Abstract: Sociology is a science of crisis. It begins as an outcome of the Great Transformation of feudal-agricultural society into capitalist industrial society. Sociological diagnoses are the means by which sociology tries to discover and explain the order of modern society and the driving forces of its change. Thus, crisis and critique come into the focus of sociology as, by understanding crises, sociology tries to produce a critique that would direct society towards reasonable development. This is undoubtedly a complicated and complex task; that is why this article is focused on the logic and problems of sociological diagnosis.

Abstract: This article is an attempt at a critical understanding of one of the major and most influential contemporary versions of critique theory ‒ the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s theory of acceleration and resonance. He claims to ground a new critical sociology that would include everything: diagnosis of contemporary times, critical theory of modernity and a theoretical alternative to modern society. What are the theoretical limitations and deficits of a critical theory that focuses on society as a whole, on modernity as a social formation? How can one think of and theorize sociologically on a social formation that is an alternative to modernity? And what are the chances that a diagnostic social critique which grounds its normativity ethically may participate in the development of an alternative sociality? These are some of the main questions in the perspective of which I analyze this major critical project.

Abstract: The article traces the fundamental question that has always stood in front of critical theory since Marx ‒ the relationship between theory and practice. The focus will be mainly on the role of the theory: what is, what can be and what should be the relationship of critical theory (mainly Theodor Adorno’s as negative dialectics) to practice, to context, to the world. This question has faced critical theory since the Eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, in which the distinction between descriptive, purely theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy is reconciled. On the other hand, the main accusations against the philosophy of Adorno and Horkheimer consist of lack of practical commitment, of resignation; here once again that central question will be posed: what is the practical potential and commitment of Adorno’s negative dialectic specifically. Adorno calls for a return to theory and moving away from revolutionary practice, as he believes that in that context (1968/9) this practice is impossible. The question will be traced through the debate between Adorno and Marcuse and their disagreement regarding the potential and role of critical theory.

Abstract: The concept of capitalism has experienced a resurgence in the social sciences, following a period of relative quiet in the last decades of the previous century. In contemporary discussions, three significant trends regarding the critique of capitalism have emerged. Firstly, there is a growing emphasis on immanent forms of critique, which derive their standards by reconstructing the fundamental principles of the institutions to be criticized. Secondly, there is a prevailing argument that the artistic critique of capitalism has lost its effectiveness, as capitalism has absorbed it into its mechanisms, while social critique has gained prominence. Thirdly, the analytical focus is directed to comprehending the critiques expressed by the actors living within the capitalist system. We assert that a comprehensive analysis of capitalist society demands the consideration of three additional forms of critique. First, this involves integrating a critique that draws from norms external to the system it criticizes. Secondly, artistic critique, often contrasted with social critique, should not be relegated to insignificance but rather revitalized ‒ especially in light of evidence indicating the perpetuation of its targets. Lastly, a critical examination of capitalism should not only encompass the critique presented by social actors but also delve into how social conditions and processes shape individual’s capacity for critique, its absence, and its content.

Abstract: Max Weber saw the true purpose of sociology not in the progress of knowledge as such, but in its significance for the self-understanding of the actors in the social-historical world. Thus, the greatest possible accuracy and reliability of sociological knowledge was exceptionally important for him. Through his interpretative sociology, as the stable core of social and cultural studies, Weber wanted to go beyond the simple postulate and to demonstrate how such a requirement can be met. His almost obsessive insistence on value-free judgments refers to what is no less than the condition sine qua non of strict empirical knowledge and of a practice that is true to reality, e.g., to that which is at stake in any serious Enlightenment. This view has motivated me to participate in many debates on whether, and to what extent, sociology really corresponds to its vocation for Enlightenment.

Abstract: The following article offers a detailed close-up reading of chosen parts of the collective work The Weight of the World (1993), published under Bourdieu’s direction. By scrutinizing the original research practices and operative concepts such as „active listening“, „understanding“, „reflex-reflexivity“, „benevolent disposition“, „autoanalysis“ of the socioanalytical programme, which Bourdieu bequeathed to us in a fragmentary form, the main intention of this paper lies in revealing its broad methodological scope which cannot be reduced to simple conceptual analysis. Alongside the discursive level, the socioanalysis works also through analytical regard towards all the accompanying affective changes in the interviewees’ behaviour. Thus, its complex strategy preconditions a new and authentic approach to marginalized phenomena such as positional suffering and symbolic violence seized through their effects in the shared biographical narratives or illusions. The socianalytical programme deserves a new reappropriation in the field of social sciences in the light of the affective turn in phenomenology both as a condition for symbolic therapy and comprehensive view to the everyday pathologies.

Abstract: In this article I juxtapose the sociology of race of W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber. They exemplify an early radical sociologization of race, rejecting the biological and naturalistic presuppositions, prevailing in their historical context. Through this juxtaposition I aim to derive an approach for thinking about the relationship between race and crisis. By crisis here I mean conjunctures in which the attainment of formal equality is followed by practical inequality, which acquires racialized forms. The latter could eventually become anchored in the legal framework. Both sociologists think in the period between the end of US Civil War and the early twentieth century, when the practical racialized inequalities, following the emancipation, were judicialized in the „Jim Crow“ system.

