Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World / libri nigri Bd.24 (PDF)

Happy are those epochs that had clear dramas, dreams, and doers of good or evil. Today technology has surpassed politics, the latter having in part become a supplement to technology and threatening to bring the creation of a technological society to completion. This society with its determinist consciousness regards a refusal to participate in the technological innovations and social networks (so indispensable for the exercise of social and political control) as sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag behind in the globalization process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of society.

This is the message of the Lithuanian philosopher and politician Leonidas Donskis's new book. Donskis echoes Jean Baudrillard in his assumption that an epoch of fragmentation calls for fragmentary writing. A short essay for a friend, a sketch, or a letter from nowhere, as if it was meant to be found in the bottle in the middle of the sea or on the coast of a remote country, can shed new light on the way in which we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

About the author: Leonidas Donskis is a Member of the European Parliament (2009-2014) and acts as a visiting professor of politics at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. He combines political theory, history of ideas, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, and essayistic style. Among other books, he is coauthor (together with Zygmunt Bauman) of Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (2013), and the author of Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging (2011), Troubled Identity and the Modern World (2009), Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature (2008), and Forms of Hatred: Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (2003).