From polemics to dialogue: redrawing genre boundaries in eastern European philosophy during state socialism

Abstract This paper addresses the proliferation of “philosophical dialogues” as a genre in Eastern European state socialist philosophy. Focusing on Romania and Hungary, we contextualize this genre by referring to the increased preoccupation with dialogue manifested in the local philosophy after the 1960s, especially stressing the close contacts with Existentialism and its own production of philosophical dialogues. Subsequently, we look at the confluence between philosophical discourse and literary technique and at the personalization of philosophical discourse, which both constitute features of the genre, by showing how these derive from entirely different motivations in both cases, yet create unexpected convergences between them.