The Hidden Handshake uses four distinct, yet intertwined essays to address the questions surrounding our notions of citizenship, national identity, and cosmopolitan belonging. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the undercurrent of EU enlargement stand out as two contrasting movements that highlight the importance of having a national identification while also defying it to avoid both the rigidity of nationalist exclusivism and the blithe nonsense of "global citizenship." Through the exploration of sociohistorical material and artistic visions as well as the author's layered identity...

In this book, Ales Debeljak offers a refreshing alternative to postmodernists such as Baudrillard, who declare the death of art conceived as yet another source of rootless, circulating fictions. Inspired by the melancholy critical theory of Adorno and Benjamin, and drawing on Weber, Debeljak shows that with the dawning of modernity, art was made autonomous. Art production was effectively emancipated from the exigencies of everyday life and its guiding ideal of purposive rationality. The Renaissance brought on the first stage in a long, gradual withdrawal of art from the hitherto dominant...