to law studies and right-wing ideas, and against scientific socialism. He was among 160 intellectuals expelled from revolutionary Russia by the Bolsheviks in 1922 on the famous „philosophers’ ship” which sailed from St. Petersburg to German Stettin. He spent ten years in exile in Germany, where he wrote anti-Bolshevik essays for the magazine „Kolokol”, and then moved to Switzerland, where he died in 1954. Like many of the „white”

At the Edge of Chaos: The end of the revolution, the politics of resistance, and the spectacle of subversion

No “revolution” is “revolutionary” enough. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns 1. Mephisto’s problem: So, what if there is nothing left behind? One of the most lucid analyses of the essence of a contemporary world in which the governance of capital becomes the assemblage of the power of technoscience, transnational corporations, and crisis management policies is the monumental study by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello titled The New Spirit of Capitalism. The main assumption seems extremely provocative. In spite of late capitalism being a neoliberal doctrine and the practice of the radical privatization of public/common goods in the world from the end of the 1970s to today, one can speak of a reaction to the defeat of the idea of the student rebellion in 1968 (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). How are we to comprehend this almost emblematic assumption of left-wing theory? For this, we have at least two explanations. One is that capitalism cannot work without periodical crisis. Stability, otherwise, arises from the danger of the system’s collapse. So, the balance of the structural elements of its existence, such as the supply economy, political changes in the bipolar system of liberal democracy and, most importantly, innovation in the field of science and technology, seems to be constantly violated. Therefore, the governance crisis in all situations from political revolutions to the wars of conquest for new markets in the 20th century and today shows the continuation of the power struggle by other means. The classic era of industrial capitalism belongs to modernity. Its ruling idea encompasses unconditional progress. But the late capitalism assembled by IT corporations is based, however, on the idea of sustainable development. What is the difference? Can it be visible only in the way social relations function? The paradigm of the linear notion of history in the social sciences and humanities has been replaced since 1968 by models of indetermination and contingency. However, despite the uncertainty in the era of doubt in unlimited economic growth, the facts contradict the heroic pathos of the “Big Defeat”. With the transition from the form of the object/thing in the form of techno-scientific capital to the process of creating a new life (biogenetics and biocybernetics), unconditional progress became a posthuman condition. Its main features include the following: (1) Science now connects once separate spheres of nature and many by exploring the possibilities of creating artificial intelligence and artificial life. In the know-how of the information society, man is reduced to biogenetic code. With it, the experiment is aimed at improving the cognitive-physical capabilities for performing complex work operations. All sciences have now become technoscience. The concept of technology, unlike the technique, is no longer an asset for purposes other than itself as the “essence” of the contemporary era. Technology, hence, refers equally to nature and culture, the production of objects and the way of creation of a subject. The shift from technology to the technosphere means the transition from the analogue to thedigital paradigm of the historical development of thinking and Being. (2) Technology, therefore, combines areas of science and culture, nature and man, information and communication. All technical logic is today digital, and instead of their instrumental power, in the centre arrives a new aesthetic function. But now we are no longer talking about a beautifying of objects. Design, on the contrary, becomes the conception of the new digital world, as the construction becomes the basic notion of complexity, but of the fundamentals of new sciences (cybernetics, informatics, computer intelligence, neuroscience). Artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL), thanks to the relationship between nanotechnology and the cognitive machines, have become the creators of life from the uncanny power of immateriality. The space of their proximity and their events is virtual, and time is taking place in the immediate instant. We can define that as a condition of forgetting the past, without being aware of the already possible event of interruption with the order of the perpetual updating of the new. (3) Finally, culture simultaneously becomes the life-world and the ideological justification of the performing event of the power of capital and capitalism without alternatives. Within this framework, culture takes the “power” of the irreducible remnant of what is most proximate to the man due to the art and its non-instrumental character of the un-representability of the work. From spectacle to design, from aesthetics to architecture, from high culture to mass culture, identity is constantly emerging. We no longer understand life as a gift and unchangeable destiny. So, to create something new, based on the methods and experimental technoscience and freedom of choice, is more important than a biologically given position as a facticity of Being. When this “holy trinity” of the posthuman condition is translated into the language of communication, then we are immersed deeply into a cognitive model of capitalism. The paradoxes and aporias of historical experience are simply shown in the fact that the 1960s were the years of the highest growth rates in the second half of the 20th century within the capitalism of the West, as well as in the framework of real socialism in Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. It is by no means a coincidence that this was the time of a pervasive belief in the stability of the new economy, despite regional wars in Indochina and the Middle East and the ongoing political crisis. The welfare state became—due to the Scandinavian model—a desirable image of labour and capital compromise. Structurally speaking, capitalism is expanding through wars of conquest and in the context of the decolonization of the Third World, and it internally intensified its power by political movements for human rights and democracy. The second explanation, however, is that neoliberalism as a new spirit of capitalism should be much broader than the dogma about the privatizing of public/common goods, the disappearance of nation-state sovereignty, and the destruction of civil society institutions. It denotes, in fact, an ideological-political project of establishing a new form of rule and governance. Foucault, in his lectures

Messianic Triumph of Ethics?

