About the Book
This book analyzes such symbolic designs of the modern troubled imagination as the conspiracy theory of society, deterministic concepts of identity and order, antisemitic obsessions, self-hatred, and the myth of the loss of roots. It offers, among other things, the unique East-Central European materials incorporated in a broad, imaginative synthesis and critique of contemporary social analysis.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by Timo Airaksinen
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1 The Making and Unmaking of Enemies: Evil and the Troubled Imagination
ONE The Conspiracy Theory of Society: From Sir John Mandeville to the Modern Troubled Imagination
TWO Transferred Loyalties, Fabricated Identities, and Organized Hatred: The Politics of True Believers vs. the Literature of Skeptics
PART 2 The Uncertainties of Modernity: Ambivalence and the Troubled Identity
THREE Alternative Modernity? Marxism, Modern Ideocracy, and the Secular Church
FOUR Modernity and the Loss of Roots, or Two Modes of Being of the Troubled Identity
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Index
About the Author :
Leonidas Donskis is a Lithuanian philosopher and critic. He was born on August 13, 1962, in Klaipèda, Lithuania. Donskis graduated from Lithuanian Conservatoire (now Lithuanian Academy of Music), majoring in philology and theater, and then pursued his graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Having received his first doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vilnius, he later earned his second doctorate in social and moral philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland. His main scholarly interests lie in philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, moral philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, civilization theory, political theory, history of ideas, and studies in Central and East European thought. A wandering scholar, he has researched and lectured in the USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe. Dr. Donskis has been an IREX-International Research and Exchanges Board Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, USA; a Swedish Institute Guest Researcher at the University of Gothenburg and a Guest Professor of East European Studies at the University of Uppsala, Sweden; a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bradford, Great Britain; and Paschal P. Vacca Chair (Distinguished Visiting Professor) of Liberal Arts at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, USA. Currently, Dr. Donskis serves as Full Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Emigration Studies at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. In addition, he acts as Docent of Social and Moral Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and also as Extraordinary Visiting Professor of Cultural Theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities in Tallinn, Estonia. For the fall 2003 semester, he has been appointed a Fellow at Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study, Hungary. Dr. Donskis has been published widely in journals, and is the author of seven books, including The End of Ideology and Utopia? Moral Imagination and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Dr. Donskis’s works originally written in Lithuanian and English have been translated into Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian. He edits the book series, “On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics,” for Editions Rodopi, B. V. Last but not least, he is a Lithuanian representative to the European Cultural Parliament.
Review :
"This is a great book, and I am proud of knowing its author…" – Zygmunt Bauman
"I accept what Leonidas Donskis says in his wise, deep, and important new book, Forms of Hatred." – Timo Airaksinen, University of Helsinki, author of The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade
"an ambitious new book … Forms of Hatred covers rich and varied material, it is always insightful, often penetrating. …well worth the reader’s time" - in: Utopian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2004)
