Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu
Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Critical Theory at the University of Western Ontario

 

Antropomorfina / Anthropomorphine:

Despite its playful tone, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu’s book is terribly serious. It is so in a double sense: first, it is a solid, grounded book; then, it is a book deeply concerned by its subject matter. Dear reader, his thoughts will end up by triggering your own, forcing you to articulate explicitly what had been so far sheltered in the apprehensions’ shadowy sphere. Because the world he focuses on, by scrutinizing its entrails and essence, is precisely the world in which you live (in which all of us live, whether we like it or not), the world in which your children and grandchildren will live their centuries – and the horizons don’t seem to be quite rosy. All the great problems of the world (as they are configured at these crossroads of century and millennia) are sifted finely, and then again, and all its chief features, that articulate themselves systematically and produce anxieties and worries, are brought into the open with ruthless acumen. The apparent easiness of the author’s discourse will catch you: he begins by circling around our world’s main problems, then corners them as if with dancing moves to, at then end, grab them without pity and transfix them in a supra-reality wherefrom they, however, dominate us.

Mihai Şora, from the foreword

 

C.-.A. M.’s Antropomorphine is a story, not at all simple, told by someone who lives thought... It is a book in which the spectacle of thought – displayed in articles, studies and essays – offers itself with exemplary generosity to the truest of the pleasures of reading. With a nonchalant wink your are taken for a ride from Christ to Hamlet to Eisenhower to Mephisto to Ferrari to (oh, God!) so many others, then to Borges, Kafka, Bataille, Mauss, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Levinas (oho, the list is terribly long…), until you are brought to the brink of a panic attack. But the purpose is not to belittle and crush the poor reader in such spectacular races on the boulevards swarming with cultural references and vectors. Beyond this entire spectacle there lies a delicate poetics of thought which, while entirely devoid of the pathology of analysis, is consistently imbued with a profoundly personal way of seeing the world.

Cătălin Ştefănescu, “Solar ideas,” Dilemateca, no. 11, April 2007

 

… productively exploding and disseminating his discourse in the direction of all non-addictive cultural passions, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu compacts and concentrates them, making them into intellectual super-poisons (if we are addicts, let us at least use true drugs, refined along the length of times, rather than surrogates! Mimicking and subverting infomania, he is not at odds with the real. Rather, he encourages and brings to light the immanent wars of the real, implicitly forcing the reader, via a super-spectacle of ideas and terminological ebullition, to choose, to react vividly, ethically, that is, culturally… His is a humanism enacted with the weapons of nihilism, technologically embodied, contemporary… As far as theoretical literature is concerned, the true editorial event of the year 2005 came to us as a gift over the Atlantic.

Bogdan Ghiu, „Immanence and ethical comparativism,” Cuvântul no. 345/3, March, 2006

 

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu’s discourse has almost no parallel in our literature... in a world of literary studies suffocated by rigid academism, Mihăilescu demonstrates that the seriousness of theoretical thought has nothing to do with the stiffness promoted by fearful universities. More precisely, his discourse is like an acid rain falling over the calcareous ground of the monument to cultural establishment, of historical tradition and, probably, of the essentialist epistemes of all colors. His project is postmodern, and its predilection is precisely the rewriting of the postmodern human.

The human types that illustrate the preceding organizations of life and knowledge are replaced by “contemporary types: communitarian egos, zombies, cyborgs, passion-defective & ideology-prone gents, IT herds, and addicts.” The latter are understood outside of the frames of the pathological and the guilty. With an oxymoron, the “anthropomorphinic subjects” consume more than they can take in; the speedy ingurgitation qualifies them to claim the position of role-model of globalization.

The great gain, it seems to me, is that the author of Antropomorphine offers a solution, that the destructuring of the grounds is not arrested just after the cataclysm; neither does it end up in some nominalist cul de sac nor in some nostalgic theory. Instead, with moderate optimism, Mihăilescu presents the antropomorphinic age as one in which humankind is learning to keep its distance from the „nothingness of its own possibility.”

Mihaela Ursa, “A new concept: anthropomorphine,” Steaua nos. 7-8, July-August, 2007