Four Short Lectures

Abstract

Four short lectures given in the turbulent post-communist Romania of the 1990s on themes as diverse as: freedom and subjection; the impossibility of pure dialogue; the relationship between men and women; and forgetting.

A series of mini-lectures which Alexandru Dragomir gave after 1995. He presented them to us in the course of our meetings as ‘short communications’ of 15–20 min. In fact they were meditations inspired particularly by the realities that we all faced after December 1989. All the themes treated here are in this sense current. Do we behave like essentially free people, or have we just liberated ourselves? What are the limits and paradoxes of feminism? Do the talk-shows that we follow daily on television tell us that dialogue is possible, or, on the contrary, that it is an illusion? The text is based on notes taken at the time , and, in the case of the lecture on forgetting , on the transcription of a tape recording made by Sorin Vieru. (Gabriel Liiceanu)