Political Narratosophy: From Theory of Narration to Politics of Imagination 1032449748, 9781032449746

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Political Narratosophy

Political Narratosophy offers a critically subversive rethinking of the political and philosophical significance of narrative, and why feminist epistemology and feminist social theory matters for the meaning of the “self” and narrativity. Through a re-​examination of the notions of democracy and emancipation, Senka Anastasova coins the term ‘political narratosophy’, a unique interpretation of the philosophy of narrative, identification, and disidentification, developed in conversation with philosophers Jacques Rancière, Nancy Fraser, and Paul Ricoeur. Utilizing the author’s own identity as a feminist political philosopher has lived in socialist Yugoslavia, post-​ Yugoslavia, and Macedonia (now North Macedonia), Anastasova explores the fluctuating and disappearing borders around which identity is situated in a country that no longer exists. She expertly reveals how the subject finds, makes, and unmakes itself through narrativity, politics, and imagination. Political Narratosophy is an important intervention in political philosophy and a welcome contribution to the historiography on female authors who lived through twentieth-​century communism and its aftermath. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of political philosophy, political theory, philosophy, feminist political philosophy, feminist epistemology, women’s studies, international relations, identity studies, (comparative) literary studies, and aesthetics studies. Senka Anastasova is a philosopher, university professor of philosophy and aesthetics, and one of the leading young generations of feminist political philosophers from postYugoslavia. With her international work in the fields of political philosophy, feminist political philosophy and epistemology, and philosophy of arts, she holds the position of full professor of philosophy at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje. Anastasova is a director and founder of the Research Centre of Social Sciences and Arts. She is an International Board Member of Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy and is an author (together with Bonnie Mann and Brooke Burns) of the new Hypatia feminist documentary Gathering Feminist Voices in Time of Covid-19 (2021). She is an associate scientific delegate at the National Institutes of Health in America, and a member of the American Philosophical Association and American Political Science Association. She lives between South East Europe and California.

Routledge Innovations in Political Theory

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Political Narratosophy

From Theory of Narration to Politics of Imagination Senka Anastasova

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Senka Anastasova The right of Senka Anastasova to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​44974-​6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​44977-​7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​37479-​4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003374794 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward the Epistemology of Political Narratosophy and Narratofemosophy. From Theory of Narration to Politics of Imagination. Ricoeur, Fraser, Rancière (Feminist Interpretations) On Political Narratosophy. From the Theory of Narration to the Politics of Imagination  7 On Political Narratofemosophy  17 1 Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress: Life as Narrative/ Narrative Identity Thinking Between Discourse Theories and Political Narratosophy Paul Ricoeur’s Political Hermeneutics  25 Dialectics of ‘Life as Narrative’/​Identity Thinking  27 Incisive Theory of Narrative Structures Beyond Structuralism. Politics of Reconfiguration  30 Political Economy of The Narrative  34 Rancière’s Political. From the Aesthetic Theory to The Political Emancipation  41 Epistemological Tension Between Neo-​Marxist Philosophy, Aesthetic Experience, Democratic Practices and Capital  54 Conclusion  57 2 Politics of Narrative Structures as Chiasmus between Fiction and History: Overlapping the Methodology, Interweaving of Fiction, Historiography, Metahistory Historization of Fiction  62 Fictionalization of History  65

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vi  Contents Modalities of the Imaginary Mediation: Reference in Fiction  70 Derrida’s Deconstruction of the Political  71 Philosophy and the Politics of Imagination (Aporias)  77 Metanarratosophy: From Discourse Theory to Normative Ambivalences  80 The Modalities of Aesthetic and Ideological Production  81 Metamemory. Politics of Memory Between Fiction and History  87 3 From Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices: In Women’s Writings from East Germany and Former / Post-Yugoslavia 93 Obscure Theory. Communist Life as Narrative /​Narrative Identity. Aesthetic and Ideological Productive Contradictions  93 From Plot to Politics  96 The Philosophy of the Referential Reality and Identity Thinking: Possessive and Disciplined Memory  99 Referential Reality –​Fiction: The Crises of Silence, The Larvae of Language  101 Ideological Mimicry  105 Identity Thinking as Counterpoint to Documentation  113 Longing for a Falsification. Compressing the Reality: Quasi-​History, Quasi-​Characters, Quasi-​Events, Quasi-​Plot  115 Post-​Yugoslavia Identification and Disidentification. Post-​Communist Theory of Discourses: Erosive Fiction –​Schism of Un-​identity  125 Theory of Political Discontinuity. A Disclosed Auto-​Bio-​Narrative  128 Theory. Praxis. History Against Itself  134 Schism: Dispersion and Spectralization  155 Memory and the Museum: Politicizing the Memory, the Matrix, the Monster, the Museum  156 Yugoslav Collective Memory and the Museum  162 Shadow, Christa, Bu  162 Conclusion: Political and the ‘Political’ Beyond the Narratosophy

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References Index

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Acknowledgments

This book draws from talks and working with so many beautiful people over the years, not all of whom I know by name. I am grateful for the support of the coordinators and participants in the Political Philosophy program at the Sorbonne University, Paris, France; for the challenging support of the dean and participants in my open public lectures at Faculty of Film, and School of Political Sciences, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; to the radical revolutionary thinkers, Californian academic workers; especially to the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of California, Berkley, USA, and to the anarchist’s archives library for recognizing of my current work in the feminist historical materialism philosophy and feminist political economy; this book makes sense as philosophical rethinking of the potentially transformative processes of progress in philosophy, theory and praxis in American society, also in the east and the west, specifically South–​Eastern Europe; for the generosity of philosophers, theorists and colleagues who have provided me with opportunities to present some concepts of the book in public lectures; to the Institute of Philosophy and Faculty of Dramatic Arts and Humanities, the Departments of Aesthetics and Political Philosophy, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, in Skopje, North Macedonia (Post-​Yugoslavia); to my students and doctoral postgraduates from the feminist political philosophy program; to the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia, for inviting me to present some core concepts at Collecting the Heritage: South-​East European Women Philosophers’ meeting (Post-​Yugoslavia); to the Berlin-​based group of women social scientists from the former East and West Germany; to Warsaw’s philosophers and artists’ invitation to join open lectures on Kieślowski and cinema in times of poli­tical regimes; to Prague-​based radical philosophers who invited me to discuss critical rereading’s of the political regimes and democracy at the Institute of Philosophy in the Czech Republic. Most of all I want to extend special thanks to the beautiful human without whom this book could not have come to life: Katy (Kathleen) R. Arnold, for her deeply impressive, inspirational work, her true support, and belief in me throughout the whole process; I am deeply thankful to James Martel for his deep

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viii  Acknowledgments understanding of this book in a way that amazes me, for his challenging subversive, provoking comments and beautiful support, for his true trust in the radical beats and importance of this book for political philosophy and beyond and from whom I got the strength to continue writing. Great thanks to Christian Sorace for his wonderfully in-​depth comments on the “transit zones”, the fluctuating, disappearing borders of my writing, Ira Allen for the powerful comments and support; Jacques Rancière for the aesthetics and political philosophy possibilities from the future and Nancy Fraser and Peg Birmingham whose philosophical books have made me to think about the new directions in feminist epistemology and feminist political philosophy; Despina Mouzaki, Anita Chari, M. L. Steen, Roland Bleiker, Veronica Gago, Ivan Ivica Djeparoski; to P. M. Schmidt with gratitude for everything , Wendy Ryder, Lisa Rider, to Banu Bargu’s Democratic Interpretations meeting at The Humanities Institute, the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, to my wonderful editor Natalija Mortensen, and to my Hypatia –​Journal for Feminist Philosophy Board and the International Board of feminist philosophers who trusted me to curate Hypatia’s feminist documentary (together with Bonnie Mann and Brooke Burns) in Cambridge Core production and to explore geo-​location vs post-​pandemic narratives in times of crises, while I was writing this book. My cat knows best what it looks like to know a woman philosopher and writer in her forties. Beyond these lines, I wish to leave here a written trace of special love to my special love.

Acknowledgments  ix

Figure 0.1 Photographs taken at University Campus Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Formal Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia). Source: Senka Anastasova, photographer

Introduction Toward the Epistemology of Political Narratosophy and Narratofemosophy. From Theory of Narration to Politics of Imagination. Ricoeur, Fraser, Rancière (Feminist Interpretations) I feel like I belong out of history I shall always stay out of history Wild history Outsider The importance to be an outsider Invisible daughter of a mammoth country That no longer exists Visible woman in another country With her voice in a new discipline Narrating via typing machine with Cyrillic alphabet Belonging where Only sounds of the typing letters left alive (Senka Anastasova, Diaries from Post-​Yugoslavia)

Political Narratosophy: From Theory of Narration to the Politics of Imagination explores the speculative connections between political philosophy, political theory, feminist epistemologies, discourse theories, feminist historical materialism, feminist politics, and female narration. I am looking for a discipline that will explore the ‘political’ concepts and form of narrativity (narrative non-​ identities, social identities) that is called in the west and lived in the east. This book considers methodological issues raised by the study of political philosophy in relation to reality, fiction, and society. It aims critically to consider, to put into question, the current epistemologies of the social sciences and humanities today. As a woman philosopher, on an intimate level of thinking, this book is the result of a longing for an epistemic discussion of narrativity, set in a political context that no longer exists, once after losing Yugoslavia as my born country, and secondly, when I left my current country for America. The end of socialism in South-​ Eastern Europe and the wild race to the current capitalism influenced by the west, only increased my need to leave the disintegration of one country, like leaving an auto-​immune disorder caused by the heavy weight of history, and to find a way for philosophical re-thinking around the concept of narrativity as such, to re-​feel DOI: 10.4324/9781003374794-1

2  Introduction my voice through the praxis of resistance, which overlapped with the need for freedom both, politically and societally. I am not an immigrant, not yet; I am a displaced woman philosopher, a subject of narration somewhere in-​between (east and west) continents. This book is about the epistemology of the narrativity that has no referent political context because it has already disappeared; or it is always-​already in transit; this book is about speculative philosophical epistemic values of the politics of ‘displaced narrative’, or politics of ‘narrative-in-motion’, Political Narratosophy explores the concept of the ‘political’ in the ‘narrative – in – progress’ (which has not yet happened), bounded to the subject of narration and the dynamics of a society that has gone; that’s why the narrative –​in –​progress is always stretched between two dimensions: aesthetic sense and social sense (political, emancipatory, materialist structures in society). Chapter 1 goes back to the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1903–​2005), an interpretation of the concept of narrative, processes of narration, and the subject of narration related to the concept of ‘political’ in narrative artwork. The possibilities of the conceptual speculative dimensions opens a discussion about the question of what ‘political’ means in narratosophy through the work of Nancy Fraser and Jacques Rancière. Narratology itself can no longer answer the political questions related to narrativity. The ‘political’ question is not limited to aesthetic structures of artistic (narrative) expressions, nor how structures and genres are constructed. Many instances are rooted in the criticism of the theory of narration, where some norming is defensible while others are not; many of the instances are discussed as political mechanisms which refer to the dislocation of the ‘text’ towards its (political, sociological, cultural) context. This book goes beyond narratology as a discipline, beyond structuralism; it goes beyond exploring the rigid coordinates of the empirical reality, entering the terrain of critiques of the politics of imagination, as a radical space of re-​imagining the imaginary that exists between ‘lived narrative’, ‘narrative turn’, (non)-​identity politics and society. There is a need for a discipline that requires new directions of the processes of narration related to political and socially engaged approaches, based on feminist political interpretations of the narrative processes. To abolish narratology and to build a new discipline from the ashes. I called this invention of the new usage of thought and language that disrupts structuralism a political narratosophy. Such a paradigm raises a series of feminist methodological–​epistemological premises that deal with contemporary questions in feminist historical materialism. At the beginning of the twenty-​first century, theoretical explanations of the ‘life as narrative’ and ‘identities’ in political theory studies are accomplished in a semantic field, later in intersectionality, and intersectional feminist political philosophy, through critical methodology, starting with Hegel’s discussion on identity and positioning the composition of ‘differences’ as a condition for identification, and politics of reconfiguration. This articulates the psychoanalytical

Introduction  3 Lacanian –​as current as Hegel’s counter-​direction concept –​through which identity becomes a cryptogram, one that dialectically splits the subject of narration between the conscious and the unconscious to grasp the world philosophically. To open the vision for the political narratosophy through the work of the three leading philosophers of this century, feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser, Jacques Rancière, and Paul Ricoeur (three of the most insightful thinkers of these days) that give a distinct base for a radically new epistemic discussion to mix contradictory fundamentally antagonistic epistemes of the hegemony in the social fields and identity politics thinking.1 I have never read these three thinkers in their correlation before, I chose them to discuss in this book since all of them go beyond the discourse theory, in a subversive way, all of them are challenging for the feminist interpretations of their views, all of them are radical and innovative in taking into account the complex historical processes of transformation in society that reflect their epistemic values; concepts on (non) identities in this work are not bounded to exploring gender, but to materialistic set of narrativity, to feminist political economy of thought, economy of imagination, aesthetics and politics, that gave me a sphere to open the further questions for human actions for better tomorrow, and where does the ‘political’ in philosophy of narrativity belong today? Three of these thinkers give me a coherent direction to develop a discipline-​spanning and genre defying exploration of the study of political philosophy, feminist epistemology, and narratology. Nancy Fraser’s (1947–​) concept of ‘politics’ (‘feminist politics of interpretation’) opens different epistemology related to representation, equalities, and social justice. Chapter 1 shows that political narratosophy integrates theories of the discourse based on the emancipatory politics and the political economy of the narrative as well, where the disruption of the narrative of the real happens in the very moment of opening of the text toward the political and historical constellation and political practices. Fraser does not speak directly on questions of narrative; by precisely distinguishing semantics from social theory, I develop a position of investigation based on Fraser’s work by sensing the next question –​ is ‘another’ narratology possible? What does it mean? In an epistemological sense, does one need an alternative academic discipline to standard a new way of thinking about the connections between democracy, political philosophy, social philosophy, social theories, and discourse theories that could epistemologically relate to feminist studies, cultural studies, literary studies? Does one need a deeper discussion about feminist epistemology and new constellations of political philosophy and social theory of discourses against capitalism today, a talk about the theory of narration, sensitive to social inequalities, postcolonial critique, migration, women’s studies, energetic crisis, displacement studies, and the context? This book suggests a discussion of a new paradigm for theorists and political philosophers. One which could be more focused on political (and cultural) tensions and the subsequent transformations that have been integral to every phase of feminism and narratology, including dissent cultures, integral to

4  Introduction today’s new social movements and protest movements against neoliberalism. I argue that feminist (political) narratology lacks the tools to explore the tensions between structuralism, discourse, and Marxist philosophy not to mention the differences between cultural politics and social politics, and the politics of difference from the politics of equality, and feminist historical materialism. The method political narratosophy is concerned not only with potential narrative structures, subjectivities, and discourses but also with the critique of capitalism, hegemony in society, and postcolonial critique which reflects on how the existing subject of narration in the artistic text is related to context. This is an open philosophical discussion for the condition of the philosophy of democratic politics which considers questions of aesthetics and freedom of acting by a subject of narration. The democratic moment of the aesthetic judgment in the artistic text is based on the absence of rules which determine the politics of imagination. This method lends itself to historical contextualization and social-​political complexities and structures. The heart tissue of this book instigates the theoretical distinctions and political–​philosophical thinking between the process of narration, narrative fiction, and the processing of the politics of the artistic text toward social theory.2 I am exploring not only the semantic level, or the rhetoric of narrative related to a political (Le Politique), I am not just questioning Ricoeur’s epistemological standpoints on narratological practices observed through the stages of mimesis, but I am also exploring Rancière’s thinking of how the material concepts of economic subordination are related to building the politics of the imaginary and how political life is an activity of constant articulation and disarticulation of the sensible. Jacques Rancière’s (1940–​) concept of aesthetics and politics is not a political judgment where usually the methods of interpretation for understanding the meaning of aesthetic works, and hermeneutic system for the political interpretation of the artistic objects could be stuck. Rancière’s position argues the construction of the sensible, a world to which the artwork/​narrative belongs, or which a political act makes possible. Although Rancière’s notion of dissensual politics can be a site of opening up, democratizing narratives, and contesting hegemony (the police logic of institutions and common sense), Rancière also seems to be thinking in the direction of the “time after” narratives, as he puts it, and in the event of the materiality of narrativity. Rancière is standing up to judgment’s authority not just to the authority of judgments. This imposes the need to activate the mechanisms for analysis of the ‘life as narrative’ / ‘narrative identity’ argued in the more streamlined narratological practices through which it is observed as a politics of narratological mechanism that builds, shapes, and is shaped by the individual and the collective through the sense of a ‘political’ and injustice. Many of the contradictory premises are argued here. The concept of ‘life as narrative’ not only refers to the identity of the narrative (the discourse, the product, the narrated story, the story) but also to the social identities

Introduction  5 as this relates to the contextual political agenda and changes in the very context of today. Having surveyed some of the foundational issues arising here, one might then wonder whether the political narratosophy as a discipline genuinely constitutes a distinct sub direction of philosophy of the narrative and the politics of social identities. The response of the narratological exchange and communicative act between the reader and the (artistic) text is expressed when it comes to the deconstruction of ‘life as narrative’ / ‘narrative identity’ /​social identities thinking accomplished through the interpretation of narration and critique of the politics of imagination. Chapter 2 opens the narrative structures and explores the blurred dimensions between history and fiction where the subject finds, makes, and unmakes itself. I elaborate here the concept of ‘life as narrative’ (‘narrative identity’ / ‘social identities’) in correlation to contemporary concepts of ‘history’, ‘historiography’, ‘historical reality’, ‘philosophy’, ‘politics’, ‘fiction’, ‘deconstruction’, ‘imaginary practices’, ‘real’, ‘artwork’ (Dean, Colebrook, Foucault, White, LaCapra, Derrida, de Certeau). I discuss dialectical terms –​ ‘fracture’, ‘deflection’, ‘crossing-over’, ‘mediation’ –​of the narration from an artistic text towards the complex political, aesthetical, culturological processes and social changes imposed in specific (historical/​ political) time. The discussion in this section makes the case for thinking the conceptualization of the text is in ‘transit’ between itself and a context in which different democratic and critical fusions can erupt. This part is about political narratosophy as a method focused on the overlap between fiction, history, and historiography and imaginary mediation. As political philosophers and political theorists, one should consider how these models of thinking are involved with epistemology and methodology from the disciplinary fields. Chapter 3 explores political narratosophy in relation to literary-​ artistic genres: biography, autotheory, autobiography, autofiction, and the reflections of women authors on history. This is discussed alongside the intentions in the artistic/​literary work, which is reconstructed and deconstructed in diverse ways during critical readings at different periods (regimes) of political and historical times. Critical methods (of staying beyond the new historicism) are activated in the epistemic feminist interpretations of the writings of one of some of the most controversial women authors from the period of communism and post-​ communism: Christa Wolf and Dubravka Ugrešić. More specifically, this part suggests how political narratosophy should integrate the method of ‘fragmented historiography’ in the interpretation of the ‘life as narrative’, or ‘narrative identity’ / ‘non-identities’ / ‘social identities’ in the works of two women authors –​seen as discursive practices against the rigid hermeneutical principles. The new historicism method provides further readings of writing (women’s) history as a division between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ and points to the contingency of literature and history. This part of the book refers to analyses of the work of the two women authors and their inclination to develop feminist politics beyond structuralism.

6  Introduction Christa Wolf comes from the German Democratic Republic; she lives and writes under the period of communism, Dubravka Ugrešić comes from Yugoslavia; she lives and writes during the period of Ex-​Yugoslavia and Post-​Yugoslavia. I decided to examine how their work examines life in and exile from societies that no longer exist (GDR and Yugoslavia). This fluctuation in the disappearing borders around which identity is situated and politics is imagined challenges political thought and communist/​post-​communist studies, women’s studies, and identity studies. I examine the fluctuation of the disappearing borders around which identity is situated and politics is imagined. The analysis of the work of these two female authors is not limited solely to their fictional opus, but will also focus on their essayistic, non-​fictional, documentary work. In this way, the most important directions in the specifics of their discourse connected to the identity of the narrating subject, both inside the text and outside of it, will be comparatively encompassed. Some achieved questions are: how does political narratosophy as a discipline deal with the destabilization, breaking, erasing of the difference between the literary and non-​literary text overflowing of fiction into an essay and vice-​versa, and the transgression from documentary autobiography into fictional autobiography? How does women’s writing oscillate between identification and disidentification, especially when one writes autobiographically? How is that related not only to auto-​verification, but also to the challenges with processes of disidentification, rupture and fragmentation, and the erasing of identities and non-​ identities? Here one has come a long way from the standard possible semantics and theory of narration to a social-​formative approach (commended to the communist and post-​communist historical period of time towards which both women authors have a social, political and critical approach in their artistic and documentary work and art intervention in related history).3 The aim of this section is to evaluate a feminist political thought, through narration, to legitimize or delegitimize recognizing and documenting the philosophical, social, historical, and cultural constraints under which the subjects of narration currently live. And yet, one might wonder whether the resources from women writers who deal with the history of the reception of the artwork may be enough when theorizing about the political aspects of narratosophy and mechanisms under which political narration more generally functions. Following the theory of reception and feminist interpretations of the specific mechanisms for memorizing the past, this part suggests that the ‘politics of memory’ (Lachmann, Arendt) is the core political mechanism in the narrative turn of feminist interpretative (anti-​) hermeneutical approach in reading and building history and historiography. I more broadly explore why the main concept, which remains constant through all chapters of this book, is political. Given that the ‘political’ is easily subverted to narrative and social identities, is there any value to codification norms for political narratosophy as a method? Some of the purposes of this book are: to determine the actions, techniques, and means through which the building of the

Introduction  7 political concept of ‘life as narrative’ / ‘narrative identity’ / ‘social identities’ is articulated to given categories and reference points; to specify the criteria; to explore the key definitions in narratosophy in correlation with the political philosophy and aesthetics, when building artistic and non-​artistic artwork (artistic text) in specific social formations; to point out the radical contradiction of the contemporary state of the ‘life as narrative’ / ‘narrative identity’ / ‘social identities’ and its elasticity in the text and the political and cultural context –​a thesis that gives this study a current contemporary framework. I conclude this book by re-​examining narration as a procedure in co-​relation with the theory and philosophy of history related to the artwork. Although the political narratosophy is not only about connections with the Real and contextual society, I discuss how the transgression of narration into politics of meta-​ narration happens (‘meta’ rooted in materialism). Within this, some current issues are being raised: what is lost, and what is gained during this transgression of (artistic and documentary) discourses into the political context and vice-​ versa? Where is the borderline between narration, identity, fiction, imaginary, and ‘Real’, reality, social identities, intersectional identities, and artwork? Is the power of political representation related to economic practices too? Is the shifting of text towards context also shifting of the identity/​non-​identity of the subject of narration at political, economic, geo-​location, and cultural levels? Is the narrating subject confirmed solely through narration and fixation in the text? Does the contextualization of the artistic narrative signify the abandonment of the sphere of fiction? What is the investment of the methods of political narratosophy in the studying of the narrative and discourse theory? Given these directions, what remains for the political narratosophy today? On Political Narratosophy. From the Theory of Narration to the Politics of Imagination If the theory of narration is concerned with the very concept of deixis, a linguistic structure whicht produces subjectivity (not references), then narratology –​ as science for the text, and narrator’s subjectivity is related only to the language as its essence. First, I open a discussion about political philosophy (La Philosophie politique) and narratology, a commonsense relationship that goes beyond narratology, which is better understood as a set of tools to express one’s interpretive reaction to the narrative. The political philosophy related to narratology opens up the space for new epistemological discussion, a new way of thinking about political narratosophy that is focused on the question of what ‘political’ in narratives refer to as: (1) factual materials; (2) narratives as texts in manner of (documentary, artistic) forms of narratives; and (3) narratives as specific acts of storytelling, happening in the very political and historical context of resistance. What does the political mean in this constellation? Thinking and elaborating on the new given method I called political narratosophy comes after years of

