Roška, 25 July 1988. Photo: Igor Modic/Delo

Gal Kirn

The contradictions and transition of (post)socialist civil society between 1972 and 1989
Lecture

Friday, 15 September 2017, at 6 p.m., Museum of Modern Art, MG+

The final talk delivered as part of the Heritage of ‘89 exhibition by a younger generation political philosopher Gal Kirn, PhD, who currently lives in Berlin.

More than merely analyzing civil society in Slovenia in the 1980s, its contradictions and (anti-) democratic processes, the speaker will attempt to outline in his talk also some of the structural characteristics and the broader framework, which needs to be located in the socialist Yugoslavia of the late 1960s. History did not completely repeat itself after all; what led to the victorious hegemony of the alliance between liberalism and nationalism at the close of the 1980s, and what did civil society have to do with it?

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Gal Kirn is currently an affiliated fellow at ICI-Berlin, and holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia). In his hometown Ljubljana he was a member of the collective Workers'-Punks' University (2003–2008), later on he was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2008–2009), a research fellow at Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin (2010-2012), a fellow at Akademie Solitude, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin (2013–2016). He is a co-editor of the books Encountering Althusser (Bloomsbury, 2012, with Peter Thomas, Sara Farris and Katja Diefenbach) and Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its Transgressive Moments (JvE Academie, 2012, with Dubravka Sekulić and Žiga Testen). His book Partisan Ruptures and Contradictions of Market Socialism in Yugoslavia was published at Sophia (in Slovene).