Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012.
Title:
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012.
Author:
Donskis, Leonidas.
ISBN:
9783869456072
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (205 pages)
Series:
libri nigri ; v.24
libri nigri
Contents:
Cover -- Titelei -- Impressum -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The Cycle of Abuse, or A Grimace of the New Europe -- 2 Trapped by Half-Truths -- 3 Unnoticed Fascism -- 4 The Miraculous Year 1989, or In Praise of Weakness -- 5 European Citizens, or How the Culture of Curiosity Works -- 6 Memory Wars -- 7 Reason or Treason? -- 8 The Tragedy with Fragile Signs of Hope -- 9 The Springtime of Our Discontents? -- 10 Does the Baltic Region Exist? -- 11 The Treason of Intellectuals, or An Identity Crisis? -- 12 We are Faster than History, Yet Slower Than a Lifetime -- 13 A Lonely Voice of Despair -- 14 The Craving for Liberty in the Arab World -- 15 Belgique mon amour… -- 16 Freedom and Democracy in Decline -- 17 Do Old-Fashioned Intellectuals and Politics Have a Future? -- 18 The Culture of Fear -- 19 The Dissonances of Realpolitik and Human Rights -- 20 Postimperialism -- 21 A Dangerous Delusion -- 22 A New Technocratic Revolution, or the End of Modern Nations? -- 23 Where Does Memory Live? -- 24 Spenglerian Fallacy and Europe as Mutual Rediscovery -- 25 The Individuals by Default -- 26 The New Russia with the Worn-Out Leader -- 27 Commercialism or a Cult of Brutality and Power? -- 28 The End of Modern Politics? -- 29 Discursive Handicap of Central and Eastern Europe -- 30 Remembering a Friend of the Baltics -- 31 The Blind Leading the Blind? -- 32 Democrats and Dictators -- 33 The Revolt of Crooks -- 34 The Source of Success -- 35 Searching for the Europe of Czesław Miłosz -- 36 From the Revolution of Dilettantes and to the Managerial Revolution -- 37 Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Our Troubled World -- 38 Nationalism and Postimperial Syndrome -- 39 The Crisis of Liberalism? -- 40 Liquid Totalitarianism -- 41 The New Class of Political Entertainers -- 42 The Ukrainian Perspective on Politics -- 43 It Happens Overnight.
44 Is Football just Another Name for Politics? -- 45 When Treachery Becomes Virtue -- 46 Criminals in Politics -- 47 Is European Culture a Fantasy? -- 48 Our Ambiguous New World, or Can We Reverse a Tragedy of the EU? -- 49 A Heroic Narrative in Violation of Good Conscience -- 50 The Inflation of Genocide -- Epilogue -- Sketching and Mapping the Moral and Political Sensibilities of Our Time.
Abstract:
Happy are those epochs that had clear dramas, dreams, and doers of good or evil. Today technology has surpassed politics, the latter having in part become a supplement to technology and threatening to bring the creation of a technological society to completion. This society with its determinist consciousness regards a refusal to participate in the technological innovations and social networks (so indispensable for the exercise of social and political control) as sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag behind in the globalization process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of society. This is the message of the Lithuanian philosopher and politician Leonidas Donskis's new book. Donskis echoes Jean Baudrillard in his assumption that an epoch of fragmentation calls for fragmentary writing. A short essay for a friend, a sketch, or a letter from nowhere, as if it was meant to be found in the bottle in the middle of the sea or on the coast of a remote country, can shed new light on the way in which we perceive ourselves and the world around us. About the author: Leonidas Donskis is a Member of the European Parliament (2009-2014) and acts as a visiting professor of politics at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. He combines political theory, history of ideas, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, and essayistic style. Among other books, he is coauthor (together with Zygmunt Bauman) of Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (2013), and the author of Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging (2011), Troubled Identity and the Modern World (2009), Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature (2008), and Forms of Hatred: Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (2003).
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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Electronic Access:
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