Ebook: Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012

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). Inhaltsverzeichnis 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 60 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 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 Reihe libri nigri - Band 24