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The Great Blank Space Beyond the Wall: Eastern Europe in Modern Intellectual History
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DerekSayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: a Surrealist History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 624 pp., $35, ISBN 9780691043807.
PatrickSeriot, Structure and the Whole: East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology in the Origins of Structural Linguistics (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 294 pp., €99.95, ISBN 9781614515296.
MichaelGubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 360 pp., $27.95, ISBN: 9780804792523.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2016
Extract
Written seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the shockwaves of the Yugoslav wars still reverberated through the continent, Ugrešić’s essays spoke to a period of European history in which the West's lack of familiarity with the East was particularly marked. In part owing to this Western incomprehension, the period of the 1990s were a rich one for theoretical discussions within the field of Eastern European Studies, as scholars sharing Ugrešić’s concerns turned their attention to the ways in which Eastern Europe had come to be imagined as that great blank space beyond the wall.
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References
1 Ugrešić, Dubravka, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 239.
2 Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, Bjelić, Dušan and Savić, Obrad, eds., Balkans as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar, Bakić-Hayden, Milica, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia’ Slavic Review 54:4 (1995) 917–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 As recent research has demonstrated, movements as diverse as Marxism, personalism, psychoanalysis, surrealism, structuralism and phenomenology all had deep roots in both Western and Eastern Europe but have almost solely been understood in existing Anglophone historiography as restricted to the metropolitan centers of France and Germany. Alongside the texts reviewed here, readers interested in these topics should consult Marci Shore's celebrated history of Marxist cultural thought in Poland, Caviar and Ashes: a Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Thomas Ort's biographical study of Czech culture, Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation, 1911–1938 (New York: Palgrave, 2013), Piotr Kosicki's forthcoming book on Polish personalist thought Between Christ and Lenin: Catholicism, the Social Question, and Poland's Place in the World, 1891–1991 and Ana Antić’s fascinating dissertation exploring the political use of psychoanalytic concepts during the Second World War in occupied Serbia, ‘Psychiatry at War: Psychiatric Culture and Political Ideology in Yugoslavia Under the Nazi Occupation’ (PhD: Columbia, 2012). Two recent and notable exceptions to the tendency to marginalise Eastern European intellectuals are Geroulanos’, StefanosAn Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, which highlights the role of Russian and Eastern European émigrés in the development of interwar French philosophy, and Moyn's, SamuelThe Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010)Google Scholar, which ascribes a central place in the history of human rights to Jan Patočka.
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5 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935)’ in The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999),Google Scholar 13.
6 For an authoritative account of the history of structuralism, see Dosse, François, History of Structuralism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
7 de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics (New York: Open Court, 1986) 118–120Google Scholar.
8 See, for instance, Dermot Moran's influential account of European phenomenology Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000).
9 For a detailed study of post-war Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe see: Falk, Barbara J., The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003)Google Scholar and Sher, Gerson, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.
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11 Gubser's critique here parallels that made by Kristin Ross in her examination of narratives concerning May '68 in French historical discourse. See Ross, Kristin, May '68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 By ‘Leninism’ Tismaneanu does not appear to mean the specific political philosophy of Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, so much as the form of authoritarian rule that came to be associated with his name in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. For a contrary account of Lenin's thought, see Liebman, Marcel, Leninism Under Lenin (London: Cape, 1975)Google Scholar, Harding, Neil, Lenin's Political Thought (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978)Google Scholar and the essays collected in Budgen, Sebastian, Kouvelakis, Stathis and Zizek, Slavoj, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 For an alternative critique of the language of authenticity, see Adorno, Theodor, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.
14 See, for instance, Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia’, and Bjelić and Savić, eds., Balkans as Metaphor.