The terrorist attacks on American soil of 11 September 2001 have reminded people how easily they can be submitted to the will of the other. This article will analyse how literature, and more particularly post-9/11 literature, deals with a new world order where the self seems to have become subjected to terrorism, being today its potential victim rather than a subject. More precisely, how have American novelists dealt with the demise of the sovereign self after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and what is the role played by memory? Focusing on Falling Man (2007) by Don DeLillo, this article will demonstrate the importance of art and literature to fight against the demise of the sovereign self.

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.

Hierarchy has properties of symmetry and scale. All that is related to hierarchy provides important perspectives on many other domains. The primary focus here is on renowned psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco’s Bi-Logic. Bi-Logic relates to the two modes of being, respectively symmetry and asymmetry in thought and reasoning and brain processes, in unconscious and in conscious modes of being. Some further consequences and implications are noted. These include relevance and potential in social sciences; in qualitative as well as quantitative literary analysis, and content analytics of text, speech, visual recording, and so on; in security and forensics; and in the contemporary theme of research and development relating to Big Data analytics.

This article offers a polemical comparison between conceptualizations of the University in the late 1960s and now. It has two main sections. The first and more substantial of these sections focuses on the left-wing student movements of the 1960s. These were underpinned by an understanding of the University as a political site: that is, an institutional formation and space structured by the ruling order. As such, the University was considered a locus of social contradictions, and could be occupied, extended and opened up, reformed, performed against the ruling order, and even abandoned or left behind. These different agendas are exemplified by drawing opportunistic lines from May 1968 in Paris to student movements in other contexts – Belgrade, Berlin, Berkeley, Tunis, Beijing, Kolkata – and back. A short section then comments on how the University has fared as a political site since. The entrenchment of managerialism, removal of policy-informing research to non-University centres, and dispersal of the University between material and digital spaces are some of the developments that are noted.

As part of the Yugoslav in-between periphery, Ljubljana became a site of interaction between an antisystemic movement, literature and theory, the fields that in Paris were arguably only co-present during the long 1968. Following Franco Moretti and Perry Anderson’s notion of modernism as a cultural field of force experiencing the imaginative proximity of social revolution, the experimental literature of the 1960s may be viewed as the last season of modernism. This is when modernism in Slovenia synchronized with Paris, the metropole that Pascale Casanova has described as the Greenwich meridian of literary modernity. Peripheries in the literary world-system are, for Moretti, forced into a belated compromise between local perspectives and globalized forms emanating from metropoles. In this case, however, it is due to its peripherality that Slovenian literature was able to produce an innovative political interlacement of theory and literature (for example, the internationally acclaimed neo-avant-garde group OHO and the Ljubljana Lacanian circle). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ljubljana student journal Tribuna published experimental literature, (post)structuralist theory and antisystemic political writings. The mere contiguity of these discourses evoked their interaction. Even stronger modes of interaction characterized their production and mediation, such as writer-theorists translating French theory or various hybrids of theory and literature. Slavoj Žižek’s early hybrid texts show the emergence of theory as a parasite of literature and philosophy. They deconstruct the (nationalist) author function. A scandal provoked by Žižek in 1967 foretells the split of the ‘68 avant-garde between the theoretical and literary faction in the 1970s.

The word ‘symmetry’ expresses in everyday language the correspondence in form, size, and arrangement of parts on opposite sides of a plane, line, or point. Such a concept of correspondence is the main idea of most definitions of this term in the various humanities disciplines discussed in this volume of European Review. But if we go back to the Greek origins of this term, we discover that the understanding of symmetry was completely different, that it signified mathematical commensurability of all important elements of a three-dimensional figure. This article discusses the termʼs initial meaning and its importance for the design and appreciation of beautiful architectonic and human bodies. It goes on to provide an outline of the main phases of the step-by-step development from the original concept towards its modern meaning established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In this article, we examine developments in HBO’s original European productions based on a quantitative overview of production from 2007 to early 2020. We supplement this overview with an analysis of the generic changes during the past decade as well as a practical producers’ approach to remakes. The intention is not to analyse the specific series’ content; rather, we scrutinize genre, talent and remakes through the perspective of the HBO brand and the creatives behind the series. The main empirical material for this article is interviews with key informants and an exploitation of online resources. Altogether, this establishes both a historical overview of the productions and an up-to-date idea of how the transnational institution considers its own local endeavours.

