Identity and Freedom provides a discursive map of Lithuanian liberal nationalism by focusing on the work of three eminent Lithuanian EmigrE scholars - Vytautas Kavolis, Aleksandras Shtromas and Tomas Venclova. Presenting these critics of society - and also analysing the significant impact of such writers as George Orwell and Czeslaw Milosz on Lithuanian political and cultural dissent - the book elaborates their three models of liberal nationalism as social criticism. Incorporating material which has so far only been available in Lithuanian, Polish and Russian sources, this...

The book maps what Leonidas Donskis terms 'the troubled identity', that is, the identity that constantly needs assurance and confirmation. Through an identity-building-and-shifting process, argues Donskis, we can move from political majority to cultural minority, or the other way around.

On the grounds of the interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry and Paul Czanne's paintings the book attempts to approach the work of art as a thing. This lets to overcome a one-sided aesthetical interpretation of the origin of the work of art and to indicate its place in the cosmos of uncreated, i.e. not hominized things. So, the second fundamental issue raised is a try to point out a metaphysical difference between a hominized and not hominized (natural) thing. Such a non-aesthetical point of view is called ontotopy by the author and is opposed to traditional ontology and the philosophy...

Classical and modern literature often reveal more about the organized world s forms of power and authority structures than do works of political philosophy. What are the origins of political consciousness? How does our understanding of political power and its exercise originate in literature? Why do the early manifestations of political and religious tolerance appear in utopian literature, rather than in philosophical treatises? Is it possible to do fictionally what others tend to do academically and theoretically? Exploring these questions allows Leonidas Donskis to analyze the relationship...

The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern...

This volume is an attempt to rethink Niccol Machiavelli, one of the most challenging political thinkers in the history of European political thought. In 2013, we will mark 500 years since Machiavelli wrote his puzzling letter to Lorenzo de' Medici, "Il Principe." This book is an endeavor to cover some of the most complex aspects of Machiavelli's life and work.

A critical inquiry into postmodern anxiety, fear, indifference, obsessive attention seeking, and the disappearance of privacy and of public space, the book offers penetrating insights into what its author terms the troubled identity, and also into the cultural canon, the weakened sense of belonging, and the inflation of key political concepts. Blending political theory and philosophy of culture, the book exposes the tension between thought and action, politics and literature, power and dissent in postmodern politics and culture. A polemical book of an Eastern European, it raises the pivotal...

The book is comprised of essays that utilize Shakespeare as a productive window into topics of contemporary social and political relevance. Its interdisciplinary qualities make the book relevant for students of political studies, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and history.

Much of the debates in this book revolves around Milan Kundera and his 1984 essay "The Tragedy of Central Europe." Kundera wrote his polemical text when the world was pregnant with imminent social and political change, yet that world was still far from realizing that we would enter the last decade of the twentieth century with the Soviet empire and its network of satellite states missing from the political map. Kundera was challenged by Joseph Brodsky and Gy rgy Konr d for allegedly excluding Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, something the great author deeply believes he never did. To...

This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities looks at how evil is no longer confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, the inability or refusal to understand them and casual turning away of one's gaze.