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Kaitlyn Tucker Sorenson’s “Radical Play” analyzes how one Slovene official’s response to student movements in June 1968 (“Changes—yes, circus— no!”) established a formula that structured relations between official and alternative culture in Ljubljana. Borrowed from de Gaulle’s famous remark in May ’68 (“La réforme, oui, la chienlit, non”), the Slovene translation captured the essence of a new mode of cultural production, both playful and political, which was beginning to emerge in Ljubljana and which would come to dominance in the late socialist period. In addition to framing the distinction between mainstream and avant-garde cultures in Ljubljana, this response became a catchphrase that was reappropriated in various contexts in order to articulate social conflict. This article traces that history in order to consider how this Slovene story contributes to broader debates about 1968.

This article examines some of Slavoj Žižek’s very first texts, beginning with the poem-treatises he first published in the journal Problemi in May, 1968. It analyses how the imagery of rupture – born out of the spirit of ’68 – emerged as a key spatial metaphor that would go on to shape the theoretical topography of the philosophical platform of the now world-renowned Ljubljana School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Beginning with Žižek’s usage of the term ‘razpor’ (‘break’) in his first poem-treatises, the article traces how this early concept is refined into the notion of ‘razdor’ in his first book, Bolečina razlike (The Pain of Difference, 1972), and finally into the later usage of ‘razcep’, which would go on to become a central concept for the entire Ljubljana School. Ultimately, the article documents the intellectual history of the notion of the ‘break’ in Žižek’s early work, thereby providing the genealogy of a concept that would later become a key component of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical platform.

This article explores and analyses several remarkable parallels between two unique cultural spaces, namely, that of the Korčula Summer School and that of the Kurorte – the Grand Spas of Central Europe. Though distinct from one another with respect to their historical as well as topographical locations within Europe, it is as cultural spaces that the two share their least apparent – but perhaps most significant – points of affinity. Just as Baden-Baden had served as the ‘summer capital of Europe’ for one set of cultural elites across political, linguistic and national boundaries, so did Korčula offer a space for cultural and intellectual exchange for philosophers from both sides of the Cold War. The article demonstrates how both of these spaces were marked by their shared internationalism, their political engagement, their privilege, their respective distance from daily social orders, and their intellectual intensity. Thus, it is suggested that Central-European Kurort culture – commonly considered a belle-époque phenomenon – did indeed survive the Great Wars, and found new expressions in a post-war, socialist context.