Introduction

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 07-08

EditorialIntroduction
The selection in this varia issue includes six articles from the areas literary criticism, culturalstudies, political science, and philosophy. Thematically they fit nicely into the scope of interestof the journal Global Conversations, which spreads over humanities, social sciences,interdisciplinary and other relevant research addressing issues of global cultural exchange andconversation in a broadest sense.
The opening pair of articles dwell on challenges of cultural intermixing and coexistence
in volatile times. Catherine MacMillan approaches Louis de Bernières’ novel Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin for a revisit of the concept of the Other via Derrida’s vocabulary of hospitality andautoimmunity. Set against the background of the Italian and German occupations of the Greek
island of Cephalonia during the second World War, the novel involves characters from all
warring sides in various relations of friendship, love, and enmity amidst most precarious ofpolitical circumstances. Following de Bernières’ subtle depicture of friendships between
putative political enemies and enmities between putative political friends – such as Corelli’s
friendship with Dr. Iannis and love with Pelagia, (for whom Corelli is an occupier), which arejuxtaposed with enmities among Nazi soldiers, as well as with the brutality of the Greek
resistance group ELAS towards the local population and fellow communists – MacMillan
unveils the binary opposition of friendship and enmity as deeply shattered. For his part, Stefan
Stefanov focuses on challenges for the coexistence of different forms of creativity and art posedby the currently predominant cultural attitudes and copyrighting regulations. Tracing the rootof the problem to the dominance of the concepts of “originality,” “genius author,” and“uniqueness” firmly fixated in both aesthetic valuation and copyright legislation since the 18thcentury, he points to the emergence of the “remix author” who appears on the creative stage asworking in a situation of tight cultural and legal constraints. In support of the remix art,
Stefanov advances the view that reusing works of others allows a wider range of possibilities
for creativity and that an “environmentalist” approach endorsing “recycling” art can flourish
upon the removal of the existent obstacles to it, noting positively recent changes in attitudes
and legislation as more adequate to the nature of creativity.
The second pair of articles address issues of politics in national and global affairs thathave become particularly pressing in recent years. Eric C. Hendriks-Kim draws attention tocertain Western political attitudes toward People’s Republic of China, which regard it as themightiest deviation from the liberal political model and call for “liberation” of the Chinesepeople from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author terms this approach neoNapoleonism associating it with Napoleon’s expansionist politics of “soldier of freedom”
fighting against Ancien Régime, and tracing it in the American foreign policy under Secretaryof State Mike Pompeo. Pointing that mainland China’s theoretical response to this approach

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sees the harmonious Tianxia tradition as a civilizational guard against aggressive ideologies
from the West, and that the relationship between CCP and Chinse people is rather complex,
Hendriks-Kim suggests that this ideological debate is far from over, especially as the current
Chinese political system is a modern revolutionist replacement of Ancien Régime on its own.
For his part, Davide Orsitto focuses on the popular support for the communitarian critique ofpolitical liberalism, which sees the latter as placing emphasis on human rights to the detrimentof the values of trust and belonging to community. He backs up his investigation with empirical
data attesting to changes in the public attitudes towards both communitarianism and liberalism
in the four largest European countries – France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom – forthe last half a century. Based on the empirical findings, Orsitto signals that while there havebeen different trends in the fluctuation of the public attitudes to these two political value
systems during this period, the overall tendency is towards a greater support for communitariansociety that advances the values of trust and belonging, and towards a lesser support forindividualistic values.
The final pair of articles are philosophical in focus exploring the interminglings of logos,
non-conceptual experience, and philosophy. J. Jeremy Wisnewski focuses on the relation
between logos and non-conceptual experience searching for answers on whether the latter could
be investigated without being “colonized” by the former; that is, outside the realm of thefounding presumption of the Western philosophical tradition that the language of reason isadequate to reality. He brings the relevance of the Indic meditative practice of samādhi as away to a non-conceptual experience unmediated by logos, while also comparatively exploring
the possibility for the former to found knowledge independently of the latter, making in theprocess numerous allusions to well-known Western viewpoints. While Wisnewski asserted thathe could find no argument for privileging samādhi over logos, the same applies also the otherway around, thus suggesting that Western philosophers still need to address their unfounded
presumption of privileging logos over experience on its own. The final article explores the roleand place of philosophy in our contemporary world issuing primarily from the work of Jürgen
Habermas and Michel Foucault. Based on Habermas’ view of modernity, which situates therole of philosophy as mediating interpreter in the exchange of expert knowledge between andwithin the levels of theoretical culture and practical application, the role of philosophy isultimately specified as competence, in distinction from expertise. Then, in a supplementary
fashion, based on Foucault’s investigations on the so-called “technologies of the self” practiced
within “the art of living” of Antiquity and Middle Ages, the role of philosophy is identified
along the principles of self-knowledge and self-care also as art of self-creation.
We hope you enjoy these articles and find there something for yourself. Thank you foryour time!

Rossen Roussev

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