KAPODISTRIAN LECTURES
Date: 04.12.26
European Academy of Sciences and Arts in collaboration with the Literary Society PARNASSUS Introduce the Annual
KAPODISTRIAN LECTURES
Initiative: Ioannis Liritzis, Vice-President EASA
Lecture
EASA, Class I, professor of philosophy and religious studies, Head of the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Centre (Koper, Slovenia) and Dean of Faculty ISH at the Alma Mater Europaea University (Ljubljana, Slovenia).
Abstract
»Antigone’s Democracy«
In an era shattered by wars, violence, and an ongoing pandemic of de-democratization, the culture of democracy must be reconceptualized beyond mere formal proceduralism or theoretical reconstruction. Drawing on our recent work in political ethics, as well as our book Antigone's Sisters (SUNY Press, 2021), this lecture proposes a radical rethinking of political justice grounded in vulnerability and the elemental conditions of life. Antigone's unyielding demand to honor and bury the unmourned directly challenges political structures that expose vulnerable bodies to structural violence, grief, and state-sanctioned forms of suffocation (structural, ethico-political, and environmentally-material). By intersecting classical tragedy with contemporary respiratory philosophy from Irigaray to Sloterdijk and beyond, "Antigone's Democracy" articulates an urgent need for a new politics and ethics of breath. It argues that genuine democratic justice rests on the recognition of our shared corporeal vulnerability, thus confronting the historical and ongoing reality of genocidal destruction and actively safeguarding the fundamental right to breathe freely in a world devastated by wars, violence, and injustice.
PEASA ARTICLE Ioannis Kapodistrias_Ioannis Liritzis
Place: Zografou Campus, Athens/online
Time:
