Boris Buden - The Crossing Zone. About the end of post-communism

Tact Publishing House, Street Collection, Cluj, 2012

Hollywood without a happy ending is the cruelest realism, but we indulge in criticizing it, and here is the real opium, for the simple fact that it leaves us feeling very smart. The happy ending is a kind of emphatic ending tacitly agreed with the consumer. So is the history of the East seen from the West. It's a hard (communist) story with a happy ending so distastefully bad-taste that it has lasted twenty years.

Many leading thinkers are already telling the story of the East without the happy ending - from Žižek to Groys (or name any other star-pop-philosopher you can think of).

Boris Buden writes this story without a happy ending in a brisk style, with an incredible dexterity of pop-pop argumentation and a relatability worthy of a hit. He takes Eastern post-communism and diagnoses it accurately: we're back where we started 20 years ago.

When you go back to the point where something that was called "communist" failed, you have no happy ending and no happy beginning. No enthusiasm, no sentimentality. You have something else, and with this invisible something Buden connects us.

(Costi Rogozanu)