Abstract

This chapter adds the problem of accruing contexts to the problem of fading or elusive contexts that subtends the discussions in the previous chapters. This ostensibly contrasting problem (rather than modes of intellectual resistance it summons up modes of compliance and spiritual surrender; rather than the mirror of intellectual utopia it upholds the dark glass of the regime's cloaked reality, the dreaded secret services) poses the same question: how can this vulnerable human capacity, the capacity to think, so much more vulnerable, according to Arendt, than the capacity to act, how can it be sustained in adverse circumstances? Revisiting heterotopian inversion as an internal operation, which alters theory into fiction, the chapter juxtaposes Bulgarian expat theoretician and novelist Julia Kristeva and Bulgarian writer, historian and secret police informer Vera Mutafchieva in the unlikely framework of a Byzantine story from the 11th century.

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