The Only Good Neighbor is the Dead Neighbor
Samo mrtviot sosed e dobar sosed
Keywords: neighbor; love; enemy; Kierkegaard; Christianity;
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Keywords: neighbor; love; enemy; Kierkegaard; Christianity;
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Keywords: Anglo-Balkan relations; Balkan Anglophiles; Balkans; Serbia; Hellenic Kingdom; Bulgaria; British Balkanophiles
The life stories of five Balkan Anglophiles emerging in the nineteenth century - two Serbs, Vladimir Jovanović (Yovanovich) and Čedomilj Mijatović (Chedomille Mijatovich); two Greeks, Ioannes ( John) Gennadios and Eleutherios Venizelos; and one Bulgarian, Ivan Evstratiev Geshov — reflect, each in its own way, major episodes in relations between Britain and three Balkan Christian states (Serbia, the Hellenic Kingdom and Bulgaria) between the 1860s and 1920. Their education, cultural patterns, relations and models inspired by Britain are looked at, showing that they acted as intermediaries between British culture and their own and played a part in the best and worst moments in the history of mutual relations, such as the Serbian-Ottoman crisis of 1862, the Anglo-Hellenic crisis following the Dilessi murders, Bulgarian atrocities and the Eastern Crisis, unification of Bulgaria and the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885, the Balkan Wars 1912–13, the National Schism in Greece. Their biographies are therefore essential for understanding Anglo-Balkan relations in the period under study. The roles of two British Balkanophiles (a Bulgarophile, James David Bourchier, and a Hellenophile, Ronald Burrows) are looked at as well. In conclusion, a comparison of the Balkan Anglophiles is offered, and their Britain-inspired cultural and institutional legacy to their countries is shown in the form of a table.
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Keywords: autobiographical theatre; first person; confession; duality; narrator; recognition; the fourth wall; nudity; choir; sacrifice; community.
The Theatre in the First Person: Tadeusz Kantor and Pippo Delbono. The theatre of Tadeusz Kantor and Pippo Delbono cannot be separated from the persons of the two directors and is characterized by the unusual presence of the author on stage. Their performances are accomplished works of art as they are independent from literature and cannot be reproduced by another person; their world, frightening, funny and mysterious at the same time, is composed of imaginary projections sprung from their personal history and are structured around their presence on stage. On stage, Tadeusz Kantor and Pippo Delbono are alternately narrators, actors and spectators: this interweaving raises the problem of the autobiographical theatre, a highly debatable genre. However, in this type of theatre, discussing oneself seems to take the form of a sacrifice, in a ceremony that summons death. « The only total truth in art/ is that of representing your own life » (T. Kantor, “The great theoretical digression”): Tadeusz Kantor and Pippo Delbono do not transform their life in a story, but sacrifice their individual lives, determining the spectator to stake his own privacy.
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Marek Skovajsa: Introducing the Symposium on Interpretation and Social Knowledge by Isaac Ariail Reed [473] Leslie MacColman: The Central Arguments of Isaac Ariail Reed’s Interpretation and Social Knowledge [475] Eeva Luhtakallio: Hands in the Peat, or on the Metaphors of Meaning [487] Nelson Arteaga Botello: The Landscape of Meaning, a Metaphor in Process [493] Dominik Bartmański and Werner Binder: On Being and Knowledge: On Some Liabilities of Reed’s Interpretivism [499] Hendrik Vollmer: Meaning, Commensuration, and General Theory [512] Steven Lukes: Defl ation and Construction: Rendering Social Causes Meaningful [518] Stephen Welch: Meanings as Mechanisms [524] Isaac Ariail Reed: Interpretive Explanation and Its Discontents: Author’s Reply to Commentaries [532]
More...Keywords: interview
The present article is merely a fragment from a larger paper, a book of interviews with the academician Dan Berindei to be published in 2015 at Oscar Print Publishing House in Bucharest.
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Keywords: world war I; rural funerary traditions; civic culture; monuments of public forum; aesthetic censorship.
Is the memory of world war I the property of former combatants or is it rather the creation of intellectual circles, disposed to provide this event with a higher, political meaning? In Romania at least, the cult of the dead and the cult of victory did not provoke an open conflict, their symbiosis encouraging an eventually positive image of the “war of reunification”. If we absolutely want to find some tension, that is not gravitating around the antinomy between traditional religiosity and modern lay piety. This rather emerges on the edge of gnawing, implicit discrepancies between the individual and the community, between the village cemetery and the mass graves. Or, the merit of funerary folklore is that of providing to anyone those emotions able to revive the memory of the deceased, to give back, every now and then, their individuality. Consequently, the distinction the French had made between the mortuary and the commemorative monuments was more difficult to apply in Romania. The “civilization” of the village was not the same with urbanization or with its reduction to a bookish prototype. On the contrary, the Romanian officials were interested in preserving its specificity, in laying claim to it, extracting from the rural universe those factors of continuity that were susceptible to consolidate the filiations between the people and the elites.
