A Publication That Opens the Universe of Ukrainian Art to the West

Lozhkina, A. (2019). Permanentna revoliutsiia. Mystetstvo Ukrainy XX – pochatku XXI stolittia [Permanent Revolution. Art of Ukraine of the 20th – the Beginning of the 21st Century]. Kyiv: ArtHuss. [In Ukrainian].

Between Liberal Constitutionalism and Permanent Revolution Arendt’s Republic of Councils

This chapter reconstructs Hannah Arendt’s theory of council democracy, as it is primarily developed in her twin study of the American and French Revolution in On Revolution (1963). According to Arendt, the council tradition discloses a way in which the constituent power can be controlled and institutionalised, hereby providing a ‘third way’ between liberal constitutionalism and permanent revolution. Arendt was as afraid of ‘overpoliticisation’ as she was of depoliticization – she was both afraid of revolutions that never reached their end (i.e., a free constitution) and became permanent and liberal constitutions that effectively contained the repressed the constituent power altogether. Beyond this binary, Arendt found in the council tradition a way of organising and acting politically as well as some guiding principles that would allow the polity to continually re-express the constituent power and continually re-politicise its foundations.

“Permanent Revolution” to Effect an Ever-Evasive (Ecological) Utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

This article aims to analyse Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia from an ecological perspective. In her ecologically conscious story, Le Guin explores the (ironic) manifestation and repercussions of humanity’s environmental fear, the virtues and ills of an ever-evasive ecological utopian society that is paradoxically informed by eco-friendly and ecophobic propensities in its pursuit of freedom through the vigorous practice of the art of dispossession, and the possibility of transcending the hyper-separated categories of difference that include the human/non-human dichotomy. What Le Guin seeks in her fictional effort above all is a permanent revolution advocating a never-ending diligent and earnest endeavour to effect an improved, preferable society with a revised awareness of its relations to its human and non-human Others, free from the ethic of exploitation rather than a promotion of an already achieved perfect state.