Persecution and the Art of Thinking

Zygmunt Bauman’s books have been read by millions of people in over thirty languages. For this reason alone the biography of this outstanding philosopher and a sociologist deserves attention. An interest in his life is justified not only by the natural need to learn about the twists and turns of his activities as a scholar and popular intellectual. It may contribute to our understanding of how someone who faced extraordinary and overwhelming challenges managed to achieve the status of a global public intellectual. Bauman’s life has already become the subject of three biographical accounts, all written by Polish intellectuals. Izabela Wagner’s Bauman: A Biography, appeared in English (Cambridge 2020). Polish-language biographies was authored by Dariusz Rosiak, (Bauman, Kraków 2019), and by Artur Domosławski (An Outcast: 21 Scenes from Zygmunt Bauman’s Life, Warszawa 2021). All of them may be read as extended commentaries on Bauman’s brusque and (un)apologetic statement: “I couldn’t have another life.” Bauman was born in 1925 in the city of Poznań, Poland, to impoverished Jewish parents. As a teenager, he fled with his family to the Soviet Union to escape the oncoming war. There he excelled in education, conducted in Russian, despite the fact that he attended it erratically in multiple schools in various locations, and then became an officer of the Polish army established on Stalin’s orders. He fought in World War II, was badly wounded in a battle, and, having recuperated, he continued to fight all the way to Berlin. After the war, his military corps was transformed into a special security force in which he served as a propaganda officer. Discharged from the army, he enrolled at the University of Warsaw and soon became an academic. As a trusted comrade, he was sent to the London School of Economics on a scholarship as part of which he conducted research for his book devoted to the British socialist movement. Upon return, he quickly climbed up the academic ladder in Warsaw and became a professor. After the Stalinist atrocities were revealed in 1956, he gradually slid into revisionist positions and became one of the suspect intellectuals in the eyes of the nationalist fraction which gradually won preëminence within the Polish communist party. In 1968 he was expelled from university, and from the country. He took his family to Israel, where he rapidly mastered the Hebrew language and taught briefly at Tel Aviv University. Never a Zionist, he was soon discouraged by Israeli politics and publicly criticized it. In 1972 the Baumans moved to England where Zygmunt chaired the sociology department at Leeds University until his retirement in 1990. As a writer, he flourished especially when released from the academic chores. He wrote predominantly in English, which was his third language. He published nearly sixty books and innumerable papers on a great variety of topics in social theory, moral philosophy, the Holocaust, postmodernism, urbanism, and many others. His Postmodern Ethics (1993) won him the status of a prominent exponent of postmodernism, a label he later discarded. After 1989 he frequently visited his homeland Poland, where he was rediscovered and admired by the young intellectual generation until the extreme-right, xenophobic movements took him to task for his past cooperation with the Polish and Soviet secret services. He passed away at his English home in 2017 at the age of 92. In 2010 Mark Davis established the Bauman Institute at Leeds University, now chaired by Adrian Favell. Undoubtedly, his was an intense and fulfilling life. But it was also riddled with secrets, some of which became subjects of international controversies: his belief in communism, his collaboration with the secret services of Soviet Russia and communist Poland, about which he was interrogated by Aida Edemariam,[1] the unfortunate pistol he allegedly used to carry in a holster in his initial year at the University of Warsaw, accusations of plagiarism and self-plagiarism, along with problematic family issues in various periods of his life, like his declarative and actual renunciation of his father, or his oppressive solicitude towards the people he loved. An autobiographical sketch he wrote for his daughters does little to dispel his secrets. In 1945 Bauman joined the communist ranks. For a number of years, he fervently believed in the egalitarian ideology, and overlooked the oppressive practice of the communist party or rather took it as a necessary stage on the road to communism. This was held against him until his death, and indeed after he passed away, as a sin for which he could not hope to be forgiven. In his voluminous work, Domosławski asks a number of pertinent questions which make the reader realize the problems Bauman had to cope with in his early life. Could nineteen-year-old Zygmunt Bauman have become anyone else in post-war Poland but a communist? Were any other options available to him over the next decade in a country ruled by a regime imposed by Moscow? Obviously, Bauman, a Jew, could not become a member of the nationalist opposition: already in his early childhood, he learned the hard way the true meaning of the anti-Semitism and nationalism ingrained in Poland’s cultural genes. There were no liberal democratic movements at that time for him to join, and, as an urban creature, completely unfamiliar with rural life, he could not seek shelter in the peasants’ movements. The key to an understanding of Bauman’s choices, and the content of his work, is the problem of oppression. Oppression was an integral part of his personal and intellectual life. He was bullied in childhood by non-Jewish peers, flew with his family from the war terror, seized any opportunity to physically survive the exile in the harsh conditions of Stalinist Russia, fought with the Nazi army during World War II, was badly wounded in a battle, and was ill-treated because of his Jewishness in socialist Poland. In a provocative essay entitled “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Leo Strauss attempted to explain the situation of a writer who, fearing persecution, encodes double meanings in his text: the superficial, understandable to

The Heidegger Case

It is almost unquestionable that throughout history educated classes have always adhered to dictatorial regimes. Plato and his failed ‘mission’ in service of Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, bequeathed us the Seventh Letter . This legendary episode is often taken as a metaphor for all philosophers and artists of the 20th century who were impressed by leaders and politics crossing the boundaries of democratic boredom. Notwithstanding, it is somewhat peculiar that the absolute moral guilt of visiting Syracuse has always been ascribed to the greatest thinker of the 20th century – Martin Heidegger – while the cases of Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound, although considered amoral, have nevertheless been regarded as completely benign compared to that of the master thinker. It is today most difficult to find literature describing and interpreting political delusions of the great novelist and poet. On the other hand, Heidegger’s marveling at Adolf Hitler’s ‘hands,’ in the words of Jaspers, who accused Heidegger of allegiance to Nazism, still serves as an inspiration. One could say that dealing with Heidegger’s short adherence to Nazism during his vice-chancellorship in Freiburg in 1933/34 represents a certain universal (moral) examination of conscience for the entire western culture. In the spirit of Hegel’s maxims, philosophy is in this way unintentionally placed above all sciences and human skills. This happens regardless of the fact that the end of the 20th century was definitely marked by Warhol’s maxim about the artist (the philosopher included), who is but one of many in the business of the world. In spite of the studies written by Bourdie, Pöggeler, Farias, Safransky, it seems that the Heidegger case remains open. Nevertheless, this does not mean that boredom has gained supremacy and that historical revisionism will dilute this episode as unnecessary for the understanding of Martin Heidegger’s thought world and political views. However, it has lately been easy to notice that most studies are trying to grasp the meaning of Heidegger’s political engagement beyond the vulgar accusation that he was nothing more than a regular Nazi. Two books written by philosophers of the younger generation – Miguel de Beistegui ‘s Heidegger & political Dystopias (Routledge, London-New York 1998) and Julian Young ‘s Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), stand out as most provocative studies. These books should be critically discussed if we wish to find the answer to the central question raised in this paper: is it possible to talk about Heidegger’s understanding of politics and political engagement as such, from the perspective of Heidegger’s idea of the western metaphysics and its particular turn? Moreover, can Heidegger’s thinking still be preserved as a life-saving chant in the overall nihilism of virtual civilization? Miguel de Beistegui is a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. His study on Heidegger and political engagement written from the point of view of understanding political as such, belongs to the tradition of new German historiography, since it is trying to consider the notion of political in relation to politics, in accordance with the famous book by Christian Meier , Die Entstebung der politischen bei den Griechen . The rigidity of execution and the faithful following of the idea of political and politics in Heidegger make this work stand together with pieces written by Löwith, Bourdie and Pöggeler. Beistegui is trying to understand Heidegger’s political engagement in service of Nazism, by pondering upon his idea of politics in general. The real question is whether this is possible in the first place, since Heidegger left only a few fragments written on politics and society (useless to the philosophy of politics), found in Sein und Zeit and in some of his lectures on great metaphysicians of the West. Therefore, Beistegui is trying to correlate Heidegger’s destruction of traditional ontology with the issues of border-lines between peace and politics in the speech of Heidegger himself. Three methodological approaches have taken root since the beginning of analyzing the Heidegger case. They are, of course, cognitively relevant, as well. The first approach claims that Heidegger’s political engagement during Nazi regime was the result of his philosophy. The second says that it is all only about moral and civil allegiance, as a form of human and political opportunism. The third approach believes that Heidegger failed and went astray into politics, of which he soon grew tired. There is also a fourth approach, which today seems least credible, saying that Heidegger gave some sort of esoteric criticism of Nazism. It could be said that Miguel de Beistegui’s is the first approach. However, he rejects Farias’s accusation that the thinker of the turn of metaphysics was but a small, provincial Nazi. In the foreword to his book, Beistegui explicitly states that he wishes to lay out the following thesis obtained from Heidegger’s radical criticism of metaphysics and modern times in general: we have before us a philosophical answer to the question about the sense of political engagement. In this respect, the entire interpretation is more inspired by the works of authors who focused on Heidegger’s understanding of community and politics, than those interpreters who ideologically rejected him as an eminent Nazi thinker. Beistegui presents Heidegger’s reception in the United States in detail, in view of his political engagement that was in the liberal democratic tradition always confronted with more benevolent attitudes of the English or Italians, or even the French, gathered around Heidegger’s friend Jean Beaufret and great surrealist poet and anti-fascist Rene Char. Miguel de Beistegui openly admits that his main problem with articulating Heidegger’s attitude towards the Nazi politics is an attempt to clarify and phenomenologically understand the notion of here-being ( Dasein ) in the part on historicity in Sein und Zeit . Nevertheless, he rejects Adorno’s serious accusation that Heidegger’s thinking is therefore basically “fascist in its innermost components.” Since there is no explicit political philosophy in Heidegger, it is obvious that we must first see why the modern man’s experience of being without home creates conditions for a different notion of politics, beyond enlightening tradition

What Does It Mean To Be An Alien?