8  Introduction working on authors Jacques Rancière and Nancy Fraser and their understanding (critique) of political philosophy. I argue that narratology is not enough to explain some core concepts such as ‘narrative identities’ / ‘social identities’; that is why there is a need for speculative dimensions (not just focused on the representation) that would give political voices and democratic accountability to the (artistic) text and its power to connect the void between narratology, political theory, and politicized cultural studies today. I argue political narratosophy by using these three concepts: policy, emancipation, and the political. The first term is related to governing, and it entails creating community consent, which relies on the distribution and hierarchy of places and functions, something that I relate to the process of creating policy. The second process is that of equality. This consists of a set of practices guided by the supposition that everyone is equal and by the attempt to verify this supposition. The naming of this set of practices is called emancipation. I insist first on the political narratosophy to bring into focus the encounter between two processes of policy and equality, where the ‘political’ is happening as a verification of equality. The third term is related to politics as an interplay between all these terms. There is a difference between policy, politics, and the political. In political narratosophy as a system of thinking, the political subject of narration is not just a generator of ideas, but it is an active operator of a particular dispositif of subjectivation through which politics comes into existence in the narrative. But beyond this, a second point is also worth considering: the relationship of contextual poli­ tical justice/​injustices reflected in symbolic meaning in the text, narrative, and society. Political narratosophy treats the concept of political representation not at the level of representation, but in that tiny space (in-​between) of the opening of the text to the context, so these dynamics have their ground at the intersection of the symbolic framing and radical democratic approach which has an emancipatory play between text and society (historical materialism). I refer to the effects of the political narratosophy approach which shows one needs a further social science about ‘opened narrative structures’, a science concerned with the potentially transformative structures of the narrative and dynamics of society. Importantly, this is not a book on narrative. In the middle of the political narratosophy concerns the question of the politics of identity/​ non-​identity/​ social identities/​ intersectional identities remains. Political narratosophy is concerned not only with the narrative constitution of the selves and identities in text, but also with their co-​relations to social realities and social differentiation that are rooted in the political–​economic structures of society. Political narratosophy is opened for something that in feminist epistemologies is called space –​in –​between, narratives –​in –​progress, narratives –​in –​transit, sensitive to ‘injures of class’ (Fraser), to post-​colonial critique, to ‘vulnerable’ narratives, ‘invisible’, ‘exploited’, ‘unsayable’, ‘oppressed’, ‘precarious’ narratives, with essential categories for building political and cultural structures from the below. These focus on social feminism, which, through fiction, could

Introduction  9 fight against exploitation and injustice in capitalism by giving space to the deliberation of narrative (artistic text/​ documentary text, subject of narration) and social democracy stabilization in society. Political narratosophy is concerned with neglected issues related to the subject of narration. It is not just focused on the semantic concepts but on the philosophical, political, social, and contextual orientation of interpretation and reflection on the transformation of narrative and its redistribution in society articulating social problems. I argue that the opposition between the political and the social stays in the core beats of the philosophical repression of politics. The tense relationship between philosophy and politics suggests the ‘end of politics’ in postmodern societies and the political theme of the ‘return of politics’ originates an initial act to bring about the forgetting of politics itself. Consensus is the ‘end of politics’, which is simply a return to the non-​existence of politics (an activity that is always in the moment). Political narratosophy includes the expressions ‘return of politics’ and ‘end of politics’ accumulated into two symmetrical interpretations of the narrative –​in –​ progress. Return to the ‘political’ means that the social is by no means a particular sphere of existence but instead a disputed object of politics. Return to the ‘politics’ means that there is a specific place for politics in the narrative which, from the stances of the political philosophy, should be identified with the political practices of the society’s activities through identification of the narrative and social identities; the political community with the social body. Symmetrically, ‘the end of politics’ points out the existence of a ‘social’ in which politics is no longer necessary. Throughout the book I argue that political narratosophy is concerned not just with recognition –​ often assumed in identity politics –​ but with redistribution too, promoting narrative forms of this kind entering the dynamics of the context and critique of political economy in a terrain where potentially transformative processes are always plural. First, the ‘narrative’ in this book is not understood in the classy narratological sense (as it is in Mieke Bal’s Narratology), which covers mainly a positivistic approach that is inherent in structuralist thought. Before I explain what poli­ tical narratosophy is, I want to set out what political philosophy is not. Political narratosophy is not narratology. Political narratosophy is not filling the gap within the Genettian paradigm of structuralist narratology, not exploring diegesis or mimesis (Plato). Political narratosophy is not an interdisciplinary narrative study or critique to categories such as ‘point of view’. It goes further, beyond context-​dependent categories and historical variables. I am leaving the stances of narratology as a discipline since discourse theory is not enough. Arging a new approach related to the need for the political thinking about the narrative (not just a positivist way) rejects the classy discipline of narratology that Bal sets out in her work. Bal’s Narratology, Theory of Narrative shows that narratology as a discipline is not enough. Having rejected the positivistic level of the description of the narrative system in narrative text, I am leaving the uneasiness of Bal’s feeling

10  Introduction about the theory of the interpretative description of the narrative text with the aim of articulating the political philosophical procession of the narrative through the political theory. Bal did some auto-​revisions of her positivistic approach (in the revised editions of the Narratology), but she is not so distinctive regarding the political theory, and she relativizes the gap of the approach in her explanation that there is a need for the ‘democratic’ use of a theory. Political narratosophy articulates the democratic and political aspects of the narrative. For example, the political narratosophy leaves behind the structuralist models of Saussurean linguistics, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Lacan and integrates the theory of discourses as a historically specific, socially situated, signifying practice. The political narratosophy as a discipline can be accounted for by making a distinction between being a political narrative and possessing political narrativity. In arguing this, I am going beyond the structuralist model of communications, and am adopting the pragmatic model (Nancy Fraser) which has the capacity for a historical contextualization and allows it to thematize contemporary social change (against capitalism). Political narratosophy is understood by different interpretations of the ‘narrative – in – progress’ within different studies in social science and humanities. Within literary studies, the narrative turn relates to the structuralist approach and descriptive rhetoric strategies of text, story, fabula. In historiography, the turn is related to the narrative theory of representing reality. In philosophical studies, political theory, cultural studies, feminist studies, social studies, and humanities (from the early 1980s) the approach is anti-​positivist, and post-​structuralistic with a focus on inquiry and critique of the discourse theory. For these reasons, the narrative text differs from one another even if the related story is the same (text is separate from the story, and text in this book refers to what I call ‘narrative – in – progress’, i.e., the text beyond structuredness of narratives, beyond the linguistic nature of it, that is an ‘artifact’). Political narratosophy proves the systematic need for concept such as ‘aesthetic extension’ towards the democratic dynamics of society. I set (not just) the narrative, but the politics of narrative, not just in the base of the superstructure but in its reconfigurative reproduction of the text toward the context (as a reflection of the specific political regime). The politics of narrative structures is an open space in which to rethink aesthetic distribution and disarticulation, vacuums, and the effects that come from the concrete regime in society. The theory of narration is considered to immanent aspects of artistic works, that means aspects that treats the rules of the artistic work itself, the philosophy of arts and narration, such as building subjectivity, a category that connects both the reader and the character/​ narrator/​ subject of narration. Political narratosophy is considered within a specific political context which reflects and constitutes narrative –​ in –​ progress and narrative identities beyond linguistic units (such as words and sentences), set in the reflected context of the democratic society.

Introduction  11 Nancy Fraser stays in the roots of the premises I developed for the political narratosophy in correlation to Paul Ricoeur’s work on the concept of ‘life as narrative’ and the theory of narration, where immanent issues of the artistic work relate to the dynamics structure of the society. This is arguably one of the most important questions on the subjectivity, social subjectivity, ‘personal’ questions related to ‘collective’ understanding of social justice related to narrative –​ in –​ progress (from text toward the context). In this sense, the political narratosophy as a method itself extends beyond identity politics and can be defined through the dynamics of social movements against capitalism, feminist political philosophical anti-​hierarchical class-​conscious (anti-​regime) struggles for a better life in the future. What I called ‘narrative – in – progress’ in this book, Nancy Fraser might call a ‘left-wing’ narrative. The concept of ‘narrative – in – progress’ deals with leaving the linguistic structuralist approach of the interpretation of the discourse theory and opens the text towards the struggle for emancipation and social equality in a context, based on materialistic grounds. Much of the first part of the book consists of a correlative approach to the theory of Nancy Fraser and Paul Ricoeur, from which I obtain the theoretical devices that allow me to situate a discourse on politics, ‘political’ in narratology related to history and the aesthetics of resistance, understanding how political representation works against this very representation, or what the aesthetic standard of evaluation means today through the work of Jacques Rancière.4 The political thinking of narratosophy is about extended aesthetic experiences and forcing the interruption of the narrative and subject of narration somewhere –​ always –​ already –​ between –​ fiction and history. Narratosophy happens there. I examine this using two main objectives. The first comes from the discussion on Paul Ricoeur’s concept ‘the semantics of action’, examining the strong connection between narrative, activity, history, process, and action in society. Ricoeur’s response to a text is constitutive of feminist interpretations of the social imaginary related to (narrative) identities in this book. Feminist interpretations of Ricoeur’s subject of narration show that this subject is embodied, vulnerable, fragile, this subject goes –​through –​narration –​ and political thinking, where the subject belongs, with the aim of achieving justice in society. Ricoeur’s model for developing the subject of narration toward –​ society –​ and action –​ is clear enough to grasp the justice claims and social changes in society which is part of the emancipation imaginary, or a politics of imagination derived in artistic text. Ricoeur is not a feminist philosopher, but his philosophy is of use to my feminist political narratosophy and feminist concerns and theories today about subjectivity because he gives space to sensing the personal experience of narration, presenting it as the concept of building ‘life as narrative’ and extended aspects of narrative identity. The second objective is prescriptive: political thoughts related to the critique of capitalism are important for the further development of aesthetic criticism for political critique, political actions that are the subject of narration and political theory, not just in the symbolic value of meaning but concerning its

12  Introduction actions. It is about a new constellation in the grammar of political claims about the theory of narration that is related to the aesthetic and political dimensions of the artistic text and democratic life. These two premises constitute the theory that this book elaborates. The practices of the political narratosophy can never be satisfied just by the rules for structuring the narrative and how it works. The theory of narration seen through the political narratosophy is oriented not only to aesthetics but also to the politics of praxis; it has material segments of existence but also segments of experience in the political context.5 First, addressing the question of the political narratosophy as a possible relation of formalist aesthetics vis-​à-​vis a radical democratic political imagery is a question of the narrative identity /​ non-​identity /​ social identities in the democracy against capitalism today. How does the concept ‘politics of narrative – in – progress’ react to the sensing of the political regimes (communist, socialist) and democracy as reforming aesthetic and political practices? The politics of narrative –​in –​progress is an autonomous terrain from the economic sphere. It is a response to the critique of political economy. What is ‘political’ in the narrative is a question that is focused on opening the text to the critical context and public sphere, to the practices of democracy and to radical democracy understood in the works of today’s radical democratic theorists (Jodi Dean, Jacques Rancière, Jean-​Luc Nancy, James Martel, Étienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and new generation of theorists Anita Chari, Banu Bargu, Ira Allen, Jason Frank), who have positioned themselves by debating some of the core aspects of the politics of aesthetics, political philosophy, Marxism and the critique of the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser. My discussion about the politics of narrative is about the reinterpretation of the dialectical relationship of the concept of subjectivity as a part of the public political sphere but given through narration and the concept of ‘life as narrative’. This displacement of radical democracy opens the terrain of separation of the ‘political’ concept from traditional Marxism and economics, so the concept of the politics of narrative is understood in normative and emancipatory relation of discourses. Politics of narrative –​in –​progress is defined as a relationship between democracy, history, contingency, disruption, conflict, and dissensus in society or, as a reflection in the narrative through building subjectivity of the narrator in discourse opened to the dynamic structure of the context. The ‘political’ is therefore not autonomous terrain when relating the subject of narration, in the sense of being sovereign, but it is autonomous in its heterogeneity to extant social forms. Political Narratosophy is concerned with the political actions of subjects of narration as a way of provoking a theory of narration that always already stays at the edge of fiction and reality. The narrative paradigms are never isolated in the structures of texts but are sensitive to segments of democracy from the aesthetic expressions of political thought and social justice related to the system of social inequalities that is the very essence of the emancipation and the future of the subject of narration and interpretation of the politics of narrative.

Introduction  13 Understanding contemporary political power (globally), at the level of contextual political theory today (after the financial crisis in 2008, after Covid-​19 global healthcare inequalities, climate crisis, energy crises, war, and voices raised against global capitalism), helps to explain there are specific reactions of the narrative –​ in –​ progress, and narrative (non-​) identities, to the specific context: to the non-​regulated economy, to social suffering and political exclusion, to cultural forms, domination, inequalities. Political narratosophy helps us to understand these connections more deeply. Hence, thinking about the ‘political’ issues in the theory of narration stays on the edge, somewhere between philosophy, aesthetics, narration and politics, where the subject of narration is always already flexible within the discipline through thinking and building the philosophy of history and autotheory. The links between these seemingly different methodological areas, as well as the ways in which they overlap and transform their discourse, makes this a perfect issue for political narratosophy whose aim is an imaginative response to the concept of ‘the political’. Even more significantly, if narratology privileges narrative at the expense of the political, the aim of the political narratosophy, political philosophers, and theorists is to expose the political even where it appears to be absent. Political narratosophy should understand the connection between ‘narrative’ and ‘political’ in a more complex way than the political theory; it must explore how and why political processes and narrative identities are connected. The political narratosophy is not related only to the structure of the text but intends to set methodology for different fields of social studies and humanities, to answer radical questions of its time, beginning with the philosophy of social sciences, political philosophy, political theory, literary theory and the history of cultural theory. The paradigm of the political narratosophy’s discussion is about the critical re-​examination of the social, political, and historical related to the concept of redistribution of the sensible in the text, democracy and the democratic turn of the narrative (from the structure of the text to the political context). Political narratosophy is oriented towards the essence of politics by interrupting the distribution of the sensible by supplementing it. Politics here comes to embody the ‘political’ as such. The political narratosophy is opened towards an understanding of aesthetic sensations and democratic politics in its most formal terms where the narration tends to be opened. I am interested in the concept of ‘philosophical’ in the political, in a sense of Nancy Fraser’s discussion about subliming the desire for la politique is, in an interrogation of le politique. In that sense, I understand the concept of the political related to the philosophy of narration as a very close concept to Jacques Rancière’s political understanding of democracy too, that can neither be reduced to the representative institutions of liberal democracy nor to the conditions that are produced by economic order, but it is somewhere in-​between. That is the macro-​plan, the politics of narrative –​in –​progress can neither be legitimated by representation nor by the dynamic structure of the society but stays somewhere –​in –​between.

14  Introduction Jodi Dean’s reading of Rancière in her book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is a clear lightening of the critique of democracy and politics related to the artistic text. For Rancière –​Dean says –​democracy and politics are interchangeable, Rancière argues that the identification between democracy and the legitimate state is used to produce a regime of the community’s identity as itself, to make politics evaporate under a concept of law that identifies it with the spirit of the community.6 Dean is right when she notes that Rancière emphasizes the convergence between presumptions of democracy and legitimacy, that is correct, but he is wrong to imply the existence of a string of identifying moves which turn politics into law and law into a unified community. Based on Jodi Dean’s work I develop a further flow of the political narratosophy, which should take its legitimization from the dynamics of society, not from the text, with a law that there is a political conflict (of power and equality) which undermines even the fiction of community. It is about concerns related to the end of ideology and the rise of consensus politics. If this is true, then seeking more democracy in society provides another perspective on building ‘politics of narrative – in – progress’, with more ‘freedom’ and a ‘democratic’ voice on the subject of narration, as a radical democratic response. Rancière, in On the Shores of Politics, offers a concept of the end of ideology and the triumph of democracy (a triumph he criticized), so he identifies democracy with a kind of dissensual politics and argues that democratic politics occurs in direct antagonism with the police (understood in the most general sense of police/​politics that of French classicism, mostly notably studied by Foucault), it is a kind of habitat of postmodern subjectivity and it is not itself political, it stays out of politics, or better, politics brings to de-​politicization, so politics is the art of suppressing the political. In Rancière’s terms, the concept of ‘politics’ does not answer the question about the mix of neoliberalism and democracy related to the narratosophy, but refers instead to the radical revolutionary emancipatory politics with acts and practices that deploy the principles of equality (L’Égalité) I am interested in, related to the analysis of an artistic text (fiction/​autotheory/​autofiction), thereby undoing or disrupting the ordered and existing political structures and functions of the police. This is important for political narratosophy thinkers, because it makes a difference to the concept of the essence of ‘politics’ as dissensus, as a permanent conflict of discourses, lives, and worlds; however it is more connected to a gap in the sensible itself, and conception of the state as an essential police state, redefined as a set of practices that use power to depoliticize, to exclude that dissension (dissensus), which constitutes politics. In this sense, politics refers to the changing of poetics of ‘reactive narrative’ (narrative –​ in –​progress) related to existing political regimes, institutions, and structures, creating dissensual ruptures, within the existing distribution of the sensible. Hence, what makes an action political is not an object or the place where it is carried out, but solely its form, the form in which the confirmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute. Anita Chari in The Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism,

Introduction  15 Reification, Critique gives a clear reading of Rancière’s political action related to conditions of politics that are neither social nor institutional nor economic. If I take this as a future ground for a possible political narratosophy’s interest, then the new direction of the ‘political’ happens when the political transformations happen through a transformation of the aesthetic distribution of sensibility and perception in society. This means that political transformations do not happen primarily at the level of political institutions, but somewhere else. The political narratosophy explores that transit zone of narrativity where the political transformations happen while the narrative is in progress, from the semantics of the text to the social context. Using the political narratosophy method, I propose leaving the structuralist and poststructuralist discussion of the narrative and extending aesthetic sensibilities into an understanding of political thoughts and history in the dynamics of society.7 Emancipation here comes as a practice of materialization (without materialization), not just as a concept, but as ‘becoming with’, as giving space and voice to those excluded from the hierarchies of knowledge in the organization of societies; through narrative –​in –​progress, it comes as a democratization of narrative, as giving ‘freedom’ to the subject of narration in the materialized context. This happens by the political entity of narrative –​ in –​progress, itself. It breaks the classical structuralist genre, focalisation theory, through the integration of questions on police, political, justice, and political economy.8 On the other hand, in the context of capitalist hegemony, political narratosophy, as a discipline, can never be transformative alone, but only when linked to politics and culture. That’s why when Nancy Fraser talks of culture and identity she uses a ‘deconstructive’, rather than the ‘affirmative’ tone I take as the ground in this book. Fraser and Ricoeur show that the bonding lines between philosophy, politics, resistance, culture, history, and the economy operate at a somewhat fluid level and open up these questions: How is the narrative subjectivity produced within the political context? How is it positioned with the deixis? How is it deconstructed in and out of the discourse? Does it matter for feminist politics? What is its political relevance in the complex public sphere? I understand contemporary ‘politics’ as an unfolding desire (never fulfilled) to create a space for possible radical politics. But politics is an immanent part of the intense quality of the artistic text which opens itself to the context. This means politics is a field of pure immanence (Hardt and Negri, Empire); it is constitutively sensitive for radical democratic public inclusion, and equality, which in political narratosophy’s roots of the episteme, means relating the structure of the artistic text to the historical and political constellation of the practice and resistance (which in an auto-​reflective way can change the episteme itself). If producing subjectivity in artistic work/​artistic texts is a matter of its political distribution to the socio-​political context of any representation of worlds of narrative, then what is the relation with the deliberative democracy? This question is influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative actions in society. Fraser is

16  Introduction critically engaged in re-​reading Habermas’s discussion of the public sphere in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Although Fraser objects to Habermas’s limited understanding of the public sphere, she claims that the concept is indispensable for critical theory: “It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction. This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state”.9 Habermas’s public sphere is limited; it is conceptually distinct from the economy, a space of discursive relations, and deliberating the distinctions between state apparatuses, the economy, and democracy are essential to democratic theory. Habermas fails to consider gender issues. The political narratosophy considers the power of the subject of narration and its ability to interact with such political representation against representation (aesthetics of resistance of representation) within the issues that cover the public sphere but that still happens in the sphere of discourse. The political concept of building the ‘narrative – in – progress’ and changing society is in the participatory practice of the subject of narration during the transit process from the text toward context beyond discourse theory. If political narratosophy is not narratology, if it is not a science about a text, then the next question could be –​Is there a bad form of this? Does ‘bad narrative’ also exist and how is it different? A bad narrative is static, it is not a narrativity –​ in –​progress, it is a nationalistic, sexist narrative, bad narrative becomes abused and assimilated by the fascist ideologies. Bad narrative is under the pressure of fascism, authoritarianism, nationalism, racial nationalism, ultra-​nationalist political ideology and movements, violence, elitism, militarism, war discourses. Bad narrative is itself a fascist narrative. The subjects of ‘bad narrative’ are fascist figures; the subject of ‘bad narrative’ is never free, but it is controlled by a series of actions that destroy the truth; bad narrative includes the paradox of positivist thinking, through propaganda and fascist rhetoric, but also the destruction of truth integrated into right-​wing discourse and fascist movements. The bad narrative is a narrative that has given no kind of resistance to fascist ideology and fascist politics; it has already become a false trope. If fascism is a collection of false tropes, then a bad narrative is a populist way of communication and spinning. Political narratosophy treats the extreme populist methods in the middle of the bad static narrative which happens between articulations of antagonisms of hegemonic distinctions between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, where antagonism plays an ideological, not a structural role. Political narratosophy recognizes the populism related to bad narrative and avoids the generality that begins to lead to vagueness in the choice of narrative –​in –​progress that is integrated into the democratic sphere of this discussion. Any categorization of a bad narrative could be an incomplete account in times of fascist rhetoric, but it largely emphasizes the material aspects of politics and it is rooted in the semantic approach. The bad narrative doesn’t negotiate the active processes of hegemony between dominant

Introduction  17 societies (from ‘above’) and subordinate groups (from ‘below’) and that is why political narratosophy, when is concerned with bad narrative, is concerned with the politics of fascism (overlapping with populism at the level of ideology, discourse, and populist political rhetoric style of the right wing; a category that is never symbolically neutral, it considers populism as a style but with rhetorical features). Political narratosophy treats ‘narrative – in – progress’ thus, regarding bad narrative that is ‘static’ as dangerous form of would-​be extremism. Bad narrative opens a new epistemology for discovering the roots of political narratosophy, and the epistemic ground should be found in the sliding scale of conservative politics. Bad narrative is closely related to heavy nationalist right forms of thinking, where totalitarianism happens (Arendt). Bad narratives suggest a transformed lie in a new ongoing reality. All of these bad aspects of narrative are included in exploring the counter part of political narratosophy. Another aspect of bad narrative is Rancière’s dismissal of emancipatory narratives as unrealizable promises, explained in his short book on Béla Tarr, where Rancière argues that communism failed because it was structured as a narrative and praises Tarr’s filmmaking for its attention to the materiality that comes into view in its broken promises. In Aisthesis, Rancière also criticizes Eistenstein’s montage for its didactic narrative structure, and instead praises Vertov’s montage for its communist sensibility and innovation, which assembles images, without incorporating them into a narrative. On Political Narratofemosophy This book is about a critique of the gender aspects of narratology linking towards the dynamics of society, starting from historicizing feminism, and second-​wave feminism, transforming the capitalist economist political imaginary that has narrowed political attention, then coming to sense a reconfiguration of aesthetic extension related to radical global movement processes that today reflects the female way of narration. The politics of feminist narratology was conceived to happen through structures ‘from below’ into the hegemony of society, where the reactions to the systems of power are included. Political narratosophy integrates sensate distributions against ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard) and develops radical democratic reinterpretation of the concept of political related to capital, in the economic structure in society. One sub-​categorization of the political narratosophy is feminist political narratosophy (or narratofemosophy). As it is evident above, in classy narratology (as Mieke Bal put it), feminist narratology rejects grand narratives, and small, forgotten, untold female stories have been conceived. To be more precise, this happens at the levels of dislocation of the subjectivity from the configuration to a reconfiguration of the sensible in culture and society. As I suggest below, I take this to be an important political moment based beyond the discourse theory. Feminist political narratosophy, or narratofemosoophy goes beyond the horizon of interest in identity politics in the text (including not only

18  Introduction gendered issues but also political social movements such as migration, displacement, exile, dissent cultures, and political regimes that reflect narrativity). The feminist political narratosophy considers identity narrative (‘life as narrative’ / ‘narrative identity’ / ‘identity of narrative subject’ / ‘identity of the subject of narration’, ‘social identities’) as a concept that is in a tiny relation not just to gender, but to the dynamics of the materialist structures in society and ways of organization, with roots in the feminist historical materialism. The feminist political narratology, as a discipline in a classy narratological sense, is not enough, it is narrow about the interpretation of political sensations, but could be rearranged, reinvented through feminist social philosophy, the status of subject of narration, disarticulation of the subject of narration, and a theory of action that actualizes a critique of capitalism, welfare system questions, social reproduction theory, wage gaps, with points on democracy, social justice issues, by way of narrative talk for building different transformative narratives towards socialism/​ democratic socialism, and the critique of capitalism. These feminist perspectives of the theory of narration should be mobilized to understand and to critique capitalism and then to create space for new imaginative acts of reconfiguration to happen.10 The narratology is passé. Going beyond feminist narratology means creating space for a radical speculative philosophy of narrative identities to happen somewhere between the connection of political philosophy and feminist narratology. I call this political narratofemosophy. It is about going beyond a discourse theory that can contribute to feminism, rising a sense for overcoming essentialist feminism, and creating the space for feminist historical materialism and political action. Political narratofemosophy creates a space for the gendering of the narration and the disciplinary norm that governs another site of gendered labor, female narration and the mechanisms of social regulation, and an articulation of the subject of narration towards the context. Methodologically, I discuss Nancy Fraser’s work behind this concept of political narratofemosophy that is rooted in her understanding of justice (appearances) of the political life of aesthetic sensibilities. I keep both forms in this book: political narratosophy and feminist political narratosophy or narratofemosophy; both forms are valid and presuppose the other, staying in the whole relationship; but I use the form narratofemosophy as a tiny distinction when the thinking opens political aspects of the narrativity that inclines toward feminist historical materialism and need for the materiality of the settings of the women subjects of narrativity (for example, expressed through exile, migration, radical movements in society for social justice or resistance of political regimes). First, the narratofemosophy stays between the social feminist philosophy, aesthetics, feminist historical materialism, and feminist political theory. This way of systematically epistemological thinking means a critique of the power of discourse theory and grand/​bad narratives. Second, it can help us to understand how social identities are built in different contextual political systems. Third, there is a recognition and a critique of the discourses of femocrats

Introduction  19 (narrative of female bureaucrats), a critique of neutralization of the radicalized emancipatory politics of female narration that doesn’t take the materiality of narrativity into consideration. Fourth, the narratofemosophy is concerned with the ‘constitutive, irreducible political dimension’ of the female narrative and the most advanced categories of political practices with a critique which considers ‘constitutive, irreducible, political-economic dimensions’ and Marxist feminism, related to female subjectivity and the female way of narration. Finally, it can illuminate how the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society is secured, and gives conditions for exploring the emancipatory social changes and political practices rooted in feminist dialectics and feminist historical materialism. Following Fraser’s concept on the politics of feminist imaginary in narration, in her essay “Mapping the Feminist Imagination, from Redistribution to Representation”, I develop new paradigm for the narratofemosophy based not just only on deixis that is an essence of language (Émile Benveniste), but also on the mapping transformations of the feminist political imagination in the political context. How might one reinvent the project of feminist political narratology, beyond the limited linguistic structure today? I do not reduce interest in processes of convergence between values, social identities, cultural identities, but the principles of redistribution emerge as a central site of political struggle related to understanding the narrative and narrative identity itself rooted in materialist aspects of feminist historical materialism. The separation between the economic and cultural sphere is a complementary process which needs, for example, a broader category of feminist historical materialism which can be inserted into a progressive (historical) narrative as one moment in a dialectical chain, where social identities require complex meanings, and interpretations.11 Hegemony (Gramsci) opens a space where power, social inequalities, and discourse theory intersect –​a common space for constituting the ‘Doxa’ of society and social reality. Hegemony expresses the circulation of the dominant power related to discourse. If feminist narratology cannot give an answer about complex structures of transforming narrative identities into social identities, then narratofemosophy goes beyond the case of social identities and the way they are constructed and fixed in the text. Thus, narrative identities led to social identities discursively constructed in a historically and politically specific social context –​ that is, in transit. A key issue is that narratofemosophy understands narrative and social identities in their full socio-​cultural complexity, not as a static and single variable fixed in a text (hence, beyond gender identity), but in the context that is contingent, and rooted in its materiality. A discussion on narrative identities requires a different sense of discursively self-​constituted political context, a new language of thinking and understanding of social and cultural hegemony where the concept of the philosophy of narrative is rooted in materialisation of the emancipation of the thought, in society and political (regimes), class struggle, resistance, the materiality of narrativity (set in exile, political asylum, rights for health care, social reproduction theory), rather than in discursive theory.

