<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-TSXQ6PZX" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe>

Ivan Milenkovic

Ivan Milenković (1965), philosopher by education, translator by vocation, critic by temperament. He deals with political and contemporary French philosophy. Published three books, more than 40 scientific papers and translated ten books from the French language. Member of the NIN jury from 2018 to 2021. He has been writing for Vreme for a quarter of a century.

Latest news

Intellectual reportage: Polish Literary Institute in Paris (2)

Legend about the Editor

Some of the greatest, like Witold Gombrović and Česlav Miloš, would almost certainly not have become what they are without Ježi Gjedrojć. However, he was not on good terms with any of them: he was too conservative to accept the profligate Gombrović and too experienced to trust the converted communist Miloš just like that. However, he never rejected either Gombrović's or Miloš's text. He was too good an editor not to realize, in spite of himself, what kind of writers we were talking about

Ivan Milenkovic

Intellectual reportage: Polish Literary Institute in Paris (1)

Freedom is always an opinion about freedom

And what does all this have to do with Serbia? Actually, much more than we might assume at first glance. Instead of fueling hatred towards Germans and Russians - and she would have every right in the world to do that - or to lament over the evil fate of Poland, which was not the first time in history that it found itself between the Russian hammer and the German anvil (or vice versa), Poland Culture he thinks about the future of Poland, first of all, in relations with the "archenemies" and the biggest evildoers. Experience, therefore, that Serbia desperately lacks. Magazine Culture and the Polish Literary Institute in Paris offer not only signposts for a disoriented Serbia, but also tools with which political freedom can be installed

Ivan Milenkovic

US President Donald Trump in a light blue tie points his finger at the audience

Comment

Imperial logic and collective hypnosis

Is it possible that, after thousands of years of imperial endeavors, we are now, suddenly, so surprised by the American incursion into Venezuela, that we cannot catch our breath?

Ivan Milenkovic

The President of Stbia, Aleksandar Vučić, sits thoughtfully in a coat, probably in a helicopter. Next to the window you can see the Exit sign

Comment

Symptoms of regime breakdown

Four symptoms point to the decline of Aleksandar Vučić's regime. To use once more the words of the wise Etienne de la Bossie: people no longer want a tyrant.

Ivan Milenkovic

None of us has the right to give up our freedom. It is unacceptable to lose heart. Leaving the last line of defense is unacceptable.

Comment

The last line of defense: He's done!

None of us have the right to give up our freedom. It is unacceptable to lose heart. Leaving the last line of defense is unacceptable. Because the barbarian attack on prosecutors and judges is their last attack. Beyond that is the abyss

Ivan Milenkovic

Literature/Philosophy

Notes of a depressed whore

Emil Cioran, Notebooks 1957–1972; translated from French by Bojan Savić Ostojić; Official Gazette, Belgrade 2025

Ivan Milenkovic

Interview: Relja Dražić, translator and publisher

The man may be becoming redundant

Austrian literature holds me in its gravitational field with its courage and aesthetically extraordinarily powerful ability to productively confront the myth of itself as "Hitler's victim".

Ivan Milenkovic

Nikola Selaković and Vladimir Đukanović before the Prosecutor's Office for organized crime with the presence of regime TV crews

Comment

Performance and overexertion

The performance of the Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković in connection with the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime does not, admittedly, exude special acting talent, but it faithfully portrays the nature of the progressive government.

Ivan Milenkovic

Contemporary BH literature

In the minefield of literature

Adisa Basic, The Book of Almir; Buybook, Sarajevo/Zagreb 2024.

Ivan Milenkovic

Interview: Lana Vasiljević, sculptor

Work slows down events.

In the "Archaeology of Memories" project, I photograph houses in one part of Belgrade, then process them monochromatically, then print them on clay tiles and later intervene with a drawing. The process of building a world takes a long time, and we tend to tear it down and replace it at a moment's notice. I think there is something in that, in those houses... Surviving for hundreds of years, like a secret. In this urban vortex, various building paradoxes are encountered, as well as carelessness in the treatment of nature, which was dominant there before.