If we should ask what remains of Husserl’s phenomenology and its study of intentional consciousness, the answer would probably be as follows – a body and Other.

Love as a Creative Dynamic Work

I present the concepts of love in the Western history (twin souls, platonism, catholicism, courtly, romantic, psychoanalytic love) and argue that the aforementioned concepts are unrealistic and disatisatifying because they measure the success of a partnership by restoring some previously lost, divine or primordial wholeness. My concept of love thus offers realistic expectations of the partnership that aims at a happy and peaceful relation which does not allow violence, abuse and inequality. Key words: Western concepts of love, Majerhold’s love concept. Given that I have written in depth about the dominant Western concepts of love I can say that previous notions or concepts in the Western culture are ‘negative’ – notions of love that makes a person either never satisfied and fulfilled or demands a tragic dimension that causes someone to die, sacrafice for the others or experience a great misfortune. Western love works on the principle of ‘lack’, and ‘lack’ is defined in various philosophical, spiritual and religious history in various ways, either lack of a premordial or pre-embodied state of the divine soul (Plato, 1960), a reunion of the lost twin soul (Aristophanes in Plato, 1960: 80), a purification of the human body, nature and the restoration of the divine spark (Orphism)[1], as a returning and recovering connection with God (St. Paul, 1984), an everlasting desire for unattainable Dame (Villiam IX. Duke of Aquitaine in Novak, 2003: 11), restoring unity of a male and female complementarity (Rousseau, 1959; 1978), a restoration of the original family (Freud, 1995) and a confluent love (Giddens, 1992). Personally, I am not for any regression to some original state (divine or familial), point zero state, ‘death’ or nirvana. And in light of the concepts mentioned, we can say that we have came a long way from chanting about finding a lost twin (Aristophanes in Plato, 1960); from chanting about wild and impossible passionate and ecstatic love (Villiam IX. Duke of Aquitaine in Novak, 2003); from chanting about tender, ethereal, sweet romantic love of male and female (Rousseau, 1978); chanting about mother as the source of all love (Freud, 1995) or chanting about love as motivation of Christian self-sacrifice for the others (Paul, 1984) to chanting about plastic sexuality and last but not least to chanting about unbridled sexual pleasures of swinging, BDSM and other diverse tastes (Soble, 2001) to finally reveal new, different concepts of love. In my opinion, people just like to meet, socialize, communicate and unite, not because of biological function (evolutionary biology, endocrinology or medicine) and not because we have to get rid of the ‘dungeon’ of our incarnation, according to which we are not important as individuals here and now (Orphism, Platonism, Catholicism) and also not because we used to be perfect, divine, complete, eternal and in control (Orphism, Platonism, Catholicism, Psychoanalysis). When and how we could be supposed that since we know only our earthly mundane existence? Our goal is also not to present man as a somekind ‘perfect machine’ that has ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ in it and behaves predictably in accordance with the hardware. If we look at this view, man tends to be a solid, stable, self-contained eternal, complete whole (a kind of jigsaw puzzle made up of parts or as a clockwork made up of gears). But at the same time, it also means that we are not the only and unique (specimen) of our species and therefore nothing special, much less a ‘crown of creation’, because we are not significantly different from others. We are just a piece of some biological species that can be interchangeable and combinatorial. Or if I express myself about our nonuniqueness with the example of Socrates and Alcibiades from Plato’s Symposium (Plato, 1960). Alcibiades, a renowned soldier, statesman and a beautiful man who could have any man, fell in love with Socrates precisely because he believed that Socrates had a distinguished feature and skill no one else had – he knew how to conjure up every situation in words, a fact or thought (probable or unbelievable, real or fictitious) so that you had a ‘feeling’ as if an ‘imagined’ thought or situation appeared before you’ as completely tangible and visible. Alcibiades discovered in Socrates the extraordinary convincing power of words and spirit, which he did not find in anyone else and which, according to him, made him the most attractive and desirable of all men. But we can say that for Alcibiades this remarkable rhetorical and ‘sophistic’ feature of Socrates was so appealing because Alcibiades was a politician and one of the most important abilities of a politician is precisely the ability to persuade convincingly, to disply the power of verbal sovereignty and persuasion. In this one finds a sensible explanation as to why Alcibiades fell so much in love with Socrates and considered him unique, (better than all the others) as he surpassed all other philosophical, rhetorical and sophistic rivals. After all, Alcibiades revealed this motive by offering a bargain that if Socrates taught him these ‘agalmas’ of his (hidden priceless valuables of verbal persuasion), he would offer him pleasure between the sheets. The human uniqueness called agalma by Lacan is thus revealed by surpassing: (s)he is unique as long as (s)he is better at something from all the others and that is something I desire and/or need (Lacan, 1996). But Socrates himself objects to this notion of uniqueness when he tells Alcibiades that he should take again a good look if he may not be mistaken – what Alcibiades is supposed to see in him is a reflection of his desires and beliefs, this is not how Socrates sees and understands himself (Platon, 1960). Socrates also thinks that Alcibiades is not in love with him at all, but with someone else, Agathon (ibid.) and thus gives us a notion of love as desire driven by the other who responds to our desire (Lacan, 1996). Therefore for the case of agalma or uniqueness of someone as a criterion for choosing someone over someone else, we can say that