20  Introduction IMAGINATION. Importantly, this book enters the political economy of imagination as a space of democracy in the narrative (against capitalism) where the thought has materialistic roots, and inclines to the freedom of expression through an extension of imagination, from artistic text to dynamics of society, with rethinking relations of power, and a critique of economism, by giving space to the politics of imaginative acts of reconfiguration. The political economy of imagination implies a cultural segment with a materialist inclination that means the materialist cultural analysis creates the space for rereading some feminist epistemologies which allows a new way of thinking about the politics of imagination. The political narratofemosophy is at the same time both subtle and direct in the discussion of what is ‘political’ in the theory of narration by opening the accounts of social inequality and aesthetic sensation. That is a way of connecting text to the dynamics of society. The concept of imagination as a political affect remains at the heart of this discussion. The political narratofemosophy concerns artistic texts that are not explicitly devoted to making political points.12 Nancy Fraser does not speak about the narrative theory itself, but my philosophical questions about the political power of imagination have been raised by reading her ‘political’ concepts, geographies of recognition in communism, post-​communism, postcolonialism, distributive justice, and social injustice. In this context, an imaginary (possible and plausible future) is being raised in this book in a speculative understanding of the political narratosophy. The political narratofemosophy opens the space for rereading the roots of feminist epistemologies. The concept of imagination is rooted in the concept of the subject of narration –​ that is the ‘self’ –​ to do the imagining. To think of the concept of imagination beyond dialectics, one would have to position the subject of narration –​out of history –​without the luggage of history. The analytical concept of imagination in the political narratosophy is unfolded toward nondialectical thought. What are the rules (implicit and explicit) that structure imagination in the public context? The answers are rooted in Hegel’s dialectic, his concept of the subject, real, and representative. Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Hegel explains that the imagination represents reality because one could not have immediate access to reality. Hegel’s position, on the other hand, is that there is nothing outside the symbolic realm and all one can access is the representation. My understanding of ‘political’ representation, as a selective and political construction of the discourse, is speculative when I talk about the philosophy of narration, and it is close to the third dimension of Nancy Fraser’s feminist politics when she talks about the representation (I called ‘representation against representation’). Hence, the political narratofemosophy should include representation of narrative –​in –​progress, not only as a matter of ensuring equal political voices (female voices) in already constituted male political societies but also in the redistribution of voices, the recognition of justice related to the sensitive opening structures of the text to the policies of context. This allows the space to include communication processes in society within a specific context,

Introduction  21 while efficacious means being capable of influencing the use of public power in a broader sense. This gives me the freedom to think about the narrative in motion, using a more interpretative critique of the theory of narration beyond micro-​ structures and linguistic limitations. It allows me to move towards macro-​level structures of power and materialisation, the rereading of history, historiography to fiction, and the art of writing into building the Real. Notes 1 Nancy Fraser (1947) is an American active feminist philosopher and political philosopher. Jacques Rancière (1940) is a French philosopher, one of the most subversive philosophers in political philosophy and aesthetics. Paul Ricoeur (1913–​2005), is a leading French philosopher in hermeneutics. Later in the book, I show how the work of Fraser, Rancière and Ricoeur overlapped in concepts, visions, and ideas. 2 Processing of the text by the reader –​ a process of receiving, processing, and producing the text which takes place inside the reader. See Iser: “The Rudiments of a Theory of Aesthetic Response”. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. 3 With the term literary/​non-​artistic texts I denote those texts that one runs across in everyday life and daily press, with influence from colloquial speech, and that have a tendency towards a documentary record but are not “purely” documentary record. 4 See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. 5 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. 6 See Jodi Dean Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 14. 7 Davide Panagia in Rancière’s Sentiments (2018) explains this activity of reconfiguration of that which is given to the terrain of sensible commenting the aesthetics of politics (given in sense perception) and politics of aesthetics in society, engaged into practices of transfiguration of what is given to sense perception. Politics is always an aesthetic activity –​Panagia says –​related to reading Rancière, and “it is not because there is a specific aesthetic to politics nor because there is a purposiveness to aesthetic objects that is political, but because within any specific social arrangement there are elements that circulate but that don’t settle into any specific compositional whole … and tends toward centripetal convergence, these sensible intensities may disrupt that tendency at any time by introducing “lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary and collective bodies … In short, they contribute to the formation of political subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible” (32). I would add here, they contribute to the formation of the artistic texts and build subjects of narration that challenge the given interpretation into the transgressive forms of “moving” of the subject of narration from the text to the context. 8 Focalisation, a term by Gérard Genette (1972) defined as a selection or restriction of narrative segments in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters, or other, more hypothetical entities in the story world. Auctorial narrator, term by Stanzel, F.K. 1964. Typische Formen des Romans, Gottingen. 9 Read Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, 1990. 10 Anita Chari talks about Nancy Fraser’s “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, I find Chari’s reading of Fraser to be one of the most lucid. Second-​wave

22  Introduction feminism issued a systemic critique of state-​organized capitalism, challenging its androcentrism, economics, and its state centrism. The second-​wave feminist critique of economism coincided with the neoliberal state’s displacement of social justice from the terrain of economic equality to that of cultural recognition. Chari is right when says that the effect was to resignify feminist ideals and to render feminist critique a source of legitimation for neoliberalism. In the context of neoliberalism, key aspects of the second-​wave feminist critique no longer retained that critical force under new historical conditions (see: Anita Chari, A Political Economy of The Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique). 11 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work, 15. 12 Skeggs (2011) following Bourdieu, talks about the politics of imagination and keeping this concept ‘open’ and ‘critical’. Bourdieu’s value gives different access to economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capitals which are, in turn, convertible into the future value of political narratosophy that integrates imaginary (possible and plausible) futures. Skeggs’s thinking is important for this book since the concept of ‘political’ resides in certain modes of connection of fictional narrative (fictional characters, speech acts, structures) related to building history and real events in social space and time. Hence, imagination becomes a political issue that happens, always already, between culture, theory, and dynamic society. The politics of imagination is related to the selection of the way of thinking the history. It always takes a part of the selection as an approach, and critical perspective of reading and building history. ‘To be critical’ means to be in relation with the openness, keeping the critique into always already rereading the society (see Joanna Latimer and Beverley Skeggs, “The Politics of Imagination: Keeping Open and Critical”, 2011.

1 Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress Life as Narrative/​Narrative Identity Thinking Between Discourse Theories and Political Narratosophy

In the period of post-​structuralism, the contextual methodology abandoned the hermetically closed (isolated) textual model of structuralism and turns towards the open artistic text, towards its communicational trans-​historic, trans-​political, and trans-​cultural ontological roots. Aesthetics of artistic text (L’Esthétique) is derived from the language, it is a secondary, double-​coded, alternately actualized iconic modelative system of reality that inscribes the referential meaning post hoc. The objective non-​literary empirical world becomes positioned and actively constructed in the artistic text motioned by language as a primary medium of reality, carrier of the inscribed meaning which does not represent a dictation and raw reflection of the real world, instead it is a verbalized product, political construct in the community. All the consecutive repeated articulations of meaning which become re-​shaped in the texts through the interpretative receptive stratagems depend on this construct. The referential field of the artistic text is established through language, it is always already textualized and canonized by different signs, and the referring of the literary text to reality is transposed, mediated by language conventions, by other literary or non-​literary texts. That way, the reality I am speaking of is not transmitted but mediated in each context with communicational practices. More specifically, the referential reality of the artistic work (text) is what the text displays as reality through the structure of signifying, rather than the reality itself. Therefore, the artistic work (text) is a coded message, and it works as an intermediary or a simulacrum of the structure and processes of the real events.1 Artistic text is embedded in language. The language as a schematized system of signs is not a mirrored, reproduced image of reality, but rather a construction of existing conventions which in a creative way “recreates” and reproduces the world. Considering this fact, the relation between fiction-​reality or the depiction of reality in the artistic text is dislocated, transferred from a referential to a communicational axis. Experience also becomes intermediated by language, which is why I do not speak of an opposition between language and reality, but the existence of dialectics in the symbolic reality itself. There is no reality in fiction, rather the reality in fiction is just an arrangement of real data, a contradictory DOI: 10.4324/9781003374794-2

24  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress composition of the literary essence and what is called ‘Real’. This chapter explores the way that representation is not merely a passive reflection (mimetic in the old school way of thinking) but a political act, an interactive engagement, or representation –​ without –​ representation. If the representation discussion could not be avoided by leaving the discourse theory for grasping the political narratosophy, then my approach is to show the radical and powerful force for the agency through the contingency of the representation as a political act, that happens in the very tiny space in-​between text and contexts, where narrative –​ in –​ progress exists. The real (mimesis) functions through the degree of contingency. This means that artwork (literature) does not deliver reality through an equation, but it fakes it, and simulates it in an intentional, intelligible way, planned, through laws and linguistic-​literary conventions within the borderlines imposed by the logic of the text. Fiction points to that which is shaped in a certain text or created (from the Latin root fingere), but it also points to that which is invented and relates to that which is not real. Fingere comes from fingo, finxi, fictum, it means creates, makes, does, builds, recreates, remakes, reshapes, shapes, arranges. But in some of its uses it also means a degree of imagination and invention.2 Related to these analytics towards the term reality, there is also the question and pretension for the “objective” depiction and the “objective” notion of reality. Artwork (literature) is a transitive category. Seventeenth-​century western science excludes certain expressive forms from its repertory, such as rhetoric, in favor of the “ordinary” and “obvious” meaning. At the same time, fiction is left out in favor of reality, and subjectivity in favor of objectivity. These categories are excluded from science and marked as ‘literature’, and the literary texts are marked as structures, compositions of fantasy, not of facts (Clifford). Michel de Certeau notes that the fictionalization of the literary language is harshly stigmatized for lack of “univocality”. In this scheme the discourse of literature becomes inherently uncertain, unstable, aspiring towards layers of meaning, it narrates one thing, but intends to express something completely different, it is traced in the language from which it continuously draws out effects of meaning that cannot be limited, or checked. Such discourse (which continues to be “banished” into science with undoubtedly variable success) will become incurably figurative and polysemic, while the scientific text will be qualified as literary because of the use of metaphors, stylizations, and evocations. The important thing for this study is that de Certeau differentiates between narration and historical discourse. Narration is an art of saying, not just a description. It would not represent approaching “reality” through a technical operation, but it would enable the audience to accept the text “through the reality” depicted in it. On the other side, narrated history creates a fictional space and distances itself from the Real through the mechanisms of the frozen syntagms: “once upon a time ...” and so on. The narrated history is a matter of fact, an act of balance in which the circumstances of the time, space, and

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  25 the narrator himself participate. It is a way of knowing how to manipulate and arrange. I indicate literature is like fiction, not because it tries to refuse ‘the acknowledged’ reality, but because it is not certain that the language functions according to the principles that exist or resemble those of the phenomenological world. That is why it is not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information, except for its language.3 The contemporary thinking of the specifications and concerns for the relation fiction-​reality, from a linguistic point of view, imposes directions, comments, and counter-​comments to the laws of semiotics as a contribution from the school of deconstructivism, with a radical displacement of the stability of the sign, and the term reality. Thereby, it is important to emphasize that this chapter points in an aspectual way to the key terms from the domain of the theory of literature and the narrating production (narration –​narrative identity –​non-​identity –​ fiction –​reality) which intersect with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivist critique, vis-​à-​vis Paul Ricoeur’s symbolic representation of reality, with no pretensions of entering the complex broad philosophical concepts which deal with studying metaphysics and theory of cognition in the works of these philosophers. Paul Ricoeur’s Political Hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative I, II, III (1984–​1986) correlates the philosophy of symbolic representation of reality with the specifics of narrativity which are derived from the hermeneutical approach, the category time interpreted in the narratological and anti-​narratological approaches, the philosophy of historiography vis-​à-​vis the fictional discourse, and its borderline genre inclinations and deductions which (sometimes) lead to documentary prose and vice versa. In such a case, the task of hermeneutics becomes double –​to reconstruct the internal identity outside of itself (outside the text), related to the world that could happen. Ricoeur’s concept of ‘life as narrative’, or ‘narrative identity’ is mediated by signs, symbols, and narrations. Meaning is never final and exclusive, but rather it is possible, derivable, and always open, dialogically. In that sense, the process of interpretation is also possible and dynamic. Through Ricoeur, I enter the other side of the poststructuralist alternative deconstruction related to Jacques Derrida. Because of this, further on in the book, the hermeneutics of Ricoeur, or the issues of the annunciation of meaning form the basis for counterpointing the philosophy of Derrida about the impossibility to finish the reading of the meaning of the text and the world.4 This is important for the argument (from the Introduction) to be given about political narratosophy as a system of thinking that follows the political subject of narration as an active agent of subjectivation through which politics comes into existence in narrative and change it, but never monolithically. Ricoeur lays out the key premises for the hermeneutical approach of the artistic text related to reality: “A text is any discourse fixed by writing. According

26  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress to this definition, fixation by writing is constitutive of the text itself … For if by speech [parole] one understands, with de Saussure, the realization of language [langue] in an event of discourse, the production of an individual utterance by an individual speaker, then each text is in the same position as speech for language”.5 Ricoeur stops at the thesis that the text does not close in on itself, but rather it opens towards another text, and that binding of the text itself unveils the unique ability for its renewal. This is the place where I open the narrative structures toward society, and the argument that comes after Ricoeur’s ‘life as open narrative’. Sometimes it is hard to follow what Ricoeur is saying, but carefully reading his work shows that the dialogical dimension of interpretation is activated in the relatively predicative notional systems inside of which indeterminateness oscillates, and the polisemicity of the word and the text become concrete; they assume shape inside the interpreter and his awareness of the separate status of the accomplished meaning. The interpretation that is evoked in the spirit of the sign could not be a result of pure and simple deduction that would extract from the sign something that was already contained in it. That which is interpreted as a comment, definition, gloss of the sign during its relation to the object. It is the symbolic expression itself. The joining of the sign or what is achieved through interpretation and the psychological process, is possible only in their union, more or less –​in the imperfect interaction between the narrator and the reader ... It is an experience that is never completely reduced to the idea or the object of the sign which Ricoeur has defined as structure. This is where the undefined character of the series of Pierce’s interpretation is derived from. The phenomena of semiosis and the semiotic trilateral, triadic shaping of the sign set by Pierce takes place through the interpretant, the user of the sign who connects the carrier of the sign (sign), and denotes the referent, the object to which the sign refers. Ricoeur takes the stand that the relation sign–​interpretant is always open, which means that there is always another interpreter who will have the ability to intermediate in the first relation. Pierce interprets the sign, Ricoeur the statement, i.e. he transfers the lexical unities to the field of statements and texts. The open sequence of interpretation, which is based on the relation of the sign towards the object, creates the trilateral relation: object –​sign –​user of the sign (interpreter) which is a model for another triad created on the level of the text. The text is the object itself; the sign is semantics liberated from structural analysis, and the sequence of interpretation becomes a chain of interpretations “tangled” in the dynamics of the text. Ricoeur’s philosophical, cultural, and hermeneutic subversive method implies the ability to touch the ‘Real’, social theory, and social reality beyond the text. This is an entering of the space for developing epistemes for possible political hermeneutics in connection of ‘life as narrative’ to social philosophy, and theory of justice, that is, one that is both normative and grounded on existing social reality.

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  27 Dialectics of ‘Life as Narrative’/​Identity Thinking The concept of Ricoeur’s ‘life as narrative’ is a metaphoric discourse where the concept of narrative identity is a life story with ontological implications of ‘metaphorical reference’. Ricoeur denotes narrative identity as the structure of experience or the model through which one reads the life of a person interpreted in the function of the personal story that is told through the plot. The thesis that the narrative identity is a narrative model which is created through interpretation, which postulates understanding and interpretation of itself through fiction, develops from this definition. Namely, the act of interpretation correlates with the understanding of oneself through the narrative identity in fiction. Defined like this, the narrative identity is equal to the personal identity of the narrating subject placed in history. It is the identity that comes from the self-​interpretation (interpretation of selfhood) through narration and story. One moved to the level of an interpretation of history and fiction, stemming from the crisscrossing processes of fictionalization of history and historicization of fiction. This dialectic of interweaving might be one sign of the inadequacy of our poetics to our aporetic if there were not born from this mutual fruitfulness an “offshoot” one that testifies to a certain unification of the various meaning effects of narrative. The fragile offshoot issuing from the union of history and fiction is the assignment to an individual or a community of a specific identity that we can call their narrative identity. Here “identity“ is taken in the sense of a practical category.6 Marxist materialistic philosophy of history put radical attention to a material basis of the context (revolutions) the emancipatory and the normative directions that occurred by struggles that understood a dialectical dynamic. I join the feminist exploration of Ricoeur’s philosophy, feminist emancipatory of thought that explores his idea of the self that stays in constitution always alongside the norm for action, which takes shape only through the direct action to other. Ricoeur integrates the serials of encounters with others, that mediates in the process of recognition, it is dialectically recognition of otherness than recognition of the self. This is an argument for the political narratofemosophy, or feminist political narratosophy that considers not just the exploration of the philosophy of self, but the politics of praxis with material segments of experience and conditions in the political and historical context. Narratofemosophy takes Ricouer’s philosophy of liberation (as theory and practice in one) that calls on us to reconnect with the action that once belonged to the emancipatory movement and to supplement the next question “What is to be done yet?” Ricoeur’s historical indebtedness to Hegel that exists through his argumentation of the genuine metamorphosis of the self. Ricoeur’s praxis applies itself in the field of action by attempting to maintain the living conditions, something that narratofemosophy is primarily concerned with related to women subject to narration and feminist historical materialism. There are two aspects of this deeply fundamentally human dimension in the

28  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress two Ricoeur’s distinct powers of acting and of suffering integrated in political narratofemosophy. The background to this is a Marxist activation of Hegel’s dialectical understanding of social dynamics, or, better, his ‘philosophy of history’ –​ discourse opening –​ to metaphysical discourses, with taking orientation from social movements to the social changes, staying beyond immanent crises taking the current situation of transformative narrative in analyses. This stance is the closest to narratofemosophy’s integrations of Ricoeur’s interpretation of social and historical processes of transformation of narrative, which goes through Hegel’s dynamic understanding of history. Hegel, in both the Philosophy of History and the Phenomenology of Spirit, understands the dynamics of history through the problems of contradictions in each social and historical situation and material obstacles to actions. Every historical and social constellation is challenged and that makes up the immanent quality and the systematic constitution of the conflict itself in society. In the foreground, the narrative identities I examine are related to the term potential history, and the search for personal identity and life as narrative enables continuity between  the potential (initial) history and the spoken history for which one takes certain responsibility. It is about identifying the deeper structures and driving mechanisms of historical backgrounds, emancipatory possibilities, tensions, and ‘contradictions’ related to narrative and theory of narration. Narratofemosohy is linking the feminist narrative with the new society to come, from theory to practice and from practice to theory. Ricoeur lucidly warns that one is “embedded in history” (Verstricktsein) before one narrates the history. Being “embedded in history” is the “prehistory” of the narrated history. The narrator chooses the beginning of one’s will. Such prehistory connects history with a wider whole and gives it an essential background of ‘vivid intertwinings’ of the entire lived experienced (personal) history. The focus here is on the ‘issuing’ (auftauchte) of history from that background. The metaphor of the ‘man/woman embedded in history’ is the basis for defining narration as a ‘secondary process’ of getting familiar with history. Narration, following, and understanding of history is only a continuation of the history that has remained “untold”. In other words, is there not a hidden affinity between the secret of where the story emerges from and the secret to which it returns? The thesis which comes forth is the concept of ‘life as narrative’, or the concept of ‘narrative identity’ is connected to the hermeneutics of selfhood (personal identity). To describe the variations of literary fiction, Ricoeur examines the dialectic relation of the identity signified through the principal sameness (idem –​ identity) and the identity signified through the change of selfhood (ipse –​ identity). Paul Ricoeur does not speak of dialectics in terms of Hegel, it is not a ‘synthesis’, but rather a continued openness of the dialectic process. Equality is understood as Sameness (Latin –​ idem, same; French –​ memeté; German –​ Die Gleichkeit). Change of Selfhood (Latin –​ ipse, by itself); French –​ ipséité; German –​Selbstheit).

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  29 Identity as sameness is a dialectic term used to signify formally unchangeable oneness. The change of selfhood (le soi) is signified as that out of which selfhood is composed, that which is not continuously necessary and unchangeable. Dialectics takes place inside the subject (of narration) which, in time, remains the same individual, the same narrating subject. Within the sameness of identity two identities become separate, the numeric and the qualitative which can be used to follow the empirical continuity of the one we consider as the same narrating individual, but whose selfhood changes over time. The numeric identity functions through the formula: two cases of the same thing, with a name that does not change in everyday language, do not create two different things, but rather the same thing. In this case, identity signifies singularity, and the operation identification suits it –​ understood also as re-​ identification of sameness, as opposed to recognizing the same thing twice or an innumerable number of times. The qualitative identity points to a very close similarity (X and Y wear such similar clothes that it does not make a difference whether one mixes them up). The operation substitution without a semantic loss (salva veritate) suits this kind of identity. Selfhood always includes the dimension of duration (and change) in time and otherness. It does not come down to a determination of one substrate, but it rather opens the question “Who am I”? through others. Therefore, the dialectics between sameness and the change of selfhood are accomplished as dynamics of sameness and the internal multiplications of otherness (inside the selfhood). The search for permanence in time is the answer to the question “Who am I”? Political narratosophy takes this striving together of human subjects towards a better future through ‘compassion’ and sensing others. In an attempt to answer these complex questions of selfhood (personal identity), Paul Ricoeur places the term narrative identity in the emplotment. The plot integrates diversity and changeability, the discontinuity in the incongruous congruity of the story.7 Therefore, selfhood is constituted as a story, and contingent events have a double position, namely (1) they cause incongruity in the plot (or the selfhood as something that includes congruity); and (2) they are necessary for the development of the plot (selfhood) and they influence the creation of congruity as a necessary element for the development of the plot (selfhood). Here is where we come to the main conclusion, which is that the hermeneutics of selfhood appear as hermeneutics of the story, and personal identity becomes analogous to the politics of narrative identity. With this point, I focus on the narration which constitutes the identity of the character, and I also call this politics of narrative identity of the character, i.e. a political construction of the identity of the narrated story. This identity of the story forms the identity of the character which will then go on to be placed against the plot in the fiction and the historiographic texts in culture and reality.

