If we are to believe Eric Hobsbawm, the Great Revolution that radically changed the world more than two hundred years ago, was, in fact, a “dual revolution.” What started 1789 in Paris with the storming of Bastille and then unfolded as The French Revolution was, in fact, only one part of a larger revolutionary event. The other was the British industrial revolution generated by technological inventions and their capitalist appropriation. Can we think of the still ongoing digital revolution that started in the mid-20th century as if it were also just one part of a much more radical “dual revolution”? But where is its other part then? Has it even gone beyond our imagination?
The talk will address the legacy of Praxis philosophy in one of its most important concepts, “the thinking of revolution.” Let’s assume that it wasn’t just a dead end of modern philosophy where few intellectual lunatics had got lost forever. If indeed their ideas deserve to be given an afterlife, then we will have to confront them with the other part of today’s dual event, the digital revolution. This, admittedly, does not seem worth much effort. But let’s try nevertheless.
Boris Buden is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. Born in former Yugoslavia he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s Buden publishes essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics and contemporary art in Croatian, German and English. He is permanent fellow at The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna, and teaches at various universities in Europe. Recently published: Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989, Berlin 2020.
Screening schedule
- Dokukino KIC