Europe on the Edge: Revisiting Habermas and Derrida

Europe stands at a precarious moment and today is facing huge economical, political and social crisis. Although the idea of Europe has been widely discussed for centuries, nowadays we are dealing with its urgent questioning, asking questions about the aim of this project beyond all historical, cultural and political borders. The main idea of this text is to bring back into discussion the idea of Europe in terms of its philosophical concepts, in the period of devastating economic crisis and the deficit of political, about the future of European Union as supra-national economical project, as well as about possibilities of forming new political identity and making a radical turn in order to renovate this project in the age of global post-democracy and media plutocracy. I would argue that one of the main problems is that the ideal of Europe as universal political community and creation of universal cultural values is still utopian ideal, and the main problem is non-existence of Europe as universal political community (politically united peoples of Europe). In other words, Europe today is post-imperial space of end of history and peoples without power. There is urgent need for structural change of paradigm of social construction of reality. Contemporary global capitalism is based on techno-science, new media and neoliberal economy; politics has become domain of managerial elites and culture reduced to celebrity culture; mass media are events without message, turned into the visual semiotics of emptiness. To address those issues, I will focus on works and ideas of two thinkers of Europe, who didn’t always agree on these topics, but are nevertheless very important critics and indispensable thinkers of European project. They are Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. Before I begin my analysis, I would like to propose three main arguments: 1) The possibility and faith in realization of European project is basically question of possibility of action within framework of liberal democracy, which is basically project of unfinished modernity. The fundament of Europe is the Enlightenment’s notion of freedom, reason and tolerance. Therefore, the question what is Europe? is not “one among the other questions”, as Derrida would say, because this is the question of sustainability of ideas that determine universality of the notion of the world, which means that the future of “project Europe” is the global question about meaning of politics in general. Therefore, as far as Habermas is concerned, there will be no change of politics before building up institutional legal-political preconditions for different type of action. 2) We must separate notion and idea of Europe from European Union. Before mentioned crisis of Europe as universal ideal is quite different from economic crisis of European Union – the point is not only about making a radical shift in political space, but to change the politics of neoliberal capitalism which in case of EU has taken form as main generator of production of structural crisis, where politicians in EU have become managers, and EU does not serve interest of European citizens and nation-states alike, but follows brutal interest of transnational corporations. 3) There is a need to change “identity without power” to “power identity”. I argue that one of the main advantages of USA over Europe is that America is successful because it is the rule of “political power without cultural identity”, and in Europe we have “cultural identity without political power”. Those are the cornerstones of my presentation, and the main point is that Europe is not geographically defined space inhabited with peoples who do or don’t consider themselves Europeans, but primarily universal political community, founded on spiritual values based on historical process of building Kantian “Perpetual Peace”. Let me first begin with Derrida’s notion of Europe. As Derrida wrote in the beginning of The Other Headings: Reflections on Today’s Europe, the question of Europe is not merely one question among others: it is a question that will always be of current interest. The question of Europe is “at once a chance and a danger”, drawing its urgency and actuality from the threat that what we call Europe is the problem that we “no longer know very well what or who goes by this name”. That said, for Derrida, Europe has always been in crisis. What is imminent today in Europe is not only that Europe may be about to realize the promise of its “concept”, but the very existence of Europe as a conception which is “at once a chance and a menace”. Taking up Husserl’s definition of Europe as an idea, Derrida inquires both into the eidetic unity of Europe and how Europe itself is born from the idea of philosophy. Although Husserl explain the crisis that the teleological idea of Europe undergoes in modernity as a result of sciences’ naive desire for formal objectivism, Derrida wrote that there is no teleological reason for this crisis, and that itself cannot reveal anything originally to us. The idea of Europe is therefore intrinsically related to the idea of philosophy as an infinite task, which is why Derrida is not only “European thinker”, but “thinker of Europe”. What follows from such a position is therefore neither Eurocentrism nor Anti-Eurocentrism, but critical interrogation of European identity as the spiritual unity of Europe. Let us remind ourselves that the idea of Europe was born from the ancient idea and birth of philosophy, and later enriched with the multiplicity of sources and identities that intersect in European heritage. The other conception of Europe, “new figure” can understand itself as having its origins outside itself. Therefore, Europe is this openness, or freedom in regards to all dichotomous counter positions (the Other). This is a universality of Europe, not as a territory or nation-state. The name “Europe” imposes itself as a conception and as a task of universality. As a consequence, Europe as the figure of the “passage” neither presupposes prior identity to be overcome, nor a new one to be achieved. Rather, it is openness to otherness, transformation and permanent transition, and this is precisely why it

The Subversive Icon of Pregnancy in Opposition to the Culture of Fear: Visual Practices in a Local Context

This paper problematizes the subversive icon of pregnancy and offers a linear overview of its various iterations in juxtaposition to the culture of fear, starting with Vlasta Delimar, whose installation Pregnancy (Trudnoća, 1987), inscribes her in the feminist and women’s art history of the Yugoslav/Croatian context as the first domestic artist who employed photo-documentation, or photo-performance, to document her own pregnancy. She performed her pregnancy in the manner of a goddess, sexualizing it by means of the Baubo pose. Next, the paper addresses the interpretations of the subversion achieved by the pregnant belly in Sanja Iveković’s work Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001). The sequence is further contextualized by the distressing confessional of Martina Križanić, a younger generation artist, who visualized the subversive representation of motherhood (Changing Booths, installation, 2017) from her own perspective and without fear, in the first local exhibition about pregnancy Woman – Pregnant Woman – Mother: Green Spheres and Necropolitics (Žena – trudnica – majka: zelene sfere i nekropolitike, Vladimir Bužančić Gallery, Zagreb 2017, curated by Anita Zlomislić). Keywords: pregnancy, Croatian contemporary visual practice, Vlasta Delimar, Sanja Iveković, Martina Križanić, subversion of fear Birth, hymen, martyr… sacrifice James Joyce This text was written in retrospect, as a post festum of sorts, to the exhibition Woman – Pregnant Woman – Mother: Green Spheres and Necropolitics (2017),3 held as part of the annual program of the Vladimir Bužančić Gallery in Zagreb entitled “Body and Mind”. This was the first local exhibition dedicated to the subject-matter of pregnancy and featured works by the following female artists: Milijana Babić, Ines Matijević Cakić, Tajči Čekada, Vlasta Delimar, Nives Kavurić-Kurtović, Martina Križanić, Ivana Popović, Lena Šimić, Ana Uzelac, Vlasta Žanić, Xena L. Županić, as well as male artist Vladimir Dodig Trokut, along with the collaboration between Darko  Schneider and  Branka  Prša. The key unifying feature of the works at the exhibition was fear:4 thus, Vlasta Delimar states that she had “a horrible fear of this ‘motherhood’ because [she] had never been too interested in children”, Ana Uzelac recounts the trauma of labor, Vlasta Žanić relates her experience of bringing up children… That is, in her performances, Vlasta Žanić also reexamines the stereotypical female roles of woman and mother, responsible for providing her family with emotional and physical nourishment. In her sculptural performance, Cherries (Maraške, 2002), the cherry cake is a symbol of comfort and family protection, while the art- ist’s body becomes the locus of the symbolic inscription of the traces of wounding. By covering her body in dough and impressing cherries into it, the artist expresses the totality of the burden pertaining to this role, as well as the burden of suppressing and sacrificing one’s own personality within the family unit, which is regarded as obligatory (cf.  Žanić in Marjanić 2014: 644). Whereas in the exhibition catalogue I provided a description of each female and the invited male artist with regard to the subject-matter of the exhibition, here I interpret the subversive image of pregnancy in a temporal continuum – from Vlasta Delimar, whose installation Pregnancy (Trudnoća, 1987) inscribed her in the Yugoslav/Croatian feminist and women’s art history as the first female local artist to employ photo-documentation, or photo-performance, to document her own pregnancy; she performed her pregnancy in the manner of a goddess, sexualizing it through the Baubo pose (cf. Devereux 1990). The linear overview 7 continues with the interpretations of the subversion by means of a pregnant belly, in this case, in a political context, achieved by Sanja Iveković’s work-intervention, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001). The outline concludes with a harrowing testimonial of a younger generation artist, Martina Križanić, who participated in the aforementioned exhibition with an exhibit and performance piece representing a subversion of the media image of the ideal (Stepford) mother (Changing Booths/Kabine za presvlačenje, installation, 2017). Consequently, performance art was the logical choice, however, the notions, terms, techniques and materials pertaining to sculpture remain present in the process of the conceptualization, as well as realization of my work (Žanić in Šimunović 2016: 265–266). I employ the term linear overview to signify the chronology of the socio-political circumstances and developments that can be ascertained from the artistic features of works analyzed in the paper – namely, Vlasta Delimar’s 1987 work Pregnancy, created in the period of late Socialism, just before the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the imminent disaster of war, Sanja Iveković’s 2001 work Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, contextualizing the period of post-Socialism and the capitalist transition in the local sphere, and neoliberal capitalism, given the location where the intervention was presented (the 1998 Manifesta 2: European Biennial for Contemporary Art, Luxembourg), and Martina Križanić’s 2017 work Changing Booths, which belongs to the period of realized capitalism or corporatocracy. All three artistic works, which I have taken as representative   of the abovementioned socio-political periods, demonstrate the superiority of the androcentric matrix, addressed in the closing segment of the paper, in which I underline that the 2018 debate in Croatia about the ratification of the Istanbul Convention con- firmed the fact that Croatian society continues to stigmatize women. The physicality of pregnancy: the expectant condition, liminality, in-betweenness Both pregnant women, by means of experience and cultural anthropology, through theory, equally attest that no experience is more physically embodied than pregnancy. During pregnancy, this body thinks more intensely, feels more sensitively and has more pronounced psychophysical reactions to the unknown – the body acts as a protective barrier, shielding the infant that is soon to come into the world (in Borgudan, http; Young 1995). In folklore and informal imaginations, being pregnant is termed expectant,8 which defines the particular patterns of behavior during pregnancy and implies the ritual status of the pregnant woman.9 Sociologist Meredith Nash (2012: 29) uses the term in-between to refer to a pregnant woman’s body in order to loosen the meaning of the liminal status (cf. van Gennep 1960; Turner 1966).10 Nash explains that she does not use the term “liminality” or the term “rite of passage”, because neither did her narrators, that is, the conversations

