Messianic ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]

Olympus Mislaid?: A Profile of Perry Anderson

Olympus Mislaid? A Profile of Perry Anderson Gregory Elliott At the very outset of his story, Berlin seems to have mislaid Mount Olympus. Perry Anderson ‘The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin’ (1990) In the Foreword to A Zone of Engagement Anderson notes the discontinuity between its first three chapters, classified as ‘intra-mural surveys within the intellectual […]

Conceptions of ‘Civil Society’

Conceptions of ‘Civil Society’ Axe! Honneth When the intellectuals of Eastern Europe began to consider the difficulties and possibilities of a democratically organised political opposition they soon turned to a classical concept in the history of political ideas. They thought that the concept of civil society always used in English to indicate its connection to […]

Ethnic War in Bosnia?

COMMENTARY Ethnic War in Bosnia? Cornelia Sorabji Bosnia is fading from the news, winter has descended to sever its population from the outside world, and military intervention of any significant scale has not occurred. In Britain much of the debate over the desirability of such intervention has revolved around the idea of ‘ethnic war’. Given […]

Children of postcommunism

Dossier: The Postcommunist Condition

A curious set of metaphors marks the jargon of postcommunist transition: education for democracy, classrooms of democracy, democratic exams, democracy that is growing and maturing, but which might still be in diapers or making its first steps or, of course, suffering from children’s il nesses. [1] This language of postcommunism discloses a paradox that points […]

Towards a critical theory of postcommunism: Beyond anticommunism in Romania

Dossier: The Postcommunist Condition

In Eastern Europe, 1989–2009 has been a time of fundamental changes in the meaning of social and political concepts, accompanied at different speeds by the radical transformation of society. I consider transition the fundamental thematic concept of this historical shift, its operative terms being integration and accession. Of course, transition had been also the fundamental […]