NotaBene

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Faces of the Utopia

In this issue

Journal NotaBene Issue 40 (2018). Editor: Gergana Popova

Topic of the issue: Faces of the Utopia

Gnosis, Utopia, Revolution – the Russian Mystic Anarchism

The subject of this paper is the revolutionary attitude of the Russian social-spiritual movement called mystical anarchism. The article describes its specific characters summarized mainly by the idea of non-acceptance of the world. An analogy between the ancient Gnosticism and the mystical anarchism is drawn. The focus of the paper is on the views of Vasilij Nalimov and Aleksej Sinyagin whose activity is in the context of the Soviet reality. The author shows the similarities between the Gnostic essence of mystical anarchism and the ideas of the Bulgarian Bogomils who are highly appreciated by Sinyagin. It is concluded that the Gnostic essence of the mystic-anarchist ideas determines their destructive character and that the imagined by the representatives of this movement revolution could not at all be soft.
Keywords: mystical anarchism, gnosticism, utopia, Soviet revolution

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Technology, Materialism and the Future of the Marx’s View of History

The article discuses some aspects of Marx’s historical materialism in the light of Heidegger’s remarks, in the Letter on Humanism, regarding Marx’s view of history and technology as the essence of materialism. It seeks to give hints at Marx’s legacy 200 years after Marx’s birth, at a time when an increasingly technological capitalism threatens to displace labour from the process of production. It argues that the issue of ownership and democratic control over knowledge has in recent years become only more vital for emancipatory politics.
Keywords: historical materialism, Letter on Humanism, technology, technological capitalism

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About Marx and Marxism according to Karl Popper

The paper is focused mainly on the key criticism of Sir Karl Popper leveled against Marxism, that is its historicist nature. According to Popper Marx’s attempt to transform socialism from utopia to science led to the formation of a deterministic view of history as governed by inexorable laws on the basis of which the future can be predicted. The paper offers a brief survey of Popper’s critical arguments against Marx developed in the second volume of his Open Society and Its Enemies.
Keywords: Marx, Popper, Marxism, determinism, historicism

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Modernity and Holocaust – Premodern Premises of the Holocaust. Part 1.

This text has the intention to explore a major problem: the relationship - as much as it exists - between modernity and the Holocaust. For this purpose, Zygmunt Bauman's views are taken as a starting point and the attempts is to be determine whether they are true and correct. For this reason that article generally tries to be an alternative to the view that modernity legitimizes science as its "singular orthodox cult" (Bauman, 2002: 109) and, on the contrary, asserts that throughout modernity we see not denial, but grading and identifying the passion with life itself and with the essence of humanity (which is beautifully synthesized by L. Feuerbach). To prove this, the article looks into the works of a series of thinkers that gave the image of what remains in history under the name modernity.
Keywords: modernity, Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman, Utopia

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Modernity and Holocaust – Premodern Premises of the Holocaust. Part 2.

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Podium

The Case Shylock: Fairness Over the Low or the Low of Fairness

The text is centered on the issue of the relationship and the boundaries between the low and the fairness. Shylock is an expression of the relation between the law in a subjective sense and the law in an objective sense, according to which the laws and the legality do not depend and do not need a criterion for fairness. The release from the notion and the requirement for a necessary connection between the law and the fairness in a world built on pseudo-values destroys the notion of the actually real world as well. The man is unable to evaluate the things that are actually happening, which is only one step away from the "banality of the evil".
Keywords: self-value, autonomous person, fairness, meaning, good, spirituality

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Media and civic education – perspectives and current issues

The article reveals the relationship between media, civil society and civic education through the prism of the functions of the media and their current status. It analyzes the role of media literacy as part of civic education in Bulgaria. In this sense, this paper aims to put some theoretical perspectives in understanding the social responsibility of the media in civic education of young people.
Key words: media, media freedom, civic education, civic journalism, citizens` media, communications

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Cultural-Anthropological Interpretation of the Phenomenon "Terrorism"

