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Articles published in Eurozine
Literary perspectives: Sweden
Beyond crime fiction, handbags and designer suits
Recent literary debates in Sweden have dwelled, among things, on authors' love lives and penchant for designer handbags. Yet there is more out there if one looks: Hans Koppel's hatchet job on suburban manners, for example, or Magnus Hedlund's explorations of human perception. [more]
Depressive European
Chocolate cigarettes, AIDS, and homes for battered wives. Hanna Hallgren conducts a critical, poetic search for European identity. [more]
Manual for postmodern childrearing
How would you bring up a child if you took the lessons from postmodernism literally? [more]
We're like a boat with water up to the gunwales and there are waves breaking over the sides the whole time!
Pär Thörn, one of Sweden's most acclaimed young writers, studied the discussions between the executive managers on the web forum www.ledarna.se ("the executives"). Read the results of his copy-pasting. [more]
What was behind me now faces me
Performance, staging, and technology in the court of law
Is it possible to imagine a court, guided by justice and law, taking into account the new "politics of representation"? [more]
Feminism and the ethics of reconciliation
The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do justice to women rape victims was not a simple oversight but is constitutive of the symbolic order dominating the political landscape of "liberal democracies". [German version added] [more]
The scream of geometry
(modified excerpts)
"How can these cities, villages, and their people exist? How can they stand there selling tomatoes and speaking their language and drying their laundry without considering the infinite number of other places where someone else is standing, selling tomatoes or potatoes and speaking their language and drying laundry?" [Hungarian version added] [more]
Living without
On the moral philosophy of Jean Améry
For their testimonial value, Jean Améry's writings are obligatory reading for anyone interested in studies of the Holocaust. But Améry can and must also be read as philosophy, argues Roy Ben-Shai. [more]
Interviewing the embodiment of political evil
Arranging an interview with Luis Echeverría, former president of Mexico, leads Alejandro Cervantes-Carson to reflect on the relationship between political violence and bureaucracy. [more]
My heart belongs to Europe. Therefore it is broken
Does literature help maintain individual and collective identity, or does it inspire us to discredit it? [more]
Networking on the wall
Palestinian artists and cultural workers talk about the "art" drawn on the wall demarcating Palestinian and Israeli territory. Their opinions are revealing of the wall's significance in the Palestinian experience and the function of "network as resistance". [more]
Melancholy and the "other"
Freud analyzed melancholia as the ego's internalization of the lost object, and thus the loss of ego itself. Can the architecture of the "geographic other" be read for the symptoms of melancholy? [more]
European waistlines
Swedish poet Ida Börjel confronts us with our favourite and most insulting national prejudices about ourselves and our European neighbours. But does she confirm them? In a series of insidious linguistic displacements and only seemingly naive phrases, the preconceived notions start to move. Measuring the European waistlines is not a standardizing measure. [more]
Theology of tidal waves
A post-humanist interpretation
The tsunami disaster in southeast Asia in December 2004 prompted a leading Swedish political scientist to make a public return to the Christian Church. Why are the humanities no longer able to accommodate mass suffering? [more]
Transborder translating
Translation is a form of resistance, but also "the original mother tongue of humankind". With a broad interpretaion of the concept of translation, Rada Ivekovic looks at the principles, concepts, and symbolic values of borders and boundaries. [more]
Necessary lies
Fabricated identities have become a valuable commodity for asylum seekers for whom credibility is the bottom line. Meanwhile, the media adds to the climate of disinformation. [more]
"Saving the honour of thinking"
Anders Lundberg spoke with Rodolphe Gasché about why deconstruction turned into a media "story", about developments in politics and ethics, about Europe and about the importance of a future for philosophical thinking. [more]
About War and the Missing Centre in Politics
Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann talked to philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the crisis of subjectivity and politics. [more]
Multitudes
Quick Electronic Notes
"Multitude" has become a keyword in the analyses of the globalized society and the resistance it generates. Anne Querrien points to some of the qualities carried by this variegated concept. [more]
And Thus Began the Fall of the Empire
Multitude and Movement in Genoa
On the barricades you do no longer find an avant-garde, but a multitude. In Genoa Antonio Negri saw this new proletariat, but also the ghosts of the past – a political Left too embedded in the systems of control and power. [more]
"Mer människa än människan själv"
Det postkoloniala tillståndet i Los Angeles 2019
När Mikela Lundahl kombinerar cyborgdiskurs med postkolonial teori upptäcker hon att filmen Blade Runner kan läsas som en allegori över kolonialismen och dess ständiga följeslagare, rasismen. [more]