In this episode, we listen in on a conversation between Zoran Terzić, a writer, jazz pianist, and a visual artist, and Priyam Goswami Choudhury, a Ph.D. fellow in the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms researching publishing networks of poetry. Zoran and Priyam have known each other for 5 years now, and in August this year they met in Zoran’s apartment in Berlin to chat about his book, Idiocracy: Thinking and Acting in the Age of the Idiot, published in German in 2020 with the English translation forthcoming from Chicago University Press.
What we hear in this episode is part of a longer conversation which took place on that day, and of their ongoing discussions. We drop in as they talk about how Zoran came to publish a book on the figure of the idiot so timeously, and follow them as they move from different manifestations of the idiot whether in Dostoyevsky, Flaubert or on the internet, through to the reproduction of the self through phenomena such as memes or Tik Tok, and finally, as they come to talk about the direction of the internet and different figures of futurity.
You’ll also hear Zoran’s musical interludes, played by him on the melodica
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In Conversation with:
Dr. Zoran Terzić, Priyam Goswami Choudhury

Zoran Terzić is a writer, jazz pianist, and visual artist. Born in Banja Luka, he has studied sociology, piano, and communication design in Nürnberg and Wuppertal, and visual arts in New York. He has recently written a book about the figure of the idiot in the era of right-wing populism and the “post-truth-fake news” era titled Idiocracy: Denken und Handeln im Zeitalter des Idioten (Diaphanes Verlag, 2020). The English translation of the book titled Idiocracy: Thinking and Acting in the Age of the Idiot is forthcoming with University Chicago press.
Priyam Goswami Choudhury completed her bachelor’s at the University of Delhi in 2014 where she had spent three years reading – among other things – postcolonial writers, European modernists, postwar European writers, and 16th-18th century English writing. Following that, she spent three years at Freie Universität between 2015-18 where she started working on postcolonial Indian poetry for her Master’s thesis. In 2019, she joined the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms to research publishing networks of poetry.
Images:


References:
- Terzić, Zoran. Idiocracy: Denken und Handeln im Zeitalter des Idioten. Diaphanes Verlag, Zürich, 2020.
- Terzić, Zoran. Idiocracy: Thinking and Acting in the Age of the Idiot. The University of Chicago Press, May 2022. (Forthcoming)
- Dostayevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Wordsworth Editions, 1996.
- Jarry, Alfred, and Laurent Tiesset. Ubu roi. Bouquineo, 2011.
- Kundera, Milan. The unbearable lightness of being. Faber & Faber, 2020.