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Keywords: Aristotelian truth; diligence; material truth; middle; objective truth; satire – subjective truth; personal attack
The contemporary truth which applies to journalists (as required by the Council of Europe standards and domestic law) reflects differences between the essence and criterion of Aristotelian truth (material truth – veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus – ad Aristotle, The Metaphysics IV.7. [1011b 26‒27]), and its practical implementation (objective truth – in medio stat veritas – ad Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.7. [1108a 19‒20]). A journalist is obliged to reconstruct the objective truth (the truth ascertainable by a man who meets the Roman law standard of diligentia boni patris familias, here referred to as diligence expected of a responsible journalist) and not the material truth. Nonetheless, a substantial discrepancy between this journalistic truth and the material truth will constitute a sufficient reason for statutory rectification. As regards the assessing statements, as well as the satirical ones, the proof of truth is only required if the assessment is a conclusion derived from descriptive statements, i.e. the factual basis, and that conclusion must be logical (proportional and therefore just). Satire may not contain words commonly considered as offensive. If a satirical statement is to enjoy the legal protection, it cannot amount to a mere personal attack. Regardless of the fact that satire is a negative assessment and an exaggerated one, it must derive from application of facts, meaning that it must reflect the reality and in that sense it can neither attack human dignity nor contain any discriminatory statements, as confirmed by the latest case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Analogical conclusions can be reached upon reading the works of Romanian satirists, for instance Horace.
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Keywords: Alexander the Great; Mihai Sebastian; „Ultima oră”;Romanian literature;
The posterity of the great Macedonian in the Romanian culture is a doubtless presence , and so is the Alexandermotive in the Romanian literature . If the important presence of Alexander with Mihail Sadoveanu , the founder of the Romanian historic novel, does not come as a surprise, the presence of the Macedonian king is quite strange with Mihail Sebastian, a writer significantly different in terms of background, ideas and style
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Keywords: Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge; bibliography;
Bibliographie/ bibliography
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Keywords: law; theology; medicine; disease symptom; material proof; miracle; omen; prophecy;
Both demonology and medical learning wanted to define what material proofs they were to use in order to alleviate the politically rooted disease symptoms of the early modern period. Finding the proper therapeutic treatment required the appropriate description of the pathology, revealing the causes and consequences and making the right diagnosis. Several key questions were formulated concerning these requirements. Most of the questions formulated in this way are based on a formal syllogism that meets the normative requirements of disciplines that include law, theology and medicine and whose formal elements became valid within the systems of fulfillment of these disciplines themselves. In this paper I shall attempt to introduce the scholarly literature based on these formal logical criteria that address material proofs, omens, prophecies, oracles and miracles. I shall then outline how this debate in European secondary literature has been received in Hungarian scholarship.
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Keywords: transfer; mediators; reproductive reception; productive reception; canonization;
This study is devoted to the mediators - translators, philologists, publishers, writers - thanks to which was carried out the transfer of the Tragedy of the man of Imre Madách in the Germanic cultural sphere of 1862 to 1892. This period was particularly fruitful to two points of view. On the one hand, it saw the birth of seven translations, as well as a dozen reviews and reviews. Those published between 1888 and 1892 were intended to prepare the public for the upcoming appearance of Tragedy on German stages. On the other hand, many personalities for the German-speaking intelligentsia have made eulogistic statements about the Hungarian drama, while others have even recaptured this foreign masterpiece by drawing inspiration from him.
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Keywords: Lager; Polish lager prose; zones of silence
The article reconstructs the most important issues on the map of Polish lager prose, those that are ignored, inconvenient for readers or authors, and sometimes for both. The author of the essay also presents the zones of silence that resulted not from the threat of violation of social taboos and political prohibitions, but from the negligence of researchers. They characterize the most important tasks faced by scholars of Polish lager prose.
