It is Difficult to Remain a Scholar When The Human is Ground Into Mincemeat: Mental Boundaries and Memorial Frontiers

Abstract

The article opens a special issue of the Journal of Frontier Studies “Mental Boundaries and Memorial Frontiers”. The text raises topical issues of the nowadays cultural and historical situation, although the author is sure that it is not unique, therefore he gives it the universal name “historical catastrophe”. The subject, forced to exist in the conditions of a historical catastrophe, is in a radicalized situation of choice. The radicality of the choice makes it impossible to reach consensus between alternative options, which act not as ready-made clear models, but as radically opposed propositions to each other. The choice of one of them determines the further strategies and trajectories of the subject, the characteristics that are attributed to him by other subjects as essential. Despite the radical nature of the opposition, the boundaries between them are not defined, and pass within the subject itself, since different sides of the manifestation of the subject in an ordinary situation can combine simultaneous manifestations of both of them, and in an ordinary situation they are not opposed.

Keywords

• moral frontier
• memorial frontier
• transgenerational frontier
• cultural exclusion zones
• mental maps
• mental boundaries
• stigmatization
• place
• identity
• space