Ivan Milenkovic

A tent settlement in front of the National Assembly

Comment

Order and culture

Even the Nazis and Communists understood that without basic legal certainty and culture, one cannot rule. However, Vučić's primitive team is not

Ivan Milenkovic

Comment

Serbian studies and other nightmares

There is nothing in the idea of the Faculty of Serbian Studies that state universities do not already cover. "Identity disciplines" are nothing but nightmares from Falangist heads

Ivan Milenkovic

The regime and the church

A small group of unusual believers

A question for the church staff: if there is nothing Christian in the demeanor and speech of Aleksandar Vučić and his entourage, why do the priests even allow that group to come to the house of God for painting and applied acting?

Ivan Milenkovic

Novel

What is reality?

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, translation from English by Aleksandar Milajić, Booka, Belgrade 2024.

Ivan Milenkovic

The head of the Serbian Progressive Party with Aleksandar Vučić in the sports hall

The banality of evil

Greed and lust for power: The depths of the Essenes' unconscious

The Essenes are a prime example of what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." Are they even aware of what is going on around them, outside of the bubbles of greed in which they are imprisoned?

Ivan Milenkovic

Dijana Hrka: Hunger strike

Diana Hrka's pain from this moment on is the pain of every citizen of Serbia, who preserved the core of humanity in the inhuman regime of Aleksandar Vučić

Ivan Milenkovic

Novopazar students from Mrčajevci kiss and hug local residents

Regime against citizens

It is not a civil war, but a cultural war

Being in Novi Sad on November 1st means opposing the anti-political regime of Aleksandar Vučić with culture as politics. It means carrying, along with your body, a set of values that the regime seeks to suppress

Ivan Milenkovic

Vučić in front of the Parliament

Comment

An essay on the inverted language

Since he cannot say "loyalty is more important to me than honor", Aleksandar Vučić will say that he is an honorable man. There are countless such examples. In philosophy, this is called a performative contradiction: by uttering a value judgment, one falls into one's own mouth

Ivan Milenkovic

Češka

Andrej Babiš for the second time among the Czechs

There is every chance that the Motoristi, a bizarre fringe group whose unofficial leader Filip Turek was banned because of pro-Nazi posts on social networks, will also join the new Babiš government, and by the way, he is also a collector of Nazi artifacts, in other words, an undisguised fascist. On the other hand, they are called motorists because they are against the abolition of the internal combustion engine, which, as we can see, is an extremely complex political program and proof that today, unfortunately, any bizarreness can pass

Sava Tatić and Ivan Milenković

Interview: Slobodan Maksimović, director

Humor as protection against harmful environment

Many people approached me after the film with a smile, while wiping away tears. I think they are touched by the fact that the film covers an era of exceptional creators, who are an indispensable part of our common history

Ivan Milenkovic

Foreign literature

Struggles with myself, women and reality

Nina Like, We are not here to have fun; translation from Norwegian by Radoš Kosović; Geopoetics, Belgrade 2024.

Ivan Milenkovic

NIS: Aleksandar Vučić opens the project

Comment

Sanctions to the NIS in the bubble of the masters of ignorance

The blow to the stomach of the citizens that follows the US sanctions on NIS is a consequence of the inability of the master of bubbles and the ignorance of Aleksandar Vučić to understand what politics really is

Ivan Milenkovic

The battle for public space

A lie in politics

Love of truth, says Hannah Arendt, has never been counted among the political virtues. Does this mean that the essence of truth lies in its impotence, and the essence of politics lies in treachery? Well, if so, doesn't powerless truth deserve the same amount of contempt as power that doesn't care about truth

Ivan Milenkovic

Comment

Who does time work for?

Citizens will continue to press the regime with their bodies. Students may turn another circle around Serbia. And the opposition has only one task: to unite

Ivan Milenkovic

Analyze

Early elections: Time is not working for Aleksandar Vučić

Whatever the regime tries, it goes to waste. Time is no longer working for Aleksandar Vučić. Hence this fierce pre-election campaign, as if extraordinary parliamentary elections had just been announced

Ivan Milenkovic

Comment

Regime gatherings as funeral processions

There is no energy at the regime's weekend gatherings as reality seeps through the cracks of an alternate reality. And without passion there is nothing, as Hegel said

Ivan Milenkovic

Comment

Two cores of the political gathering

Ideological and moralistic purity cannot defeat the regime of Aleksandar Vučić. It is necessary for citizens to gather around two political cores that jointly strive towards the same goal

Ivan Milenkovic