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East translates East
The articles published here are part of the project "Diagnosing the present", initiated by the journal Critique & Humanism (Bulgaria) and supported by the Next Page Foundation within the programme "East Translates East". The project aims to add to an understanding of cultural, political, and intellectual life in contemporary eastern central Europe.
The articles were jointly published by three Eurozine partner journals: alongside Critique & Humanism, they are Kulturos barai (Lithuania) and Kritika&Kontext (Slovakia). Eurozine compiles online all articles in Bulgarian, Lithuanian, and Slovakian, along with English translations.
Cultural journals, whose role is to react and reflect upon cultural change and new social, political, and intellectual tendencies, are the ideal medium through which to encourage translation and exchange within eastern European.
Culture and society
Mobile citizenship?
culture and society The "new mobility" implies new freedoms as well as new privations. The biographies of Bulgarian migrants reveal how the horizon of departure has become a basic dimension of the world. Mobility, writes Ivaylo Ditchev, will need to be taken more seriously in the anthropology of citizenship. [ more ]
Global museums in the twenty-first century
The Guggenheim foundation and the rhetoric of cultural planning in Vilnius
culture and society The fact that a Guggenheim museum is being planned for Vilnius is indicative of the conviction that "de-provincialization" can only be achieved by taking part in global projects. Meanwhile, the cultural demands of the local population go unheeded. Vilnius is not Bilbao! [ more ]
The non-efficient citizen
Identity and consumerist morality
culture and society Consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom. In the consumerist system, the individual who asserts him or herself through authentic freedom is regarded as a non-efficient citizen. [ more ]
An amorphous society
Lithuania in the era of high post-communism
culture and society "High post-communism" in eastern Europe is defined by efforts to control collective memory, political discourse dominated by abstract concepts, and the cult of entertainment – a view from Lithuania. [Slovak version added] [ more ]
Between mimesis and non-existence
Lithuania in Europe, Europe in Lithuania
culture and society Cultural and political life in Lithuania is marked by what Homi K. Bhabha, speaking of postcolonial nations, called "ironic compromise". The Lithuanian is "almost a European but not quite". [ more ]
populism
The populist moment
populism Unlike the extremist parties of the 1930s, the new populist movements do not aim to abolish democracy: quite the opposite, writes Ivan Krastev. What we are witnessing is a conflict between elites suspicious of democracy and increasingly illiberal publics. [Slovak version added] [ more ]
National populism versus democracy
populism Given the failure of the leftist projects of the twentieth century, it is telling that far-right populism is more anti-democratic in the new democracies of eastern Europe than in the West, writes Antony Todorov. Is populism identical to the crisis of democracy or rather a symptom of it? [ more ]
Radical demophilia
Reflections on Bulgarian populism
populism Populism in Bulgaria feeds off two phenomena: a pure hatred of political parties and the constant emphasis in the public discourse on an alleged contrast between ordinary people and the political elite. [ more ]
Made in Bulgaria
The national as advertising repertoire
populism In Bulgarian political discourse, to talk of the nation means to talk non-politically. Advertising makes visible this depoliticization of the national. [ more ]
Philosophy
"Why Nietzsche today"
Philosophy Despite the major criticisms to be made of Nietzsche's philosophy, his
writing on morality and politics continues to raise important issues, writes
Bela Egyed in an introduction to a series of texts first published in
Kritika&Kontext. [ more ]
What does Nietzsche mean to philosophers today?
Philosophy Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal, and irrelevant, or radical, prescient, and misunderstood? Six philosophers answer Kritika&Kontext's questions on Nietzsche. Their responses make one thing clear: Nietzsche still divides opinion. [ more ]
Questioning authority
Nietzsche's gift to Derrida
Philosophy Nietzsche's deconstruction of authoritarian subjectivity shares much with Derrida's postmodern critique of the subject as privileged centre of discourse. Alan D. Schrift discusses Derrida's Nietzschean refusal to "hypostatize the subject". [ more ]
Nietzsche's anti-democratic liberalism
Philosophy A Nietzschean politics is less a critique of political events so much as a diagnosis of the forces and tendencies driving them – and therein lies its liberalism, writes Béla Egyed. [ more ]
The heaviest burden
Nietzsche and the death of God
Philosophy Nietzsche's response to having lost faith, but not being able to live without it, was to invent the figure of a new creator – someone who could bring together Man and World once again. In order to do this, man had to begin to think through his own existence: the heaviest burden of all. [ more ]
Soul craft
On Nietzsche's teaching of self-overcoming
Philosophy Nietzsche's writing on solitude and friendship belies the impression his philosophy preferred the ecstatic over the measured way of life. For Nietzsche, self-overcoming required both, writes Horst Hutter. [ more ]
