Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe

The volume maps out the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of "precariousness" as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. Among these misfortunes the failed Communist experiment figures prominently. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and worth studying in its own right, but with the re-integration of the "new Europe" into the "old" one and the emergence on the "Western" European intellectual scene of many thinkers and writers from the "East," this culture will also determine what the European mind will be like in the 21stcentury. Such a voice is indispensable for the ongoing conversation that Europe is. The project aims at exploring and decoding this culture of "precariousness" from the complementary angles of philosophy, political theory, intellectual history and literary studies. The work of authors such as Cioran, Kolakowski, Kert sz, Baumant and Zizek, as well as a wide range of topics (from philosophical martyrdom to collective suffering to geographical fatalism) are covered, or just touched on, in the course of the project. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.