30  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress Why do I find Ricoeur’s hermeneutical methodology political and vital for political narratosophy? Grasping social life through the concept of ‘life as narrative’ is something that stays between Ricoeur’s tendency of the philosophy of narration/​narrative –​towards the theory of justice (which, as I pointed out, is close to Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice in the Introduction). Human beings who are fragile, vulnerable, and suffer –​are at the heart of of Ricoeur’s (Fraser’s too) theory work, capable of expressing their own identities narratively, acting their capacities in the system. Ricoeur’s subject of narration is made from a fragile equilibrium between oneself and another, between axes of dialogical concepts of the constitution of the self and human actions in society. Ricoeur’s subject of narration in his hermeneutics and theory of narration and justice always refers to the historical context related to human existence. Ricoeur’s first point of hermeneutics is the recognition of otherness, so in the middle of this concept stays his dialectical tendency to find a way to overcome negative struggles, and the long-​term goal for justice is its contribution to attaining social peace. One of the basic products of the narrative in Ricoeur’s work is the creation of the narrative identity, on two levels (Wood): (1) on the level of history and (2) at the level of individual life. Such a view on narrative identity is a contemporary incursion in the stability of the identity. Ricoeur suggests a model identity, but he is aware that many stories could find a place in the constitution of the narrative. Therefore, I am talking about a contingency of the identity, its revision through reorganization of the events which took place through memory, the will of the narrating subject, its ethical implications, and the moving force of narration. Thus, Ricoeur’s thesis accentuates the life story, it stems from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, and it juxtaposes Jacques Derrida’s philosophy about the divide of the narrative on the level of the narrating subject and its ability to multiply the stories through imagination and in real life. Incisive Theory of Narrative Structures Beyond Structuralism. Politics of Reconfiguration I come to the point when I must make the connection of the narrating subject from the text to reality. The shaping of the narrator’s identity in the text will be analyzed through the principles (modes) of metaphor and story (plot), through the theory of emplotment. 1. Metaphor is a substitution with ontological implications, a kind of trope, a replacement of the literal meaning with figurative semantic understanding, which is accomplished on the level of the sentence. It is a transition from the traditional understanding of metaphors-​words –​ reduced to the old rhetorical substitutive paradigmatic replacement. Ricoeur is radical, showing how poetic language reveals a capacity for nondescriptive reference which exceeds the immediate reference of everyday language, and calls this ‘a reference accomplished through metaphor’. Although it is secondary, with the help of this reference the

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  31 metaphoric statement describes a reality that is inaccessible for direct description. This means that the metaphor does not accomplish a referential attitude towards reality, but it rather creates a fiction towards which it assumes a referential attitude, so metaphorical discourse is a ‘redescription’ of reality (movement of essence between substances). Thus, meaning is something which is never final and exclusive, but it is possible in its dialogical nature and polyphony. In such a case, the investment of the metaphor in the referential attitude towards reality is one of Ricoeur’s most significant principles. Thus positioned, the relation fiction–​reality points that the literary discourse is not stable in terms of empirical or fictive reference, but rather it is shaped through the modus of reference ‘seeing –​as’. Seeing –​as implies saying–​as and being–​as. Figurer is the strategy of figuration and embodiment which is initiated by the ontological modus ‘being –​as’ because the location of the action of the metaphor is determined by the verb –​copula –​I am, to be. The semantic solution of the ontologically epistemological status of the poetic discourse (the metaphor) creates bonds with the term truth through the analysis of the capacitance status of the ‘divided referentiality’ that Ricoeur connects with the semantics of the term truth. It derives from the logic that language is the only valid reality for the immediate objectification of literature through the creation of immediate literary-​lingual reality. Namely, the reference shows inside the language as a postulate which cannot be proven immanently. 2. A parallel modus of reference accomplished through metaphor is the dynamics of emplotment in the deep narrative structures (the basis of the text). For Ricoeur, the plot (figuration) is an integrative and configurative element that has the role of an intermediary in the mimetic function of the story through which the relationship of temporality and narrativity is being solved. But figuration is an a priori historical organization of the time, which precedes the explanation of logic because it encompasses time. If writing through metaphor prevails in the domain of sensory, aesthetic, and axiological values, then the mimetic function, as a structural category, is the most expressed dynamics present in the union between action and temporality. The plot is a reconfiguration, textual cosmization of the time dimension. Ricoeur goes further than Aristotle’s exclusion of the time aspect. He includes the time a priori in the emplotment. Namely, the referential function of the plot comes from the refigurative abilities of fiction to temporality, and the modus of congruity is cosmization harmony, a dominance of incongruity in the configurative act which should signify a poetic solution for the aporias of temporality. Ricoeur’s concept of life as narrative, or narrative identity is in direct relation with mimesis as an incision that opens the space of fiction. It is a complex process that is accomplished with a trilateral spreading of events through triple mimesis. Mimesis I or prefiguration precedes the composition of the plot. This mimesis signifies the prefigurative time, the time of living, the time of phenomenological

32  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress experience, the time before the story was created, or the precognition of the world of the real praxis and recognition of the basic forms of human action in the understanding of the intelligible, symbolic structures and the time element. This mimesis is a symbolic mediation of action. The core of mimesis, the presentation of action, the shaping of the text is Mimesis II. It is the kingdom of “how-​to” or configuration which is a paradigm for the emplotment as a textual configuration of mimesis and presentation as mediation between the two other mimesis. This mimesis is used to signify the time of narration, the configurative (shaping) time that is used to create fiction. Mimesis II is present both in history and in narration; the plot is the intermediary between the event and the narrated history; the theory of emplotment, the plot transforms events in history. Mimesis III or refiguration is used to signify the refigurative time, the time of reading or fusion, the crossing over, the flowing into, the intersection of the world of the text (the world projected in the text) with the world of the reader or concretization of the text in the mind of the reader during the process of reception, shaping and reshaping of the temporal structures in fiction. Through Mimesis III, the story accomplishes its goal, and the reference of the story is realized. Reconfiguration as a final phase of mimetic activity is accomplished through the reception of literature, or rather, perception of time, which is shaped in the story, or reshaping of the narrative configuration of time which happens in the mind of the reader through the aesthetic-​cognitive effect. That is why refiguration is a hermeneutical process in which life as a narration or narrative identity is understood and interpreted in real-​time, vis-​à-​vis the existence which precedes the shaping of the story, and then to the consciousness of the empiric reader. Ricoeur starts from Aristotle’s plot (mythos) as a term that is understood dynamically.8 Furthermore, he develops this term as emplotment (la mise en intrigue), as an imitation of an action (mimesis praxeos), and as an integrative compositional mechanism, a schematized principle that builds a unique, complete, one and whole story, and makes a turn, a twist (metabole) of the linear line of events in the story. The emplotment is an incision in the poetic composition. Through this, I point out the essential artistic narrative configuration, that is, the integrative, organizational, and configurative principle based on the text. The plot in this textual field has a transversally uniting function; in that sense, it also has an intermediary function on a wider level, between precognition and after-​cognition of the arrangement of the action and the time mark. The plot is significant for opening the text ‘outwards’. That which is remarkable in these analyses is that Ricoeur elevates the plot to a degree of recognisability, through its property of metamorphosis. All the time making sure it doesn’t lose its identity and function. This is important argumentation about the dialectic sublimate of the triple mimesis that leads to the conclusion that language is directed outwards, –​ outside its bonds and it effectuates the juxtaposed relation: language

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  33 to the world as otherness, disparity, and the possibility of the praxis, something with which political narratosophy is concerned. Literary work is brought into the language experientially and temporally (the reader receives not only the meaning of the work but also its reference). Narration is founded on cross-​reference and interactive conjuncture between the text and the world (the text of historiography and the text of fiction). Cross-​reference is crossed to live temporal experience between fiction and history. Therefore, the emplotment as textual configuration and constructed time has an intermediary function between the real temporal experience (which is prefigured in the practice of configuration of the plot) and reconfiguration of the temporal experience by the reader to the constructed time in fiction. Ricoeur is the key figure in the analysis of the new identity position thinking and the process of identification that is accomplished on two levels, namely, through (1) narration and (2) interpretation. To understand oneself is a matter of interpretation, and the interpretation of oneself comes from narration. Therefore, the hermeneutics that Ricoeur suggests relies upon the reader receiving not only the knowledge of the literary-​artistic work but also the interaction between the text and the world on a level of reference and communication. The reader receives the reference and the experiential load from the text embedded in the language and assimilates both temporality and the world concretized in the artistic work. Going back to a narrower domain of narratology, the core of narrativity in Ricoeur’s work is the term narrative intelligence. It is the intelligible organization of the story, the strategic ability to build, follow, and to understand the story, a derivation of the experienced narrative communication guided by the rules of the syntagmatic order of the story and the rules of composition, according to which the events in the past tense are organized. The hermeneutical resultant is the axis of the narrative identity. Existence is structured like a plot, life as narrative. According to the series of analyses of the key terms in Ricoeur’s work to which the narrative identity is built, I conclude that Ricoeur recognizes both the desire to be and the effort to spread the action for others. This argument is a core for understanding the main directions of the political narratosophy, towards the dialectical relationship of the concept of subjectivity as a part of the public political sphere but given through narration and through the concept of living the narrativity. That it is primarily presented as a complex spiritual content and it favors the thesis that the character of the individual or the collective is created through narration and interpretation, and that the identity is shaped, built, and expressed through a story. To understand oneself is a matter of interpretation, and the interpretation of oneself comes from narration. Here lies the significance of the closing of the circle through mimesis, “the fusion of horizons” (Gadamer), or the intersection of the world of the text with the world of the reader and active, brave reference to reality outside of language (the non-​lingual reality). In such a case the language is successfully directed outside of itself, and the literary

34  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress work brings its own experience into the language and enters the world like any other discourse. Narrativity comes from the cross-​reference between history and fiction. Therefore, prefiguration accomplished completely through the circle of mimesis, is the equivalent of Aristotle’s imitation of an action (mimesis praxeos) which points to the relation of the artistic work and what precedes as a notion, as experience or realization in the world of real practice. The configuration complies with Aristotle’s thesis that an imitation of the story is the composition of events, and we see that mimesis is mythos. To this Mimesis II, Ricoeur adds another aspect of configurative dynamics, through the emplotment. Reconfiguration contains the reception of the text as an application of the ontological status of ‘opening’ the artistic text (autotheory/​fiction) towards the context. Reconfiguration contains something I called a radical political moment that is ultimately to displace the limit of structuralism to social empowering by creating the space –​in –​between the text and the context through the incisive act of articulation, which is the space for active life and living. The politics of reconfiguration is a democratic act itself since it deliberates the text from the structuralist method. Politics of the reconfiguration happens in-​between the symbolic order of the artistic text and the Real. That in-​between process of unfolding of the political thought is the place where politics of reconfiguration happens. This is a connecting en passant process of the narrative –​in –​progress including the future of identity thinking in co-​relations with antagonist social reflections at the same time. I understand the politics of reconfiguration in a post-​Marxist sense, the politics as a process of happening, as an active presence, as given, as potential, because of historical changes. One more thing happens here: this presumes the transformation of the real reader through a fusion of fiction with the existence of the reader (interpreter). What do I mean by ‘political’ in building the ‘narrative – in – progress’? The rhetoric of narrative opens a door to the political approach in narration, so the narrative theory is a selective frame of representation; the ‘place’ where the narrative should appear based on the techniques of persuasion, power of plausibility, and the ability for identification. Political Economy of The Narrative Fraser’s Feminist Social Philosophy. The Transformation of the Discourse Theories to the Social

Nancy Fraser (1947–​), American philosopher, critical theorist, and university professor of philosophy and social sciences started the discussion on a structuralist model that treats language as a symbolic system or code (Saussure and Lacan) and on a pragmatic model that treats language as a set of multiple and historically specific institutionalized social practices, insisting that the pragmatic

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  35 model leads to the purposes of feminist politics. She opens this talk in “The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics”. Later, in “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”, Fraser opens another dimension for text and narrative in the contexts and that is feminist theorizing of the sociological stratum and reflection of the society to always already looking for a political understanding of the essence of the narrative. Invoking Fraser’s work, contemporary political philosophers and political theorists interested in narrative, identities, and political philosophy have assumed that the theory of discourse isn’t enough for understanding social identities. An implied question of the political narratosophy is how ‘life as narrative’ can relate to inequality and social groups and how it can illuminate the way in which the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society is secured and contested. I have argued elsewhere that Fraser works on social identities and insists on the specific moment of history that always should open social-​theoretical analysis and condensation around the anti-​imperialist New Left. That inspired me to develop a theoretical approach in this book that could catch the disturbing possibility of historically specific social practices through which cultural descriptions of equality and women’s way of retelling are produced and circulated. In its narrowest sense, that includes narrative –​ in –​ progress, as a term that has developed as a part of the contextual, institutional change. As is evident below, the ‘life as narrative’ has been conceived as transfiguration from Ricoeur’s concept of ‘narrative identity’ to Fraser’s concept of social identities (always in plural), indicating that historical materialism is the goal, as roots of the feminism related to “state organized” society, and anti-​capitalist thinking instead of identity thinking. Fraser has challenged the view that issues of identity thinking are more central to political and social paradigms than to economic issues. But social identities are exceedingly complex and depend on sociocultural complexity, they are always plural and depend on the discursively constructed codes in historically specific narratives and circumstances in the “state-​ organized” society. Political narratosophy and narratofemosophy are concerned with diverse context, where people from South-​Eastern European and the United States share their experience of migration working abroad , sabbaticals, exile, suffering, health crisis, by living through each other’s stories. By “state-​ organized capitalism” Nancy Fraser means the hegemonic social formation in the post-​war era, a social formation in which states played an active role in their national economies and power to shape political context. Fraser does not speak directly on the political economy of narrative identities, or better, she does not speak for narratology related to economic issues, but I take Fraser’s social philosophy as a ground and I argue that the concept of ‘life as narrative’ or narrative identity is directly related to justice, state-​organized society, and political power for regulation, promoting inclusion, social equality, and cross–​class solidarity. The political economy of the imaginary in the narrative-​in-​progress is a whole new way for developing future premises for the political narratosophy that

36  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress treats life as a narrative through political legitimacy taken from the claims of the political culture of the state-​organized society and social reflection toward the narrative. I am unfolding this premise via political deliberation and contestation that the ‘narrative’ is positioned as a passive formalist issue, instead of as the epistemic power of the process of narrativization as a political act of active disruption in society. As I suggest, the process of narration always stays beyond one-​sided culturalism, beyond the language, as a radical transformation of the deep structures of the social totality. The most radical emancipatory direction of the thought here is that the art of narration is directly connected to emancipating from (gender) hierarchy, spread in the concept of account of language that could supply feminist social theory. Nancy Fraser in “Structuralism or Pragmatics? On Discourse Theory and Feminist Politics” would have predicted the emergence of the need for this discussion; for a long time, she has avoided metatheoretical discussion on discourse theory and narratology and the connection between social philosophy (Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Habermas) and discourse theory (Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva). This book takes the opposite approach, but with the same aim that contemporary identity philosophers paradigms are not enough to expand the idea of the relation of new directions in political philosophy related to leftist politics and narratology. What feminist interpretations want in a discourse theory is the main question related to a political narratosophy and politics in discourse that changes the society. How can the theory of discourse contribute to a feminist narratosophy/​narratofemosophy? The most radical concept I elaborate is that the conception of discourse theory leads us to how people’s social identities are constructed through narration and how a conception of discourse can illuminate the way the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society works. But the ‘life as narrative’ is directly related to hegemony (Marxist Italian Antonio Gramsci) that can express the advantaged position of dominant social groups concerning discourse. The art of narration is also rooted in the emancipatory conditions of social changes. Below, I recount the importance of these directions. First, it is important to understand the relation between narration and social identities. The social identities of the subject of narration are potentially equivalent identities with those who live and act under a set of society’s historically specific social practices through which the narrative is constructed (under specific political, social, cultural) reflections. Opening the ‘narrative identities’ from the text to the context can be explained through what Nancy Fraser in her text “Rethinking Recognition” has argued: We are facing, then, a new constellation in the grammar of political claims-​ making –​and one that is disturbing on two counts. First, this move from redistribution to recognition is occurring despite –​or because of –​an acceleration of economic globalization, at a time when an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality. In this context, questions

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  37 of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them. I shall call this the problem of displacement. Second, today’s recognition struggles are occurring at a moment of hugely increasing transcultural interaction and communication, when accelerated migration and global media flows are hybridizing and pluralizing cultural forms. Yet the routes such struggles take often serve not to promote respectful interaction within increasingly multicultural contexts, but to drastically simplify and reify group identities. They tend, rather, to encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism, and authoritarianism. I shall call this the problem of reification. (Fraser 2000, 107) Following Fraser, my argumentation for epistemic discussion of the political narratosophy is shaped toward context that connects the ‘narrative identities’ with the political exchange, related to the interpretation of hegemony, as a discursive aspect of power (Gramsci). This is the most developed position toward a critique of the authoritative definitions of social situations and social needs, something that Nancy Fraser has raised in a debate with Axel Honneth. To put it differently, Fraser’s insightful theory gives broader aspects of a fixation on identity politics in terms of the economic dimension of justice. And she asked why, after Soviet-​ style communism and migration, do so many movements couch their claims in the idiom of recognition? Political narratosophy as a discipline is not only concerned with the aspect of recognition, and aspired identities, but it also brings to the leftist movements a lateral dimension to battles about the redistribution of wealth and power. This discussion on ‘identities’ integrated into political narratosophy is key especially for a woman philosopher from Yugoslavia (don’t Balkanize it), who has been living and working in Europe and the United States of America and who belongs to the leftist resistance. Following Fraser, the political narratosophy is concerned with the move from the redistribution to the recognition that is occurring despite an acceleration of economic globalization, at a time when an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality. If hegemony refers to the intersection of power, inequality, and discourse of power, the identity of the subject of narration is treated not just to the narrative –​ in –​ progress, but to the political concepts of the context that produce the narrative –​in –​ progress; something that political narratosophy deals with in a speculative way, related especially to the feminist practices against hegemonic discourses. Going beyond the limits of structuralism is important to understand narrative identity thinking, and subjects of narrations related to hegemony, political theory, social theory, and emancipatory practices. Fraser claims that recognition struggles are occurring at a moment of increasing transcultural communication. She calls this the issue of displacement. But this displacement, when accelerated migration happens often serves not to promote respectful human rights interaction within the context of diversity, but to drastically simplify and reify group

38  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress identities. This works toward bad narratives and authoritarianism. Thus, Fraser explains, many have turned away from identity politics. Another aspect Fraser talks is about the problem of reification, referring to the Marxist concept of rich ideas becoming concrete, material things. In the post-​war period, two general models of theorizing language emerged in France and globally. The first is the structuralist model, with a focus on the language as a symbolic system or code derived from Saussure, and in this book deconstructed in women’s writing and women’s cultural and political studies, and now in political narratosophy. The second is the pragmatics model, which studies language at the level of discourse (shown in this book in Ricoeur’s approach), and as historically specific social practices of culture. The structuralist model is of limited usefulness for feminist theorizing, but I am analyzing the development of the political narratosophy from the epistemological stances, as a journey from the narratology as a discipline, from the language as systems of signs (the symbolic order, the symbolic system of codes) to the political philosophy of the narrative –​ in –​ progress that illuminates the processes by which cultural hegemony and social practices work. The structuralist model of language (Saussure) is of limited usefulness for feminist theorizing if the understanding of ‘narrative identity’ has no aspiration for the political context. This model takes discourses, not structures, as its object. Discourses are historically specific, socially situated, signifying practices, set in the actual context related to social processes. At the basis of my understanding of political narratosophy, or narratofemosophy, stays Fraser’s concept of politics of need interpretation is discussed in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Fraser shows that complex and specific political questions about identity thinking, should not be taken as one-​dimensional, set in the language as a symbolic system or code, but that the need for the interpretation of the discourse should be politically contested (insisting on the feminist perspective of reading too). Feminist historical materialists modified elements of authorized means of interpretation and communication, they coined new terms of description and analysis and new ways of addressing women’s subjects of narration in the theory of discourse. The structuralist model constructs the narrative identities (as noted above in Ricoeur’s case) by abstracting from the social practices and the social-​ political context. This happens in the Saussurean linguistics model of langue (the symbolic system of signs) and parole (speakers’ uses of language in practices). The structuralist model insists langue be synchronic rather than diachronic. Accordingly, the structural model tends to a monolithic view of signification and doesn’t count the contradictions of social agency, social conflicts, and social practices, but the discourse is reduced to a symbolic system of signs. That is why the social sciences and humanities urgently need a discipline that would open a space for the interpretation of discourses by reopening questions about identity related to social practices. Political narratosophy and narratofemosophy insist

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  39 on the social context of communication, integrating the model that articulates hegemony, power, and inequalities using a diachronic approach. This model of understanding the discourses is always in a historical contextualization that allows thematizing change and relations between text and processes in society. That is why there can be questions not only about the symbolic order of the language but also about a plurality of different speakers and the different social identities of narrations. It says that narrative subjects are not only structures and systems of signs but also illuminate, rather, socially situated agents. Hence, the political narratosophy stays between structuralism and pragmatics and rejects the concept that social meaning constitutes a single, coherent, self-​reproducing symbolic system. Instead, it allows terrain for social schemas of interpretation and raises discussion for social identities as non-​monolithic. Finally, the theory of discourses links the study of discourses to the study of society. Fraser talks about pragmatism and a pragmatic approach that I have integrated into the politically naratosophical approach that allows understanding the features one needs in other to understand the complexity of social identities, the formation of social groups beyond structuralism, the contesting of cultural hegemony, and the possibility of political practices. Based on Fraser’s premises –​‘political theory and culturalism against structuralism’ –​I argue Ricoeur’s concept ‘life as narrative’/​narrative identity related to hegemony and cultural oppression, which is the political model that counts on a plurality of historically changing of the discursive practices and creating intentionally social identity through narrative –​ in –​ progress. Hence, the concept of ‘life as narrative’/​narrative identity intentionally self-​developed into the discursively constructed social identities, through a critique of essentialism. Let us remind ourselves that core critique of structuralism is through political context and, following Fraser, that would be the pragmatic and political dimension of the narrative –​in –​progress. Fraser comments on this based on Lacan and the essay by Julia Kristeva called “The System and the Speaking Subject”, where she establishes a critique of lacking transgressive practices in Julia Kristeva’s work, which could help feminist politics into emancipatory power. In her essay, Julia Kristeva conceives language as a symbolic system, but Fraser’s argues that structuralist semiotics is necessarily incapable of understanding oppositional practices and change. Kristeva proposes ‘signifying practices’ like a new concept of the ‘speaking subject’. This subject should be socially and historically situated, and it is not totally subjected to the reigning social and discursive pragmatics. This is true, but this is not enough for the cultural and hegemonic relationship of the narrative in the fight against oppressive context and opening wider social emancipatory discussions that the political narratosophy is concerned about. Fraser uses the terms ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ in her social philosophy approach, both philosophically and politically. Philosophically, both terms refer to normative paradigms developed by political theorists. Politically,

40  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress they refer to claims raised by political actors and social movements in the public sphere, globally. For Fraser, everything depends on how recognition is approached. Identity can only be reconstructed dialogically, argues Fraser, with mutual recognition of our reciprocal values and relations. This argument is important for my understanding of political narratosophy which is concerned with the recognition, of the culture, as a terrain of struggle, a site of injustice, and deeply imbricated with economic inequality (Fraser). The subject of narration is shaped in relation to others and in dialogical interaction against hegemonic narrative, against imperialism. Political narratosophy goes on to argue for a new way of rethinking the politics of recognition in a way that can help to solve, the issues of displacement and reification. As a philosophical term, Fraser relates ‘redistribution’ to social democracy, to new conceptions of justice and socio-​economic redistribution. Fraser relates the term ‘recognition’ to Hegelian philosophy and phenomenology. In this context, recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects in which each sees the other as equal and separate from it. One becomes an individual subject only by virtue of recognizing and being recognized by another subject. Thus, ‘recognition’ implies the Hegelian thesis, that social relations are a priori to individuals and intersubjectivity is a priori to subjectivity. Philosophically, therefore, the terms ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ make an odd couple and that is expressed in the political narratosophy where structuralist and poststructuralist thoughts tend toward more radical critique in narratofemosophical transformation related to narrative identities. Given these clarifications, we can now supply the counterpart in social theory to the moral theory of the previous section. The key point is that each of the two dimensions of justice is associated with an analytically distinct aspect of social order. The recognition dimension corresponds to the status order of society, hence to the constitution, by socially entrenched patterns of cultural value, of culturally defined categories of social actors –​ statuses –​ each distinguished by the relative respect, prestige, and esteem it enjoys vis-​à-​vis the others. The distributive dimension, in contrast, corresponds to the economic structure of society, hence to the constitution, by property regimes and labor markets, of economically defined categories of actors, or classes, distinguished by their differential endowments of resources. Each dimension, too, corresponds to an analytically distinct form of subordination: the recognition dimension corresponds to status subordination, rooted in institutionalized patterns of cultural value; the distributive dimension, in contrast, corresponds to economic class subordination, rooted in structural features of the economic system. (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 50) In “Reshaping Justice: Between Nancy Fraser’s Feminist Philosophy and Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology”, Gonçalo Marcelo develops a concept of theory and a praxis of justice based on converging philosophies of Nancy

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  41 Fraser’s work and the late Ricoeur’s work. What I find important in this work is challenging Fraser’s theory of justice and connections with Ricoeur’s hermeneutics based on the historical landscape. What is historical in Ricoeur’s work, that is transitional from the historical to the normative point in Fraser’s theory of justice and social theory? Based on this, one of the main questions this book asks is how the process of ‘life as narrative’ / ‘narrative identity’ / ‘narrative identities’ / ‘social identities’, is positioned in the broad social-​theoretical frame. Far from ontologizing the distinctions, and based on Fraser’s theory of justice, I contextualize ‘life as narrative’ to the specific context of living and writing, something that the political narratosophy is focused on in the social organization of the society and it could be changed depending on social formation, where history raises the concepts and dimensions of social order, injustice, hegemony, and subordination. Rancière’s Political. From the Aesthetic Theory to the Political Emancipation Jacques Rancière (1940–​), one of the most significant philosophers and radical thinkers of this century, a professor of Philosophy, and a French philosopher is the main inspiration for this book and for the concept of ‘political reading’ of history into building the narrative –​in –​progress. The concept of ‘political in narration’ is a ‘revolutionary act of resistance’ par excellence since it is related to the subject of narration and narrative –​in –​progress that is split into two dimensions: one is an aesthetic sense of the artistic work (text), while another is a social, political, and emancipatory aspect of the artistic work (text). This relation between aesthetics and social bound is in contradiction as the responsibility of the state is in contradiction related to the political subject of narration (Le Sujet politique). Every subject of narration is political. The entity of the state must be a strong source for the revolutionary thoughts of the subject of narration and future means of production but, at the same time, it must give freedom of the functional concept of the political reading to be developed in the full capacity, not dominated by the state. By unfolding the political concept of the narration based on Jacques Rancière’s thoughts, I am raising the theory of political actions of the subject of narration that have already placed a contradiction at the edge of fiction and reality. The theory of political actions of the subject of narration is related to changing the cartography of the sensible and the thinkable. Rancière stays at the heart of my arguments for digging the epistemology of a political narratosophy. Jacques Rancière is not a structuralist, he doesn’t speak on the theory of narration, his early work is close to Louis Althusser’s Lire le Capital, but at the same time, there are differential aspects of his work that make him different, including his aversion to compulsive textualism (visible in the general lack of direct quotations), his angst-​free relationship to Hegel, his indifference toward phenomenology, intention toward metaphysics and deconstruction, commitment to history that selected him from the canonical writers of the philosophic tradition.

