Boris Buden

Boris Buden was born in 1958 in what is now Croatia and works as an author and cultural critic in Berlin. He studied classical and modern philosophy in Klagenfurt, Zagreb, and Ljubljana and earned his doctorate in cultural theory at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In the 1990s he was editor of the journal Arkzin in Zagreb. Buden regularly publishes philosophical, political, and cultural-critical essays on the former Yugoslavia, Western Europe and the United States in German, English, and French, for example in the "Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik", in Literatur und Kritik and in the Viennese cultural magazine Die Springerin. He has participated in numerous conferences and art projects in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the USA, including Documenta XI. Buden is a Permanent Fellow of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna. He taught cultural theory at the Faculty of Art and Design at the Bauhaus University Weimar. In 1998, the first Croatian reprint of the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" was published with Bastard Verlag – which Buden founded – with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Buden's political activism has found expression in his own volumes of essays, published under the title "Barricades I" and "Barricades II". Central to Buden's writings is the idea of a Europe divided along cultural-political lines: post-communist Eastern Europe is seen as an outsider and a "bastard" of the European Union. (1.476 characters)