This article aims to discuss “terrorism” not solely as a political or legal phenomenon, but as a result of the identity crisis caused by the interaction between a person and the other, the state, or the international politics. Furthermore, some problematic interpretations of the term terrorism are analysed. Terrorism is perceived as one of the many demonstrations of aggression, along with the forms of violence used by the state in its domestic and foreign affairs. Finally, we discuss the impact of mass media on the portrayal of terrorism as even more inhuman and horrific.
Keywords: terrorism, violence, identity crisis

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Minima moralia

Translation of Culture and the Culture of Translation

This paper analyses two methods of literary translations. The first method tries to carry away one cultural reality into another and here the paraphrase is inevitable. In this respect the article considers St. Jerome’s, St. Cyril’s and Martin Luther’s translations of the Bible which broaden the borders of translation as a cultural phenomenon and gives a beginning of new cultural realities and processes. The second method aims to achieve literal transferring of the original text. The most famous examples illustrating this mode of translation are Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin and Francis William Newman’s translation of the Iliad which are very skeptically accepted by the readers. The paper states the hypothesis that the translation has to adapt one cultural reality into another and sometimes the translation is better than the original.

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The Possibilities of Science and Biotechnologies – Meeting with Future. The Provocation of the Humanistic Tradition

The article focuses upon some ethical and social problems bound up with the development of biotechnologies. The progress of science and biotechnologies conduces to new situations that provoke human values, traditions and fundamental principles. “What way the man is going to choose” is a very important question. We have to table it for discussion before we continue to organize the reality around us in conformity with some already established practices that change us and our world.
Key words: biotechnologies, humanism, transhumanism

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A Story of a Bulgarian about the Philosophy Education as a Module of the Cognitive Science in Germany

This article proceeds from the assumption that academic knowledge could be enriched not only by personal investigations but through the view towards and the understanding of the work and achievements of other scholars in a particular field of knowledge. The paper put an accent on the personal experience in the meeting with other modes of investigation. From this point of view the personal experience of a Bulgarian student on the philosophy education as a module of the cognitive science is described and analysed.

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Babylon

The Birth of the Tabloid Man

Gojko Bozovic (1972) is a serbian poet, literary critic and chief editor of the Belgrade publishing house Archipelago. In this text he presents the withdrawal of the “public man” from the public scene and his replacement from the so-called “tabloid man”. The author considers this as a result of the invasion of the intimacy into the public space, and establishing the spectacle as a main form of communication and the entertainment as a supreme value. This is considered as a consequence of the marginalization of the high culture and the role of the middle class in the society.
The presented essay is translated from Serbian to Bulgarian by Sonya Andonova.

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Announcement

The Jewish question, modernity and human relations within Zygmunt Bauman

The following article deals with the modern phenomena of Holocaust. The current survey shows the impact of devastation during the German Third Reich, the different causes for the creation of totalitarian system of government, and some remedies which seek prevention of human oppression and maintenance of blissful environment.
Key words: genocide, cold intellectualism, eugenics, imperialism, anti-semitism, totalitarianism, collective thinking or mass irresponsibility – rascalism, morality, need for eternal values

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Between personal and fictional: signs-symbols in the intertextual and narrative plain of the graphic novel “Fun Home”, Alison Beckdel

The article explores one of the five global themes in the graphic novel “Fun Home” of Alison Bechdel – the theme of death. It goes through all intertextual relationships connected to it, namely the reference to existentialism, to Camus, to Wallace Stevens, to the myth of Icarus. It also reveals the role of the main narrative events which could be interpreted as signs-symbols shedding light on the death of the main character. All this is achieved through verbal and graphic figures and their interaction is part of the research.
Key words: graphic novel, intertextuality, narrative, sign, existentialism, authenticity, facticity, absurdity, death

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Poiesis

Blue. Photoes by Yana Paneva, Svetoslav Koev, Veselina Lozanova

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