Zygmunt Bauman, commenting on Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island,” singled out this novel of warning as a genuine dystopia of our time which exposes our frame of mind with its insecurities, phobias, and discontents. Most telling was his emphasis on what he described as a new sense of fatalism, powerlessness and helplessness in the face of the new pattern of technology and politics, the latter being merely a derivative and subordinate of the former.(Tęsti...)
By Leonidas Donskis
Twenty years ago Lithuania paid the heavy price for having become the first rebellious and breakaway republic in the former Soviet Union. The kiss of death to the dying empire, the real coup de grâce dealt by a small country to the last colonial empire in Europe, albeit disguised as a legitimate heir to the ideals of the Enlightenment and also as a trailblazer to the Left in the world, signified the arrival of the new epoch.(Tęsti...)
By Leonidas Donskis
Once I became witness to a stunning dialogue between a celebrity jazz musician and the audience. It happened on October 22, 2006 during the show of Arturo Sandoval, a Cuban-born American jazz trumpeter, in the Kaunas Jazz festival, Lithuania. A most revealing dialogue occurred after a couple of opening pieces which proved Sandoval one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of our time.(Tęsti...)