42  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress The contradiction is seen primarily here between two claims ‘aesthetics in narration’ and ‘politics’, like permanent separate spheres that must be inserted into one another. In the philosophical world of Rancière’s thoughts, there is no direct distribution of the concept of politics of narration (La Politique) itself, but implicitly, I am reading it through his understanding of the aesthetic regime of the distribution of the sensible (Le Sensible), as forms of equality for the appearance and distinguishing the invisible from the visible, the sayable from the unsayable, actions from non-​actions, from the privileged point of intersection of aesthetics and politics in narration. Therefore, aesthetics is always political, and politics is always aesthetic, because of the system of inclusivity of perceptibility, sensibility, and intelligibility. In Rancière’s terms, politics (la politique) is a distribution of the sensible, as a dissensual act of subjectification that intervenes in the political order, hence political activity reconfigurates the distribution of the sensible. There is an aesthetic moment of equality and a political moment of equality. Rancière in “Ten Theses on Politics” develops the concept of politics as the existence of a subject (of narration, in this book for political narratosophy), defined by its participation in contraries. Politics is a paradoxical form of action. There are two modes of action, a poiesis governed by the model of fabrication which gives form to matter, and a praxis that subtracts from this relation the ‘inter-being’ of subjects committed to political actions. Rancière’s concept of dissensus as not an institutional overturning, but an activity that cuts across forms of cultural and identity belonging and hierarchies between discourses and genres is one of the core aspects for understanding ‘the political’. I move his arguments to the new subjects of narration and heterogeneous objects into the field of perception. Both activities have to do with reorienting perception and disruption of the forms of belonging. Hence it can be shown that politics has an inherently aesthetic dimension and aesthetics an inherently political one. Rancière examines the concept of dissensus as a conflict between sense and sense: Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/​or ‘bodies’. This is how dissensus can be said to reside at the heart of politics, since at the bottom the latter itself consists in an activity that redraws the frame within which common objects are determined. Politics breaks with the sensory self-​ evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies’, that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying. This ‘natural’ logic, a distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise, pins bodies to ‘their’ places and allocates the private and the public to distinct ‘parts’ –​ this is the order of the police. Politics can therefore be defined by way of contrast as the activity that breaks with the order of the police by inventing new subjects.

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  43 Politics invents new forms of collective enunciation; it re-​frames the given by inventing new ways of making sense of the sensible, new configurations between the visible and the invisible, and between the audible and the inaudible, new distributions of space and time –​in short, new bodily capacities. (Rancière 2010, 139) In the epistemology of the political narratosophy premises through understanding dissensus a new possible discipline is introduced. The ‘political’ is a radical process, and politics is an activity that consists only in blurring the boundaries between what is considered political and what is considered proper to the domain of social or private life. Inspired by Rancière’s political critique as a fundamental oscillation between the privatization of speech in structures of power and its disincorporation through the activities of political subjects (in narration) the intensity of the political can be measured. Within the contemporary critical discourse of Rancière’s critical theory of Althusser’s method, and his reading of Marx’s cultural theory, the practices of equality/​inequality are related to the understanding of the politics of inequality and dissensus (that had been active in the critique in the 1960s and 1970s). Rancière’s inspiring philosophy of political and artistic action is in a direct act with equality, which is not an essence or a value. It is a presupposition of theory and practice, but it has no inherent content of its own, which forms the condition of developing the possibility of politics and freedom, which leads me to a rereading of Ricoeur’s narrative identities. Rancière’s epistemic provocative work in social sciences and humanities makes a mediated epistemic break of the hermeneutic for reading Marx and subversive aspects of political, aesthetic, equality, and philosophical questions of our times, based on the transformation of sensibilities. Considering that the notions of identities, non-​identities, and philosophy are part of non-​standard, speculative philosophy, the art of writing and politics only ever consist in the powerful effects of equality that they stage, in the plots in which specific practices of blurring appear. Possibilities of politics mean possibilities for political disruptions of the social order based on a presupposition of equality in the order itself that always already presupposes the equality of subjects of narration as political speaking beings in its functioning. Inspired by Rancière’s work on dissensus, I am developing the concept of politics as an emancipatory project between art and the real, and a radical distinction between the social and politics is in the struggle for and maintaining of power. The political narratosophy is created by the epistemological desire for action in-​between, directed to have to re-​identify politics and police. There is a tiny line between Rancièrian conception of art (of writing) and politics and the identification of this practice of blurring with ideas of ‘art becoming life’ or ‘everything is political’. There is an ‘ontological illusion’ of the politics of narrative, in the name of understanding politics of social inequalities. I have approached the concept of radical ‘politics of narration’ through the concept of policing, in

44  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress Rancièrian terms, where views on politics mean something he calls policing. “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby aggregation and consent of collectivities are achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police”.9 To establish policing is to understand the process of identification that normally goes by the name of politics. Let me paraphrase Rancière: policing is the partition of the sensible, the visible, and the sayable, which means, politics, that sees the activity is visible and another is not. Police is an official zone of visibility (in a sense of Michael Foucault), it is a set of practices of the dominant politics (including resonance of hierarchy, processes of elections, voting processes, elites vs common people, distribution of the power and economy, dominations and hegemonic process in society, society system as a whole). The praxis of the police determines the political subjects of narration in society, as acting of legitimization of the entity of the very police than to change the system. By naming this form of politics policing, Rancière refers to the reality as the absorption of all reality and all truth into the category of the only thing possible. By police, Rancière is speaking about an organizational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution of the sensible or a law that divides the community into a group. If one connects the idea that the repression in society often is associated with the police, then the structures of the visible emerge. Rancière invites us to develop the perspectives of the three-​layered society system in the cultural hegemony (close to understanding Raymond Williams’s cultural politics), and this process is essential for the process of identification. On the other hand, Rancière’s policing could refer to the new-​geocolonial politics of strategies of narration (strategies for geopolitical postcolonial subjects of dominant narration, lacking health justice and structural inequalities related to, these days, Covid-19 vaccinations, for example, the demographic health dichotomy between poor and wealthy countries, politics of narration for the health safety of the population, protection, and sensing of health groups of people, developing (or not) policies for them, the welfare of the state, capitalism and oligarchy benefits from the public–​private health systems and mainstream politics). Rancière’s methodology is radically grounded in an abstract system of the politics of narrative paradigms (established into the discursively confirmed self), but he has an anti-​general theoretical approach to social justice and emancipation. Namely, the politics of narrative structures comes from the specific political struggle, from sensing the pain, sensing the suffering, from the vulnerability and desire to be in relation to others, rather than from the general political issues. Rancièrian politics of emancipation is about overcoming the naked discursive theory of the subject of narration in the last instance of the resistance and opening the narrative identities to the dynamics of the society. This is the process of subjectivisation, from the lingually conceived self, into a subject, to

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  45 mediate the narrative identities to the social identities, to the others, and to oneself. This process is also a return to the process of the identification through the politics of the self as an Other (in relation to other subjects of narrations/​beings/​ nature/​labor), but at the same time as the material process (without materialism) in Fraser’s terms, seeking the legitimization from the context (society). The logic of emancipation is about heterology (a logic for the other), or, in Greek terms, a heteron, but also it is about the ‘Life of the Narrative’, narrative identities, narrative –​in –​process, legitimized by the social structures outside the narrative. Emancipation is a philosophical procedure in relation to the politics of equality, as a conceptualization of the relationship between thought and society, identity thinking, and philosophical representation (its concrete historical objects), where the general criticism of the social and political philosophy is against the hierarchy and its political structures. The subject of narration is inserted into the system of performatively contradictory aspects of emancipation and social inequalities. The concept of identity thinking can never be a simple assertion of identity, but it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by the other (by the ruling order of policy). My claim is that the future of emancipatory practices is set out of history, this question stays somewhere between political philosophy and political theory, through sensing the core of oneself as a radical subject of resistance in time. Emancipation is respected by the verification of equality. The logic of political subjectivization, or better, the logic of political emancipation of narrative identities is a heterology, it is the logic of the other. First, it is never the simple assertion of an identity, it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by an Other, given by the ruling order of policy. Second, it is a demonstration, and that demonstration always supposes an Other. It is staging a political commonplace for the terrain of equality. Third, the logic of subjectivization always entails an impossible identification. To speak of emancipation in Nancy Fraser’s work is to speak about great transformation through seeking the roots of domination in every sphere. To paraphrase Fraser, emancipation is hierarchical protection, or better, feminist claims for emancipation. In this sense, the concept of ‘life as narration’ is bounded to the emancipation related to the contextual hierarchy (beyond narrative as a process), where the social protections are oppressive. Fraser’s feminist critique of hierarchical protection runs by developing of the concept of narrative bounded to emancipation’s ambivalence in the process of the great transformation of society and dominant discourses related to the popularization of the society. This process of emancipation is what Fraser would relate to modes of protection, often as part of a struggle for emancipation intersected with another struggle, between principles of protection and deregulation. Political narratosophy enters the scene of the reorganization of the subject of narration and destabilization of the narrative –​ in –​ progress, by finding a way for improving the democracy (La Démocratie) of the opening narrative toward

46  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress the context and inter-​legitimization by claiming that the democracy is reflected in the narrative –​in –​progress; one can follow that through Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the police. Democracy is an act of political subjectivization that disturbs the police order (La Police/​L’Ordre policier) by polemically calling into question the aesthetic coordinates of perception, thoughts, and actions. Instead of policy, Rancière’s politics is something that undermines the police order. Rancière explains, saying: I propose now to reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration –​that of the part that has no part… an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. (Rancière 1999, 29–30) The concept of politics in Rancière’s work has never been answered through any other means except philosophy. Namely, it is related to the undoing of the police order through the presupposition of the equality of subjects of narration. Let us say that equality here is what Rancière calls presupposition, equality is not political, but generates politics when it is implemented in the specific form of dissensus (Le Dissensus). Equality is not a founding ontological principle but a condition that functions when it is put into action; equality of common language is a condition for disrupting the orders of discourse. Equality (general), political equality, and aesthetic equality are all equivalent. As for the excess of the language –​ in the sense that I am using the word here –​ it happens equally, which makes redistribution of the sensible possible. Consequently, politics produce political subjectification, dissensual acts that disturb the hierarchies of the given ‘police order’ in the struggle to verify the presupposition of equality. Hence, fundamental equality is related to the imaginative power of the language. The political narratosophy treats Rancière’s politics not merely as proof to those in power, but as proof to oneself through one’s actions; that’s why political in narration stays at the edge somewhere between political philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, politics, and history, as a flexible space for reading the upcoming history, a history that has not happened yet. At the same time, the politics of narration is a struggle for equality which can never be merely a demand upon the other but always, simultaneously, a proof that is given to oneself. The political narratosophy does not analyze equality as a conceptual category for art (fiction), but the notion of aesthetic equality allows us to rethink certain incoherent categories integral to the contemporary art of writing (L’Écriture). Politics creates political subjects of narration through the action by which they come into being as humans who at once see and impose themselves as equal.

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  47 That’s why one no longer talks about political narratology which concerns only the way of narration, but the democracy of the written word (in the Platonic sense). However, the democracy of the art of writing is not yet democracy as a political form but equality in the art of writing has an intention to distance itself from political equality. The equality of the written word (language) is not the same thing as the equality of exchange (commodity) which is a matter of capital. Politics in Rancière’s work opens a space for new directions of the political narratosophy, a discipline that deals with narration, identities, and antagonisms in society. Rancière’s political stays an antagonistic link to the police because it breaks the sensible configuration in which subjects of narration could be defined. Rancière”s political perspective would consist, in a way, of avoiding the categorization of democratic crisis, considering that political metaphors still have politically enough strength for denominating “the actual state of democracy”. In this spot, Rancière is close to Ricoeur’s political thinking about the metaphor. Rancièrian politics is a set of practices that defines modes of being, which Rancière names the police. Hence, politics is the opposite of the police because it is an intervention in the distribution of the sensible (Le Partage du sensible) that disturbs the “self-​evident” sensory order. If one relates this contradiction to the fundamental contradictions between the essence of life and politics, the conclusion is that politics is the general distribution of the sensible, founded on the identification between politics and the police. Thinking of the political in the philosophy of narration based on Rancière’s concept of politics, as I said before, is closely related to Rancière’s understanding of the effect of the presupposition of equality, but not as setting down equality as a kind of transcendental governing of every sphere of activity but related to the concept of dominance. That is to undo the classification of the police order –​ classifications by which some subjects of narration are given authority over others, that is a class struggle. Art of writing in the aesthetic regime of art (Le Régime esthétique de l’art) has ruled Rancièrism, and Rancièrism has ruled through the implementation of certain equality, based on the destruction of the hierarchical system of the fine arts. Rancière argues that the essence of equality is not so much to unify as to declassify, but that does not mean that there is no unity within politics. Politics divides the social order, or, in Rancière’s words, to express dissensus into it. That has a meaning related to my focus on the destabilization of political cultures and political narratives through Rancière’s understanding of democracy: “Every politics is democratic in this precise sense: not in the sense of a set of institutions, but in the sense of forms of expression that confront the logic of equality with the logic of the police order”.10 If this position of politics is an important task of the political narratosophy that Rancière invents and attempts to institute, then the following task should be to emancipate the democracy of the written world –​that –​is –​not –​yet a democracy as a political form in narrative –​in –​progress. The political intervention comes later. The politics of different subjects of narration and the emancipatory

48  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress future of the politics of narration is a result of history. Rancière’s work on ‘politics’ points out the limits of Marxist politics and it is a politics from the below, in Gramsci’s understanding of the hegemonic layers in society. Democracy is a practice of politics and subjects that are reflected in each police order by the division into the social order. That means the subject of narration is a part of the political stage and participates based on the mutual presupposition of equality instead of domination. Finally, the presupposition of the subject of narration’s inequality is expressed in different ways in the political struggle outside the artistic work/​artefact/​text. Rancière is against narrative (in the classy traditional understanding of it, as narratology does), which rushes on to the effect that follows from a cause. As he says, for the writer “to see”, means “to make the scene visible”, but what the writer writes is not what the writer sees. For filmmakers, the movement of the camera is a movement of the narrative; what the filmmaker sees, what is in front of the camera, is also what the spectator will see. Rancière’s dismissal of emancipatory narratives as unrealizable promises is shown in his Béla Tarr’s discussion on The Prefab People (released in 1981), a film produced and directed in socialist Hungary, where Rancière argues that communism failed because it was structured like a narrative (he means ‘a strict narrative’, ‘grand narrative’), and praises Tarr’s filmmaking where narrative happens between two temporalities like a great distance between official planning of production and conducts and the reality of lived time, expectations, aspirations, and that is the materialization of broken promises of one time. In this context, I argue that narrative –​ in –​ progress, narrative –​ in –​ transit has an anticipatory strength to leave the authoritarian regimes and to give meaning and freedom that hasn’t come yet, set always –​ already in “time after” narratives and events of materiality. In Aisthesis, Rancière also criticizes Eisenstein’s narrative cinema and his montage for its didactic narrative structure, and instead praises the montage of Dziga Vertov, for its mixing forms and communist sensibility, innovation, which assembles images, without incorporating them into a narrative, without intention to illustrate the slogans of the regime, but giving them a poetic capacity of power in a poetical sense; a poem makes everything into more than a thing –​as Rancière says, into its material life or sensible materiality of its idea. Rancière suggests another economy, another circulation between subjects of narration, words, and things, through the potential meaning of the narrative (not through the actual meaning of the narrative). Regarding Ricoeur’s mimesis, Rancièrian aesthetic regime of arts shows initially the breakdown of the system of representation. To radicalize political narratosophy (in Rancière’s political philosophy, sense, not in a political ontology) is to claim that inequality is related to the hierarchies and dominations of a given police order, to acknowledge that a given hierarchical police order is to be committed. At a political narratosophical level, the political action (acting out the presupposition of equality) is to bring the commitment to equality

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  49 through establishing the relation of the subject of narration, narrative –​in –​progress, identities/​non-​identities to the exterior space, out of history. Political action organizes a political position of the subject of narration where there was none before. There is no political subject of narration that first exists and then decides to act. A political subject of narration in the political-​cultural society (or a collective political subject of narration) does not pre-​exist its activity but is created through action that expresses the presupposition of equality. That is something the political narratosophy legitimizes directly from the structures and dynamics of society divides itself from narratology as a discipline. This concept of Rancièrian subjectification is the way of becoming equal in society: “By subjectification, I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus a part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience”.11 Inspired by Rancière’s thoughts, I argue that this affirmation of the political action cannot remain limited to those alongside whom one-​acts. If subjects of narration who have no part are to see themselves as equal to those subjects of narration who have a part, then they must also see those who have a part as equal to them. This has implications for political action (reflected by the concept of opening the narrative from the text to the context). My claim is that narrative –​ in –​ progress is bounded to the dynamics of (narrative) identities towards the context. Subjects of narration (in fiction, in historiography) always have the pretension to be creatures set in the materialization of the narrative –​in –​progress (despite the discursive process of structuring the plot and narrative identities). However, an exit from the discursive theory grasp of philosophical thinking of narrative is possible, as Ricoeur, Fraser, and Rancière have shown. The effect of such an exit is not only epistemological but also radically social. Philosophy of the narrative –​ in –​ progress becomes an essence of politics and treatment of the (non) identities in an artistic text, history, and historiography too, which I shall try to demonstrate further in the next chapter. Rancière’s theoretical vocation rises from the ruins of Althusserian theory. Rancière’s effort is to raise the politics of Althusserianism related to protocols of institutional privilege. The transformation of Althusserianism in the work of Rancière is Rancière’s political transformation. This is core tissue for understanding the ‘political’ concept in the theory of narration. Rancièrian ‘political’ happens through a transformation of the aesthetic distribution of sensibility and perception in society, it does not happen primarily at the level of political institution. As Rancière says in the Preface to La Leçon d’Althusser, the theoretical and political distance separating his work from Althusserian Marxism, was a result partially of the events of 1968 and the realization that Althusser’s school was a ‘philosophy of order’ whose very principles anesthetized the revolt against the bourgeoisie. The background for a ‘political’ entity of the narrative structures is rooted in the Frankfurt School, thoughts that are developed through the concept of emancipation (L’Émancipation), and at some point, it has convergence

50  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress with Rancière. Dialects and the possibilities of emancipation come as a reflection of the distribution and sharing of the sensible. If both, art (artist text) and politics are aesthetic insofar, then, as they affect our senses and how we understand and feel the world around us –​ important and sensible. Rancière’s critical theory, theory of democracy, and emancipation draw attention to power and its relation to oppression, it contributes to progressive social change and transformation, in a sense of ‘post-truth’ politics. Critical thinking leads to a mobilization of oppressed groups in their struggle for emancipation, to understand the domination. Political narratosophy is constituted by the so-​called Rancièrian distribution of the sensible where the aesthetic dimension of politics is the ordering of the social (Rancière here refers to the ‘police order’) which creates divisions in terms of what is sayable and not sayable, what is visible and not visible. I would like to propose here a feminist, different procedure of perceptible, thinkable, and radically reframed narrative –​ in –​ progress, that results in the production of new meanings and new subjectivities in society, by situating it in equality as a democratic act of disrupting the ‘normal’ order of hierarchy. In political narratosophy, especially in feminist political narratosophy, or narratofemosophy its meaning is important, crossing the boundaries of what is fact and should be verified and documented, and what is not. Feminist readings of the Rancièrian position of discussing the narrative give his work a performative aspect that questions the ‘dominated’ subjects of narration. Narratosophy shows that the concept of performativity develops the resistance between the dichotomy of ‘dominated’ and ‘domination’ and changes the social categorization of the narrative that should re-​inscribe the hierarchy from the inside. In that sense, narrative –​in –​progress points to the materialization that questions the hierarchy from the inside (institutions), pointing out the dislocation between the system of symbolization and the performative aspect of the subjectivity of narration (that is, a feminist resonance of the ‘decentered’ subject of narration). This inception is about verifying the new modes of the politics of narrative subjectivity brought into effect through the transgression and transfiguration of structures from the text to the context. Radicalizing this perception opens new subjectivities like gendered or classed political subject positions associated with the current discontinuity of the politics of narration (set in disturbing times, like a global health crisis, post-​pandemic crisis, climate crisis, or transgressive crossing in health care labor where workers transgressed temporal and occupational boundaries to produce many layers of human narrative identities through actions to survive). The non-​hierarchical engagement overcomes the structuralist and poststructuralist dichotomy of understanding the narrative, entering the space of aesthetic sensibilities set into the real world of historical materialism. The radical interruption of emancipation of the concept of narrative gives a voice to the political subjects of narration excluded from the hierarchies of knowledge in society, and at the same time, affirming their existence and power

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  51 to change society (through art, or rereading/​retelling history). From the feminist point of interpretation, my claim is that radicalizing Rancière’s work explains why political narratosophy is concerned not just with the rhetorical affirmation of the discourse theory, but rather with the distribution of the sensible, at the level of narrative –​ in –​ progress, and in its context, as an aesthetic dimension of human experience that allows us to make a difference between the actual and the unactual, between the present and the past. First, the actual narrative –​ in –​progress always goes with political management of the sense (following the dominant capital valorizations). On the other hand, unactual is resistance and disobedience against capitalist accumulation. In accordance with the distribution of the sensible, humans are no longer in the times of social strikes against capitalism (post-​Covid-​19 pandemic shows this when the inequalities are greater than ever). It is more a commodification of the process of narrative –​ in –​ progress, instead of emancipation of thought. I understand Rancière’s political practice as an operator of emancipation that produces its own distribution of sense. This distribution of sense, unlike that of dominant structures in society, seeks to show the actuality of the unactual narrative –​in –​progress. In other words, feminist interpretations of Rancière show that political practices are focused on the progressive understanding of domination through the distribution of the sense whose principle is resistance and disagreement. Political narratosophy treats that aspect of narrative –​ in –​ progress that has the strength to leave the discourse theory interpretations and to treat the feminist dialectics of thought against domination. The emancipatory thought and aesthetic dimension of the human experience come as a critique to capital. Feminist interpretations of Rancière find a new way of understanding political practices or politics of narrative –​in –​progress –​ that have a form of time that is opposed to that of progress. This is the logic of the interruption. Narrative –​ in –​ progress as an interruption of the domination, becomes the fundamental axis of the forms of aesthetic experience, in time. Political narratofemosophy shows that narrative –​ in –​ progress, read through Rancière’s work, does not confront the domination itself, but this concept as political practice confronts the conditions of possibilities that make it possible for some to rule over others. Rancière gives an alternative to political philosophy, and it is connected to political practices to emerge in our sensitive experience. For this purpose, it is necessary to put forward an alternative political thought. Rancière’s aesthetics is not about sensible, but a certain distribution of the sensible related to the category of time. Rancière problematizes the first book of Aristotle’s Politics, arguing that it is not evident that logos allows the emergence of a life in common. There is a logos that serve to manifest the useful, and there is a logos that allows us to understand what is unjust. The concerns of political narratosophy are focused on the utility of a given subject and on the speech act as a manifestation of the common good that political philosophy wants to point out. The distinction between the utility and common good is a distribution of the sensible, a distribution of our ways of perceiving the world that cannot

