Camil Ungureanu
Biographic Data
| ID | 1136813 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Camil Ungureanu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Camil |
| FAMILY NAME | Ungureanu |
| SIGNATURE | UNGUREANU C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universitat Pompeu Fabra |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8419-8111 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A Philosophy of Crisis? Methodological and Critical Perspectives
Building on Miguel de Beistegui's Crisis: A Critique (2026, Bloomsbury Academic), this forum exchange debates the book's central arguments and their significance for contemporary social, political, and ecological thought. In contrast to philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, who question the relevance of the concept of crisis because of its entanglement with a meta-physical vision of temporality and history or scholars like Janet Roitman who decon…
Comedy, grotesque realism, and Marxist heterodoxy in Sembene’s early cinema
This article explores the use of comedic strategies in Ousmane Sembene’s early cinema as a form of heterodox Marxist resistance to authoritarian and neocolonial power. Focusing on the relatively understudied Borom Sarret (1963) and Niaye (1964), alongside Mandabi (1968), we draw on concepts such as Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” (1984)—understood as a “physiological” mode of comedy grounded in the disruption and inversion of symbolic order, power,…
The ‘mystical’ foundation of democratic society, mythmaking and truth in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford 1962)
In this article, I combine political philosophy and film to examine the problematic of the ‘mystical’ foundation of authority and democracy as represented in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . Ford’s filmic vision is interpretable as a parable of the passage from the state of nature to the modern republic and the deconstruction of American democratic progressivism. To analyse it, I proceed in two steps: first, I defend a middle-way critical Enlig…
The blurred lines between center-right and far-right: Reverse contamination” and the People’s Party’s environmentalism in Spain
Scholars have recently focused on the eco-nationalist “turn” of the far-right right parties in Europe and their obstruction of a substantive environmental agenda. However, we argue that the analysis of far-right eco-nationalism must be broadened to include certain established and impactful centre-right European parties. By focusing on the single case-study of the centre-right People’s Party (PP) in Spain, we argue that it has articulated Manichea…
Crisis as a Way of Life
Cristi Puiu and Vladimir Solovyov: Evil, Death, and Crisis in Malmkrog
The revolution born out of a swear”: Populist humour, carnivalization, and mass protest in Romania
This article aims to make two contributions. First, at a theoretical level, I briefly outline an embedded narrative approach to populism, which is critical of treating it solely as an ideology or ontologizing it. This alternative approach provides a better understanding of the connection between populism, humour, and insults. Second, at an empirical level, I argue that the 2018 mass protests against the political elite in Romania were unique in t…
Reconciliation without forgiveness? Reading Icíar Bollaín’s Maixabel (2021) with Hannah Arendt
The Spanish process of addressing Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’s (ETA) violent past has not followed a single transitional justice model or established a truth commission akin to those in South Africa, Latin America or Eastern and Central Europe. Instead, the case of Spain is marked by diverse legal, political and civic endeavours, sparking distinct discussions and artistic depictions regarding the dialectic between justice, forgiveness and reconciliati…
Truth is a “bird of prey”: Interpreting the postcolonial dialectic in Agustí Villaronga’s El ventre del mar (2021) with Frantz Fanon
In this article, I argue that Agustí Villaronga's 2021 film El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) explores a post-Fanonian version of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, and between the elite and the dispossessed in a limit situation. Villaronga's cinematic vision of this historical struggle is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncanny…
New municipalism and feminist leadership after the Indignados: The political aesthetics of truth in Ada Colau for Mayor (Faus 2016)
In this article, I reflect on the intersection between feminism and documentary art as truth-telling by focusing on Alcaldessa ( Ada Colau for Mayor), the most relevant documentary of the long-term collaboration between the film-maker Pau Faus and Ada Colau, the first female mayor of Barcelona (2015–2023). My argument is critical of a reductionist interpretation which portrays Alcaldessa as a personalist postfeminist documentary overly fixated on…
Far-right Ecology and Geopolitical Resentment at Europe’s Periphery: The Case of Romania’s “Conservative Revolution”
Building on insights from political geography and the social sciences, this paper illuminates the diversity of European far-right politics in general and far-right ecologism in particular by contextually examining a party at Europe’s margins—the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Based on a discursive thematic analysis, our objective is to show how AUR challenges existing theoretical accounts, predominantly tethered to the Western and Cen…
The green, green grass of the nation. A new far-right ecology in Spain
The political ecology of water memory: Contending narratives of past hydraulic infrastructures in Barcelona (2015-2021)
Secularist Humanism, Law and Religion in Ian McEwan's The Children Act
