Anthropos 55 (1): 5-7 | issn0587-5161 | E-ISSN2630-4082
Introduction
Nina Cvar
Univerza v Ljubljani nina.cvar@ff.uni-lj.si
HBH © 2023 Nina Cvar
In one of my seminars, while reading Althusser's seminal work Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, I introduced students to Bob Dylan's song 'Masters of War' as an example of how (repressive) state apparatus and ideological state apparatus work together. To my surprise, the students were largely unfamiliar with this Dylan song, yet they sat in complete silence after the song played - as if Dylan's anti-war intervention and protest against the nuclear arms buildup in the early 1960s had moved something in them.
Regardless of the current conditions of contemporary global capitalism, these processes of recognition of the subject in representations of the social order still seem to be a viable topography for beginning to engage with the theoretical problem of the subject's relation to the social. This intersection is particularly relevant with the return of the nuclear weapons discourse. Without even flinching, part of the political discourse shamelessly resorts to the mention of these weapons of mass destruction.
But perhaps even more worrying than the proliferation of this discourse is the way it is being spoken - without any real reference to the potential end of the world; or better put, the end does not include those who can cause it, implying that something has shifted in the way the narrative of the end itself is structured. The envisaged end, it seems, has been structured through the complete negation of the Other(ness), urging us to re-question the very structure of the existing social fabric. We should therefore ask ourselves what the implications of these processes are, especially if we want to reflect on the return of the nuclear weapons discourse.
In this regard, dear readers, the latest issue of Anthropos presents you with a thematic section on the unbearable lightness of the return of the nuclear weapons discourse. Beginning with Pia Brezavscek and Katja Ci-cigoj, their contribution offers an intersectional and anti-colonial feminist critique of representations of nuclear infrastructure with Jessica Hurley's aesthetic category of the nuclear monden, which allows them to free
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.55.5-7
Nina Cvar
the established discourse on the nuclear from its fixation on a single, supposedly apocalyptic event. As a counterbalance, they map out feminist-utopian treatments of nuclear and environmental catastrophes, which involve complex reflections on possible futures and solidarities in non-ideal environments ravaged by war and environmental disaster. Mirt Komel's analysis focuses on David Lynch and Mark Frost's television series Twin Peaks: The Return - specifically episode 8 - to address the issue of past and present nuclear fears, which Komel argues are intrinsically linked to post-World War 11 geopolitics, the role of class struggle in capitalism, and the problem of sexuality in a patriarchal society. Using a theoretical approach based mainly on (post-)structuralism, combined with other philosophical references, the paper critically reflects on the social anxieties related to the 'return of the repressed' of the nuclear age, and also offers an examination of its aesthetics. Lana Zdravkovic addresses the theme of the end by presenting the most important and recent eschatolo-gical theorizations of radical political-philosophical thought. One of the central arguments of this text is the importance of positing the political emancipatory potential theologically, emphasizing the need to infuse it with theological notions of renunciation, self-control, and self-sacrifice. Primož Krašovecs study on the connection between capitalism and depression rounds off this thematic block by thinking critically about the phenomenon of non-attachment. The elaboration of different versions of non-attachment actually functions as a study of different modalities of subjectivities and their intersections, underlining the unique structural relationship between the social fabric, subjectivity, and the return of the nuclear weapons discourse.
In addition to the central thematic section, this issue also includes two academic texts on the reading experience of eighth-grade students and Wittgenstein's philosophy in relation to aesthetics. Ana Vogrinčič Čepič presents her findings from a study on the reflection on the reading habits of eighth-grade students, which shows a disparity between compulsory school reading and reading for pleasure, so that the author finally tries to formulate more relevant guidelines for understanding reading behavior and to put more emphasis on the discussion of pleasure reading. Varja Štrajn, on the other hand, shows us Wittgenstein's understanding of the philosophy of art, highlighting the fact that aesthetics played an important role in Wittgenstein's life, while he did not pay much attention to it in his theoretical analyses. Of course, this lack in Wittgenstein's work is not accidental: the philosopher's position was that philosophical theory in the
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Introduction
field of art quickly drifted into aestheticism, and that aesthetic questions belonged more in the field of art criticism.
The journal concludes with three reviews, mainly devoted to current Slovenian philosophical books, and a report from the Bled Conference of Analytic Philosophy, which was devoted to apicative epistemology and which ranks among the biggest philosophical events in Slovenia.
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