Mihail Dragomirescu și dialogurile morților: în căutarea poporului care lipsește

Abstract

Romanian critic Mihail Dragomirescu (1868-1942) chose to present his philosophical system in the form of dialogues of the dead. The book appeared in 1929 under the title Philosophical Dialogues. Integralism, and contains 44 numbered dialogues with 8 interlocutors. Other dialogues, however, had been published seven years earlier in the cultural and political press, covering topics related to polemics, critical debates, or even satire. The study focuses on the complex issues involved in the revival of an ancient genre invented by Lucian of Samosata and developed in the form of ephemera, pamphlets and colportage literature between the 17th and 18th centuries. The main question concerns the role that the dialogues of the dead play in problematizing a changing society in the context of post-World War I Romania. Emphasizing the significance of time and anachronism in the dialogues of the dead, the paper investigates, based on the reflections of Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman and Vinciane Despret, the elaboration of perspectives on the common and the imaginary deployment of a “People”.