Global and International Studies

This article is a close reading of Józef Tischner's Historia filozofii po góralsku [History of Philosophy in Góral] (1997), considered alongside Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire européen des philosophies [European Vocabulary of Philosophies] (2004) and in the context of European unification. Written in the Góral dialect of Polish and recounting the history of philosophy as if it belonged to Górals, Tischner's book re-imagines Europe as a space of reciprocity, equality, and freedom. This gesture is inseparable from the mode of as if, a mode that translation, literature, reading, and the future anterior tense all hold in common.

Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and “patriarch of Bu-Ba-Bu” Yuri Andrukhovych shares his perspectives on contemporary European, Russian, and Ukrainian cultures and politics; and on the current situation of writers working in minor languages in this part of the world. East-Central Europe, for him, is the ever-shifting terrain of struggle over and for Europeanness and, at the same time, a place where ruins are still uncertain and thus full of creative potentiality. Andrukhovych’s own influences, which include Franz Kafka, Magical Realism, and the Polish O’Harists—itself a movement influenced by the New York School—trace an uncommon path of world-literary circulation.

“Perverse Tongues” articulates “postsocialism” as an analytical lens on the current global condition. The “post-socialist” here marks modes of personhood and locution that are perverse with respect to the reproductive aims of the post-1989 order. Deriving from the socialist past but not reducible either to its official doctrines or to its official dissident cultures, these modes of personhood persist. And they disable, however momentarily, the apparently closed language of neoliberal freedom and progress. The essay turns to figurations of Eastern Europe’s contemporary predicament found in Michał Witkowski’s novel Lovetown (2004), which tracks an aging queer community for whom the transition to capitalism and liberal democracy brought not emancipation but the threat of catastrophe; and in Szabolcs Hajdu’s magical-realist film Bibliothèque Pascal (2010), which tells the story of a woman who returns from working in an elite brothel in the UK. What makes these texts apt reflections on the pernicious effects of the neoliberal order and indices of a more general global condition is not merely the social and economic marginality of these subjects. As they resist both the liberal dream of common humanity that might be achieved through recognition and the neoliberal dream of prosperity that is indifferent to the human as such, the novel and the film call for practices of reading and spectatorship that would be attentive to subjective and temporal fractures within the putatively unified global present.

Published in the FlashPoints Series of Northwestern University Press, Form and Instability brings notions of figuration and translation to bear on the post-1989 condition. “Eastern Europe” in this book is more than a territory. Marked by belatedness and untimely remainders, it is an unstable object that is continually misapprehended. From the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, Starosta considers the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of the disappearance of the Second World. Literature here becomes a critical lens in its own right—both object and method, it confronts us with the rhetorical dimension of language and undermines the ideological and hermeneutic coherence of established categories. In original readings of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz, among other twentieth-century writers, Form and Instability unsettles cultural boundaries as we know them.

from Kafka's The Building of the Temple: "Foreign workers brought the marble blocks, trimmed and fitted to one another...  No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple... Except that, to wreak a spite or to desecrate or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every stone—from what quarry had they come?—for an eternity outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless children's hands, or rather the entities of barbaric mountain dwellers."