Ian McEwan's The Children Act focuses on a real-life conflict between religion and children's rights in a pluralist society. By drawing on Charles Taylor's work on religion in the "secular age", I argue that McEwan's narrative is ultimately built on secularist assumptions that devalue religious experience. McEwan's approach aims to build a bridge between literary imagination and scientific rationality: religion is, from this perspective, reducibl…
Splitting Urban Waters: The Politicisation of Water in Barcelona between Populism and Anti‐Populism
The current literature on remunicipalisation is focused either on theoretical concepts (e.g. right to the city, commons, return of the political) or on the “insurgent” actors involved in this process, overlooking the counter‐politicisation of the economic agents and the resulting struggles for power and legitimation. This paper examines, by means of an interpretative qualitative methodology and by critically engaging with Ernesto Laclau’s approac…
Jürgen Habermas
Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion: Between Public Reason and Pluralism
What is the place of religion in a pluralist democracy? The continuous presence of religion in the public sphere has raised anew normative and practical issues related to the role of religion in a democratic polity, generating spirited political debates in Western and non-Western contexts. Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion provides an advanced introduction to, and a critical appraisal of, the major schools of political thought with a…
A note from the East
Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam: From the death of God to counter-Enlightenment
Michel Houellebecq has, I argue, changed significantly his portrayal of Islam: in earlier novels, he advances a hostile view of it premised on the secularist belief in the death of God and the inexorable decline of monotheism ( Platform, 1998; The Elementary Particles, 1998; The Possibility of an Island, 2003). Houellebecq sets capitalism against Islam, and advances a vision of a godless ‘religion positive’ (Auguste Comte) better suited for capit…
Habermas on Religion and Democracy: Critical Perspectives
La prospettiva postsecolare di Habermas ha avuto un impatto significativo nel dare forma al dibattito circa il ruolo della religione nelle società plurali del nostro tempo. Tuttavia, mentre le democrazie sono attraversate da una nuova ondata di sfide interreligiose, sembra che la sua visione di cittadini religiosi e secolari che interagiscono discorsivamente in un processo di apprendimento e riconciliazione per via di traduzione e deliberazione d…
Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem
This paper is focused on the meaning of the artist's 'theatre of violence' and self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem (2011), a parable of power and resistance in the age of technology. To interpret 'the first great artwork of the 21th century' (as this resistance is called in the film), I critically draw on Jean Baudrillard's post-Maussian theory of spectacular terror and on Walter Benjamin's reflection on technology and the aes…
The Post-secular Debate: Introductory Remarks
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Legacy on 03/02/2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2015.1006928
Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism in Europe: Secularism and post-secularism
Religion in Contemporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation
Sacrifice, Violence and the Limits of Moral Representation in Haneke'scaché
This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden, 2005) as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” inte…
Derrida on Free Decision: Between Habermas’ Discursivism and Schmitt's Decisionism
The green, green grass of the nation. A new far-right ecology in Spain
Splitting Urban Waters: The Politicisation of Water in Barcelona between Populism and Anti‐Populism
The current literature on remunicipalisation is focused either on theoretical concepts (e.g. right to the city, commons, return of the political) or on the “insurgent” actors involved in this process, overlooking the counter‐politicisation of the economic agents and the resulting struggles for power and legitimation. This paper examines, by means of an interpretative qualitative methodology and by critically engaging with Ernesto Laclau’s approac…
Far-right Ecology and Geopolitical Resentment at Europe’s Periphery: The Case of Romania’s “Conservative Revolution”
Building on insights from political geography and the social sciences, this paper illuminates the diversity of European far-right politics in general and far-right ecologism in particular by contextually examining a party at Europe’s margins—the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Based on a discursive thematic analysis, our objective is to show how AUR challenges existing theoretical accounts, predominantly tethered to the Western and Cen…
The Contested Relation between Democracy and Religion: Towards a Dialogical Perspective
In recent years, various European and UN documents have been advancing the idea of `open, transparent and regular' dialogue between religion and democracy. Is this the naïve (or, at worst, hypocritical) rhetoric of the `Good European'? This article will discuss this issue starting from the debate between Habermas and Rawls on the role of religion in the public sphere. My approach presupposes a passage from deliberation to democratic rhetoric, the…
The blurred lines between center-right and far-right: Reverse contamination” and the People’s Party’s environmentalism in Spain
Scholars have recently focused on the eco-nationalist “turn” of the far-right right parties in Europe and their obstruction of a substantive environmental agenda. However, we argue that the analysis of far-right eco-nationalism must be broadened to include certain established and impactful centre-right European parties. By focusing on the single case-study of the centre-right People’s Party (PP) in Spain, we argue that it has articulated Manichea…
