BORIS BUDEN: WHICH LANGUAGE DOES THE SURVIVAL SPEAK?

Wednesday, July 25
Cinema Square, 8 p.m.

BORIS BUDEN: WHICH LANGUAGE DOES THE SURVIVAL SPEAK?

Perhaps the only good thing about the notion of the Apocalypse is that it forces us to contemplate the end of everything in terms of a global event. In return, the perspective of the global end reveals the apocalyptic conditions of local life. This talk will focus on one of its aspects – the end of language as we know it. If during the Apocalypse we speak English globally, then which language(s) shall we speak locally to survive it?

BORIS BUDEN is a philosopher, publicist, translator, and cultural theorist. He was born in 1959 in Zagreb, where he graduated in Philosophy and received his PhD from Humboldt University, Berlin. His essays and articles cover such topics as the theory of translation and language, philosophy, politics, and cultural and art criticism. He has been described as “a brilliant mind from the Balkans who must certainly be read.” In the 1990s, he was one of the founders of the Zagreb periodical Arkzin and of its edition Bastard  ̶  which he himself described as “an organ of the urban guerrilla in the conditions of nationalistic cultural hegemony.” Buden once said that Arkzin was “the only place where you could critically reflect on Croatian reality in a media relevant and modern way.” He is the author of Barikade I and II and Kaptolski Kolodvor. Buden is one of the best translators of Sigmund Freud into the Croatian language, his own definition of which he expressed to Miroslav Krleža: “Croatian and Serbian are one and the same language that the Croats call Croatian and the Serbs Serbian.” His works Vavilonska Jama. O (Ne)predvodivosti Kulture and Zona Prelaska – O Kraju Postokomunizma were published for the speaking territory of the shared Serbo-Croation-Bosnian-Montenegrin language by Belgrade Fabrika Knjiga. He is a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Art and Design of Bauhaus University, Weimar. Buden lives in Berlin, owns an Austrian passport, and does not declare his nationality.

Cinema Boka, 10 p.m.

FILM PROJECTION: SILENT RUNNING
(Director: Douglas Trumbull, 1972)