Wish for one‘s own Freedom

Against voluntary slavery was Étienne de La Boétie. It is supposed that he was sixteen years old boy/man when he wrote this little discourse. He died when he was thirty-three. The question arises if he passed away so early, although it seems he died from plague, because he was forced to the slavery of the established life? For the reason that he could not stand his own choice to the conventionality? That he did not dare to act according to his youth attitude? Is not the critique of Michel de Montagne’s relation towards his friend’s work La Servitude Volontaire, result of one‘s own contemporary lack of courage to confront oneself with not having audacity and will not to support the tyranny either in public or in private life? Or, just petit bourgeois. This amazingly liberating and youthfully free, insightful text of almost digested stile, which with an openness overcomes always politically cautious, although celebrated psychoanalysts of the second and the third millennium, is unpleasantly reflecting from the past one’s own present-day conformity, of avoiding confrontation of oneself with the consent to agree to one’s own slavery… What is the nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or, rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled, but tyrannized over? These wretches have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own. They suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Trying to comprehend the reason for that La Boétie encourages disobedience: Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. Persistence of will to serve, voluntary slavery, so that it seems that even love for freedom is not natural any more, leads him to conclusion that the first reason for voluntary freedom is habit. Nevertheless, it is clear enough that the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection… It is amazing, not only this unbelievable synchronicity of La Boétie’s perception of mind-numb- ing conformity in 16th century with the contemporary one, which has advanced with the help of misuse of media into the powerful means of political manipulation, but that in spite of this insights it is not often that one rebels against it. In the ruling life emptiness it is not even noticed as slavery, or thought as important: At the very beginning of his translation in 1942, Harry Kurz writes: »This call to freedom ringing down the corridors of four centuries is sounded again here for the sake of peoples in all totalitarian countries today who dare not freely declare their thought. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else. The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, »Long live the King!« The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. It is not historical secret that philosophers have often supported tyrants, and some of them even the famous Fürer. Even the professional connoisseurs of man’s soul have not believed in realization of his perverted fantasy. With the misuse of their knowledge, even today, the justify delusions of their own petit bourgeois interpretations and their arrogant self-confidence. … It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. … Thus the despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others, and thus is he protected by those from whom, if they were decent men, he would have to guard himself; just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself. The embrace of power, and dependence on it, as a part of an exchange for family

The New Left and Its Discontents

In contemporary social and political theory in the last twenty years, there are two currents that are of crucial importance in rethinking modern economic-political and cultural global constellation: neoliberalism and socialism. Although it seems that after the fall of Berlin wall we have witnessed glorious victory of neoliberal doctrine, the events in last two decades have shown at what extension such a victory was temporary, brittle and deceptive. If the left and Marxist social theory have traditionally been placed into the wider cultural framework of modernity, then neoliberalism and so-called Third Way as its contemporary ideological disguise are denominator of postmodern tendencies. The main idea of my essay is to give brief critical overview on some recent philosophical and political theories that deal with contemporary constellation of leftist and neoliberal forces, i.e. to give appropriate interpretational framework to the dialectics of capitalist modernity. After concise elaboration of economic-political and social-intellectual parameters of recent social theory, I will try to provide summary of main currents into certain doctrine and critically evaluate its relevance in the scope of respective social constellation. Both neoliberalism and new left in the previous decade have invested their creative energy into the utopian thought, which means that a huge variety of radical thinkers get into the business of imagining real utopias, the fact by itself interesting enough and invigorating for constructive and critical debate, even more if we have in mind that, historically speaking, leftists and socialism have hold the monopoly over utopian ideas. In the same manner, there is emergence of surprisingly new theological turn that left had made in the recent years, turn denoted by numerous leftist thinkers as a result of radically new conceptualizing of terms of universality and solidarity (I will address that issue later on), which does not only mean that rightists have lost monopoly on Bible, as suggested by one author, but also that a major change took place in regards to restructuring discursive field of leftist theory whereby the new thinking of collective emancipation had emerged. This is only one of several examples of big structural changes in the field of social theory, and to appropriately analyze them it is necessary to begin with the simple premise of this text, a premise upon which there is a need for building fundaments for contemporary analysis of phenomena such as neoliberalism and socialism. This assertion is very simple: today both capitalism and leftist ideas are in deep crisis. However, the major difference, as Russian social scientist Boris Kagarlitsky argues, is that the crisis of the Left is moral and ideological, not economic and predominantly social as it is the case with neoliberalism or its political cover of Third Way that used to legitimize its means. Against hegemony of neoliberal concept he wrote trilogy New Realism, New Barbarism, The Twilight of Globalization and The Return of Radicalism, trying to develop discussion on the reasons of demise of leftist politics that primarily went wrong, as shown in the last part of his trilogy, in institutional and organizational meaning of the term. His attitude is clear: contrary to some Western interpretations, wild transitional capitalism and underdeveloped postcommunist democracy in Eastern Europe and Third World have shown that there is a strong need for universal new left thought as only relevant and pertinent alternative to what he named “new barbarism” arguing for alternative socialism or barbarism, because there is no third way. If we take a look upon historical situation, leftist ideas and socialism have dominated in the 60’s and 70’s in Europe and around the globe, intellectually hegemonized all major centers and articulated idea of collective emancipation, from socialdemocratic Sweden and France in 70’s to Tokyo and Far East. And then, suddenly, this leftist tide withdraws, as scenically depicts Göran Therborn in his book From Marxism to Post-Marxism, leaving the space for the arrival of devastating neoliberal tsunami. Socialist and leftist structures fall apart, and Marxist ideas have drowned in the global deluge. That was a time for triumph of liberal capitalism which tried to show itself as moral “capitalism with the human face”, and the fall of Berlin wall became a “new play of liberalism” with totalitarian disposition of the world as a horizon of enacting biopolitical power that all natural sciences turns into biosciences, humanity into barbarism and political economy into microphysics of power of imperial forces. However, if we look upon this argumentation from another perspective, it is obvious that the victory of neoliberalism was actually shattered: some authors claim this is the end of neoliberal utopia that died twice: first, at 9/11 when terrorist attack ruined very fundaments of democracy and developed countries of the world led to the abyss of biopolitical surveillance and psychosocial fear and mistrust, and second time in year 2008 with the beginning of deep economic crisis on the global scale, whereat it was proven that even the hardcore neoliberal democracies such as USA have to impose socialist solutions such as redistribution of wealth in order to mitigate the crisis (basically, loss of money of big private companies was restored and refunded from national budget, as it was the case in communist countries, with a major difference that private capital was saved thanks to taxpayers, i.e. common citizens). As Michael Hardt convincingly argues in his text Collective ownership in communism where he questions relations between Marxism and biopolitics, the rule of capital has been put on a trial. Hardt criticize Keynesian system where he sets out difference between private (capitalism) and public (socialism) ownership, arguing for some kind of communist collective ownership, clearly from contemporary perspective instead of referring to historical Marxism from the previous century. Two basic principles in this text are to bring back the concept of communism its original meaning and to critically question biopolitical, non-material production based on hegemonic position, which are the point easily related to the ideas he developed (together with Negri) in crucial political writings in the last decade, books Empire and Multitude. Hardt asserts that

