Editorial board

Etienne Balibar, philosopher, Paris ;
Raja Ben Slama, writer, psychoanalyst, Cairo/Tunis ;
Deyan Deyanov, sociologist, Plovdiv ;
Rada Ivekovic, philosopher, Paris ;
Christophe Jaffrelot, senior research fellow at the CNRS, political scientist ;
Ferda Keskin , philosopher, Istanbul ;
Dragan Klaic, theater scholar and cultural analyst, Amsterdam ;
Mustapha Laarissa, philosopher, Marrakech ;
Marie-Claire Lavabre, sociologist, Paris ;
Boyan Manchev, philosopher, Sofia ;
Nivedita Menon, political scientist, New Delhi ;
Rastko Mocnik, anthropologist et sociologist, Ljubljana ;
Bruce Robbins, philosopher, Columbia University ;
Reina Sarkis, psychanalyste, Beyrouth ;
Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Research Centre, Calcutta ;
Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, publisher, Istanbul ;
Stephen Wright, writer, art critics, Paris ;
Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes, directrice de la rédaction.

 

 

On August the 25th, Dragan Klaic (1950 - 2011) died. Dragan was a friend. He was one of those people who, encountered for the first time at the start of the 1990s, during the period of great upheavals, fully contributed to constructing the reflection on and action in the Balkans by Transeuropéennes, and to deepening the project of the journal. He was an administrator for the association in the first period of Transeuropéennes and he joined the journal's editorial committee in 2009.

A theatre specialist, a theatrologist, as he called himself, researcher and academic, he was exiled to the Netherlands at the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia, refusing to support any kind of nationalism or identitarianism at all. Dragan was a polyglot, brought up in Hungarian, Yiddish and Serbo-Croat, a perfect English and then Dutch speaker, and at ease in German, Italian, French and several other Slavic languages. He was fundamentally nomadic with a taste for the unknown and for others, and he had an acute sense of situations.

He was a builder who didn't in the least ignore the power of ruins.

In European cultural milieus that were all to ready to forget the division of Europe and the Communist experience of the "Eastern Bloc", he put history into perspective ceaselessly, and provoked a thinking of the differend, ruptures, things unspoken.

Known for his humor, for his talents as an orator, Dragan was never very happy with half-measures, approximations, complacent projects. In recent years, his research work for major foundations or European networks, his university teaching, his militant commitments were so many landmarks for taking a cultural hold of the European project again.

His going leaves us in dismay, and our thoughts are with his family.

May these words bring us together in an act of homage.

 

Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes