Articles

“For seventy years in succession, the Communists accused Western leaders of being Don Quixote. The latter did the same, accusing the Stalinists of being Don Quixote […] As you see, Don Quixote is always the loser, because the politicians who use his name are not on his level and have not a bit of his nobility.” Ismail Kadare on why Don Quixote belongs to Balkan folklore, how Cervantes first came to be translated into Albanian, and why today’s politicians should be banned from using the knight errant’s name as a term of abuse.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the politics of history in western Europe has produced a “hot” memory of the Shoah. In eastern Europe after 1989, the memory of Communism became “hot”, while the memory of the Holocaust remained as “cold” as it had been during Communism. Adapting the histoire croisée method of history writing – the focus on crossovers of different cultures, social groups, and historical events – Éva Kovács examines the mémoire croisée of the Shoah in the different political systems of eastern and western Europe.

At a time when neighbourly relations between nation-states dominated international politics, Carl Schmitt defined the political as the tension between friend and enemy. After 1945, states were expected to adopt a trans-national understanding and to step beyond their isolationist boundaries, a hope largely disappointed in Cold War hostilities. After a surge of popularity for concepts such as fluidity, migration, and fragmentation, polarity has returned to the stage of international politics, bringing with it renewed interest in neighbourhood. Associating neighbourhood with friendship, Hasan Bülent Kahraman looks at Maurice Blanchot’s theory of the “infinite distance” inherent in friendship. Turkey can and should, he argues, use this distance as a parameter in order to establish a productive relationship with the EU and the West.

France’s non-commemoration last year of the bicentennial of Napoleon’s great victory at Austerlitz was a sign of national uncertainty about the role of history and its relationship to the state.

During the riots in France in November 2005, much was made of the increasing religious radicalism of the Muslim youth. But it is not so much cultural difference and Islamism that is taking young Muslims to the street, says Turkish sociologist Ayhan Kaya, as a mass reaction to two centuries of colonialism and racism, compounded by recent poverty and exclusion. Does the bell toll for French Republicanism?

Residual authoritarianism and social inequality, be it in his native Austria or in the US, are both target and spur in Josef Schützenhöfer’s painting. Literary critic Klaus Zeyringer describes the artist’s development of a painterly aesthetic in keeping with his social-political commitment, first in the political paintings executed in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, and later in the work at the Steyr-Daimler-Puch and Semperit plants in Austria. Now, with the hegemony of abstraction losing its hold, Schützenhöfer’s “Social Painting” is having its day.

British feminist and psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell talks to Cogito about her role in the British New Left in the 1960s. Mitchell was at the centre of the movement: as editorial board member of the New Left Review, as participant in Third World and anti-psychiatry movements, and as co-organizer of grassroots initiatives, including the “Anti-University”, founded on the steps of Shoreditch Church in East London. Here, Mitchell outlines her intellectual trajectory from her early Marxism, to feminism of the mid-1960s, and to psychoanalysis in the 1970s.

The cosmopolite’s notion of justice does not cease to exist at the national border. She dreams of the world city, filled with opportunity and potential for change; the labyrinthine commotion of the marketplace and the pluralism of human existence. But fundamentalist Muslims, Christians, and others despise the “world city”. Political cosmopolitanism was born out of an analysis of globalization – it is critical both of the neoliberal globalization of the market and the fundamentalist or nationalistic backlash. Questions concerning world citizenship, dual citizenship, and multiple loyalties make their presence felt as it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between inner and outer, foreign and domestic politics, citizen and foreigner, friend and foe.

The formal laws constituting freedom of expression in democratic societies are only the tip of the iceberg of unwritten agreements between citizens about what they can express publicly in one context or another, says Göran Rosenberg. These agreements differ from society to society: in the case of Denmark, the agreement to allow expressions of anti-Muslim prejudice has served to produce conflict instead of dealing with it. With communications technology enabling the proliferation of parallel public spheres, the need for common agreements on freedom of expression are all the more necessary if conflicts such as the latest controversy over the Mohammed cartoons are not to intensify.

Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, an archivist who lived in early apartheid South Africa, wrote extensively about the social origins of the South African nation, specifically about slavery in the colonial Cape, as part of a project to resist the increasingly ossified racist legal and social structures of South Africa. In a series of articles for the political magazine Drum, she wrote about Krotoa-Eva, the first indigenous Khoikhoi woman to marry into colonial settler society. Jeffreys’ use of Krotoa-Eva as a “mother of the nation” figure can be compared to the resurgence of writing about her in post-apartheid South Africa. Discourses of “racial difference” and “racial mixing” in the formation of “the nation” need to be seen in an historical perspective that takes account of gender as an axis of experience with relation to “race”, and as a tool for discursive identity construction.