Ethics and Metapolitics

In order to discuss the problem of ethico-political disenfranchisement I will analyze some recent contributions and topics that stood out as cornerstones in debate on

The Permanent Condition of War-And-Peace

If there is no war, there is no history. Hasn’t this premise been given in advance to a mythical discourse that presupposes a triumph: the golden age

Overcoming the West?

(The errors of occidentalism) Ideology is older than the world of modernity. Like religion and metaphysics, it is“innate” to man as a member of a social community. Just as paranoid manifestations in asociety can sometimes have a protective function – because society responds to apotentially genuine threat by activating the defense mechanism of fear, which results in areturn to human solidarity – prejudice is not merely a false consciousness, but rather away in which a society shapes its self-consciousness in relation to the Other. Ideology is,admittedly, a modern invention of struggles based on opposing politics and worldviews,but it also transcends the realm of politics. The entire history of the 20 century can bequalified as an attempt to subdue culture by means of ideology, beginning with socialistutopias and totalitarian fascist movements, all the way to the neo-liberal ideology ofglobalization with its frightful counterpart, religious fundamentalism. The last book ofessays by the German ideological critic Panajotis Kondylis goes one step further than theusual neo-Marxist approach to ideology. [1] According to Kondylis, it is no longer aquestion of the distorted consciousness of a false social being – which, in Marx’s case,provided a strong standpoint for criticizing all things extant through the lens of animaginary utopian future – but of an intertwining of culture and ideology as almostidentical value structures, from which framework every human action is then judgedthrough the moral standards of survival. Only when history is viewed from theperspective of apocalypse does ideology reach its climax. There is in fact not a singleserious ideological power system that desires to implement its “program” in a futureconceived of as a realm of beauty and eternal justice, after having won the formidablebattle against the forces of evil and transforming the world into an idyllic heaven.Ideology is always only a means to other ends. This is why its resemblance to religion, as a surrogate mode of finding one’s way in a world lacking sure strongholds, is only fitting.Edward Said’s critical study Orientalism, published in the 1970s – which showed how theWest used all forms of knowledge and power, throughout the history of colonization, tocreate an ideological image of the so-called Orient, in order to domesticate it and turn itinto its own reflection, all the better to subdue it by other means (science, technology,and culture) – created a fertile ground in postcolonial studies and cultural theory onwhich to base a different critique of ideology than the one canonized in the works ofcritical theory (i.e., by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas). This implies a fundamentaldeconstructing of so-called Eurocentric discourse and thought. Using Said’s theory as herstarting point, Maria Todorova wrote a key book on the Balkan problem, which shedefined as an ideological product of the West’s policy rather than an eternal geographicand cultural twilight zone. The value of ventures such as hers is manifold. They are notmerely an abstract, theoretical penetration into the collective unconscious of history seenas “scream and fury.” Critiques of orientalism and of the vision of the Balkans as an“imaginary map” of all the Western ideological chimeras had the clear political functionof dissipating the myths, prejudice, and appalling political incorrectness. And the last isrecognizable at every step – in the case of the philistine British Prince Philip during hisvisit to the Aborigines, or in Peter Handke’s adoration of Slobodan Milosevic in his role asa noble barbarian genius, who, in his “defense and his last days,” is trying to wash awaythe sins of his own genocidal politics through a critique of the West.Admittedly, Said and his critique of the West’s ideological bugbears have changed criticaltheory’s dominant discourse in social science and the humanities concerning traditionalsocieties of the so-called Third World. It is just as undeniable that his critique ofEurocentrism and Americanism, conceived of as a continuation of the West’s hegemonyat the end of the Cold War era, created a ground for another kind of ideologicalmanipulation – namely, lack of any kind of self-criticism on the East’s part in theintercultural dispute/dialogue, even after such a significant turning point as the terroristattack on the US on September 11, 2001. Freeing oneself from the colonizer does notnecessarily lead to a positive state of freedom from one’s own ideological specters. Justas the blinded ultra-leftist fanatics in 1968 France saw in Mao and Castro icons of the“utopian revolution,” as opposed to totalitarian dictators and tyrants (and this goes justas well for students and their ideological leaders such as Sartre, Althusser, Foucault,Derrida, Baudrillard & co.), thus the idea of the West outgrowing itself as a cradle ofreason and insanity is deeply rooted in the ideological picture of the East, conceived of asa geographical and spiritual locus of purity, virtue, and ingenuity. The last, however, is nolonger just a fiction of the West, attempting to find a way to overcoming its crisis and itsdecadence in mystical India or esoteric Tibet, but a dangerous fiction of the East itself, inits hatred of the West.Having laid their hands on the ready-made concept of Said’s critique of orientalism,authors Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma published a controversial essay entitled“Occidentalism.” [2] Their notion of occidentalism is simply a set of images and ideasabout the West as they appear in the minds of its foes. The essay takes as its startingpoint the thesis that the present hatred of the West by the East, meaning mainly theThird World countries and leftist and rightist critique of America in Europe, is a result ofa historic fight against the universalism of a new age enlightenment project. It is nolonger merely that anti-modernist anger of the “humiliated and aggrieved” against the materialist culture of capitalism, as presented in justifications of the terrorist fanaticismof Islamic fundamentalists. The hatred against the West, conceived of as a project ofcreating an “alternative” world history beyond capitalist modernization, appeared in theform of a program to overcome the West as far back as 1942, not long after the Japaneseattack on Pearl Harbor, when a group of Japanese philosophers in Kyoto discussed therole of Japan in the world. The ultra-nationalist project of returning to the sources ofauthentic culture meant at the

