Abstract: Among George Orwell’s many remarkable formulations in his novel 1984 there is the Party command to reject the evidence of what we see and hear. And yet, in resisting the Party command, can nowadays seeing and hearing provide evidence? Do, perhaps, the „lower“ senses of touch, smell, and taste prove to be the more reliable witnesses? These questions gained poignancy in the wake of the lockdowns and the push towards virtualization which reduced our senses to the two “higher” ones – the ones technologically transmittable, technologically surveillable, and increasingly susceptible to digital simulation. The lower ones are as yet elusive. My reflections on this paradox were triggered by a study (Excrementum: Senses of Proximity by Nina Nikolova) and an exhibition (Noli me tangere by Minna Antova), which coincided in time with the lockdowns. In my attempt ‒ largely against the grain of Baudrillard ‒ to extract utopia from the wreck of the human senses, I will turn to the lessons of an earlier era through two very different novels, Ivan Efremov’s The Andromeda Nebula (1957) and Philip K. Dick’s Simulacra (1964).

Abstract: The text asks the question whether political radicalism is indispensable in the conceptualization of an ongoing war, and moreover is it morally righteous to think of war in a non-radical way. The article does that with the help of one of the most prominent theorists of war, Michael Walzer. The text is a kind of a critique of his conceptions. Besides being an inventor of the modern concept of „just war“, Walzer is also a rightwing anti-radical due to his path of philosophical development as a whole. His early work analyses the Book of Exodus as a source of all radical politics and finds a new interpretation of the story from the Scripture. The text presents it in parallel with a short story by William Faulkner – „Go Down, Moses“. Then the author examines Walzer’s idea of „distributive justice“ and juxtaposes it with some Bulgarian theoretical examples. Walzer’s doctrine of „just war“ is discussed with reference to the views of Hannah Arendt on violence and war. Finally, the text opposes some recent reactions to the war in Ukraine.

Abstract: The paper examines the (technically reproducible) „atrocious image“ within discourses commenting on the tendency of such visuals to affect the viewers’ imagination and memory and their ability to make sense of and retain in their minds (representations of) „exceptional events“ such as war. The text analyses the theoretical circumstance that the affective potential of the „atrocious“ gives rise to many „iconoclastic“ debates about the ethical risk involved in the production, dissemination and consumption of technical images representing „transgressive moments“ – those „imagining“ death, torture and all manner of other ‘atrocities’. The aim is to discern what these debates miss, namely that the locus of misunderstanding is conditioned by the premise that photography and cinema have a disproportionate (compared to other media) power over people’s imaginations, and thus over the social as such. This power is tied to the uses of and prejudices about the apparent ability of a medium in a particular historical period to capture the truth of events and reality in general. In this sense, the article attempts to show that as contemporary audiovisual culture changes, the boundaries of old arguments about the affective potential of technical images must be reconsidered, as they have begun to lose their power and verisimilitude because they are easily falsifiable and increasingly function as a form „image speech“ for private individuals.

Abstract: The paper examines the (technically reproducible) „atrocious image“ within discourses commenting on the tendency of such visuals to affect the viewers’ imagination and memory and their ability to make sense of and retain in their minds (representations of) „exceptional events“ such as war. The text analyses the theoretical circumstance that the affective potential of the „atrocious“ gives rise to many „iconoclastic“ debates about the ethical risk involved in the production, dissemination and consumption of technical images representing „transgressive moments“ – those „imagining“ death, torture and all manner of other ‘atrocities’. The aim is to discern what these debates miss, namely that the locus of misunderstanding is conditioned by the premise that photography and cinema have a disproportionate (compared to other media) power over people’s imaginations, and thus over the social as such. This power is tied to the uses of and prejudices about the apparent ability of a medium in a particular historical period to capture the truth of events and reality in general. In this sense, the article attempts to show that as contemporary audiovisual culture changes, the boundaries of old arguments about the affective potential of technical images must be reconsidered, as they have begun to lose their power and verisimilitude because they are easily falsifiable and increasingly function as a form „image speech“ for private individuals.The key idea of this article is the understanding that in the contemporary societies of supermodern capitalism of singularities and virtual effects, historical and geopolitical images play a substantial role in the transformations of power situations both within the separate state formations and on the regional and global scale, mediating the power transformations themselves towards new kinds of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Historical and geopolitical imaginations, however, despite being closely related, should be distinguished as forms of social imagination working at different level

Abstract: The article is interested in the phenomenon of wargaming. Turning to history and development of war games in the XIX and XX centuries, the analysis examines the characteristics of such practices and tries to situate them. The aim of the article is to outline the social field of artificial warfare and the complex constellation of „players“ ‒ military officers, politicians, academics from the universities and the non-governmental sector, military entrepreneurs and manufacturers, etc. The article describes this field as a specific field in which techniques, mechanisms, practices, knowledge, discourses are deployed to objectify and subjectify the players involved in warfare and war decision-making.

Abstract: Bulgarian society’s efforts to achieve national unification culminated in the Bulgarian Kingdom joining the First World War in 1915 on the side of the Central Powers. In 1917, the military and political leaders of the country began to pay special attention to the Bulgarian army’s spirit and morale which influenced its resilience and willingness to fight the enemy for a prolonged period of time. For this reason, a Guidance was drafted on collecting specific data and information that played a decisive role in forming the army’s attitude. On the basis of this guidance, hundreds of reports and information from all parts of the army were submitted to the Headquarters of the Active Army. The article is devoted to a specific aspect of the content of this massive documentation, namely the information collected on the impressions and opinions of Bulgarian soldiers about the other people participating in the war – allies and enemies. Based on that, the „notion of the other“ – the result of both pre-war stereotypes and first-hand experience and observation – can be distinguished in a relatively clear manner. The dynamics in attitudes related to specific military and political events and their impact on the shaping of this image can also be distinguished and traced. The Bulgarian soldier outlined a number of positive and negative character traits in his allies and enemies. Available evidence reveal an indisputable link between the army’s spirit and the image of the ally and the enemy.

