Boris Buden and Anna Förster: Translation, Theory, Time: An Introduction into the Problem

For the fourth session of the working group Semi-Peripheral Theory | Tendencies of Contemporary Theory Production in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, our guests will be Boris Buden and Anna Förster, who will discuss questions of translation and time, the ideological dimensions of temporality and how this is expressed in discourses of belatedness and “catching-up” with regard to the region.

Boris Buden, born in 1958 in what is now Croatia, works as an author and cultural critic in Berlin. He regularly publishes philosophical, political and cultural-critical essays on the former Yugoslavia, Western Europe, and the United States. Central to Buden’s writings is the idea of a culturally divided Europe: post-communist Eastern Europe is seen as an outsider and a “bastard” of the European Union.

Anna Förster works as a literary scholar at the University of Erfurt with a research focus on Eastern and Central European literary theory and its history.

The discussion will be centered around an essay by Boris Boden on “Translation and the East. There is No Such Thing as an 'Eastern European Study of Culture'” and the first chapter of Johannes Fabian’s book Time and the Other (1983).

If you would like to attend and receive the texts beforehand, please send a note to theorycese@zfl-berlin.org.