The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left

by Boris Buden, Mladen Dolar, Saroj Giri

There is a commonly accepted notion that we live in a time of serious crisis that moves between the two extremes of fundamentalist terrorism and right wing populism. The latter draws its power from the supposed threat of immigrants: it proposes to resolve the immigrant crisis by placing the blame on the principal victims themselves, that is to say, on some form of otherness (immigrants, Islam, the LGBT community and similar). The predominant leftist position, which advocates multicultural tolerance and understanding, is no match for such aggressive populism. The premise of The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left is that our situation is indeed extremely dangerous, that near unimaginable catastrophes lurk just beyond the horizon, but that these new dangers also open up new spaces for radical emancipatory politics. Eleven distinguished thinkers take these perils as a challenge to provide sharp, specific analysis of our social and political predicament, combining a merciless critique of the prevailing leftist humanitarian approach with elements of a new vision for the Left. The Final Countdown is therefore also a countdown to a new beginning; it is a practice of theory that is not here to lament but to re-think and reframe the very basic coordinates of how we understand and deal with today's major political issues.

Published on the occasion of the NSK State Pavilion, held during the 57th Venice Biennale, May11-July 15, 2017. Palazzo Ca' Tron.

Genres: Politics

208 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Boris Buden is a philosopher, translator and cultural theorist. His essays and articles cover the topics of philosophy, politics, cultural and art criticism.

He studied classical and modern philosophy in Klagenfurt, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and received his PhD in Cultural Theory from the Humboldt University, Berlin. Since 1984 he has worked as a free-lance journalist and writer. Buden regularly publishes essays in German, English and French on philosophical, political, and cultural subjects pertaining to the former Yugoslavia, western Europe and the United States of America in such journals as Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik, Literatur und Kritik, and the Vienna cultural magazine Springerin. In addition to his activities as a journalist Buden has made a name as a translator of Freud into Croatian. As an activist in the Yugoslavian peace movement he founded in 1993 the journal Arkzin, a cultural-political and social-critical publication devoted to international literature, art, pop culture and the new media. In addition, he is the founder and chief editor of Bastard Publishing Co. In 1998 it published the first Croatian new edition of the Communist Manifesto with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Buden's political activism has born fruit as a volume of essays that appeared as Barricades I and Barricades II.

Central to Buden's writing is the concept of a culturally-politically divided Europe: post-communist eastern Europe is regarded as an outsider and "bastard" of the European Union. In its exclusion, however, Buden sees the chance to define anew the universal appeal of west-European culture, for "this universal is not being reconfigured along the dividing line drawn between cultural identities, and even less upon the bulwark of multiculturalism which only freezes the existing relations, but rather it is being expressed on the barricades upon which, after all that has happened, it was born in a political and historical sense." (Based on source).

Buden is a permanent fellow at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) in Vienna and he teaches cultural theory at the Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus University, Weimar. He lives in Berlin.