52  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress be explained from the pragmatic freedom that allows us to reach consensus (Habermas), nor from the idea that there is class domination (Marx). Rancière’s attitude comes from the capacity of language to transit from the reason to the consensus of justice. This has given the name of police distribution of the sensible, a way of our experience to give order to life (ways of being and ways of saying). Police distribution of the sensible happens when a community can distinguish an instrumental action, which maximizes the utility of a certain subject, and a just action, which allows the stability of the common. I argue that political narratosophy transforms political conflict into police, allowing consensus into narrative –​in –​progress to emerge. This happens after leaving interpretations at the level of discourse theory and through developing an interest in thinking of the narrative –​in –​progress as a concept for a critique of the capital. The consensus is a system of sensible evidence that has as its principle a specific way of giving sense to the given. I argue the narrative –​in –​progress through Rancière’s work as an unfolding of the political thought that is immanent into the narrative and that allows us to go beyond the police configuration of sense at the same time. Rancièrean politics in the narrative –​in –​progress as I read it, is a core aspect of the political narratosophy, it is a change in the distribution of the sensible to perceive a phenomenon that has always been present in history, that is political practice. My new position on reading Rancière’s philosophy of politics related to political narratosophy, is that the politics of narrative –​in –​progress is not equivalent to the political practice of subject of narration. It is rather that the politics of narrative –​in –​progress has the power to reconfigure the distribution of the sensible in a specific way. In Chapter 3, I show how artistic practices in their aesthetic dimension have their own politics of narrative –​in –​progress. Like the politics of disobedient subjects, the politics of narrative –​in –​progress reconfigures the given context and the way the author makes sense of it through the subject of narration. Political narratosophy considers the just, but that is not the normative horizon of contemporary political thought, but rather a contingent way of assuming the connections between words and things. Political narratosophy goes beyond and gives a possible emancipatory meaning of the narrative –​ in –​ progress that has been despised by political philosophy (Rancière is not for political philosophy but for politics of writing, which allows us to go beyond the police configuration of the sense). I took Rancierean politics of writing, integrated it in my stances for political narratosophy that treats the change in the distribution of the sensible to perceive political practices. The sense of Rancière’s critique of political philosophy begins at the level of normative tendencies. The political narratosophy instead political philosophy is not normative but aesthetical, which puts under question the police of the distribution of senses through the aesthetic dimension of emancipation (seen in the artistic/​historiographic work). In other words, politics happens when narrative –​ in –​progress interrupts the flow of events and disrupts the present, but aesthetic tendencies happen there too. The narrative –​ in –​ progress is set in Althusser’s

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  53 contingency of the materialism of the encounter. Althusser says that every social formation could not have occurred because its principle is not a necessity, but the equivocation that the encounter supposes. Hence, capitalism as a social formation emerges from a set of misunderstandings and encounters. Rancière’s critique of the conditions of politics, understood as in the ancient Athenian world, seeks to eradicate the different regimes of the wrong implied by politics practice itself. Rancière’s perspectives on political philosophy show (together with political science) the intention to make political practice itself unthinkable. In a traditional sense, politics forces police distribution of the sensible grasped by the political philosophy that doesn’t have a sense for the contradictions and abuses of the concept of justice. Political narratosophy integrates Rancière’s understanding of the new politics of writing against the normative character of the political thought itself. Political narratosophy develops it through the fluid concept of the narrative –​in –​progress, or the identity that is stretched and is in flux through the free flow of events and justice towards the context. If the distribution of the sensible happens through the perceptions and practices that shape and sustain a common world then the concept of the ‘political’ in subjects of narration refers to leaving the traditional structuralist ‘subjects of narration’ (that belong to the text, as a matter of signification, at symbolic and linguistic level). Evidently, in Ricoeur and Rancière’s work, the democratic appearance that is opposed to the democratic visibility of the political subject of narration, is already open toward society. Political narratosophy is grounded on the elaboration above about the potential of the political subjects of narration. Rancière’s modalities on understanding (radical) democracy and political aesthetics leave the traditional understanding of democracy and goes into the depth of interdisciplinary aspects of democracy related to arts and cultural politics. The treatment of the subjects of narration, narrative –​ in –​ progress, and narrative identities in political narratosophy is based on interdisciplinary aspects. The political subjects of narration are born in the very act of opening itself toward the action, breaking the ‘frames of the text’ towards the politics of the context. Such modes of actions refer that the political subject of narration is not legitimated only through the structures of narration, but the subject of narration is politically engaged in the politics of everyday life and complex processes of understanding the democratic theorizing of the cultural politics itself. For Rancière, democratic theory legitimizes political subjectivization. He is inspired by the French political thinkers on the Left after May 1968 (his early works are in communication with the epistemic roots of Althusser’s method). Hence, I am actualizing the position of the political subject of narration that provokes the police distribution through narration and re-​set the ‘political’ in narration. Rancière’s philosophy of democracy is not limited to formal justification, but it is aesthetically rooted in democracy through the radical shifts of the rules, society (mostly based on the proletarian poetics and nineteenth-​century socialism, everyday life, and cinematic way of thinking).

54  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress The politics of everyday life in his work come from Pierre Bourdieu (concept of habitus) and Michel de Certeau’s work, which I explore later in this book. The politics of common life in Rancière’s work opens a whole new topography of rethinking the political and aesthetical subject of narration based on the serials of action and imaginary radicalism. There is no equivalence of culture with the dynamic process of subjectivization. Raising political subjects of narration is leaving the stays somewhere in-​between subjectivization and the cultural political context. ‘Politics’ in the subject of narration should bring the capacity of “double being” of the subjects and mimetic act of splitting in two the narrative identities of the subjects of narration with anticipatory strength to become active society agents for democratic processes. It is a visionary act of political aesthetics that provides an essential conceptual system for thinking about the presumption of ordinary equality through the concept of ‘as if’ in narration that implies the dissensus of political thinking that counts on the agentic potential of the being, the agentic potential of the self into society’s processes and class struggles. The political dispute that Rancière conceptualizes in the terms of dissensus has an empirical component (with a strong critical theory toward a positivist social sciences approach) and that is the point I take as the ground for unfolding the political narratosophy related to political sciences and progressive economic class (Marxist) interest into unfolding political in the subject of narration. The political narratosophy is built on this dissensus, pointing out that theory of narration is not a selective discipline from the contemporary democratic theory of the processes and antagonisms in society. It must include the epistemology of the contemporary political theory and the contemporary theory of narration. Epistemological Tension Between Neo-​Marxist Philosophy, Aesthetic Experience, Democratic Practices and Capital I suggest reading Ricoeur’s concepts on ‘life as narrative’/​ narrative identities/​ non-​identiteis not to handle his structuralist notions, but to correlate beyond the symbolic and semiotic linguistic systems of signs as signifying practices and to initiate changes that should include political narratosophy and narratofemosophy politics between identity politics and social identities pragmatic theory of discourse through a critique of essentialism, including the political economy of the difference as such. Investment in moving from the level of textual analysis to the level of critique of the capitalist economy, beyond text, concerns speculations on the terrain of epistemology. There is a notable difference in artistic commitment to the facts and specific arguments in history. In Rancière’s work, there is no ‘real world’ and there is a limit to the distribution of the thinkable related philosophy of history. Instead, there are always definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  55 perceptions and the field of our interventions. The real is a matter of construction, a matter of ‘fiction’. The quality of the fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real. Political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus that is ‘real’. The practice of fiction recreates connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs and spaces, framing a given sense of reality. The ‘fine arts’ are so named because the law of mimesis defined them as regulated relation between a way of doing –​ a poiesis –​ and a way of being which is affected by it –​ an aesthesis. Art in the aesthetic regime finds its only content precisely in this process of undoing, in opening a gap between poeisis and aesthesis, between a way of doing and a horizon of affect. Aesthetic experience is that of an unprecedented sensorium in which hierarchies are abolished that structured sensory experience. The resistance of art is related to lived experience, and this is the paradox of ‘artistic resistance’ since art promises to an audience that art is art and insofar art is not art. Rancière’s reading of Aristotle’s theory of emplotment develops a speculative understanding of knowledge in space and time and takes account of the metaphysical emplotment: The specificity of the representative regime of the arts is characterized by the separation between the idea of fiction and that of lies. It is this regime that confers autonomy on the arts’ various forms in relation to the economy of communal occupations and the counter-​economy of simulacra specific to the ethical regime of images. This is what is essentially at stake in Aristotle’s Poetics, which safeguards the forms of poetic mimesis from the Platonic suspicion concerning what images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that the arrangement of a poem’s actions is not equivalent to the fabrication of a simulacrum. It is a play of knowledge that is carried out in a determined space-​time. To pretend is not to put forth illusions but to elaborate intelligible structures. Poetry owes no explanation for the ‘truth’ of what it says because, in its very principle, it is not made up of images or statements, but fiction, that is to say, arrangements between actions. (Rancière 2013, 32) Rancièrian (anti) hermeneutics is based on regimes of sense and perception, so the becoming has a plot-​like structure. Rancière’s specific understanding of the mimesis related to Aristotle’s Poetics and theory of the emplotment can be read here: Aristotle rejects the conflation Plato plays between two kinds of imitation, that of the poet offering fables and characters and that of the soul acting or suffering according to the models that have been imprinted in it … He challenges the passive status of mimesis that led Plato to see it as a simulacrum leading to suffering and instead gives it an active status as a mode of knowledge, which is inferior but still real (117).

56  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress I call the distribution of the sensible system of self-​evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed… It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise the question of ‘aesthetic practices’ as I understand them, that is forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility … From the Platonic point of view, the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces (7-​8). Rancière’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and Metaphysics is a different to Ricoeur’s, conceiving that the representation is determined by the action. Invoking different readings of Rancière elaborated by Davide Panagia, one can describe the commitments of aesthetic and political meaning related to action as an essence where mimesis is understood as a normative theory of action. The plot stays somewhere-​in-​between the sequences of necessity and probability, and representation comes for relating things. I argue that through reading such passages, as above, Rancièrian mimesis stays beyond the authoritative and hierarchical position of the mimetic system rooted in the police that refers neither to a system of oppression nor to a specific institution or control. Hence, the Rancièrian plot is a transparent process that takes action across, an intersubjective relation, that is juxtaposed to and intercut with intrinsic tonalities of the narrative itself through using the reflections of the actions in society. All this is important for understanding the political narratosophy inclinations and interests, something that political theory or narratology itself could not cover in the commitment to intelligibility and political interlocutions. Rancière’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics is a kind of both regimented and intuitive, it is aesthetic-​ political radical interruption of a political episteme in the narrative, that makes poetic regime of the sensible specific one in a sense that the ‘political’ can no longer rely on an account of action. Rancière emerges on the side of an abstract exchangeability of the stories, self-​understandings, and audience (spectator’s gaze). The Rancièrian idea of the ‘concepts’ is almost fully rooted in materialization; he thinks about concepts almost as though they are material objects; this comes from his deeply personal process of research during which he integrated personal experience into a certain kind of conceptual (artistic) practice. Political narratosophy as a discipline integrates Rancièrian radical aesthetic and emancipatory potentials of art, something that narratology could not cover.

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  57 This new way of thinking, the emancipatory sense of what I called narrative –​ in –​progress, has engagement between art and transformational politics related to the society, especially in times of crisis and fundamental political, economic, and social changes. I put the consideration of Rancièrian thinking beyond structuralist terms, beyond conventional Marxist approaches to conceive the political dimension of emancipatory struggles of the neglected, exploited, and oppressed (narratives). Radical tendencies of the political narratosophy are to read the artistic and political radicality of narrative –​ in –​ progress, that reaffirms the deep connections between aesthetics and radical politics. I am suggesting synthesizing the democratic practices to life, narrative, and identity politics is a political and aesthetic experience and joining the process of the economy of narrative against capitalism. From the experience of Marxist philosophy, the critique of political economy must be realized through perceptual dimensions of aesthetics regimes and distribution of the sensible, between economy, politics, and life as narrative, or better, the identity politics. These are symmetrical discussions covered by the political narratosophy. Conclusion This chapter provides core aspects of political narratosophy related to narrativity –​ in –​ progress in the work of Ricoeur, Fraser, and Rancière. First, the chapter opens the concept of Ricoeur’s narrativity through his political (anti) hermeneutics approach in the theory of historiography vis-​à-​vis the fictional discourse. Although I am simplifying what is, in fact, a complex set of political processes of the context, the consequences are the following. First, political narratosophy integrates feminist interpretations of Ricoeur’s ‘narrative – in – progress’ and ‘narrative identities’ that turn the screw into the new directions, that theories of justice bear upon societies, thus society is the subject of change that reflects and creates ‘narrative – in – progress’. Second, I show that Nancy Fraser rethinks the theory of justice today, and Ricoeur’s political hermeneutics is complementary to the anticipatory direction of rethinking Fraser’s theories of justice. Ricoeur’s method of ‘narrative identity’ thinking is not based only on recognition but on recognition of others, or anticipative reconstruction since it anticipates the critique of unjustly reified ideologies to grasp social life and to change it. Ricoeur’s political hermeneutics shows that ‘narrative identity’ (transformed in this book to the concept of ‘narrative – in – progress’) is a base for grasping the social reality, rethinking the theory of justice, that is grounded on the existing social reality. Ricoeur’s subject of narration is always in co-​relation to the others, in his political hermeneutics there is a root for the idea of justice placed between the self and practical actions related to others. As in feminist interpretations of the subjects of narration, Ricoeur’s subject is embodied, vulnerable, suffering, and fragile, in the voyage to others where the social imaginary is constitutive as

58  Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress an action. Finally, by insisting on narrativity by both narratives and otherness, Ricoeur’s model seems open to mutation to identities over time, ready to grasp justice and social changes. The practice of justice is one that can consider the valid claims of social actors for redistribution, recognition, and representation. Thus, Fraser, in her article “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World”, finds some echoes in Ricœur’s theory of justice. Political narratosophy integrates Fraser’s theory of justice and treats the ‘narrative identities’ and ‘narrative – in – progress’ only related to the questions of political injustice and productive imagination that push beyond the actual real, rooted in the economic and politically specific context of change and resistance, always dialogically through recognition. In this sense political narratosophy has highly anti–​capitalist tendencies in treating of the concept of ‘narrative – in – progress’. Fraser’s three-​ dimensional theory of justice is based on redistributive struggles instead of recognition, where the social movements and dynamics of democratic terrain are redistributed. Her approach is historical and geo-​locative, with feminist struggles integrated. Narrative –​in –​progress, and identities in Fraser’s terms are results and reflections of the ‘new social movements’ against capitalism, and transformative political actions, challenging the rules of heteronormativity with a significant emphasis on economic and social questions. Fraser is radical in the reconstruction of political interventions given as new tools for intersectional identities. Fraser is close to Ricoeur in a method of historical reconstruction of the context and a sense of moving beyond that. Frasers ‘politics of recognition’ method facilitated the naturalization and acceptance of neo-​ liberalism and free-​market fundamentalism. Only strikes give a better balance between economic and cultural claims and narrations. That is the third phase in Fraser’s theory, and it is about political representation and the need for change –​ toward global justice. Both Ricoeur and Fraser’s understanding of a better future is rooted in socially based progress and social imaginary, that is not drawn apart. In the epistemology of the political, narratosophy premises, through understanding dissensus, a new possible discipline. The ‘political’ is a radical process, and politics is an activity that consists only in blurring the boundaries between what is considered political and what is considered proper to the domain of social or private life. Third, inspired by Rancière’s critical theory of Althusser’s method, and his reading of Marx, I argue the concept of opening the narrative structures toward democracy where the practices of equality/​inequality are related to the understanding of the politics of inequality and dissensus. Rancière’s inspiring philosophy of political and artistic action deliberate the narrative structures and are in direct relation to Ricoeur’s and Fraser’s equality, which is not an essence or a value in Rancière’s work. It is a presupposition of theory and practice, but it has no inherent content of its own, which forms the condition of developing the possibility of politics and freedom. Political narratosophy enters the scene of the reorganization of the subject of narration and destabilization of

Political Narratosophy and Narrative – in – Progress  59 the narrative –​ in –​ progress, by finding a way for improving the democracy of the opening narrative structures toward the context. Notes 1 In Hayden White. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 27. 2 See P.G.W Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1968. 3 This discussion by de Certeau is in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. 4 Paul Ricoeur is a hermeneutically oriented philosopher who researches the narrative as a manifestation accomplished in the discourse through the specifications of the structure of time. Related to this author are also the research of Jacques Derrida, and Hayden White, and further on in this book, they will be connected to the analyses of Dominick LaCapra, Hannah Arendt, and Claire Colebrook, which I shall compare to new historicism as a separate method. 5 In Paul Ricoeur’s “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding”, 107. 6 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Volume 1, 2, 3, 244. 7 I relate this to Congruity and incongruity (Aristotle). If incongruity dominates over congruity in life, the artistic text is governed by the principle of the dominance of congruity over incongruity (see Ricoeur Time and Narrative). 8 For Ricoeur, the term intrigue is the equivalent of the term mythos which Aristotle (2009) uses to signify the unity of events. In Ricoeur’s work, the plot is close to what Sklovskij and Tomasevskij call sujet (theme) –​ an artistically built sequence of events in the text, or the sum of motives in the mutual relationship that the text provides for them, unlike the Fabula, which is the sum of motives in their temporal interconnectedness. 9 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, 28. 10 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, 101. 11 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, 35.

2 Politics of Narrative Structures as Chiasmus between Fiction and History Overlapping the Methodology, Interweaving of Fiction, Historiography, Metahistory

Political narratosophy shows that the ‘life as narrative’, ‘narrative identity’ and the identification of the subject of narration in each chronotope, specific time and space depends on the overlapping of the refigurative methods of the one who interprets and from the capacity and strategies of (1) historization of fiction, (2) fictionalization of history and (3) modalities of intermediation during the narration. What is the approach in political narratosophy to analyze the relation identity –​ narration –​ fiction –​ history –​ historiography? Political narratosophy speculates that the category understanding (Verstehen) is the starting category of narrative competence, it signifies digging around the unity of discourse and explanation. Understanding is an empathic and analytic category that enters the domain of spiritual sciences and contemporary historical science. This chapter discusses political narratosophy in relation to history and story; to understand the story is to understand the language and the political codes out of which a certain type of plot is derived. Political narratosophy explores understanding of narration by the explicative potentials in the story, i.e. to narrate means to explain and to understand. Namely, it institutes a cushioning relation between the rigid denial of the narrative character through history and the leveling of historiography with fiction. The interweaving of history and fiction through the emplotment (White) is placed between the narrated history (story) and the argument. Political narratosophy shows that the term ‘story’ has a polysemic meaning. In English, it means a ‘story’, but in French ‘récit’ means ‘fable’. Hence, I show that there is a differentiation between the story and the plot. ‘Story’ could be understood in a limited sense (stretched between the beginning, middle, and ends) that takes place during the story (storyline). This suggests that the non-​narrative property of history brings to the foreground the historic events as a product of the historian’s imagination. This potential provides innovative positions for further exploring, at the expense of traditional claims which see historic events as DOI: 10.4324/9781003374794-3

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  61 products of the argument. Furthermore, it shows there is a difference between discourse and narration, namely, the discourse is the narrative, the product of the narration, the narrated story, and narration is the process of storytelling itself. In English, the term ‘narrative’ is used for both. By emplotment, a sequence of events is ‘configured’ (‘grasped together’) in such a way as to represent ‘symbolically’ what would otherwise be unutterable in language, namely, the ineluctably ‘aporetic’ nature of the human experience of time. By this, I argue that political narratosophy shows that the force of philosophy of history lies in the subversive way in which the term ‘plot’ is introduced in history. Such a thesis offers a disturbing perspective of reading history as writing, as a script. Hence, the discourse and the narrative are not a matter of taking neutral positions for the real, but rather of making a specific ontological and epistemological choices related to ideological and political implications.1 I find that in such cases history can be levelled out with historiography, and the historiographic work can be observed as a literary (artistic) artefact, verbal fiction, and a form of creating fiction. Namely, it means this broadens the term narrative structure and extracts plot as an element of identification that identifies history within the frames of a specific configuration class, as a product of tradition and culture. The writer of history codes the contents that the readers decode, from the same or a different cultural and political heritage. Such is the status and the procedure of a risk of deleting the difference between history and fiction, by emphasizing the importance of rhetoric (this is White’s ‘poetics of historiography’, a category separated from epistemology, but directed towards objectivity and truthfulness). In this context, political narratosophy opens the concept of ‘metahistory’ (White’s term). Political narratosophy integrates the thoughts that metahistory can look upon the historical story as verbal fiction, close to its literary –​ fictional (artistic) shapes by the content and the form. Unlike White, Ricoeur does not place history in the domain of fiction, believing instead that history and historiography belong to the narrative discourse. Ricoeur’s position is to abolish all reference to a given reality. In speculative reading, if the plot creates the dynamics of all levels of the narrative structure, in such case, from the epistemological incision between history and fiction, comes the fact that reading of fiction is also in correlation with historiography and is derived from the competence of ‘following the story’. Rancière’s contributed to three directions in this elaboration: history, politics, and aesthetics. Contemporary writing of history is related to institutional and narrative constructions of time and through the communities that can disrupt what Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible). According to Rancière, the politics of narrative structures happens between history and philosophy, between philosophy and politics, and between documentary and fiction. I present that the politics of narrative structures depends on the distribution of the sensible, related to the system of divisions and boundaries that define what is fiction, and what is history within a particular aesthetic-​political

62  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History regime. I have explained that the Rancièrian long-​standing interest in aesthetics goes at the same time for analyzing its conjunction with both politics and history in a manner to re/​discover the contingent quality of the end of ideologies, politics, and history, and to identify a few contradictions which may prompt to reexamine not just the power of political narratosophy but also the status of the activity called ‘politics through the concept of democracy’. I also explored that aesthetics refers to a specific regime for identifying the politics of narrative structures in the art of writing, modes of articulation, and possibilities of modes of transformation. Art of writing (in the Platonic sense) opens the question of fiction that is first a question of the distribution of places. This means that the aesthetic regime of politics is strictly identical to the regime of democracy (a world based on laws). The plurality of regimes to identify the art of writing with the pluralization itself being the effect of one historical regime among others remains invariant throughout history. This is because, in the end, this is the nonhistorical and apolitical condition of politics itself, which is what is hidden in the three forms of existing political philosophy. In Rancière’s thoughts, there is no such thing as the science, or the people, or the Marxism but at best variable series of practical and discursive regimes of visibility and intelligibility that allow certain modes of doing, saying, seeing. In that sense, it is not the Human who makes history, but humans, who produce their means of existence, those who fight the battle in the class struggle, setting the narrative –​in –​progress in the materialization of the thought. Historization of Fiction Fiction imitates history by narrativizing ‘how’ something has happened. This thesis relates to the fact that the past as if is essentially important for the meaning of the story (signification-​récit). The formula “as if” is a symbol of separation from reality. The ‘as –​ if –​ past’ is essentially important for fiction. There is a difference between narration/​storytelling (erzälen) and commenting/​expressing (pesprechen). The phenomenology of the temporal experience is bound to happen through the nonlinear aspects of several levels of time. The past tense of the story is temporal quasi-​past, and the events which are narrated in fiction become past facts for the voice of the narrator (the implicit author). And to read afterward means to make a contract (based on trust) between the reader and the author, that the event conveyed by the narrator’s voice belongs to the past. Following Ricoeur’s course of analysis, fiction can be just as much historical as history can be fictional. History is fictional in the paradoxical manner of presenting, as much as the quasi-​presence of events placed before the readers are added upon, with intuition and allusive character of the transient, of that which passes. Secondarily, the ‘as –​ if –​ past’ is connected to the rule of emplotment according to the principles of probability and necessity. The difference between history and poetic discourse is that history describes events that happened, while

