Articles

Caught on a bus in rush-hour Tokyo, Anthony Head wonders whether Schopenhauer was right that immunity to noise is proof of idiocy. Could the impassive facades of his fellow travellers be concealing something more spiritual?

The hopes for African footballing success raised by Cameroon’s performance in the 1990 World Cup have yet to be fulfilled. However African football has long since stepped out of the shadow of its colonial origins, writes Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling. All that remains is for an African nation to capture football’s most coveted trophy.

Modernity in eastern Europe tends to be seen either as the partial opening up of a region characterized by traditional forms of societal self-understanding, or as a disfigured and radicalized adaptation of western modernity that prioritizes closure. Paul Blokker, in an article focusing on Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Hungary, argues that both views need to be combined.

Some common notions about analytic philosophy – that it is uniformly anti-metaphysical or indifferent to the history of philosophy – are clearly misconceived. However the impression that analytic philosophers are essentially linguistic philosophers is not entirely false and hence less easy to refute, writes Pierre Wagner.

Asked to compare the Hungarian city of Pécs to his own birthplace, author Peteris Puritis is at a loss: he was only there once. Instead, he gives an unofficial guided tour of the many Soviet-era monuments in the Latvian town of his childhood, recalling some of the cheeky uses he and his friends found for them…

Viktor Horváth’s novel “Török tükör” [Turkish Mirror] portrays everyday life in sixteenth century Hungary, when it was a suzerainty of the Sultan Suleyman. The narrator, an old Muslim man, addresses the reader throughout as “my heir to the true faith”, assuming that by the time his words are read, the Hungarians will have assimilated with their conquerors – an ingenious reversal that runs throughout the book and gives it its special charm. The excerpt translated here describes the market town of Pécs.

Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one’s mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of fiction that sum up the New York attitude.

The “open society” to which Soviet existence is often claimed to have been opposed resembles the old idea of “the free world”. A non-moralistic approach to group relations in the Soviet Union moves beyond the simplistic link between modernisation and openness, writes Catriona Kelly.

Marx’s comment that history advances by the “bad side” has inspired an apocalyptic strand of anti-capitalism that supposes history is “on our side”. Benjamin Noys takes issue with the “accelerationist” view that welcomes apocalypse as the decisive moment.

Attacks on scientific consensus employ the simulacra of scholarship and a deceptively readable idiom. Those who debunk the deniers tend to be old-fashioned rationalists or committed activists. Neither group are particularly well suited to looking at the deeper reasons behind denialism, warns Keith Kahn-Harris.

Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist control and domination. Machines, not human bodies, are now the subjects of the text.

When newspapers die it can be a slow and painful business. Many of its current problems – loss of revenue and falling readership among them – are of the newspaper industry’s own making, but there are signs that some in the business are finally getting the message and shaping up to the future.

Where hard physics combines with traders’ animal passions, the bestiary of financialized civilization becomes imbued with the relations between hunter and hunted, writes Brian Holmes. Systemic corruption has produced the fundamental disconnect between the informational sky above our heads and the existential ground beneath our feet.