The Political and the Violent. On Resistances

Politics and the Political This essay explores the political, in particular that which we might call the vanishing of the political. We should first be aware that the terms politics and the political are polysemous and their applications are many. Politics as praxis can be used against the political as a discursive principle or attitude and, vice versa, the political as an ethos or universal category of “being- with” (Nancy) can be opposed to politics. If we take politics to mean the organization of societies and their futures, including institutional systems and the handling of conflicts, the political addresses firstly the human state of being political; our existence as zoon politikon, which has always placed us in a space of “dispute” (Lyotard), dissent or “disagreement” (Rancière). At the same time, the political denotes that discursivity in which the reasons for the structuring orders of the social are experienced as divided and posited in conflict (Aus- einander-setzungen). The political thus also designates the necessity of forming and structuring the social, as well as the dispositif of its legitimacy and rejection, which always accompany it. We are thus dealing in two ways with measures that are as practical as they are theoretical, that equally produce and reflect upon the social. However, it is not the discursive alone which is most important – that discursivity of discourse which builds upon the classic political dichotomization between freedom and the lack thereof, justice and injustice, law and violence, etc. – but rather the practical which establishes and enforces the differences within the social. Nor should we fail to mention that the differences that pervade discourses of the political are on the one hand themselves the effects of practices which in turn can be described as such, just as on the other hand discourses are practices, situated in the space of politics and the political. The problem of talking about the political is therefore that it both has the power to create society to a certain extent – to order it and to quash it – and at the same time denotes reflections on this power, in which it is justified or criticized – and the two terms cannot simply be separated. The intricate situation results thus from the political referring to both a practice of creation and a practice of theory or reflection, which, as a practice, is part of the political in which it intervenes. Every criticism of social conditions or the political systems which they uphold is itself already a political action, participating in the power structure, even and especially when suppressed or prohibited. There is thus no extrapolitical terrain, no apolitical discourse, no conflict about the political which transpires in a special philosophical space outside of that which the term denotes. This by no means should imply that the political nature of these practices is so unavoidable that we are locked into them as in a cage. Politics and the political are rather complementary like the two sides of a mirror, which is not accidentally the cardinal metaphor of reflection; but – like with every mirror – they distort reflection and only make some aspects visible while highlighting selected details that otherwise would have remained hidden. This also means that we must see politics and the political to a certain extent as universal categories. Just as there is no beyond to social systems, there is no beyond to the political – the structure and organizational forms of the social necessitate politics and the political. It is this circumstance that makes the reciprocal clarification and understanding of their relationship so difficult; the question of the politics of discourse and the discursivization of politics, not to mention the politicalness of the question of the political, which always intervenes unreasonably in political relations and dares to criticize them. However, in order to begin somewhere, I choose the polis as the paradigmatic stage on which all these questions play – on the etymological level as well. The polis already includes the symbolic question of the politiké, the politeia, and the problem of thinking about the source of these structures, their arché or foundation and legitimacy. The terms politics and the political thus both deal in equal measure with the body politic and its realization, whether in the form of different political systems and their specific instruments – or media –, such as laws, the public sphere, means of negotiation, relations to the outside world, etc., or in the form of the formulation of general principles which go before, and which, according to Martin Heidegger’s reconstruction of early Greek philosophy, were of course situated in the physis.2 It is also of note that all of these questions are directly connected to ethos, or were and still are touched upon in discussions on ethics – in particular all questions of justice and a just order and, correspondingly, laws such as the ones introduced in the Greek city-states after the overthrow of tyranny in the 6th century BCE. At the same time, these questions are contextually tied to episteme, knowledge and its philosophical justification which is taken on the one hand from an other – namely a natural ontology –, without asking whether this is a transferable category; and on the other hand from the phronesis of practical intelligence meant to guide governance and its tactics. The aim is not to justify the order and specific organizational structures of the polis, but rather to ensure strategies of exchange such as the long-term transmission of tradition and its protection through a way of life. The latter necessitates in particular the temporalization of the varying respective beings and the shaping of their relationship to one another. Differences between desires and order must be balanced and this balance must be preserved or withstood, whereby the former took the form of a kind of spatialization of participation (methexis), which invented the polis as a whole, as a unified organism. This inventory makes the origins of the different terms and their particular perspectives