People build bridges in many ways, and not least over time, spanning the different epochs that define their lives. For social anthropologists, this process is far from self-evident. Diverse ways of thinking about transitions summon anthropology’s traditional mode of making bridges, cross-cultural comparison. This account thus interweaves materials from Europe and Melanesia. Stimulated by an ethnography of an East German town being precipitated into a new world, it focuses on abrupt transitions and their recurrence. What is happening when a radical break with one kind of past is also recalled as looking forward to a moment when another kind of past might finally come into its own? Pursuing such paradoxes, the article turns to today’s Papua New Guinea where many have seen colonialism – like socialism – come and go in a lifetime. People’s aspirations for the future, raising questions about the abruptness of breaks and the crisis that new times create, throw out challenges as to how to envisage worlds old and new.

This article explores the relevance of economic and cultural (identity-based) factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments among young people in Poland. It discusses the changing labour market situation of young workers, involving their precarisation and critically reviews existing accounts of new nationalism in Poland. In the body of the article, based on the analysis of biographical narrative interviews with young nationalist activists and right-wing supporters, the subjective justifications of their far-right views are analysed. It is concluded that the central motives for supporting the agenda of the nationalist movement by our informants are not directly connected with their economic situation, but related to their search for solid, clear and unambiguous foundations of social order and their biographical identities.

This article traces the ways in which the Anthropocene has led us to rethink what we mean by crisis. Crisis in the Anthropocene is no longer about a threat to a sovereign self but signals a dissolution of the sovereignty of the planet. In order to trace the shifting scales of crisis, this article reads Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 Hurricane Katrina novel, Salvage the Bones. Katrina, I argue, offers a site at which to think through how crisis in the Anthropocene is both natural and human, epistemological and ontological. Ward’s novel, I contend, offers a glimpse of the ecological interdependency of life in the Anthropocene. Ward’s novel also offers an environmental account of racism and a racialized account of environmentalism. In this way, Ward’s novel works through the divergent scales of crisis of life in the Anthropocene.

Amongst the most significant extreme meteorological phenomena are the Sand and Dust Storms (SDS). Owing to significant amounts of airborne mineral dust particles generated during these events, SDS have impacts on climate, the environment, human health, and many socio-economic sectors (e.g. aviation, solar energy management). Many studies and reports have underlined that the society has to understand, manage and mitigate the risks and effects of SDS on life, health, property, the environment and the economy in a more unified way. The EU-funded European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action ‘InDust: International network to encourage the use of monitoring and forecasting Dust products’ has an overall objective to establish a network involving research institutions, service providers and potential end users on airborne dust information. We are a multidisciplinary group of international experts on aerosol measurements, aerosol modelling, stakeholders and social scientists working together, exchanging ideas to better coordinate and harmonize the process of transferring dust observation and prediction data to users, as well as to assist the diverse socio-economic sectors affected by the presence of high concentrations of airborne mineral dust. This article highlights the importance of being actively engaged in research networking activities, supported by EU and COST actions since common efforts help not only each scientist by shaping their expertise and strengthening their position, but also all communities.

This article examines some of Slavoj Žižek’s very first texts, beginning with the poem-treatises he first published in the journal Problemi in May, 1968. It analyses how the imagery of rupture – born out of the spirit of ’68 – emerged as a key spatial metaphor that would go on to shape the theoretical topography of the philosophical platform of the now world-renowned Ljubljana School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Beginning with Žižek’s usage of the term ‘razpor’ (‘break’) in his first poem-treatises, the article traces how this early concept is refined into the notion of ‘razdor’ in his first book, Bolečina razlike (The Pain of Difference, 1972), and finally into the later usage of ‘razcep’, which would go on to become a central concept for the entire Ljubljana School. Ultimately, the article documents the intellectual history of the notion of the ‘break’ in Žižek’s early work, thereby providing the genealogy of a concept that would later become a key component of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical platform.

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

In this contribution the focus is on nationalism, i.e. the view that one’s own country and people are unique and superior, implying a negative comparison with regard to other national groups and countries. The research questions we set out to answer are: (1) what are the cross-national differences and trends in nationalism across Europe? (2) Which individual and national characteristics can explain these differences and changes in nationalism in European countries? We use high-quality cross-national data from 20 countries from the ‘National Identity’ modules of the International Social Survey Programme, collected in 1995, 2003 and 2013. Considerable differences between countries were found; however, within countries the level of nationalism remained rather stable over the period from 1995 to 2013.

