You are looking at a collection with the subtitle “texts on the occasion”: it includes essays and articles created “on commission”—for thematic issues of magazines, or grown out of conference papers devoted to the widest range of fields of knowledge, as well as texts of sharp, polemical temperament… The pretext changes—so does the topic. Why do people need, at all costs, an enemy? When does a human embryo acquire a soul? How does technological progress reshape the meaning and tasks of diplomatic service?
In many of these works you can hear a playfulness—a joke, a parody: Eco wrote them to entertain both himself and his audience.
Published by agreement with the literary agency ELKOST Intl.