Submissions now closed - 50 (1/2025):  reflection/distance/irony 

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.
Michel de Montaigne

Fifty Shades of Er(r)go...

And while each of them offers a different kind of cogitation, such an anniversary – and nearly a quarter-century of looking into the discursive mirrors of culture – inevitably invites reflection. A reflection not only retrospective and diachronic, critically contemplating evolutions and mutations of the entire network of phenomena, texts and theories filling the troubled spaces of our being-in-the-world, but also – and perhaps most importantly – an introspective reflection, a reflection on its very nature, including all the paradigmatic pitfalls, cognitive challenges and moments of existential euphoria.

It is to this particular reflection – reflection on its own essence – that we wish to devote the 50^th jubilee issue of our journal. Immediately, however, we are confronted with a well-known cognitive aporia: reflection, traditionally understood, presupposes a necessary distance, a going-beyond the perimeter of the object of critical contemplation, locating the observers at a safe distance. Yet, as postmodern theorists remind us, today we can no longer afford such comfort. Critical distance has disappeared into oblivion (Fredric Jameson), and the relationships between the observed and the observers have lost their hierarchical character, as the status of the latter is no longer legitimized by their distanced position of the researchers, but by the level of their participation and involvement instead. The ivory tower has turned into a busy street brimming with a multicultural and rarely compatible mixture of languages, discourses and ideologies, the space of which, as Ernesto Laclau reminds us, is defined by the blurring boundary between theory and empiria, further complicating the strategies of its exploration.

So, in this cacophony of conflicted voices, is there still room for cool-headed objectivity, uninfected with nostalgic longing if not for the intellectual ancien regime then at least for the grand-narrative world of stable categories? Are we left with nothing but irony lined with ideological helplessness masking our cognitive perplexity and – even worse – existential cynicism camouflaging our despair at the unsealing canons of truth? Do we really – as postulated by Slavoj Žižek – stubbornly cling to ideological illusions, fully aware of their provisional nature, believing that one day they will turn into the truth? Or perhaps, on the contrary, and – as Peter Sloterdijk suggests in evoking the notion of kynicism – irony is our last resort in the struggle against the ploys of various ideologies, which allows us to expose and thus disarm their oppressive intentions. Seen in this way, irony becomes a most welcome and sometimes even desperate strategy of survival in a world where the line between human and non-human intelligence is increasingly blurred.

As a critical approach to the issues outlined above, we invite authors to submit publications inspired by the following questions: 

• reflection/cogitation/contemplation
• cynicism vs. kynicism
• irony in literature/film/art
• proximity and distance
• observation vs. participation
• paradigms/models/ideologies
• crisis of criteria/criteria of crisis
• theory vs. empiria
• critiques of reasoning
• illusions of cognition/limits of perception
• postmodern cognition
• seriousness of irony
• pastiche/sarcasm/parody
• ergo/sic/ad hoc

Articles, along with all required metadata, should be submitted through the OJS system by March 1, 2024 (but no earlier than December 1, 2023), following the procedure described in  "Submissions" and "Authors’ Guidelines” sections.