Aleš Erjavec

The Slovenian philosopher Aleš Erjavec, born in 1951, lives and works in Ljubljana. He is the Director of Research at the Philosophy Institute of the Slovenian Academy for Natural Sciences and Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Ljubljana. In addition, he holds the Chair for Cultural Studies in the humanities faculty in Koper. From 1984 until 1999 he was the Head of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics, and from 1998 until 2001 President of the International Union for Aesthetics. His writings in aesthetics, which are concerned with critical theory, postmodernism, Slovenian art and the relation between aesthetics and ideology, have enjoyed worldwide recognition; they have been translated into English, French, German, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Erjavec’s chief works include the monograph »On Aesthetics, Art and Ideology« (Ljubljana 1983), an essay about the interaction between postmodernism and post-socialism, the essays, »Das fällt ins Auge…« [It is quite obvious…] (Munich 1998) and »L’estetica e le filosofie« [Aesthetics and Philosophy] (Turin 1998), and the historico-philosophical work, »The Impossible Histories« (Cambridge 2003). A central theme in Erjavec’s writings is the thesis that postmodernism provided east-European artists and intellectuals with the means and the manner of expression to fill the post-socialistic vacuum without reverting to pre-modernism.