An Impossible Escape

Guest lecture by Boris Buden.

On the first pages of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge writes about a paradoxical feeling that accompanied him in his younger years, “that of living in a world without any possible escape …” There is much to suggest that we can today share this same feeling. We seem, however, utterly unable to draw the conclusion that he did: in such a world, “there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape.” Serge meant, of course, a radical change, a revolution with a capital “R”, an idea that has completely evaporated from our minds. But the world is changing nevertheless. Moreover, its transformation has become so profound, abrupt and dangerous that it threatens to get out of control. The notorious Doomsday Clock was recently set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we have ever been to the Apocalypse. Only a rapid and radical change can save us, and yet we cannot even think of it. Why?

About

Boris Buden is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. Born in former Yugoslavia, he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s, Buden has published essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics and contemporary art in Croatian, German and English. He is a permanent fellow at The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna and teaches at various universities in Europe. Recently published: Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989, Berlin 2020.