Malgorzata Kowalska - Böcker

Football has emerged as an important symbolic field through which various social, cultural, political, economic, and historical dimensions and antagonisms are negotiated. This volume covers a variety of themes illuminating the multiple ways that football impacts on people's everyday lives. Using anthropological research methods and data collected from ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors scrutinize not only the social fields of football fans and the specific socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded, but also other actors beyond the pitch, and the possibilities for both agency and subversion. Taking into account processes of Europeanization, globalization, commercialization and migration, the collection offers fresh insights into fan identity formations and practices and highlights the importance of anthropology's self-reflexive and actor-centred perspective.

Football has emerged as an important symbolic field through which various social, cultural, political, economic, and historical dimensions and antagonisms are negotiated.

Dialectics beyond Dialectics is a study of contemporary French philosophy from Bataille to Derrida. It analyses, on the first level of generalization, the decomposition of Hegelianism understood as philosophy of totality. Many French philosophers of the 20th century deconstruct Hegelian dialectics and harshly criticize the very idea of totality as either dangerous or impossible. The thesis of the book is that, on doing so, they do not really break with dialectics, but transform it. On the second level of generalization, the issue of the book is modernity and the thesis is that transformations of dialectics reveal transformations of modern consciousness which – despite hasty declarations on the end of modernity – still remains ours.

The subject of this book is the philosophy of Stanisław Lem. The first part contains an analysis and interpretation of one of his early works, The Dialogues. The author tries to show how Lem used the terminology of cybernetics to create a project of sociology and anthropology. The second part examines Lem’s essay Summa technologiae, which is considered as the project of human autoevolution. The term «autoevolution» is a neologism for the concept of humans taking control over their own biological evolution and form in order to improve the conditions of their being. In this interpretation, Summa is an example of a liberal utopia, based on the assumption that all human problems can be resolved by science. Various social theories, which can be linked to the project of autoevolution, are presented in the final part.

In recent years, the terms "ethics," "politics," "performativity," and "experience" have proliferated throughout the discourse of the humanities. However, it is rarely noted that their contemporary understanding has been shaped by the works of Jacques Derrida, who has employed all these concepts since the mid-1960s. The aim of this book is to present the lesser discussed topics of Derrida’s thought – not only as the creator of a specific mode of interpretation called "deconstruction" but also as an initiator of recent ethical and political reflection, a pioneer of performatics, and a precursor of current research on experience. At the same time, the book provides a panorama of the most important changes in the humanities of the last thirty years, and in particular – the ethical, performative, and empirical turns.

Award-winning essay in philosophical anthropology meditating on who, in terms of history of ideas, modern western man was, is, and will perhaps become. The author focuses on developments of modern man’s self-knowledge, understood both as concept of his own human nature and as individual self-consciousness, made possible by the idea that each human being is an autonomous rational agent. The book examines how Selfhood and self-governed individuality connect to science and technology, and offers an imaginative exploration of various modern narratives of human singularity, from Robinson Crusoe to Zarathustra, and to contemporary individual Facebook profiles.

The aim of this book is the analysis of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s meta-epistemological project of the semantic theory of knowledge and its implementations to solve certain traditional epistemological problems and their metaphysical consequences. This project claims that cognitive problems need to be approached from the perspective of language. One of the results of this analysis is the thesis that the philosophical-linguistic legitimisation for the meta-epistemological project is the philosophy of Edmund Husserl from his Logical Investigations. This is the philosophy that makes it possible to speak reasonably of a close relation between thinking and language and provides thereby the legitimisation for this project.

This is a book about impending catastrophe. The metaphorical insane “run“ ends with the outbreak of the First World War. The book focuses on European culture of the late nineteenth century and the Polish contribution to it. The word “dark“ used to describe modernity is understood as a metaphor of gradual and permanent devaluation of the idea of progress, as a fading hope for the future of Europe as bright, predictable, prosperous, and safe. The “darkening“ also receives a literal sense. At the end of the nineteenth century, darkness found its way back to the public space – in the theaters, panoramas, dioramas, and “love tunnels“, which awaited the visitors of American and European amusement parks.