User:Lepartizan/Lepartizan

Gal Kirn was born in Yugoslavia and is a Slovenian philosopher working in the field of political philosophy, cultural and memory theory. After graduating in Intercultural Studies of Ideas and Cultures (UNG, 2012) with summa cum laude, he has been working abroad for more than 10 years, mostly within German academic space. Since 2021 he leads a research project at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. He has published his findings and insights in various books and articles (see: https://zgodovina-ff-uni-lj.academia.edu/GalKirn)

Life
Early Education

Gal Kirn visited Prežihov Voranc Primary School in Ljubljana and afterwards attended the Poljane Gymnasium, where he was enrolled in the linguistic program studying French, German and Latin. It was during these years that he began to be inspired by the social sciences, especially during the lessons of history, sociology and Slovene. According to the interview his parents inspired him to read avidly, a passion that was further cultivated during university years. He was influenced by the columns of Rastko Močnik in Mladina and the texts of Slavoj Žižek, which also led him on the path of critical thought.

Study years

Gal Kirn received a diploma degree in political philosophy on the concept of sovereignty from the University of Ljubljana, where he was also awarded Prešeren's Prize (2005). In 2012, he obtained his PhD in political philosophy at the University of Nova Gorica, where he defended his doctoral thesis on socialist Yugoslavia and developed an inventive reading of the concepts of politics and reproduction in the thought of French philosopher Louis Althusser (summa cum laude).

Work

From 2008 to 2010 he worked as a research fellow at the Department of Theory at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, while from 2010 to 2012 he was a research associate at the Institute for Cultural Research (IC Berlin. The academic path then led him to Humboldt University, where from 2013 to 2016 he researched on the Soviet avant-garde as a recipient of an Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation Fellowship. In 2016-17 he was at Akademie Schloss Solitude, where he and Niloufar Tajeri designed the project Thinking the Monument to Sub/Urban Riots. Between 2017 and 2020 he worked at the University of Dresden, where he worked on the project of "cinema-train". He has lectured numerous film and philosophy seminars, summer schools and courses in contemporary political theory at Freie Universitat Berlin, TU Dresden, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen and the University of Koper. He has also written numerous articles, books and participated in many international research projects.

Theoretical works
Partizanski prelomi in protislovja tržnega socializma v Jugoslaviji

His first book was published in Slovene (2014) and called Partisan Ruptures and Contradictions of Market Socialism in Yugoslavia. The author's debut book critically and innovatively intervenes in the debate on socialist Yugoslavia. It is an in-depth synthesis of a critical parallel reading of Althusser's works and critique (realisations) of the ideas of communism, and a reconstruction of the conflict between liberals and communists, the Yugoslav socialist path, emancipation, egalitarianism, self-management, cooperativism, the politics of non-alignment. It focuses on two main periods: the politics of rupture during and after the Second World War, and the historical processes that already in the mid-1960s pointed to a transition to capitalism within the socialist system. The starting thesis of the study is that we need to understand our recent past beyond the dominant ideological prism, which on the one hand nostalgically recalls the good old days, while on the other hand seeks to demonise everything associated with socialism, Tito and Yugoslavia into a totalitarian paradigm.

The Partisan Counter Archive (De Gruyter, Berlin, 2020)

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant ‘archives’ that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material – from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films – and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical “history of the oppressed” as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

Other publications
Post-Fordism and its discontents. Jan van Eyck Academie. 2010.

''Partizanski prelomi in protislovja tržnega socializma v Jugoslaviji. Sophia.'' 2014.

Beyond Neoliberalism: Social Analysis after 1989  Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 (co-editor Marian Burchardt).

''Partisan Ruptures. Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia,'' Pluto Press, London, 2019.

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338941/partisan-ruptures/

The Partisan Counter Archive : retracing the ruptures of art and memory in the Yugoslav people's liberation struggle. De Gruyter. 2020.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110682069/html

Nights of the dispossessed: Riots unbound. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. 2021 (co-editors Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri). Accessible: https://plus.si.cobiss.net/opac7/bib/25547267.

Projects
Memorial Multistability: The Parallax View on Transformative ‘Yugoslav Art’ from Post-Yugoslav Context, 2010-2012 (ICI Berlin)

How to Rethink Sub/Urban Riots:Failure or Dissent of Democracy?, 2016-2017 (ICI Berlin)

Cinema-train as avant-garde apparatus, 2017-2020 (TU Dresden)

Supplement and Surplus as Reduction(ism): Partisan Art and Archive, 2020-2021 (ICI Berlin)

Counter-Archive, 2021 (supported by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation)

Protests, art practices and culture of memory in the post-Yugoslav context (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, 2021-24: https://www.ff.uni-lj.si/en/protests-art-practices-and-culture-memory-post-yugoslav-context?fbclid=IwAR1t1xSfnGNE3s05uASaN1Ku8r2vunn3KTKmkvyZueKRtSL7WAn8t50y9uw)