New municipalism and feminist leadership after the Indignados: The political aesthetics of truth in Ada Colau for Mayor (Faus 2016)
In this article, I reflect on the intersection between feminism and documentary art as truth-telling by focusing on Alcaldessa ( Ada Colau for Mayor), the most relevant documentary of the long-term collaboration between the film-maker Pau Faus and Ada Colau, the first female mayor of Barcelona (2015–2023). My argument is critical of a reductionist interpretation which portrays Alcaldessa as a personalist postfeminist documentary overly fixated on…
Derrida's Tense Bow
This essay explores both the appeal and the difficulties of Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.” Derrida’s broader philosophical project seeks to make explicit the paradoxes or aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In unveiling these aporias, Derrida pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion so as to make them hospitable to difference. However, I will argue that Derrida’s reduction of t…
Bourdieu and Derrida on Gift: Beyond “Double Truth” and Paradox
The revolution born out of a swear”: Populist humour, carnivalization, and mass protest in Romania
This article aims to make two contributions. First, at a theoretical level, I briefly outline an embedded narrative approach to populism, which is critical of treating it solely as an ideology or ontologizing it. This alternative approach provides a better understanding of the connection between populism, humour, and insults. Second, at an empirical level, I argue that the 2018 mass protests against the political elite in Romania were unique in t…
Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam: From the death of God to counter-Enlightenment
Michel Houellebecq has, I argue, changed significantly his portrayal of Islam: in earlier novels, he advances a hostile view of it premised on the secularist belief in the death of God and the inexorable decline of monotheism ( Platform, 1998; The Elementary Particles, 1998; The Possibility of an Island, 2003). Houellebecq sets capitalism against Islam, and advances a vision of a godless ‘religion positive’ (Auguste Comte) better suited for capit…
Habermas on Religion and Democracy: Critical Perspectives
La prospettiva postsecolare di Habermas ha avuto un impatto significativo nel dare forma al dibattito circa il ruolo della religione nelle società plurali del nostro tempo. Tuttavia, mentre le democrazie sono attraversate da una nuova ondata di sfide interreligiose, sembra che la sua visione di cittadini religiosi e secolari che interagiscono discorsivamente in un processo di apprendimento e riconciliazione per via di traduzione e deliberazione d…
Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem
This paper is focused on the meaning of the artist's 'theatre of violence' and self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem (2011), a parable of power and resistance in the age of technology. To interpret 'the first great artwork of the 21th century' (as this resistance is called in the film), I critically draw on Jean Baudrillard's post-Maussian theory of spectacular terror and on Walter Benjamin's reflection on technology and the aes…
The Post-secular Debate: Introductory Remarks
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Legacy on 03/02/2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2015.1006928
Sacrifice, Violence and the Limits of Moral Representation in Haneke'scaché
This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden, 2005) as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” inte…
Derrida on Free Decision: Between Habermas’ Discursivism and Schmitt's Decisionism
The Contested Relation between Democracy and Religion: Towards a Dialogical Perspective
In recent years, various European and UN documents have been advancing the idea of `open, transparent and regular' dialogue between religion and democracy. Is this the naïve (or, at worst, hypocritical) rhetoric of the `Good European'? This article will discuss this issue starting from the debate between Habermas and Rawls on the role of religion in the public sphere. My approach presupposes a passage from deliberation to democratic rhetoric, the…
Reason in the Labyrinth of Practice
Law, State and Religion in the New Europe: Debates and Dilemmas
El gusto por lo extremado: Un análisis crítico de Baudrillard y Derrida sobre el terror y el terrorismo
Baudrillard interpreta el «nuevo terrorismo» como un intercambio simbólico de regalo y contra-regalo: la muerte del terrorista es un contra-regalo irrefutable que rompe el círculo coercitivo de las relaciones sociales «impuestas» por el sistema global. A su vez, la concepción de Derrida tiene dos dimensiones, explicativa y normativa: en primer lugar, Derrida considera el 11-S como un síntoma multifacético de una crisis autoinmune que tiene aspect…
Bourdieu and Derrida on Gift: Beyond “Double Truth” and Paradox
Derrida's Tense Bow
This essay explores both the appeal and the difficulties of Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.” Derrida’s broader philosophical project seeks to make explicit the paradoxes or aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In unveiling these aporias, Derrida pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion so as to make them hospitable to difference. However, I will argue that Derrida’s reduction of t…
Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism in Europe: Secularism and post-secularism
Religion in Contemporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation
Sacrifice, Violence and the Limits of Moral Representation in Haneke'scaché
This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden, 2005) as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” inte…
Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem
This paper is focused on the meaning of the artist's 'theatre of violence' and self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker's The National Anthem (2011), a parable of power and resistance in the age of technology. To interpret 'the first great artwork of the 21th century' (as this resistance is called in the film), I critically draw on Jean Baudrillard's post-Maussian theory of spectacular terror and on Walter Benjamin's reflection on technology and the aes…
The Post-secular Debate: Introductory Remarks
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Legacy on 03/02/2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2015.1006928
Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion: Between Public Reason and Pluralism
What is the place of religion in a pluralist democracy? The continuous presence of religion in the public sphere has raised anew normative and practical issues related to the role of religion in a democratic polity, generating spirited political debates in Western and non-Western contexts. Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion provides an advanced introduction to, and a critical appraisal of, the major schools of political thought with a…
A note from the East
Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam: From the death of God to counter-Enlightenment
Michel Houellebecq has, I argue, changed significantly his portrayal of Islam: in earlier novels, he advances a hostile view of it premised on the secularist belief in the death of God and the inexorable decline of monotheism ( Platform, 1998; The Elementary Particles, 1998; The Possibility of an Island, 2003). Houellebecq sets capitalism against Islam, and advances a vision of a godless ‘religion positive’ (Auguste Comte) better suited for capit…
Habermas on Religion and Democracy: Critical Perspectives
La prospettiva postsecolare di Habermas ha avuto un impatto significativo nel dare forma al dibattito circa il ruolo della religione nelle società plurali del nostro tempo. Tuttavia, mentre le democrazie sono attraversate da una nuova ondata di sfide interreligiose, sembra che la sua visione di cittadini religiosi e secolari che interagiscono discorsivamente in un processo di apprendimento e riconciliazione per via di traduzione e deliberazione d…
Jürgen Habermas
Splitting Urban Waters: The Politicisation of Water in Barcelona between Populism and Anti‐Populism
The current literature on remunicipalisation is focused either on theoretical concepts (e.g. right to the city, commons, return of the political) or on the “insurgent” actors involved in this process, overlooking the counter‐politicisation of the economic agents and the resulting struggles for power and legitimation. This paper examines, by means of an interpretative qualitative methodology and by critically engaging with Ernesto Laclau’s approac…
Secularist Humanism, Law and Religion in Ian McEwan's The Children Act
Ian McEwan's The Children Act focuses on a real-life conflict between religion and children's rights in a pluralist society. By drawing on Charles Taylor's work on religion in the "secular age", I argue that McEwan's narrative is ultimately built on secularist assumptions that devalue religious experience. McEwan's approach aims to build a bridge between literary imagination and scientific rationality: religion is, from this perspective, reducibl…
The political ecology of water memory: Contending narratives of past hydraulic infrastructures in Barcelona (2015-2021)
The green, green grass of the nation. A new far-right ecology in Spain
The revolution born out of a swear”: Populist humour, carnivalization, and mass protest in Romania
This article aims to make two contributions. First, at a theoretical level, I briefly outline an embedded narrative approach to populism, which is critical of treating it solely as an ideology or ontologizing it. This alternative approach provides a better understanding of the connection between populism, humour, and insults. Second, at an empirical level, I argue that the 2018 mass protests against the political elite in Romania were unique in t…
Reconciliation without forgiveness? Reading Icíar Bollaín’s Maixabel (2021) with Hannah Arendt
The Spanish process of addressing Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’s (ETA) violent past has not followed a single transitional justice model or established a truth commission akin to those in South Africa, Latin America or Eastern and Central Europe. Instead, the case of Spain is marked by diverse legal, political and civic endeavours, sparking distinct discussions and artistic depictions regarding the dialectic between justice, forgiveness and reconciliati…
Truth is a “bird of prey”: Interpreting the postcolonial dialectic in Agustí Villaronga’s El ventre del mar (2021) with Frantz Fanon
In this article, I argue that Agustí Villaronga's 2021 film El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) explores a post-Fanonian version of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, and between the elite and the dispossessed in a limit situation. Villaronga's cinematic vision of this historical struggle is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncanny…
New municipalism and feminist leadership after the Indignados: The political aesthetics of truth in Ada Colau for Mayor (Faus 2016)
In this article, I reflect on the intersection between feminism and documentary art as truth-telling by focusing on Alcaldessa ( Ada Colau for Mayor), the most relevant documentary of the long-term collaboration between the film-maker Pau Faus and Ada Colau, the first female mayor of Barcelona (2015–2023). My argument is critical of a reductionist interpretation which portrays Alcaldessa as a personalist postfeminist documentary overly fixated on…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (9 works)