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 […]
Kafka’s Dimension of Critique. The authors in the text emphasize the critical dimensions of Kafka’s oeuvre, directing attention to the deconstruction of bourgeois subjectivity, the structure of institutions of the modern state, the questioning of modern distinctions between private and public space, work and free time, and other socio-political phenomena. In line with more complex […]
“A Serbian Film” by Srđan Spasojević: An Analysis of Transgression and Postmodern Ethics. Toward Understanding the Film as a Mirror of the Collective Unconscious. “People don’t want the truth. They want something they can’t look away from.” Vukmir • Why return to analyzing A Serbian Film sixteen years after its release? Precisely because time has […]
The Polish-French filmmaker Roman Polanski (Paris, 1933), a highly controversial figure privately—having been a fugitive from U.S. justice for nearly half a century due to the rape of a minor, and a person whose name is linked to several other potential cases of sexual violence—is among the most talented film creators of the second half […]
Thomas Mann – Death in Venice: The Path to the Abyss. “Death in Venice” is not merely a novella about decadence and longing, but a profound philosophical study of the conflict between Apollonian moderation and Dionysian chaos. Through the fate of Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann explores the boundaries of artistic creation, the nature of beauty, […]