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Keywords: Pyrrhonism; skepticism; truth; assent; belief; equipollence; suspension of judgment;
This is a defense of Pyrrhonian skepticism against the charge that the suspension of judgment based on equipollence is vitiated by the assent given to the equipollence in question. The apparent conflict has a conceptual side as well as a practical side, examined here as separate challenges with a section devoted to each. The conceptual challenge is that the skeptical transition from an equipollence of arguments to a suspension of judgment is undermined either by a logical contradiction or by an epistemic inconsistency, perhaps by both, because the determination and affirmation of equipollence is itself a judgment of sorts, one that is not suspended. The practical challenge is that, independently of any conceptual confusion or contradiction, suspending judgment in reaction to equipollence evinces doxastic commitment to equipollence, if only because human beings are not capable of making assessments requiring rational determination without believing the corresponding premises and conclusions to be true. The two analytic sections addressing these challenges are preceded by two prefatory sections, one laying out the epistemic process, the other reviewing the evidentiary context. The response from the conceptual perspective is that the suspension of judgment based on equipollence is not a reasoned conclusion adopted as the truth of the matter but a natural reaction to an impression left by the apparently equal weight of opposing arguments. The response from the practical perspective is that the acknowledgment of equipollence is not just an affirmation of the equal weight of arguments but also an admission of inability to decide, suggesting that any assent, express or implied, is thrust upon the Pyrrhonist in a state of epistemic paralysis affecting the will and the intellect on the matter being investigated. This just leaves a deep disagreement, if any, regarding whether equipollence is an inference based on discursive activity or an impression coming from passive receptivity. But this, even if resolved in favor of the critic (which it need not and ought not be), is not the same as confusion or inconsistency on the part of the Pyrrhonist, the demonstration of which is the primary aim of this paper.
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Keywords: anti-Semitism; de-Holocaustization; Museum of the History of Polish Jews (POLIN MHPJ); Polin myth; Polish historical policy; politics of memory; Polish Jews (concept revision); symbolic violence
The text offers an analysis of the MHJP’s core exhibition, the architecture of the Museum’s building as well as the transformations of its surroundings, seen as operations in as well as on a space that is a sign and a designate of the Holocaust. This observed de-Holocaustization of the Holocaust story takes place in the context of progressing Holocaustization of the story concerning the past of ethnic Poles. The main narrative uniting the MHJP’s surroundings, building and core exhibition is the idyllic myth of Polin which dictates the selection and presenting of information. The story of Polish hosts and Jewish guests that is inherent to the Polin myth establishes inequality and dominance/subjugation as framing principles of a story of majority-minority relations. It also constitutes a mental gag and an instance of emotional blackmail which precludes any rational – analytical and critical – conversation based on historical realities. Furthermore, in practice, it is a part of a pattern of culture which produces – and at the same time legitimizes – violence and exclusion. The article reconstructs the principles governing the Polinization of the history of Jews in Eastern Europe (a term coined by Konrad Matyjaszek). These principles include: emphasizing the Polish over the Jewish lieux de mémoire; presenting the figures and landmarks of importance for both groups through the prism of those aspects which concern the majority group; refraining from problematization of specific phenomena (like Judaism or transboundary character) and from applying to the a longue durée perspective; and decontextualization (e.g., by passing over anti-Semitism – Christian but not only Christian – and its significance for the construction of the majority group’s collective identity, an identity that over time increasingly determined the Jews’ conditions of life, until eventually it determined their fate). In relation to the core exhibition the text discusses such issues as: “last minute” censorship; affirmation of anti-Semitic phantasms (like the Paradisus Iudaerum or Esterka); the abandonment planned – and prepared – part of the exhibition dealing with the period after the regaining of independence by Poland in 1989; presenting numerous events and questions in a way that contradicts the state of research not only known but often arrived at in Poland (a particularly outraging example of this is abstaining from a realistic presentation of the Polish context of the Holocaust in favor of a return to the outdated category of the innocent, or indifferent, Polish bystander to the Holocaust). The stake of this retouched story is the image of Poland and reputation of Poles, that is to say – the complacency of the non-Jewish majority. The price is the mystification of Eastern European Jewish history and the thwarting of the potential for change which arouse as a result of the Jedwabne debate. This potential promised a chance for a revision of culture and a remodelling of social relations in the spirit of equal rights and integrated history. Apart from the period from 1944/45 to 1946, this chance was unprecedented in the Jewish-Polish and Polish-Jewish “common history that divides”.
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Keywords: Globalisation; the processes of globalisation; economic development; globalised economy;
What is the current state of globalisation, how are we to understand the processes involved and where will a globalised world system lead us? These are some of the questions Boaventura de Sousa Santos aims to elucidate in a thorough and wide ranging essay. Arguing that our current globalisation is indeed something unparalleled in history, Santos discusses the unequal economic and political realities between North and South which globalisation enforces. Globalisation is to be understood as a non-linear process marked by contradictory yet parallel discourses and varying levels of intensity and speed. Even states however have to adopt as the supremacy of the nation state is eroded, giving way to new transnational alliances and the convergence of the judicial systems as the supreme regulator of a globalised economy. Will all these processes usher into a new model of social development, or will this lead to the crisis of the world system as others fear?
