Seminarat-nachin na upotreba
THE SEMINAR: MODE D'EMPLOI - Impure spaces in the light of late totalitarianism

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on a phenomenon that emerged as a major feature of the last decade of the communist regime in Bulgaria and that came to be designated as “the seminar”. From its elitist inception as a restricted academic activity in the early 80нs to its spilling over into street action involving hundreds of thousands of people in 1989 and 1990, the seminar was produced as the dominant trajectory of the collapse of totalitarian power in Bulgaria. Thus if we cannot say that the seminar brought the totalitarian regime down (although what did it? there is no definitive answer yet) we can say that the communist regime in Bulgaria brought along the seminar as the one major symptom of its demise. The seminar hence presents the enigma of an indomitable political, economic and military machine disintegrated by discourse - by “glasnost” Exploring the seminar’s theoretical and historical dimensions opens, therefore, the possibility for revisiting the question of discursive resistance and its chances in the face of the violence and terror that derive from totalitarian and fundamentalist attitudes.

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