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  63 in poetic discourse, events which could have happened according to the laws of probability and necessity take place. Since Aristotle’s Poetics one comes upon the thesis that there is an opposition between (1) that which could have happened and (2) that which happened. Aristotle is still current on this subject of my work because thinking in the name of the principle of persuasiveness, namely, must correlate with the principle of credibility of that which has happened, and fiction must avoid real mimesis. The quasi-​past of fiction detects and discovers the gaps and hidden areas in the real past. Aristotle’s term –​probable, or that which could have happened, at the same time, signifies the potential of the “real” past and the possibility for destabilization of the “unreality” in fiction. In the deep affinity between the probable in pure fiction and the potentiality of the historic past, I pose a crucial paradoxical question (in correlation to Ricoeur): is fiction, on the one hand, liberated from the limitations of the documentary record, while it is internally bonded to the quasi-​past which is another name for the limitation of probability? The interweaving of history and fiction in the refiguration of time is based on a mutual rearrangement during which the quasi-​historical moment of fiction is replaced by the quasi-​fictional moment of history. This is the origin of the tight bond between the narrative identity and the comprehension of human time in which, against the background of aporias of the phenomenology of time, the account of the past in historiography and the imaginative variations of fiction and the processes of creation of the narrative identity come together. The reconstruction of the bond between history and narrative configuration, or the epistemological incision, divides the abyss between history and story as an imitation of people and events. This is bridged by Ricoeur using three modalities (modes/​relays) of the epistemological incision: the quasi-​plot, the quasi-​event, and the quasi-​character. These are new modes of historical configuration to the formal concept of emplotment, taken in the broad sense of a synthesis of the heterogeneous. The first mode –​quasi-​plot –​is the separation of the explanatory discourse of the story. Through this mode, I signify the risky, borderline conditions of objectivity or the fallacy of referentiality as Hayden White would put it. The second mode –​the quasi-​event –​is an analogical broadening of the term individual causal attribution and is an additional argument that proves the intermediate bond between explicative history (historical explanation) and narrative configuration. Ricoeur calls upon the probable imaginary construction. Namely, to explain that which has happened, every historiographer should ask himself –​ what could have happened. To reconstruct the real world, first, one must construct comparatively imaginary worlds. What is derived is the affinity of reality with the emplotment in fiction. Every change enters the historical field as a quasi-​ event. The mode which represents a bond between historiography and the story is the term event (analogous to historical events and the events which the plot needs to embed in itself. The quasi-​event is every narrative change that enters

64  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History the historical field. Especially important for the analytical part of this study will be the quasi-​events that mark the critical transitions of the ideological systems; these are encircled with quasi-​plots which, as Ricoeur points out, provide a ‘narrative status’ for that mentioned above.2 All the characteristics of the historical events such as individuality, punctuality, contingency, exclusion) –​undergo processing during emplotment (of the quasi-​event) in the textual narrative configuration of Mimesis II. The quasi-​event is analogous to Aristotle’s metabolic processes, it gives life to the plot, it gives it shape, twists, and upturn. The third mode –​ the quasi-​character –​ divulges the intermediary bond between the structure of the historical cognition and the process of narrative configuration and it refers the status of the historical time to the temporality of the story. The difference to the event in history which implies plurality in historical time can be seen in the fact that the quasi-​event (just like the quasi-​plot) appears on several levels as a configurative factor. The second modus, the quasi-​characters, is accomplished on the level of participative entities which in the domain of historical discourse are called actors, agents, primary performers of the action, analogous to the actors in the configuration of narration. With the second mode, Ricoeur derives an important thesis that the non-​deductive object of history has a social character. The quasi-​characters, actants in narrative configuration, should be analogous to the primary entities which appear in historiography (entities represent entire peoples, nations, cultures, and civilizations). These entities are transitory figures between the artefacts in historiography and characters in fiction. Through the three modes which Ricoeur describes, I emphasize the autonomous status of explanation and the entities as agents, actors, carriers, accomplishers, and performers of the action and the specific epistemological status of the historical time. Thus, the search is once more for the configurative affinity between the structure of fiction and historiography. This brings the possibility of questioning the past. That further points to the bond between narrativity and referential reality through at least three hypotheses: The first hypothesis activates the poetic language which transports experience and points its horizon towards the world in which it exists; The second is about the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung/​Gadamer) of the world of the text and the world of the reader is the second starting point; the third hypothesis locates the problem of reference of the narrative discourse in the asymmetry of the referential modes of historiography and fiction. Such referential dynamics of historiography unavoidably contain the appearance necessary for the historiographic text, to reconstruct the past. According to this logic, this discourse relies on the reference accomplished through metaphor, in the same amount in which fiction uses reference-​based clues in the name of the goals of metaphor. This is a refiguration that implies alteration, a transformation of reality. It is first refigured in the consciousness of the writer, it is then configured in the text as narratological strategy, and then it is reshaped in the virtual experience of the cognition which happens

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  65 during the process of reading, during the crossing of the horizon of the text with the horizon of the reader.3 Such a process is enabled by following the hybridization and modification of the documentary in fiction, or historiographic metafiction (Hutcheson). Political narratosophy understands this poetically theoretical category at the level of historiography that is specified through the metafiction, i.e. one that includes the correlation of history-​historiography-​fiction-​historical genre. Historiographic metafiction suggests that the past exists, but our relation to it semiotically transforms. At this point in the analysis, one becomes aware of the past only through the strong bond between history and fiction. or what the fixed code and written texts (artwork) offer. The narrativized history, just like fiction, again and again, shapes, interprets, and changes the material from the past. Political narratosophy suggests that the current political context reflects the shifting of the narrative –​in –​progress from the semiotics to the transforming of the social context by giving the narrative –​ in –​ progress the rightful place as a central part of the political narratosophy. Fictionalization of History The term history signifies reality, an event that has happened, and historiography (récit historique) is the materialized text about that reality. In Hegel’s dialectic philosophy, history is an ambiguous term that unifies the objective and subjective sides of narration, and which equally denotes both ‘historia rerum gestarum’ and ‘res gestae’, i.e. it points to the fact that historical narration appears at the same time with the historic events. Historia (ae, f), or history, has a double meaning in Latin, it means researching, knowledge, happening, but also narration, storytelling, recount, fable, story. History, in German (Geschichte f), means history, recounting, story, but also event, occasion. History does not come from the verb ‘geschehen’ – ‘to happen’, but from the verb –​ ‘schichten’ –​ to regulate, to arrange, to separate. In political narratosophy constellations if the Latin term ‘history’ (which relates to knowledge, the science of the events and happenings) is absorbed in the new term –​telling/​narrating, then the process of the events and the process of their awareness have converged in one term, which suppresses the conditions for the possible experience of the telling/​narrating and the conditions for its cognition. Unlike history, historiography activates the root of writing. The Greek etymology shows that writing as an entry for history signifies shaping, but also announcing, making public, reminding of something, giving a written order, constructing, and asserting something in writing.4 Ricoeur’s theses do not deduce the historiographic text (research, textual expression of history) based on the referential relation towards reality, they rather include in it, in an unusually vivid way, its communicative potential (the ability to follow the story during the cognitive process of understanding of narration). History (mythos/​emplotment) is also a term that emphasizes the story

66  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History as a unifying category. As an addition to this thesis, the term history is used to denote every text that has that sort of integrative process at its heart. Rancière’s move in the philosophy of history is towards the de-​historization of systems of conditions of possibilities of knowledge. Rancière in The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Les noms de l’histoire) speaks about history as a science that produces its difference from history as narrative within a narrative. Rancière’s understanding of knowledge is neither strictly philosophical nor purely historical, but its work deals in-​between the disciplines of philosophy and history, so he is a philosopher and historian, but also an anti-​ philosopher and an archivist of the struggle of politics of narrative. Through these Rancièran concepts I introduce a disturbance in the fixed demarcation of disciplines, with their boundaries between the sayable and the unsayable. History needs the homonymous ambivalence of histoire, which in French can designate both the narration of fiction and the academic discipline. Hence, history is something more than a story but one which is distinguished from fiction (Rancière does not use the term ‘fiction’ but ‘literature’), since fiction makes history possible as a discourse of the truth. Rancière in The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge unfolds the poetic dimension of historical writing, naming it as poetics of knowledge: “as a set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature” (8). Hence, the conditions of the content are in the frontal view of investigations. Rancière”s historical and hermeneutics methodology is a form of fiction. When asked what he thought about the regimes of art (Les Régimes del’art) and transcendental conditions of possibility for history, and the conditions of probability that are immanent in history, Rancière said: I try not to think about this in terms of the philosophy of history. As for the term transcendental, it is necessary to see what this word can mean. The transcendental is something like a reduction of the transcendent that can either bring the transcendent back into the immanent or, on the contrary, make the immanent take flight once again into the transcendent. I would say that my approach is a bit similar to Foucault’s.5 Political narratosophy through the Rancièrian work could be legitimized through the principle of the Kantian concept of ‘transcendental’ that replaces the dogmatism of truth with the sear for conditions of possibility. To paraphrase Rancière, at the same time these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression. Rancière differs from Foucault’s archaeology which follows a schema of historical necessity (and the limitation that something is no longer thinkable or formulated). Political narratosophy is engaged in opening the visibility of a form of expression as an art form, which depends on a historically constituted regime of perception and intelligibility. Political narratosophy is legitimized by the Rancièrian concept of the transcendental because, at the

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  67 same time, he historicizes the transcendental and de-​historicizes the system of conditions of possibility. That is the core aspect for rereading the narrative –​in –​ progress and narrative identities that depend on historically constituted systems of possibilities that determine forms of visibility, but this does not mean that the possibility of the new system coincides with the impossibility of the former system. In this way, political narratosophy is concerned with the aesthetic regime of art, as a system of possibilities that is historically constituted but which does not abolish the representative regime. In this sense, in the term politics of aesthetics, for example, the political “universal” stay in contradiction par excellence, since the forms of art of writing are contingent. Political narratosophy shows that politics is not tied to a determined historical project, but exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted related to contexts, actions, and places in society (that is demos, actually/​Le De-​m os). The asymmetry in Rancièrian treatment of art is important for political narratosophy, since it shows us the narrative identities overlapping over history and fiction. The art of writing (fiction) and politics are not two domains that would otherwise receive the same treatment in Rancière’s readings. Art and politics lead to two approaches that are deeply unequal and asymmetrical. The art of writing (fiction) is treated to the historical order of three regimes of identification (the ethical regime, the representative regime, and the aesthetic regime). In a Rancièrian sense, the politicization of art is coextensive with the true politics of art where he raises the premises for politics of aesthetics. Political narratosophy concerns Rancièrian’s ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a tool to hide the reality that aesthetic judgment is structured by class domination. Rancière in Dissensus, On Politics and Aesthetics, opens a discussion on the notion of aesthetics as a specific experience that leads at once to the idea of a pure world of art and self-​suppression of art in life to the aestheticization of existence. As I suggest, political narratosophy deems the aesthetic experience as effective only if it grounds the autonomy of art to the extent that it would ‘change the life for better’, through ‘art becoming life’. Hence, in the epistemology of the political narratosophy, historiography is an ambivalent term by itself because it connects two disparate polarities –​ the real pole (history) and the fictional pole which etymologically signifies writing. Michel de Certeau in The Writing of History gives the basis of historiography and radically disturbs the usual classification of history by positing the thesis that the writing of history does not represent some secondary actions connected solely to the rhetoric of communication which could be neglected as something that belongs only to the category redaction. Historiography takes the position of the subject of action who ‘makes’ history. Historiography gives intelligence the function of activating possible moves between power and the realities from which it is distinguished. Its very definition is about the connection between politics and history. Following de Certeau, history is not written in some timeless place, but in reality, and the present is most obvious when one forgets about

68  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History it. Writing history is constitutive of the historical modus of understanding. Therefore, history is historiography or, to put it subversively, history is a literary artefact. Historiography is the shape of evidence that desires to determine how its form outlines the contour of an absence, a void, which, in turn, is assumed to be the ground of history. It is very material, evidence of a continued historiographical or ‘scriptural’ (scripturaire) process engaged in a dialectic of belief, writing, and absence. Political narratosophy opens the radical aspect of the history and historiography that oppose each other in their mutual space –​ the space of narration, through the capacity of imaginary navigations. The narration has no content, but it belongs to the art of making a coup. I show that the disturbing act is that narrated history creates fictional space, and it does not describe the historical “coup”, it makes it, creates it, does it. Narrated history is an act of balance in which the chronotope, the place, the time, and the subject of narration participate, and it represents a way of manipulating, arranging, and promoting the rendition. It is a matter of sense and tact (affaire de tact). With this, I develop a direction in which political narratosophy shows that narration causes effects, instead of objects, or description, hence narration is the ability/​the art of saying (savoir dire), it incorporates the style and politics of tactics, and it connects to the experience of saying and the experience of doing.6 The distinctive intentionality of fictional narrative is this: offering a new world, a new way of perceiving things or possibilities. Political narratosophy is a terrain of the study of the theory of fiction in play with the space between history and the relation between demonstration (historiographical ‘verisimilitude’) and its lacunae (an analytical ‘truth’). Political narratosophy addresses questions that concern the fictionalization of history as a form of imagining historical reality; it is a form of deliberation of history itself, thus incorporates the metahistorical dimension (the history of history). That’s the source of the need to differentiate the discursive practice (historiography, the recount) from the non-​discursive (historical reality, past). Ricoeur, in the chapter “Interweaving of History and Fiction” (Time and Narrative), has shown that questioning the fictionalization of history, the intermediation of the imaginary has an important role in the politics of the past as it was, with the purpose of showing in which way the imaginary is included in ‘what happened’, without weakening its “realistic” portrayal during the process. This thesis is close to Barthes, who in “The Discourse of History” discusses the real in the “objective” history as unformulated signified which is hidden behind the obvious all-​powerful referent, naming it ‘real effect’ (effet du reel). The imaginary grows as the approximation increases. This is included even in the “most realistic” thesis that history re-​inscribes the time of the story in the time of the universe. This re-​inscription is specific to the referential modus of history. The abyss between the time of the world and the experiential time is bridged using the construction of connections for contemplation of the historical time.7

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  69 The conceptualization of the trace as a phenomenon is the culmination of the imaginary character of the bonds which signify a determined historical time. Political narratosophy as a branch of philosophy, political science, contemporary political theory, history, and narratology, philosophy of arts, has accelerated the core questions of the mixed structure (mixe) of the traces as a remnant (resultant of the sign) that refers to the imaginary intermediation to a radical extreme. This structure expresses a complex engagement through which time is retraced (retracer). The collecting (selection) of the past and the documents intermediate the trace, to make a conclusory assumption of the re-​inscription of the empirical (experiential time, the time which owns the present) in the successive time (the time without the present). The imaginary character of the union which intermediates the trace is confirmed in the interpretation of the ruins, the museum artefact, or the monument, as carriers of the value of the trace, i.e. the resultant of the sign. The synthetic activity is expressed by the verb “to retrace” and it is summed up, in turn, as a complex concept such as those at the origin. If the trace is a more radical phenomenon than the document (archives) of historical time, then the imaginary quality of the activities that mediate the trace is evident in the intellectual work that accompanies the interpretation of remains. According to Ricoeur, writing about the world, which is continuously missing and escaping, the intermediation of the imaginary can only be followed when one moves from the re-​inscription of the experiential time into cosmic time. In that sense, the political narratosophy opens a discussion about the fictionalization of history as distinction between narrating (erzahlen) and commenting (besprechen): Imaginary mediation as presupposed by the mixed structure of the trace itself, is considered as a sign-​effect, where this mixed structure expresses a complex synthetic activity, and activities of interpretation tied to the signifying character of the trace as something present standing for something past.8 There are two inclinations between fiction and history: (1) the intentionality of history and its inquiry into the real as actual (things that have happened), and (2) the intentionality of fiction as the re-​inscribing of the real as possible (things that might happen or have happened). This implies new possibilities for being-​in-​the-​world and new perspectives of seeing the world as human beings. The deretorization of historical thinking as an additional argument for the history, separated from fiction. Finally, the political narratosophy shows that history and fiction both narrate something which can be differentiated by its ontological status.9 Historical discourse is not deduced by the “evident” factography of the historical record, but rather by the constructive exclusion and implicative choice of the type of events that are represented in the narrative –​in –​progress. Consequently, if the historian possesses her/​his style in the historiographic discourse, at the same time as it refers to a “literary” style, that will mean to be rhetorical. It would also be an anathema of the objective status of representation. In Barthes’s sense, history is represented through variables that are additionally “constructed” rather

70  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History than “discovered”. The historical imagination connects to the specific (chosen) historical event, and the principle of exclusion limits the rules of description (the descriptive protocols) because the very term “fact” signifies an event which went through a certain intervention and which has been described, so it represents an “historical fact” as such. Unlike fiction, history subordinates imagination at the expense of ‘that which happened’ (genomena) in the past and it strives to detect and announce “real” events. Consequently, the politics of interpretation (White) is not equaled to the interpretative practices of political theory and the political comment; instead, it stays in correlation with the authority and ethics of the interpreter vis-​à-​vis the established social–​political authority of the other (remaining) interpreters. Such interpretation is not an opponent of the political activity; instead, it relies upon politics as a historical condition, and actualizes the interpretation of politics as an ethical issue. Modalities of the Imaginary Mediation: Reference in Fiction The authenticity of the modalities of the imaginary mediation of reality transferred into fiction –​ is read through their function in the refigurative process of fiction and in the interweaving of fiction and history or the reconfiguration of time. The first modality takes over the function of metaphor from the position ‘to see/to perceive as’. If the historical writing joins the historical cognition which comes from the outside (at the same time becoming equal with it) then, in Ricoeur’s terms, nothing prevents us from admitting that history in its writing imitates the types of the plot which has been inherited from literary tradition. Parallel to this thesis, history not only takes over the plan of the compositional refiguration from fiction, but it also activates the ‘representative’ function through historical imagination, i.e. it urges ‘to percept’ / ‘to see’ / ‘to perceive’ certain compositions of events from the past under the sign of ‘as’. In this point merge, for example, a historiographic novel and pure fiction. Namely, one can read a historiographic book as a novel, by developing collaborative correlations and interactions between the voice of the narrator and the implicit reader. In such cases the historian is subjected to the discursive resultant, historian changes, ‘points’, or is subject to what Aristotle in Rhetoric calls ‘elocution’/ ‘diction’. As ‘real’ is considered that which is determined according to the principle of belief (to be real). With the influence of fiction in the real, one enters the domain of illusion which confuses the theses ‘to see as’/‘to perceive’ with ‘to believe to see’. Ricoeur insists upon controlled illusion and takes a step further from the thesis ‘to see as’. This thesis does not prevent the merging of metaphor which assimilates, and irony which in principle divides. At the same time, the controlled illusion is in service of the individualization which comes from a given process of life

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  71 and is complemented by the quasi-​intuitiveness of fiction. In such a case, fiction allows historiography to become equal with memory. The figurative language of the tropics acts in the phases of understanding the personal experience (White, Metahistory). Yet in the structure which forms basis of historical imagination, one discovers the mechanisms of action of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. A metaphor is a way of describing something with the help of something else that makes the objects of the scientific discourse available to cognition. The historiographic text seen through this tropological analysis is significant for political narratosophy as the connection between history and fiction is articulated using theoretical principles, and the historiographic text is defined as a model, an image, an icon, which excludes the relation of reproduction or reduplication of reality. In this process, the ‘crossed reference’ (category by Ricoeur) is the reference of fiction and history crossed with the basic historicity of human history (White). The history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historiography. This thesis is crucial in fusion, convergence, and complementarity of both types of narrative discourses. I take the mechanism ‘to see as’ to activate the ontological unraveling of –​ ‘to be as’. This is extremely important in political philosophy, aesthetics, and arts and humanities studies, where I argue that if metaphor abolishes the literal meaning, then it also abolishes the powerful referential relation with reality. In this zone of metaphorical incision, this opens up the possibility of a secondary reference, accomplished through metaphor. Or, to put it in Ricoeur’s terms, the referential relation towards fiction is projected through non-​pertinent attribution or non-​pertinent predication. In the analysis of the metaphorical account, one needs to implant the referential understanding of the poetic language which considers the nullification of reference of the everyday language, which, further on, is guided by the term ‘divided reference’. The first phase of the opposite face of the positive strategy is contained in the meaning of the metaphorical account, which comes after the literal interpretation of the account has been abolished, after which the final abolition of the primary reference will happen. The interpretation of the metaphor causes a new semantic pertinence after it discards the literal meaning; it creates a new referential striving that appears because of the nullification of the reference which gives a response to the literal interpretation of the account. Derrida’s Deconstruction of the Political Fraser’s Political Economy of the Difference

The deconstructivist analyses by the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–​2004) introduce a new repertory of approach to the concepts of ‘life as narrative’, narrative identity, and narrative –​ in –​ progress connected to the work of Fraser, Rancière, and Ricoeur. The signified becomes a resultant of

72  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History the infinite circularity of the signifiers. What does that mean? Meaning is not situated in the sign, which is redundant, continuously derivable, and reproduced in a different context with a variable identity of the signified through the chain of signifiers. Derrida’s radical thesis refers to the fact that the unlimited semiosis or dispersion of meaning (and therefore of reality) is not fixed in the chain of signifiers. That meaning is not completely made present, it is delayed, ‘expected meaning’, reduced to fiction in the processuality of the language. The deconstructivist differentiation appears as a reaction to the structuralist binary oppositions. It points to their perversion, and irreversibility. Deconstruction introduces the unbridgeable difference between the present reality and the potential absence of meaning, between reference and autoreferentiality of the sign. This dissensus of the sign calls for the contingency of the otherness to come forth, the disseminational complexity of counterpointing the differences in the literary artistic text and its opening toward the context. That means that the concept of ‘life as narrative’, or the identity of the narrating subject is placed inside the language, and that is a convincing argument for the contingency of otherness and constituted only to the Other, to what one is not and what one is missing, to that which is called constitutive exterior.10 Like Rancière, Derrida set an alternate concept of democracy, or better, democracy –​ to –​ come, if Jacques Rancière emphasizes political subjectification, Derrida tries to open up this gap through the category of the Other. In Rancière’s work, emancipation is related to the political activity of the subject here and now; in Derrida’s work, emancipation happens because of an ethical attitude of infinite respect for otherness. In his essay on Derrida, “Does Democracy Mean Something”, Rancière discusses the substantialization of the Other which shifts the emphasis from political demonstration –​ which inscribes a multiplicity of forms of otherness in supplement to the body of the community –​to a transcendental horizon that never arrives. Derrida ultimately dismisses political speech, diverting it for the benefit of a theory that must continuously deconstruct the occurrence of any actual other. Rancière makes a difference between name and ‘thing’ that may be seen as a radical line, as an internal difference that constitutes democracy as something other than a kind of government. This question defines the common ground between Derrida’s inquiry into the aporetic structure of democracy and Rancière’s democratic paradox (democracy as a form of government is threatened by democracy as a form of social and political life and so must repress the latter). Derrida talks about the ‘auto-immunity’ of democracy, which means, first, that democracy has an inherently unlimited capacity for self-​criticism, which can also empower anti-​democratic propaganda, second, it implies the possibility that democratic governments can act to revoke democratic rights to protect democracy against its enemies, those who use the freedom of democracy to fight against it. At the same time, democracy has the inherent and unpredictable power of the autos and self. Democracy lacks its Other, which can only come to it from the outside. Derrida set out to break the circle of the self

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  73 by weaving a thread to the wider perception of the other, including the horizon of the ‘democracy to come’, –​ not a democracy that will come, but democracy emploted within a different time, a different temporal plot –​ it is democracy as a promise that involves infinite openness to the Other. That is Derrida’s position and Rancière agrees with it. I take the position of Rancière: where otherness does not come to politics from the outside, democracy is the principle of otherness, democracy is the disruption of power through the three concepts I was discussing in the first chapters of this book, about police, politics and the political. Namely, I am reading in Derrida’s work the infinite Other as the invisible, because only the illusory and relative exteriority which belongs to theory and the need is revealed to the eye. The deconstructivist strategy reveals the so-​called ‘bidirectional transfer’ out of which is derived that the literary text is not a priority for the context, but also the context is not a priority for the text out of which it is reconstructed. The writing (écriture) or the written sign is imposed in the absence of the receiver. The absence, distance, and delay are terms that Derrida reduces to a certain absolute of absence, to construct the structure of the script (assuming that there is a script). Correspondingly, one of Derrida’s crucial terms, important for this study, where it has been derived from, and that is differance (différance) (“neither a term nor a name”),11 a term which represents an ontological modification of presence. Therefore, for Derrida, identity is constituted through différance and it becomes permanently destabilized. Like all signifying practices, identity also depends on such play of differences, and it complies with more than one logic. The script should be repeatable, iterable in the absolute absence of the (empirical) receiver. Iterability is proven by something which precedes and can be recognized through the denotement which appears to have happened only once (appearing, in Derrida’s terms means it is a concept by itself pre-​divided or multiplied by its structure of iterability). Derrida’s philosophy of iterability (iterabilité) undermines the classical opposition between the fact and the principle (droit), actual and possible (virtual), the need and the possibility. Through iterability, the structure gains the qualities of a script. Iterability is a form of carrying out speech acts and their structural possibilities. Derrida relies upon two types of understanding of the possibilities: ‘éventualité’ and need. The function of iterability is perceived in the idiom, through the unique event and the identity of the sameness, through its repetitiveness and the ability for identification, in, through, and even through the aspect of its change. The structure of iteration refers to two terms: identity and difference. The iteration in its “purest” form –​because it is always impure –​by itself contains a contradiction of the difference which constitutes it as iteration. The iterability of an element a priori divides its identity because the iterability is differential, i.e. it divides each element at the same moment as it constitutes it. Therefore, iterability is a condition of the ability of repetition, but at the same time, it is a condition of its impossibility because each repetition also signifies an

