Articles

It started as an act of radicalism. Anne Sofie Roald and Pernilla Ouis adopted the headscarf back in the 1980s at the same time as political Islam began to grow. Now they are part of a global trend towards secularisation in which more and more women are shedding their headscarves and veils.

“After thirty years of revolutionary cinema, complex gender issues are still pending. Simply reversing gender roles is not progressive in feminist terms. It is destructive in that it perpetuates the roles designed in patriarchal society”, writes Brígida Pastor in her analysis of Cuban cinema in the 1990s.

Even the staunchest advocates of Turkey’s EU accession must consider alternatives to full membership. Yet what does “Plan B” – or “privileged partnership” – entail? If the enticement of full Union membership is removed, can the EU achieve its goals in Turkey, namely democratization and human rights reforms? This question is made all the more pressing by a renewed perception in Arab countries of “Ottoman” Turkey’s belonging in the global Muslim community together with a surge of anti-western feeling, writes Claus Leggewie.

“What would happen if Hungary were to slip off the face of the earth?” According to a recent survey, a tenth of respondents said it would go unnoticed and a fifth said nobody would care. Asked how they saw their country ten years from now, nearly half said that it would be backward and impoverished and only a third that it would become a successful European country. “Hungary’s political elite, its intellectuals and its media bear enormous responsibility for this negativity,” writes Elemér Hankiss.

Postmodernism as an epistemological project still reproduces a particular form of coloniality. A decolonial perspective requires a broader canon of thought that would require taking seriously the epistemic insights of critical thinkers from the global South. How can a “critical border thinking” that envisages a “transmodern world” moves us beyond Eurocentrism?

The capitalist order implies that the ultimate objective of citizens is to be consumers. Yet consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom, writes Tomas Kavaliauskas. In the consumerist system, the individual who asserts him or herself through authentic freedom is regarded as a non-efficient citizen.

Nietzsche’s writing on solitude and friendship belies the impression that his philosophy preferred the ecstatic over the measured way of life. For Nietzsche, self-overcoming required both, writes Horst Hutter.

Approaches to migration often fall into one of two camps: anti-neoliberal hostility or euphoria at “flows”. Yet the “new mobility” implies new freedoms as well as new privations. Researching the biographies of Bulgarian migrants, Ivaylo Ditchev finds that the horizon of departure has become a basic dimension of the world. Mobility, he writes, will need to be taken more seriously in the anthropology of citizenship.

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.

Populist movements are a threat not because they raise the issue of direct democracy, but because they advocate nationalist mobilisation based on xenophobia, writes Antony Todorov. 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 central and eastern Europe than in western Europe. Is populism identical to the crisis of democracy or rather a symptom of it?

Be it the moral-theological tradition, God, or his own status as author, Nietzsche’s refusal to legitimate authority remains constant. As Alan D. Schrift writes, Nietzsche’s deconstruction of authoritarian subjectivity shares much with Jacques Derrida’s post-modern critique of the subject as a privileged centre of discourse.

When, in 1989, Ferenc Fejtö payed a fleeting visit to Hungary after fifty years of exile, the eighty year-old found the time to meet a great many of the intellectual founders of the nascent democracy. Ágnes Széchenyi, his secretary at the time, pays tribute to a man “unwavering in his principles, but flexible and open in his practice”.

Renowned Hungarian-French intellectual Ferenc Fejtö died on 2 June. Ferenc László recalls how well into his nineties, Fejtö remained an unassumingly honest thinker whose refreshing common sense and European viewpoint made him a matchless figure on the Left.

The period of “high post-communism” in eastern Europe is defined by efforts to control collective memory, political discourse dominated by abstract concepts, dilettantism, and the cult of entertainment. Writing from the Lithuanian perspective, Almantas Samalavicius finds society caught in between the extremes of hysterical activity and blind resignation.

Though still routinely referred to as Germans, Austrian novelists have experienced a recent run of critical and commercial success. The “difficult” prose of the past has been replaced by a focus on story-telling, with women writers producing no less interesting work in the genre than the new male “narrative miracles”. Yet experimentalism is by no means out: darkly humorous and self-referential “writer’s novels” are also booming. In the latest essay in Eurozine’s series “Literary perspectives”, critic Daniela Strigl surveys a contemporary Austrian scene at the top of its game.