There is a type of knowledge that presents itself as entirely neutral—as if it merely records reality exactly as it is, free from self-interest, ideology, or history. Medicine claims to describe the body. Psychiatry claims to describe the mind. Jurisprudence claims to describe justice. Modernism, that massive intellectual climate that defined the 19th and 20th […]
When Power Becomes a Burden: Cyclic Patterns of Crisis, Delegitimation, and Elite Exodus Introduction In the history of major social crises—wars, economic collapses, and political breakdowns—a recurring pattern emerges: the search for a “culprit” to swiftly diffuse systemic tension. This “scapegoating” mechanism does not explain the root causes of a crisis; instead, it […]
There is a type of thought that cannot be expressed linearly. It demands a detour through analogy and a form that speaks for itself before we even utter a word. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is precisely such a thought — a book that is simultaneously the object and the very interpretation of consciousness and time. It […]
“They are no more” The play “They are no more” (Njih više nema) premiered in Norway as part of the two-day international festival Ibsen Scope in Skien, the birthplace of Henrik Ibsen. On May 7th, across two sold-out slots, the audience had the opportunity to follow Sadika’s story: a tale of memory, forgetting, loss, and […]
Varanasi (ancient Kāśī), also known as Banaras, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world (see: Eck, Diana L. 1982. Banaras: City of Light. Princeton: Princeton University Press). The archaeological layers associated with the area of the modern city are reliably dated to the 9th or 8th century BCE, although there are […]
Senegal today also preserves the memory of the Salonika Front, when the French army fought shoulder to shoulder with the Serbs, and among its ranks there were Senegalese soldiers as well. Senegal, a country somewhat larger than Serbia and Greece combined, with about twenty million inhabitants, is slowly waking from its dream and taking the […]
Kris Kelvin and the Immature God of Solaris In the novel Solaris, Stanisław Lem shapes one of the most striking literary experiments regarding the limits of human knowledge and the nature of encountering the “radically other.” Kris Kelvin, a scientist and psychologist, arrives at the station above the planet Solaris with the task of investigating […]
Late in his illuminating and useful examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Benjamin Ware quotes Wittgenstein’s assessment of the Viennese house the philosopher designed and built for his sister in 1940, by many lights a modernist masterpiece that Wittgenstein himself deems “the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, an expression of great understanding […]