Abstract: 1989 styled itself as a break with the socio-economic system of socialism, as well as with its progressive teleology. This is summed up by the paradigm of the ‘end of history’ which promised a break with the future, closing off the possibility of an alternative political organization except liberal democracy. The pre-determination of the future pushes the political antagonisms towards the past, exemplified by the revisionist debates such as „was there fascism in Bulgaria?“ that sprang up in the early 1990s. The past becomes the only terrain for the legitimate articulation of political enmity. The war in Ukraine reversed the process of displacement of the political; today all actors in the conflict reach precisely to political identifications and ideologies considered long buried to make sense of the conflict: those of fascism and anti-fascism. In this article, I examine the unusual revival of these political positions from the first half of the XX century after the supposed „end of history“. I relate them to the raging debates over two „neuralgic“ common sites of memory in Bulgaria, one spatial (the Soviet Army Monument), and one temporal (the Bulgarian national holiday). I outline the possible consequences of the rehistoricisation of the war. In contrast to Marx’s expectation of „the second time as farce“, the re-actualization of the anti-fascist discourse has the potential to trigger a tragedy that ends history in a very literal sense. The article is thus also an exercise testing our resources and capacities to make sense of the unthinkable.

Abstract: Public fears of post-truth, hybrid warfare and foreign propaganda are gaining prominence. The purpose of this article is to show such concerns are hardly novel. I will make analogies between the contemporary debate and the problematization of public opinion and propaganda in the United States in the 1920s, juxtaposing the works of Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. I examine the incommensurabilities and overlaps in their understandings to extract three types of perspectives towards propaganda: liberal, neoliberal and democratic. Furthermore, I am interested in how to theoretically make sense of the internal contradictions and paradoxes in anti-propaganda attitudes and discourses.

Abstract: Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones places literature in a very unusual position ‒ that of a witness to the truth. The unexpected status of literature turns out to be justified because neither the victims nor the executioners can describe the terrible events of the Holocaust during World War II. The victims are subjected to the extermination, the executioners try to conceal their guilt. Then we need a third point of view – that of the fictional narrative. Because the executioners survive, unlike the victims, Littell’s novel sets out to present the Holocaust from their perspective. However, to what extent can we trust the main character, the Nazi officer Maximilian Aue? Does his seemingly objective narrative in fact not leads us towards belittling of the events he describes?

Abstract: The focus of this article is the development of Volodymyr Zelensky as an actor with a career spanning over 20 years, mainly concentrated in the field of comedy genres, before he was elected President of Ukraine. As a key to the understanding of Zelensky’s performance style, Mikhail Chekhov’s theory of acting is drawn, insofar as, on the one hand, it is particularly relevant in the context of the post-Soviet artistic scene, and on the other hand, it offers tools for building a stage and screen image, whose effects are visible precisely in the realm of comedy. Zelensky’s on-screen presence from the end of the 1990s and the evolution of his team from Studio Kvartal 95 are traced in the context of the question of whether the TV shows and the series „Servant of the People“ can be commented on as a political project, especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The role of satire in the process of forming civic consciousness in the audience and even in the process of forming national identity is considered. Ultimately, the observations stress the political functionality of the image of the actor-comedian, who will eventually face the tragedy of war.

Abstract: In the post-truth situation, emotions instead of rational judgments determine the political and moral positions on war, the notions of aggressor and victim. The text proposes to look at the current term post-truth from the point of view of its interrelationship with the concept of lifestyle. The research focuses on the media images of presidents Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, formed after the start of the war in Ukraine and, more specifically, the lifestyle models they represent. The images of the presidents circulating in the media became not only emblems of the two sides in the war, but also weapons with which to win allies and fans.

Abstract: The article emphasizes the importance of state capacity in shaping social dynamics and applies a new approach to research and assessment of state capacity in developed countries, using ideas from social theories of risk.

Abstract: The article zooms onto the relation between the movement of labor power and capitalist modes of production and social reproduction that form vis-à-vis the taming, slowing down, and accelerating the speed of that same movement. I coin the notion of moving labor power which allows me to analyse the moments that arise between the transformation of body power into labor power (social reproduction) and labor power into labor (production). Marx’s conception of labor power as an „elastic potential“ and Foucault’s understanding that labor power must be first tamed in order to be fixed to production apparatuses allow me to think through the development of capitalist relations as continuously going through a double dynamic of fixing and freeing of labor power spatially. The combination between these approaches enables me to analyse the ways in which the capacity of the body to move is being entangled in differentiated regimes of movement and relations that arise between labor and migration apparatuses. I use two cases: the refugee and the freely moving pauperized.

Резюме:

Abstract: The article presents an interpretation how with the collapse of the cultural system of real socialism in Bulgaria the art scene begins its transformation into a ‘field of art’ (in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu), in the context of the significant political, economic and social changes. It introduces a view on the specific forces, stakes and interests involved in the developments, through which painting that had been dominating the field initially, was overshadowed by new media practices in the mid 90 s, to achieve recognition at the end of the period as legitimate medium of contemporary art on certain conditions.

Резюме: Dimitrina Popilieva (1962–2023)