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Keywords: Sarmatism; enlightened absolutism; clientage;servitude institute;
The Polish-Prussian history has traditionally been evaluated from the defensive point of view rooted in the times of the partitions. This led to excessive demonisation of the opponent, typical for hostile relations. Moderate demonisation of Prussia, however, was more justified. Prussian modernisation undertakings were either disregarded or ignored. Eventually, however, this trend changed thanks to the emergence of modernisation historiography, which could even be observed in the traditionally conservative Kraków School or the national democratic, and therefore modernisation-oriented, historical writings of Władysław Konopczyński and Adam Skałkowski, presenting Sarmatism as feudal anachronism and describing the absolutist – and therefore imposed from above (von oben) – modernisation in Prussia. This trend is still present in today’s historiography, but Sarmatism is also often seen from a multicultural perspective that focuses on individuality and otherness, and not on inferiority.The author believes it necessary to verify this state of affairs and describe the reforms thanks to which the discrepancy between the level of civilisation development of the Prussian and Russian partition in 1918 increased significantly in comparison to the year 1793. He then indicates a number of elements of such analysis.
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Keywords: Czecho-Slovakia;Nazi Germany;Sudetengau;Munich Agreement;Second Czechoslovak Republic;cession of borderlands;authoritarian regime;President Hácha;anti-Semitism;autonomous Slovakia;autonomous Carpathia
The study presents and analyses the period of the Second Czechoslovak Republic, contradictory and neglected by both Czech and European historiography. For Czech society, the Munich Agreement was a shock. What people have believed for twenty years and what they worked for self-sacrificingly was suddenly in ruins and questioned. For Masaryk’s republic, it was an economic, political, social and moral catastrophe. Weakened Czecho-Slovakia was in a difficult, desperate, even tragic situation. The belief in democracy was shaken, and the trust in the West was undermined. After its territorial losses, Czecho-Slovakia was left at the mercy of Hitler’s Germany. In a turbulent atmosphere, people looked for someone to blame. Attention is focused on the Sudetengau, which originated from the ceded borderlands, on the transformation of the relationship between the Czechs and the Slovaks, on the situation in Carpathian Ruthenia, as well as on considerable economic and social difficulties. At the forefront of interest is also the transformation of the political system, the operation and role of Syrový and Beran’s government, the election of President Hácha and the creation of authoritative democracy. A sad reality of that time is the awaken anti-Semitism that affected overall civil society, including elite professions. The Jews and Roma became second category citizens. The question remains to what extent Czecho-Slovakia only bowed to Berlin’s pressure, which intensified and strengthened, and to what extent it introduced its antidemocratic demands by itself. At the end of the fateful year 1938, the country lived in the shadow of the Nazi threat.
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Keywords: Bosnia and Herzegovina; 1878-1919; caricatures; stereotypes;
Bosnien und die Herzegowina erlebten während der vierzigjährigen österreichisch- ungarischen Herrschaft ein Interesse in der europäischen Publizistik, wie es in ihrer Geschichte, mit Ausnahme der Kriegsjahre 1992–1995, weder davor noch danach je vorgekommen war. Das Bild dieses Landes in der genannten Periode ist vielfältig und vielschichtig. Ursprünglich spiegelte es vor allem die stereotypen folkloristischen Vorstellungen von der orientalisch geprägten Balkanwelt wider und erhielt erst allmählich eigene erkennbare Umrisse und Merkmale. In der Zeit, von der hier die Rede ist, besaß das Karikaturgenre in der europäischen Publizistik geradezu Konjunktur. Satirisch-humoristische Blätter und Zeitschriften hatten außerordentlich hohe Auflagen und wurden gern gelesen. Auf die ihnen eigene Art zeigten sie die Wirklichkeit im Zerrspiegel und beinflussten die öffentliche Meinung, damit gleichzeitig auch die Festigung und Verbreitung von Stereotypen.
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Keywords: Catulle Mendès; Le Nouveau Décaméron; short stories; women; desire
This work aims to contribute to the broadening of the critical analyses of the nine short stories by Mendès published in Le Nouveau Décaméron, texts that still remain open to interpretation. First, we discuss the polemical aspects of Mendès in the literary context of the end of the century, as well as the importance of the writer at the crossroads of the literary trends of this period. We analyse the different sources of Mendèsian inspiration in the writing of his short stories, and we specify the importance of his contribution to the project of Le Nouveau Décaméron. We then explore the universe of Mendès in these nine narratives which have been forgotten by the critics, and whose analysis confirms the recurrent exploration of the feminine. The writer offers the reader a range of female characters defined by one essential element: the power of sensual or sexual desire, a component frequently unavoidable in their lives. The study of the feminine in these texts makes it possible to discover a bold Mendès, open to the dynamism of the liberation of morals and to the new moral paradigms of Parisian society.
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