Abstract: This paper focuses on some military-technological transformations which lead to significant changes into the bodily experience. Such an analytical interest is based, on the one hand, on the understanding that the military-bodily experience is marked by historical metamorphoses in war itself and in the modus of warfare which arise from the drive for achieving military superiority through innovations and technological superiority. On the other hand, my inquiry is based on the obviousness that the military experience is par excellence a bodily experience; but it is also based on the fact that the military experience is a „border-experience“ because it confronts the body simultaneously with power and death, that is to say, with two types of violence – respectively suffering – to which the body is exposed, and which it simultaneously causes and therefore embodies.

Abstract: The article addresses the problem of cat cruelty represented in Post-war and Contemporary Japanese Literature, discussing it against the background of the attitude toward cats in the West and in Japan before the WWII. I give numerous examples of violence against cats in Japanese fiction written between 1945 and 2020 but I focus in particular, on the one hand, on a scandal involving the writer Bando Masako who admitted in an essay published by Nihon Keizai Shinbun that she kills kittens precisely because she loves cats, and on the other, on a short text by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, titled „Cats and Metaphysics“. The analyses show that even though there are significant and irreducible cultural differences cat cruelty throughout the ages shares a common motive, a motive I see as metaphysical, that has to do with man’s finitude facing what the human being cannot thoroughly understand. In the factual and real violence against cats there is already a fictional moment involved, a motive that makes the distinction between „real“ and „literary“ cats difficult. It is this motive that reveals most of the attempts to legitimize violence against cats as unacceptable. Violence poses a metaphysical question concerning the epistemological and ontological finitude of the human being and at the same time attempts to be the answer to that question at the point where the question cannot be answered. As a response violence is irresponsible.

Abstract: In the genre of experimental thinking, this article poses the question of what is the field of primary self-evidences from which those critiques of the present that have as a stake Gaia (Bruno Latour) and the living earth (Deyan Deyanov) could draw their justification. Can we assume as true – and, if so, in what sense – the self-evidence by which Latour qualifies the universality of the experience that „the ground is giving way“ as well as Deyanov’s thesis that the living earth today „may be warning us, blaming us, taking revenge on us, and demanding atonement from us“ in the face of „ecocollapse“? Within the framework of an ecological phenomenology inspired by the later Husserl’s analytics of the life-world, the article outlines an understanding of primordial nature which places in epoché the Galilean nature of „bare things“ that exists as an „absolutely persisting“ reality in itself and „speaks in the language of mathematics“. At stake in this phenomenological archeology is the manifestation of a „primal generative“ core (Husserl) in the light of which the object constitution of the natural world unfolds eo ipso as a constitution of a world of goods; while the alien (in their cultural-historical formation) surrounding worlds open up to the possibility of connection-in-separation in „the one life-world of Gaia“. This phenomenological archeology can be viewed as a correlate of the practical archeology of the „forgotten“ nature which, upon every techno-natural disaster, rejects its status of formless material and manifests itself as a phenomenon of befalling.

Abstract: In this text, I develop further the concept of ‘larval subjects’ that I have borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and used in my book Life with Dementia. Angles towards elusive attempts. ‘Larval subjects’ as pre-perceptive intuitions of the body as a whole, before the kinaestheses, coming before the work of senses that weakens and could deteriorate with age or as a result of health disorders. But even then, the ‘system of passive Me-s’ stays bare as a last fundament. It is in this quantum state, manifested e.g. by life with dementia, where, as I assume, sovereign forces are hidden that permit no computational simulation. In the same time, robots are more and more used as social assistants, companions governed by artificial intelligence, including the care for dementia patients. Here I seek, with no claims of being exhaustive, working answers to the following questions: Can intelligent robots fill in gaps in the everyday life of people with psychosomatic problems and more specifically of elderly people with dementia? What effects on the person with health disorders and the dynamics of the illness could have even the partial robotization of everyday care? What are those robots – enhancement tools (prostheses), simulations of pets, or artificial humans?

Abstract: War and Types of Pacifism

Abstract: The current paper presents and analyzes recent empirical data from a nationally representative study of the factor determinism of the „shadow economy“. Within the framework of the study assessments were collected, revealing the dependencies between the demographic characteristics of the individual and the tendency to deviant behavior in the economic sphere. Depending on the inclination and attitudes towards deviant economic behavior, we distinguish between economic deviants and economic conformists. Economic deviants tolerate and get engaged in various manifestations of the „shadow economy“, although under certain circumstances economic conformists also ould be tempted by the shadowy practices.

Abstract: The article problematizes the lack of social security rights for those working in the informal economy in Bulgaria from the point of view of the existing legislation. On the basis of in-depth interviews with two labor experts and ongoing participant observation in the work of the Union of Self-Employed and Informal Workers in the period 2021–2023, several topics have been identified that could be the basis for social dialogue and progress in the protection of this kind of labour. The attempted analysis is based on the engaged categories (goods) embedded in the narratives of the interviewees, in the sense involved in Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s concept of „orders of significance“ and „modes/regimes of engagement“.

Abstract: The digital divide (second level skills and third level online benefits) and social inequalities – socio-economic (inequalities between professional groups with different levels of education), which are associated with unequal market opportunities; socio-demographic inequalities (based on gender and age) are interrelated. At the same time, digital communication is developing and increasingly entering both professional and personal life. This article is focused on social inclusion and inequalities in the context of digital society and digital communication. The goal is to investigate the importance of socio-professional status for the development of digital skills, for the benefits and risks of online communication. To realize this goal, the article makes a secondary analysis of data from the tenth wave of the European Social Survey and the Digital Economy and Society Index to 2021.