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Lacanian theory is used to explain culture, as Žižek and Salecl do, for example. Do you think it is a key to understanding contemporary culture?
I’m very suspicious, myself, of taking concepts that were developed in the clinical setting for transformative psychotherapeutic work and trying to apply them everywhere else. People are sometimes confused: they see that Lacan talks about paintings, films, and artworks of different kinds and they think that Lacan is therefore applying his own concepts to the artworks. It’s the exact opposite—he is looking to art to inspire him to develop concepts to use in his clinical work...

Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink, Dany Nobus, Paweł Dybel, Szymon Wróbel, Karol Irzykowski...

Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Avishai Margalit, Stanisław Grabski...

Alexandre Kojève, Nikolai Fyodorov, Quentin Meillassoux, Stanisław Brzozowski...

The conference Modernity and What Has Been Lost. Considerations on the Legacy of Leo Strauss was held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on June 4-5, 2009. The conference made an attempt to identify Strauss’s intellectual background and these problems which may be found in the foreground of his thought. The repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation) proves to be a pivotal point of his views. The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or abhorrent to those who love search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen the quarrel between the Ancient and the Moderns, as well as it refers to esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries... [more]

F.W.J. Schelling, Ivan V. Kireevski, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-François Courtine, F. Scott Scribner, Alberto Toscano, August Cieszkowski...

On 22 April 2009 two of our editing staff members: deputy editor in chief Piotr Nowak and Rafał Kuczyński participated in an International Seminar dedicated to the Polish cultural heritage of the interwar period (1918 and 1939). The seminar was organized by the Vardo-Semminar Foundation, Polska Institut and Stockholm University and gathered numerous scholars and students from Stockholm University as well as invited guests from Poland.

Un Dieu vengeur a exaucé les voeux de cette multitude
Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859

In his recently published tour-de-force The Reformation of the Image, Joseph Leo Koerner discusses an early panel painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The painting, a crucifixion from 1503 now in Munich, is unlike any Cranach would later paint on the same subject. Cranach presents a radically oblique view of Christ that introjects a viewer into represented space, specifying one’s position “through the contingency of forms beheld as if at this specific place and time.” By manipulating point-of-view, the artist makes available the “subjective perception of an eyewitness” to the event depicted. The painting suggests a contingency involved in viewing Christ, as if one were to happen upon the scene... [more]

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt...

Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Gopal Balakrishnan, Zygmunt Bauman, Krzysztof Michalski...

Plato, Seth Benardete, Leo Strauss, Roberto Calasso...

Friedrich Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Mladen Dolar...

Nikolai Berdyaev, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Marjan Massonius...

James Hillman, Maryla Falk, Rudi Visker, Edward Abramowski...

Luigi Pareyson...

Max Horkheimer, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Adam Mickiewicz...