Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions : Heterotopias of the Seminar

This book examines the eastern European seminar of the late 1980s and early 1990sGan ongoing academic meeting place outside the formal rubric of the universityGtracing its evolution into a social movement on the street and identifying the political force of the theoretical conversations that took place there. It also shows how these theories reflect the loss of socialist idealisms and established materialist frameworks that eventually evolved into a set of heterotopic visions with a fundamentally altered sense of materialism. It provides both glimpses of a genuinely alternative world to the Western academy that its denizens are so prone to critique, one in which oral discourse and dialogism were especially prominent values, and a utopian view of the Western intellectual world from that now-lost space. "This book examines the eastern European seminar of the late 1980s and early 1990s-an ongoing academic meeting place outside the formal rubric of the university-tracing its evolution into a social movement on the street and identifying the political force of the theoretical conversations that took place there. It also shows how these theories reflect the loss of socialist idealisms and established materialist frameworks that eventually evolved into a set of heterotopic visions with a fundamentally altered sense of materialism. It provides both glimpses of a genuinely alternative world to the Western academy that its denizens are so prone to critique, one in which oral discourse and dialogism were especially prominent values, and a utopian view of the Western intellectual world from that now-lost space."--Project Muse Ntroduction The seminar : mode demploi : impure spaces in the light of late totalitarianism The west as intellectual utopia Between irony and revolution : sexual difference and the case of Aufhebung An unfinished project : man as comedy Addendum : the discretions of inverted theory Notes Works cited Index. Concerned with the institution of "the seminar," a meeting for philosophical face-to-face oral discussion outside of the confines of Communist academia, which evolved into social movements on the street in the Eastern Europe of the 1980s and 1990s