Biography and the 20th Century Tony Judt's Project of a Political Death

• Autorzy: Bartłomiej Błesznowski
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

The aim of this article is to analyse the political and mnemonic programme to be found in the last books of the British historian and thinker Tony Judt. The author of this article assumes that the final period of Judt's writing, in which he produced Ill Fares the Land, TheMemory Chalet, and the posthumously published discussion with Timothy Snyder entitled Thinking the Twentieth Century, is dependent on a kind of 'art of memory'. For Judt, being terminally ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and thus condemned to immobility, this method became not so much-as in the case of its classic varieties-a technology of remembering, as a manner of recognizing and analyzing the contemporary world by turning to his own biography. The purpose was to construct a 'political testament' for the Western world in a time of crisis whose roots, according to Judt, can be found in the supremacy that 'economic' thinking has achieved over traditional political thought. In a gesture reminiscent of the Stoic 'techniques of the self' described by Michel Foucault, Judt, by exploiting his own no less complicated biography and identity, tries to throw light on the complicated history of the 20th century, containing the sources of 'our contemporary ills'. Biography and history thus meet here in a 'work of memory' whose horizon and catalyzer is the perspective of death, and whose stake is the idea of a political community experiencing, according to Judt, a period of inertia. (original abstract)

Słowa kluczowe

EN

Biography; Politics; History

PL

Biografie; Polityka; Historia

• Czasopismo: Polish Sociological Review
• Rocznik: 2014
• Numer: nr 2 (186)
• Strony: 195--212

Twórcy

autor

Bartłomiej Błesznowski

• University of Warsaw

Bibliografia

• 1. Benjamin, Walter. 2011. On the Concept of History, in: Idem, SelectedWritings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, transl. E. Jephcott and Others. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, pp. 389-400.
• 2. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix. 2007. A Thousand Plateaus, transl. B. Massumi. London, New York: Continuum.
• 3. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The Use of Pleasure, vol. II of The History of Sexuality, transl. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
• 4. Foucault, Michel. 2001. Foucault, in: Idem, Dits et ecrits. 1954-1988, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1450-1455.
• 5. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981-1982, transl. G. Burchell. New York: Picador.
• 6. Foucault, Michel. 2006. Preface to the 1961 Edition of History of Madness, transl. J. Murphy, J. Khalfa. London, New York: Routledge.
• 7. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, transl. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row Publishers.
• 8. Hutton, Will. 2010. Them and Us: Changing Britain-Why We Need a Fair Society. London; Little, Brown.
• 9. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: William Heinemann.
• 10. Judt, Tony. 2008. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: The Penguin Press.
• 11. Judt, Tony. 2010. Ill Fares the Land. London. New York: The Penguin Press.
• 12. Judt, Tony. 2010a. The Memory Chalet. New York: The Penguin Press (Kindle Edition).
• 13. Judt, Tony with Snyder, Timothy. 2012. Thinking the Twentieth Century. London: William Heinemann.
• 14. Kołakowski, Leszek. 2002. Kapłan i błazen (Rozważania o teologicznym dziedzictwie współczesnego myślenia) [The Chaplain and the Fool: Reflections on the Theological Heritage of Contemporary Thought], in: Idem, Pochwała niekonsekwencji. Pisma rozproszone sprzed roku 1968 [In Praise of Inconsistency: Scattered Writings from 1955-1968], vol. II, selected and edited, Z. Mentzel, London: Puls.
• 15. Neumann, Birgit. 2009. Literatura, pamięć, tożsamość [Literature, Memory, Identity], transl. A. Pełka, in: M. Saryusz-Wolska (ed.), Pamięć zbiorowa i kulturowa. Wspołczesna perspektywa niemiecka [Collective and Cultural Memory: the Contemporary German Perspective]. Krakow: Universitas, pp. 249-284.
• 16. Norman, Jesse. 2010. The Big Society. The Anatomy of the New Politics. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press.
• 17. Ranciere, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Asthetics, transl. G. Rockhill. London, New York: Continuum.
• 18. Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. Memory, History, Forgetting, transl. K. Blaney, D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 19. Shore, Marci. 2012. Introduction, in: Tony Judt, Historia niedokończona. Francuscy intelektualiści 1944-1956 [Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956], transl. P. Marczewski. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej.
• 20. Welzer, Harald. 2009. Materiał, z ktorego zbudowane są biografie, transl. M. Saryusz-Wolska, in: M. Saryusz-Wolska (ed.), Pamięć zbiorowa i kulturowa.Wspołczesna perspektywa niemiecka [Collective and CulturalMemory: the Contemporary German Perspective]. Krakow: Universitas, pp. 39-57.
• 21. Yates, Frances. 1999. The Art of Memory. London and New York: Routledge.