Mapping the Balkan and escaping to Europe

The questions of where are the actual boundaries of the Balkans actually include many traumatic issues of belonging, identity and imagery and they involve the outwitting of geopolitical theories. In my opinion, the very aspiration for drawing precise boundaries is meaningless, because, for example, saying that Croatia really geographically belongs or does not belong to the Balkans does not mean much, considering that it is indeed Balkan identity by its specificity (Luketić, 2013). In addition, the stringent definition of Balkan borders is often invited by those who wouldn’t be covered by these borders, and such geographical precision is actually caused by the desire to get away from the fear of the Balkans. Talking about the borders of the Balkans without neurosis means talking about something changeable, about mixing and effects in the sphere of culture which is widely understood, and not about the strict mapping, drawing, and defining of the area in accordance with specific political, ideological or cultural conceptions. Croatia is – among other things – the Balkans, wherever we think the borderline of Balkan itself passes through, just like Slovenia is the Balkans because of its history and identity strongly determined by what was happening in the “real” geographical undoubtedly Balkans (cf. Rihtman-Auguštin, 1999). Let’s look further at what is cooking in the same imaginary cauldron, how to evaluate it and dispense the Balkans, and European ingredients. To geographically belong to the Balkans for many local residents means not to belong to Europe, therefore implies disconnection from the desirable society which, in the collective consciousness, assures civility, civility, and progress, in short, bright future (Todorova, 1999). The possibility of the coexistence of the two areas, the possibility that in one of the cultural specificity both paradigms are meeting, or more different paradigm, and Balkan-European hybrid identity consciously lives, without neurosis, usually is not taken into account (hereby I agree with similar argument in: Luketić, 2013). Being a European automatically excludes the possibility of being  Balkanite because everything that is Europe was created in a shared awareness exactly opposite to the Balkans. For a current position that you can be either Europe or the Balkans, not both, and the belief that the recognition of multiple, plural identities jeopardizes supposedly important, national identity, most responsible were the local political and intellectual elites (Hammond, 2004). They defined the magic circle of identity: what remains inside, in the zone of the permissible, and what is out there, the empty space being ousted. They don’t support that circle by producing constant characteristic narrations about “us” and “them.” We need to destruct/ decode such rigid, identity narratives based on the tense duality as a kind of “zero position” to accept hybridism and heterogeneity, the “Bakhtinian” polyphony of cultures. Collective identities are usually variable and regularly depend on the current ideological and political groups and social tendencies of the majority (Jambrešić-Kirin, 2004). They are always constructed according to the requirements or objectives of a social group, they are neither natural nor permanent, but only present themselves in this way. With greater mobility, speed, globalization and everything what characterizes modernity, and what Zygmunt Bauman meant by the period of “liquid modernity” (as opposed to the earlier “solid modernity”), identities are becoming more variable, unstable and fragmented, which means they are increasingly and rapidly creating and dis- solving. National gives way to the cultural, great narratives behind the establishment of national identity are replaced with a series of smaller narratives that an individual can take as needed and discard. In addition, the words of historian John R. Gillis say that in the transnational world of capitalism of the late 20th  century an increasing number of people are forced to deal with multiple identities and multiple memories (Todorova, 1999). But this “transnational world”, typical for the West, was the future in the Balkans at the end of the last century. However, not even today it does not mark these areas. One-dimensional national identities (as they are given in the nineties) still quite impossible open recognition of hybridism and multiplicity of identity in the public sphere. For the area of the former Yugoslavia, it’s characteristic (and that what distances this space from the time shown by the clock in the west, neoliberal zone, and we don’t think about the delay/retardation/inadequacy, but in a different development) that the strong national identities, as they were shaped in the nineties, were constructed in Europe almost a century ago. In Croatia, Europe appears as an object of desire and determines the most local fantasies, while the  Balkan is averse and it is trying in every way to escape. Balkans in  Croatia and identity binary equation can never replace the position with Europe, as it is for example the case in Serbia. In fact, even when Europe finds favor when weakening the intensity of identification fantasies about some current political events (such as court judgments in Hague,   the criticism of European diplomacy, etc.), the Balkans in Croatia is never taking her place. Here comes to reversals, but only to a temporary lowering of Europe at the level of the Balkans, where it is often revived and narratives by which “we” are more Europe rather than the Member States of the European Union (Rihtman-Auguštin, 1999). So, in regards to my research, the following questions logically arise: What is the content of these Croatian fantasies about Europe? In one version it’s a fantasy about the community at a high civilization stage of development with stable democracies. I say fantasy rather than reality, given that in many countries of the European Union repressive policies exist towards foreigners and immigrants, and in many social groups racist refusal on the existence of the others. European hyper-correct and decorated democracy is not simply established in the reality, even today in the political sphere dominated by the pursuit of achieving the maximum possible democratic. In another version, it is Croatian fantasy on Europe that unites many cultures, on a supranational identity in which differences have a common root and a

An-Arché as the Voice of the People: Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Disagreement

Abstract An-arché in the thinking of politics and aesthetics beyond the tradition of political philosophy of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt in 20. century, or in contact with the ideas of political emancipation by Joseph Jacotot, and Karl Marx and anarchism, marks the theory of politics as a disagreement (mésentente) in the writings of Jacques Rancière. The intention of this text is to show how and in what way the thinking of the political should confront to the philosophy of politics who always take care theoretically about the politics of norms, postulates and rules of action. Since Rancière believes that political preceded by politics as a police or regime of the oligarchic law in contemporary liberal democracies, and it should be a matter of radical equality among citizens, then it is the fundamental problem of determining politics in an attempt to think of an- arché. In this contingency, we are doomed to a constant struggle with the order of inequalities and chaos in its own vagueness. That must be a reason why we use the word “mysticism” for what comes out of the state in-between two ways of comprehending a politics: (1) as the power of a hierarchically predicated society on which a state is constructed and (2) as a spontaneous struggle for democracy. The true politics of the equality must face what lies in its own bargain. And that is the powerful and chaotic an-arché. The paradox and aporia are not that democracy and freedom are derived from this principle without principles. Anyway, the scandal that rules in neoliberal oligarchy represents a confirmation of the same an-arché. For this reason, its archi-politics, para-politics and meta-politics are “the cunning of reason” of a perverted order of the world where the power of the “police” sets limits to the “politics” of freedom and not vice versa. Contemporary oligarchy is based in this an-arché-ic model of chaos and ambiguity in all its visible and invisible areas of action, from the management of the economy to marketing policy. But the problem with Rancière’s metapolitics has been seen from the beginning to be a problem of the impossibility of political without the articulation of power. Equality without power remains unfulfilled by the demands of the “people” as temporary demos. Keywords: An-arché, Oligarchy, Democracy, Disagreement 1.  Introduction Why do we have a certain kind of manner to say very often that today anything has become political and that almost everything is happening as aesthetic body shaping? Do that two terms contradict, though it may be that behind Janus’  face masks conceal the abyss of other definitions except what suspends any possible over-determination? It should be said that politics designates the power of ruling the people in the community (politeia, civitas dei, republic, monarchy, democracy). Aesthetics, in turn, signify the area of pure bodily experience of what belongs to the language and the image in the experience of beauty. We are not talking about feeling but on the experience. The difference is that feeling denotes a subject of psychology. In addition, the former and the latter shows to us the relationship between the work and the observer. As an experience, we call a reflection of feelings at a higher level of perception. Politics as power and aesthetics as an experience are not in contradiction with the determination of what enables them. It is impossible to impart the power without a sense of sensible experience. The relationship between the two should be causal and efficient. However, the problem arises when their connection is called into question. It no longer determines politics as power or aesthetics as a meaning of sensation in the world, but it surely comes with the emergence of a completely different “politics” and “aesthetics”. On the other hand, abodes of “power” and “sense” are changing. However, it seems obvious that a different relationship becomes a daily experience. It might call that situation as an event of un- foundation action. Greeks named this by a word an-arché. The thinking after Heidegger, beginning with the ethical revolution in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, one can thus call post-foundational theory or deconstruction of the unconditional principle of “nature” of Being as presence, the idea of God and all that had features of the onto-theological tradition. [1] An-arché in the thinking of politics and aesthetics beyond the tradition of “political philosophy” of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt in 20. century, or in contact with the ideas of political emancipation by Joseph Jacotot, and Karl Marx and anarchism, marks the theory of politics as a disagreement (mésentente) in the writings of Jacques Rancière. What should be especially emphasized right there refers to equality, which in many respects belongs to the mainstream of French political ontology of events, regardless of the differences between Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Badiou, Lefort, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe. But the fact is that only Rancière has performed the most persistent criticism of the contemporary era of global politics as the oligarchic order of “police” rule. However, he gave a pretty convincing argument about that way of approach with a number of new concepts. [2] If we would like to make a card experiment according to thinking of politics today, we could show that “poker aces” with regard to the issue of this post-foundation event, which opens the possibilities of change of world- historical revolution, that is, from the typical French tradition, are present in the following way. All the basic concepts with which the modern revolution started were the notions of the French Revolution. These are equality, fraternity, freedom (egalité, fraternité, liberté) and last but not least ─ justice. The first term denotes the point of thinking of Jacques Rancière, and the third is associated with Foucault and Deleuze, the fourth with Levinas, Derrida and Lyotard, and the media intervention in the new historical framework. One can even argue that the term might be a key to its maintenance. The reason is that the concepts of the upcoming community of equality, freedom and justice are