4 November 2010 “What cannot be discussed, must be discussed”, that is about censorship today!
On 7 November (Sunday), at 2 p.m. in the Hall of the Centre of Humanities Studies of the Jagiellonian University (ul. Grodzka 64) a discussion will be held titled “What cannot be discussed, must be discussed”. The meeting will be dedicated to the problems of censorship today. Przemysław Czapliński, Marcin Koszałka and Maciej Zaremba will answer Ewa Majewska’s questions, who foreshadows: “I would like to propose my interlocutors reflection on whether the subject they generally work with fits in this category and how they would define modern censorship. A direct inspiration of our discussion will be Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski’s statement, which in opening last year’s Congress of Polish Culture said that after 1989 there is no censorship in Poland. I would like my interlocutors to share their opinions on this subject”.
Further on in Majewska’s foreshadowing we read: “The psychoanalytic understanding of censorship treats it not as a foreign element on a fundamentally healthy body of a nation, as liberal theorists of politics do, but like a mechanism allowing to keep the ego on a tight leash. If we substitute the “subject” with society and “censorship” with mechanisms limiting freedom in culture – we apply the Freudian scheme for the entire nation and see how the entire social organism disposes of inconvenient content in order to maintain cohesiveness. In such an understanding of censorship every country has it censor – Sweden has one, as if doesn’t want to talk about eugenics and neo-fascism, Poland has one, as it hides structural support for the mechanisms of domestic violence over women and children and every other country has one, because development means blocking and disowning inconvenient information”. The meeting at the Hall of the Centre of Humanities Studies of the Jagiellonian University (ul. Grodzka 64) is shaping up to be an utmost interesting event of the last day of the Conrad Festival. Join us!
Ewa Majewska – philosopher, cultural theorist, activist; lecturer of Gender Studies ISNS of the University of Warsaw and the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Author of books on social philosophy (“Feminizm jako filozofia społeczna. Szkice z teorii rodziny”, 2009), co-author and editor of the anthology of political system transformation (“Zniewolony umysł 2. Neoliberalizm i jego krytycy” together with J. Sowa, 2007; “Futuryzm miast przemysłowych. Wolfsburg i Nowa Huta” together with K. Szreder and M. Kaltwasser, 2007); author of the report on violence towards women in the family and intimate relations for Amnesty International Polska (2005), as well as numerous textbooks for teachers on equality in education. Since 2007 a participant of the project Index 73, and in the years 2009-2010 a visiting scholar at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. Currently – a researcher in the domain of Gender Studies of the University in Orebro (Sweden), where she is writing a book about love in neo-liberalism, politics of translation and colourful feminism.