The main aim of this article is to analyse J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) from a posthumanist perspective. By focusing on the character David Lurie, this article analyses the complex materiality of bodies and the agentic powers of nonhuman entities in coping with individual trauma, where agency is no longer considered to be the distinguishing quality unique to humans. In so doing, it highlights the interdependence of the human and the nonhuman and the idea that environment is not a mere canvas onto which characters’ traumas are being reflected. On the contrary, it is a material-affective matrix which becomes a catalyst for making sense of the world in post-apartheid South Africa. At the same time, as this article argues, it decentres the sovereignty of the human subject.

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.

This article investigates the trend of smartphone-enabled screen tourism based on the findings from practice-based research carried out during the development and testing of the locative screen tourism experience ‘DETECt Aarhus’. This work shows how smart screen tourism can facilitate multilayered cultural encounters because it can provide a multifaceted perspective on locations and can motivate people to explore local culture. App-guided tours enable the embodied and emotional experiences of traditional screen tourism, but in a more flexible way that eases the crossing of thresholds between the material space and fictional places of crime stories. The testing of the DETECt Aarhus app’s pilot version further highlighted that popular crime narratives and smart tourism technology can address a broader group beyond fans of specific crime media. In addition, visitors with no previous connection to (local) crime stories can use apps to encounter the destination as a material space, fictional place and site of cultural production.

Using the theoretical tools provided by the conceptualisations of resilience and interconnectedness, this article carries out a comprehensive analysis of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2008). The starting hypothesis explored in this article is that Happiness represents the transformational process of suffering and/or psychological wounds through the reparative agency of interconnectedness among humans as well as between humans and animals. Accordingly, this article will first demonstrate how the novel represents the possibility of healing one’s psychological wounds through the stories of Attila and Jean, the two protagonists falling in love after a chance encounter. It will then explore how the novel presents the necessity of establishing relationality between the self and the other in coping with adversities. Finally, it will elaborate on the indispensable coexistence between humans and animals in the novel, which provides the characters with the possibility for achieving the ecological self. In doing so, this article will demonstrate that Happiness succeeds in representing the need for an interdependent world and the impossibility of a sovereign self in order to achieve happiness in the contemporary age.

The modern Polish–Ukrainian dialogue is the second interstate dialogue of the twentieth century, in the development of which the historical and political discourses have played an important role. The so-called Volhynia discourse poses the most serious challenge in this dialogue, while at the same time being its main component. The article claims the Volhynia discourse plays a major role in bringing about the asymmetry of historical memory between the two states. The events of Volhynia-43 have remained in Polish historical memory as an act of genocide perpetrated in 1941–1943 by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), on over 100,000 Poles and citizens of the Polish state inhabiting Galicia and Eastern Małopolska, including Volhynia. These territories, considered by the Ukrainian nationalist party OUN as indigenously Ukrainian, were to be included in the future independent Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian historiography, apart from sparse exceptions, avoids the term ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ in reference to the events in Volhynia, defining them as a conflict or a Polish–Ukrainian war with a comparable number of casualties on both sides. The article, analysing speeches and announcements by political leaders of Poland and Ukraine, focuses on explaining the causes and effects of this shift in accentuation in the Ukrainian discourse on Volhynia, and, broadly, in Ukraine working through its past.

The general concept of symmetry is realized in manifold ways in different realms of reality, such as plants, animals, minerals, mathematical objects or human artefacts in literature, fine arts and society. In order to arrive at a common ground for this variedness a very general conceptualization of symmetry is proposed: the existence of substitutions, which, in the given context, do not lead to an essential change. This simple definition has multiple consequences. (i) The context dependence of the notion of symmetry is evident in the humanities but is by no means irrelevant, yet is often neglected, in science. By taking this context dependence into account, the subtle problematics of concept formation and of the ontological status of ‘similarities’ become evident. In general, the substitutions underlying the concept of symmetry are not really performed but remain in a state of virtuality. Counterfactuality, freedom and creativity come into focus. The detection of previously hidden symmetries may provide deep and surprising insights. (ii) Related to this, due attention is devoted to the aesthetic dimension of symmetry and the breaking of it. (iii) Finally, we point out to what extent life is based on the interplay between order and freedom, between full and broken symmetry.