74  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History already established change (alteration). Accordingly, it is repeated in the signifying chains in language which repeat and are not a one-​time occurrence. The philosophy of iterability is closely connected to the theory of John Austin’s speech acts (performatives). The ability for repetition is important in the theory of iterability because it is a foundation for the nature of language, since the performatives function only if they are repeated (for example, the repetition of quotations of the usual everyday words: “I pronounce”, “I promise”). With the repetition of the words, the action is carried out. This theory demonstrates that the possibility for repetition is a foundation for the language, the language is performative, and that means that it not only transfers information, but it also performs acts with its ability for repeating the established discursive practices, and for repetition of how we do things –​ with repetition of words. It is significant that the iterable model relies on referential similarity (not equality), and that introduces to the foreground the difference –​ as a principle with whose influence one avoids the continuous transfer of the petrified intervals of the minimum of meaning. Iterability points to the fluctuation of knowledge and writing, and Derrida signifies their practices as potentially infinite. That is why the etymology of this term is important in this context (namely, the term iterability comes from itara, which in Sanskrit means other, so this term can be read through the logic which connects repetition with alterity).12 Finally, with iterability, Derrida points to breaking the authority of the code as a limited system of rules. At the same time, Derrida signalizes the radical destruction of every context as a protocol of the code. Iterability is a suggestion for the loss of origin, and it imposes indetermination, and undecidedness of the unstable term of the single identity. The meaning to be understood must be transformed in the (new) context in which it is inscribed; the future is not present, but there is an opening into it; and because there is a future, a context is always open (the context of what is still to come).13 The theory of iterability is a basic concept for another new term –​ dissemination, i.e. continuous multiplication of meaning in the text, or dispersion, distortion, vibration, spreading of meaning which is never present in the sign. Derrida makes a difference between fragmentation and dissemination. Fragmentation is a necessary violence; castration of the text to reopen the discourse. Dissemination is that which takes place after the fragmenting. It is a material transfer of the product of fragmentation –​in a new discursive context for the multiplication of the meaning and questioning of reference. Dissemination is not the only thing that takes place after fragmentation, because fragmentation can perpetuate in the form of mimesis. Therefore, on the one hand, fragmentation belongs to dissemination but, on the other hand, it also doesn’t belong because of its role as a binary obstacle for dissemination. Fragmentation (in any case) is a carrier of the meaning of violence or negation of violence and (it seems to) institute an ability that dissemination wishes to deny. Fragmentation and dissemination are not entirely dialectically interrupted terms; they represent further purification of the meaning. Identity is one of those terms which appear between the interval

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  75 of interruption and further purification of the new “term” which is supposed to happen. According to Derrida, there is no basis for absolute sense, the sign is iterable, and it can be repeated in different contexts which creates differences in meaning. The meaning “tremble” in the structure of the language, in the infinite dispersal differentiations, excluding any pretension towards logocentrism. In such a case the script remains only an ‘image’ of that which exists in the spoken and after it. Namely, the logos, with which the meaning and the truth are constituted, precedes the text. The text is something external and it carries the meaning in the graphic chain. Ricoeur also discards the possibility of a unique and unchangeable meaning. However, he starts from the polysemic nature of the language, from the degree of indeterminateness of the meaning which is a mark for the text and the communication accomplished through iterative and reiterative practices. Ricoeur believes that the specific intentionality lies in the capacities of the indeterminateness of the meaning, which, for Derrida, always already exists in the text. In the works of Derrida selfhood is not identified in the absolute sense, because, according to him, that does not exist. Iterability shows that every repetition is also a change. In such a case, Derrida offers a radical thesis –​ namely, that identity cannot be searched for in language, nor can it be said that representation and reality mix in the language, but that the language is both reality and representation. Therefore, the speaking subject is at the same time represented. Derrida draws the line with the thesis that the discourse is represented, that it is a representation of itself. Precisely at this point, the interpretative positions of the philosophical premises of Ricoeur and White on one side, and Jacques Derrida on the other, come into confrontation. But this dichotomy must not be understood rigidly, because Ricoeur and White point to the non-​finite exclusiveness of the meaning, of the inability to read it fully, of its dialogicity and multiplication, but they emphasize the possibility of its existence. Unlike Derrida, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics does not deny the possibility of transfer of the meaning, nor does it fully reject it. One is radically concerned with the subversive thesis that there is no original and only meaning of the (narrative) identity of the narrating subject surfaces. The aim of the political narratosophy is to explore and transcend to the non-​closed ontology of the self. I explore Derrida’s radical understanding of the metaphor by completely attacking the entire term, he rejects the metaphor understood in the traditional sense and reduces it to a metonymic process. Where is the provocation in this? Namely, he understands the category Analogousness much more as ‘enigma’, as a secret tale made of several metaphors, as powerful asyndeton (or hidden conjunction) whose characteristic is to describe a certain action with the help of impossible combinations of words. Therefore, metaphor carries within itself its death, and that death is, undoubtedly, also the death of philosophy.14 I connect this to Fraser’s readings in this chapter. Instead of affirmative reading of discourse theory, Nancy Fraser opens core specters among American

76  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History philosophers about Derrida, French politics of deconstruction, and ‘the end of metaphysics’ into the ‘politics of deconstruction’. Therefore, one finds Fraser developing this discussion towards a wider perspective of political economy and difference, rather than the narrative identity discussion. ‘The political’ concept is radically taken directly from the philosophy without the impact of empirical sociology or normative political theory; the distinction between affirmation and transformation applies equally to distribution and recognition. In this sense, the political narratosophy opens terrain for the controversies of what is ‘political’, and what is ‘philosophical’ into the process of prolonged subjects of narration where ‘the political’ is extracted from the ‘politics’ and is connected to theoretical reflections with resistance and critique to the society. Fraser’s work on the potential of social philosophy and distributive justice-​related identity politics is inspiring for the radical rereading of processes of identification. Could one talk about justice and identity belonging in the same theoretical paradigms? The ‘political’ concept designates ‘economic’, ‘cultural’, ‘private’, and ‘personal’ issues. In Fraser’s essay “Culture, Political Economy, and Difference, On Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference” she talks about mixing two different paradigms of equality through culture and political economy. This essay brings a discussion about ‘recognition’ and ‘redistribution’ through the bifocal interest of injustice rooted in the political economy and difference.15 The position of Young’s critique of “the distributive paradigm” is ambiguous. The target of the critique is “the standpoint of distribution” as opposed to the “standpoint of production”, but the main concept of ‘politics of difference’ opens the tension of the dominance of the cultural paradigm over the political-​economy paradigm. One point is important toward culture, another toward political economy in Young’s discussion on oppression: “Oppression consists in systematic institutional processes which prevent some people from learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings, or institutional processes which inhibit people’s ability to play and communicate with others or to express their feelings and perspectives on social life in contexts where others can listen”.16 The expression “one’s experience” is important for the politics of difference expressed in cultural forms, sets of practices, way of life, feelings, and perspectives on social lives where inequalities are rooted in the division of labor. Hence, differentiated politics of difference is related to the critical theory of recognition and the integration of the redistribution paradigm as emancipatory practices in the paradigm of recognition. Following this analytical context (Ricoeur, Fraser, Derrida), there is no absolute reality, but rather the representation of the past reality in the historiographic text is taken as ‘real’ (if that which the text speaks about has been seen by witnesses in the past). Therefore, there is not even a relation towards reality, there is only a relation towards the memory and the records of other people. At this point, Ricoeur and Derrida exclude the same term reference. The relation towards some past (or present) reality is only a necessary relation

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  77 of transformation or refiguration. The refiguration of the real time in the historiographic text already happens with the creation of the historical text in the spirit of the historians (in the field of reception), so the text itself is revealed as a “notion” of the past or the present. However, the narrative world in fiction represents immanent transcendentality by giving the artistic text an ontological position, derived from the phenomenological process of concretization, actualization, and objectivization of the literary work, namely when the circle of perception/​reception (mimesis III) ends. Hence, the question of fictionalization of history anticipates a certain role of imagination in the intentions –​for history to represent the past ‘as it was for real’. That which once was, cannot be observed, so there is a vacuum of imaginative space, which means that the facts are not only connected with the intellectual operations, but also with imaginative processes rooted in schematized conventions. Philosophy and the Politics of Imagination (Aporias) Rancière’s (anti) hermeneutics approach to the poetics of knowledge is close to Derrida’s deconstruction; knowledge for Rancière is a kind of deconstructive practice which happens through rules and procedures of differentiation and legitimization in knowledge discourses. On other hand, Ricoeur affirms the philosophy of imagination as a process of semantic innovation. This happens through an imaginative activity that leads to the theories of reproductive imagination and explains the process of imagining in terms of the object of analysis instead of the productive imagination where the imaginative activity happens in terms of the subject’s way of seeing. In the middle of this concept sits Hume’s empiricist principles of perception. Ricoeur’s productive imagination discusses the evocation of something absent, where the focus is on imagination and seeing the difference between the real and the imaginary through critique. The theory of  the imagination here happens at the axis which is no longer noematic but noetic. Ricoeur in Du texte a’ l’action: essais d’ herme’neutique discusses the aporias that, at the other point of the axis, the imagination is a tool of the critique of the real (the transcendental reduction of Husserl as neutralization of existence) where there is a blurry state of the consciousness which, unknown to itself, takes as real that which for another consciousness is not real and the act of distinction. Ricoeurian productive imagination is connected to the verbal, to creating new worlds, new meaning by being said, making what is predicatively impertinent at a literal level into something predicatively pertinent at a poetic level through new meanings realized through the verbalizing. This is a visionary concept of imagination, it is a hermeneutic account of imagining in terms of most qualities of the semantic model of innovations, where imagining is the meaning. Imagination can be recognized as the act of finding new meaning, as emerging realities in new ways of expression, that is why semantic innovation finds itself at the level of an ontological event and transcends the limits of the texts. The innovative

78  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History power of linguistic imagination is related to inventing the poetics of imagination of narration and the project of action. I called this process of building new worlds the politics of imagination, where the author opens toward text instead of imagining the objective or subjective hermeneutics/​interpretation. In the middle of this sits the traditional opposition between theoria and praxis where every semantic innovation leads to social transformation. Imagination at the level of symbol is the Ricoeurian transition from phenomenological reflection to linguistic realms of symbols of existence and double meaning that is more important than the content for designating direct designation. Oneiric or Dream Imagination, is imagination that happens at the level of the phenomenology of symbols. Poetic imagination epitomizes symbolic imagination and relates the premise that the structure of poetic imagination is that of the dream as it draws from fragments of one’s past and future. This phase is about a phenomenological dream of philosophy without presuppositions. The hermeneutics of symbols must begin from the full language of symbols (before descriptive phenomenology before intuition and reflection). In Kant’s terminology (not in Hume’s) Ricoeur identifies ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ imagination: “To approach the problem of imagination from the perspective of a semantic theory, on a verbal plane, is, to begin with productive imagination in the Kantian sense, and to put off reproductive imagination or imagery as long as possible”.17 The Utopian Imagination in Ricoeur’s works refers to the reduction of the social imaginary to ideological distortion and argues instead for an affirmation of its utopian potentials. With one dominant discourse as the superstructure of society, other discourses come to serve as the ideological means of justifying and integrating new orders of domination. Ideology, in this context of social self-​representation, is an indispensable dimension of the hermeneutic and the best response to ideological imagination is not a pure negation but a hermeneutic imagination capable of critical thinking. Such a critical hermeneutic, Ricoeur believes would be able to operate within the social imaginary, with resistance to the hermeneutics of affirmation. Political narratosophy as a theory of knowledge arises from concerns about the relation to the real and the politics of imagination. Following Jodi Dean’s (2009) reading of ‘gaps of history’ there is a synchronic conceptualization close to Derrida and Lacanian pointing out the ways which the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real are entangled with one another, through rupturing, filling in, and covering their excesses and lacks. Conceptualized in this way, the concept of imagination is not neglected in Derridean deconstruction, but rather could be seen through ‘imaginative negation’ that might reconstruct narrative identity to deconstruct it with implied performative rather than essential quality.18 I want to connect this in terms of Deleuze and Guattari, as a process of ‘deterritorialization’

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  79 and then ‘reterritorialization’. Here comes the power of implication of the theories of imagination and their relation to the subject of narration and building subjectivity in society. This is close to Foucault’s imaginary world that has its laws, its specific structures; the imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as denial or compensation, rather it grows among signs, in the interstice of repetition and commentary. The concept of “masking the truth” in Foucault’s understanding of the politics of imagination avoids the idea of hiding the truth but gives the perspective of performing the very now, the very presence.19 Foucault, in his essay ‘Dream, Imagination and Existence’, talks about imagination as a critique, as an active and selective imaginative act. In this sense when I say politics of imagination, I mean giving space to the relation in –​between the visible and the invisible, which is necessary for all concrete knowledge, the change in its structure, revealing through gaze and language what had previously been below and beyond their domain. From the above, I insist that the notion of the past is always founded on imaginative activity through the articulation of otherness and diversity. The imagination has its investment in the configurative representation of the past. It is based on the imaginative operation –​ to represent something: in the form of narrative similarity, analogous to metaphor, or irony. The concluding analyses show discarding the old mimetic models of an imitation of the traditional historical discourse. Narrative structures are based on the plot both in history and in fiction, and the traditional ‘stable’ understanding of the ‘narrator’s’ identity –​is undermined. The concept of ‘life as narrative’, or the identity of the narrating subject is juxtaposed to (1) the plot in fiction and (2) the plot in the historical text. The identity appears at the merging point of history and fiction, it is a place of subversion. The focus on identity draws attention, or rather it saves Ricoeur’s and White’s approach from structuralism and heavy eclectics which annoy in certain parts of their opus. Through the offered modalities of imaginary mediation, one becomes witness to the fact that the subject of narration in fiction merges with the personal identity in history, and that causes new provocations in the actualizations of the hermeneutics of selfhood and the questions: Who are we? Who am I? Radicalized, the new thesis: life as a narrative is de-​focalized from the identity of the narrative (plot) –​in the identification of the identity of the narrating subject that inclines towards society. The identity of the narrating subject is transferred –​ from the stable axis of the chronotope of history –​ towards destabilization in fiction. It becomes clear that the identification of the subject of narration –​ is relativized in the contingency of reality or, in other words: the narrative identity weakens equally in history and fiction because history is as fictional as fiction is historical. It is indisputable that the quasi-​historic nature of fiction is noted in the fact that fiction always represents a past of the narrator’s voice. Therefore, it is derived that the quasi-​past of the narrative voice is in union with the laws of probability and necessity, with that which could have happened, regardless of the real portrayal of the past. And the quasi-​historicity of fiction in

80  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History Ricoeur’s work implies that fiction through the text configures those possibilities which have remained potentially unfulfilled in the past –​a thesis that gives a new variation for reading Aristotle. The narrating subject becomes liberated from the bonds of reality, and it stands before the creation of a potentially fictive world. Metanarratosophy: From Discourse Theory to Normative Ambivalences The analytical distinctions between history/​literature (belle lettre), fact/​fiction, term/​metaphor, and affirmation/​irony, are still at the terrain of language. There are several “true” views, and each of them requires its intervention during interpretation. Hence the studying of language is an a priori polyphone, multiplied point of view (always in plural) which is posed in correlation with reality, and in an aspectual way, to the societal, and political experience. From this course of exposure, it is derived that history is potentially transformed, and all its forms are limited by language, namely, they are all equally real and equally limited by language. With the theory of linguistic determinism, one can predict the ways of translating from one modality of the discourse into another, in the same way as one translates from one language into another. Such a way of conceptualizing the question of relativism is superior to that which builds the viewpoint of the era, the place, or the ideological persuasion because one could not imagine the translation until one imagines the ways of translating between the different politics of the codes in the language. There is a representation at the level of society and the level of language. The re-​interpretation of the borders of the language and breaking the linguistically constituted thought through language produces meaning for the expansion and extensiveness of the borders of history. Political theorizing limited by normative and epistemological criteria remains inescapably constrained by language. Ontologically, language means meaning, meaning denotes codes of meaning, and political theory means a selective approach to meaning, where political thought is held. In Fraser’s critique of theories of distributive justice, there is an articulation of the deeply ambivalent nature of normativity in capitalism and the political articulation of norms in the capitalist context as fundamental for understanding hegemonistic practices and social domination. Fraser’s theory on emancipation is related to something I called meatanarratosophy where the challenges of the discursive theory and normative commitment in practices in the critique of capitalism are explicit through the ambivalence generated by the constellation of the capitalist context itself. With this term, I point out not the ‘metaphysics’ itself, but the metaphysics of the economic, social, politically cultural dimensions of narrative –​ in –​ progress, critique, and materialism in a specific context and time. In fact, through Fraser’s work on the critique of recognition, I put under question the core aspects of (uncritical) subjectivism of identity thinking. Metanarratosophy is a subtle blend of Marxist theory, structuralism, feminism, post structuralism. postmodern theories of the subject of narration that does not avoid acknowledging the

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  81 importance of the historical materialism as a source of emancipatory knowledge of the narrative –​in –​progress and the need to relate the discourse theory to the materiality of the non-​discoursive more of production in the context. It also means connecting the theory of cultural justice, postcolonial critique, and the concept of the narrative identity and narrative –​ in –​ progress in the concrete historical constellation, valuing inequalities and changes of the political systems too (in American context this is a question of intersectional feminist philosophy). In such circumstances, does it make a difference if one talks about narrative ­identity –​ in –​ progress, in communism, or capitalism? Is that the only way of making an analytical contrast between these two very different constellations? At the theoretical level, I suggest a metanarratosophy reflection of discourse theory which pays attention to the material dimensions of injustice; materialist feminists reject ‘metanarratives’, it is about anti-​essentialist logic, referring to social constructions of narrative –​ in –​ progress. I take the position of Fraser to unfold the way I suggest metanarratosophy at the theoretical level, where two conditions at least are met: an objective precondition of redistribution and an intersubjective precondition of reciprocal recognition. In metanarrotosophy, identity thinking has been changed since the normative framework of thinking has been changed. I think that while Fraser’s critique of the subjectivist construct of recognition is largely justified, she falls into countervailing objectivism. Identity politics or struggle for recognition are distinct from social justice redistribution, and a theory of history that views oppression as the most fundamental reality through materialist approach. Fraser’s ‘non-identity’ narrative rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential and interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity thinking, so this is not the right way to develop the political agency. But the ambivalence of the new directions of the normative frames and Fraser’s dualist paradigm opens to metanarratosophy a terrain for the materialist redefinition of identity thinking into the material reality and political agency related to redistribution of the global goods and resources, where history and economic issues are relevant. For emancipatory political objectives and ‘emancipatory narrative’ (Lise Vogel) where there is a commitment to concrete historical and cultural analysis. From the aspect of feminist interpretations of Rancière, Fraser, and Ricoeur, metanarratosophy implies a consideration of the metanarratofemosophy with suggestions to materialist feminist interpretations that have challenged Marxist theory as possible not just to demonstrate its fundamental importance for the concept of oppression that narrative –​in –​transit should take into consideration, but its transformation toward the context and contradictions of class, dialectics of mode of production, and labor processes. The Modalities of Aesthetic and Ideological Production I have already elaborated on Rancièrian work and the hermeneutical approach of Ricoeur that comes vis-​à-​vis the deconstruction of Derrida; the deconstruction

82  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History comes vis-​à-​vis structuralism. Moreover, on a broader (political, social, economic, cultural) level, the correlation between history and fiction can be pre-​ actualized, re-​read through the links between the history of cultural politics, neo-​Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, or the alternative epistemologies, through which one comes to the episteme of feministic (postcolonial) critique or the contemporary theory of politics. With the new historical research (the Marxist, analytical, Foucauldian current) and the new directions of textual critique (semiotic, poststructuralist) what is represented as reality in the social sciences –​ in art –​ is always analyzed as a string of social norms and conventions.20 Claire Colebrook in New Literary Histories (New Historicism and Contemporary Critique) emphasizes that new historical reactivation becomes necessary when a certain story or historical narrative can no longer be seen as a finished and valid category. The new historicism not only becomes a self-​ conscious fraction, secession from the main course of historiography, but it also introduces the sensitivity for irony, anecdote, and the power of the discourse, and it looks upon history as a functional narrative. The mutual disregard between historicism and new historicism exceeds the systems which the validity of knowledge offers. The search for the limits of linguistic meaning has shown that it is unclear where the text ends and context begins (White, LaCapra). In that sense, the text goes in correlation with the symptomatic, critical, transformative pertinent context since it tends to potentially reshape, more through the stylistic accountability or modus of narration, than in a specific way of representation of any kind of desire, different society or government system.21 This opens another perspective of rereading the intellectual history through modes of critical interpretations of social history. This is important since there is a door for rereading the methods of questioning the context of interpretation. The dialogical transfer between the past and the present denies that the past is an objective entity that can be neutrally portrayed or protectively reprocessed in the present. I am opening the questions of the correlation towards the past through metaphor and tropes. I don’t agree that the historic (real) events subjugate to the process of complete imaginative suspension (their closing in fiction). I also disagree that the contrast between history and fiction could be renewed, and on a higher level through the phenomenological philosophy which appears in the role of authoritative mediator and source of abstract aporias. If the dissonance is connected to the ‘real world’, then in the narrative world prevails a conventionalized, refigured reality as a completely rounded imaginative structure. The relations order/​disorder, plot/​ contingency are not categories that coincide with the relation narrative/​reality, because in the narratives the plot is complicated with the contingency, especially when the repetitive temporality is questioned. In that case, the reality is partially structured. LaCapra, in History, Politics, Novel provides an account of the development of thought that the novel accomplishes contact with reality and history by resisting throughout the plot (though the conventionalized and shaped, rounded narrative). On the other hand, Foucault in The Order of Things

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  83 understands new historicism as contingent contemporary thinking which escapes one-​way thinking. This is close to Colebrook’s approach (mentioned above) for the opening the text towards historical specifications of the time that is followed in the political approach, the Marxist current, and feminist historical materialism, which are opposing directions of the discourse theory. Hence, new historicism poses several key questions: what is the correlation of the text to its exterior (a question which has typical beginnings in Marxist literary theory and it juxtaposes the text with its “objective” context); further on, if and in what degree the historical narrative out of which the textual context is built is taken into account; towards what does the text correlate to; to what does history determine another text; is history privileged, grand narratives to other texts; is history a narrative? The dynamics of the fictional narrative were already connected to the historical, but the quality of art depends on how much that fictional narrative is reactive. Such a distinction reconfirms that the structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the social/​ political and the poetic, between history or society and the subjects of narration, there is nothing that is not social and historical-​indeed, that everything is “in the last analysis” political.22 The second interpretative frame is related to the term ‘culture’. By analyzing the question –​ Is there something which would be named ‘culture’? –​ I instigate the concept of whether the historical specifics of the artistic text can be explained, without positioning the factography of the context or further text at the same time but rooted in historical materialism. Following Raymond Williams there is an indissoluble connection between material production, political and cultural institutions, and activity and consciousness … and language is a way of thinking and acting that has material consequences. If history is narrative for itself (and at that, it signifies a specific, contemporary form of narration), then it could not be maintained for a long time as a phenomenon of connecting the text with the context. In such a case, history has the function of posing the question of how the text is created, produced, and made together with what is accepted as its context. The implications of these concerns are How is the aesthetics of the text which is accepted as a phenomenon independent of other “texts” created? How is history in which other texts are inscribed and located created? Is there another way of thinking about the meaning of the text which will avoid the position of history as a previously given fact without returning to formalism or going into textualism. But what, precisely, does staying ‘beyond historicism’ mean? Althusser’s conceptions of epistemological relativism open the concept of relative autonomy of the knowledge and involvement of the subject in history that has a transitive nature and it is not a form of historicism. One of the dominant themes of For Marx and Reading Capital is the specific impact of scientific practice, which gives its effects a certain autonomy relative to the conditions of its existence. To paraphrase Althusser, the formal concept of the production conditions of theoretical practice alone cannot provide the specific concepts which will enable us

84  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History to constitute a history of theoretical practice, let alone the history of the different branches of theoretical practice. To go beyond the merely formal concept of the structure of theoretical practice, i.e., of the production of knowledge, one must work out the concept of the history of knowledge, the concepts of the different modes of theoretical production (most important the concepts of the theoretical modes of production of ideology and science), and the peculiar concepts of the different branches of theoretical production and of their relations (the different sciences and their specific types of dependence, independence, and articulation).23 Science can no more be ranged within the category “superstructures” than can language … As for science, it may well arise from an ideology, detach itself from its field to constitute itself as a science, but precisely this detachment, this “break”, inaugurates a new form of historical existence and temporality which together save science (at least in certain historical conditions that insure the real continuity of its history –​conditions that have not always existed) from the common fate of a single history: that of the “historical bloc” unifying structure and superstructure.24 Through these implications, I explain the ‘discontinuity’, as a disintegration of history, with the theoretically methodological approach of the new historicism. The distinction between the literary past and its critically theoretic interpretation in the form of a story points to the possibility for methodological innovations in the research of the past and the updating of the literary-​historical tradition, and it doesn’t exclude the projects of pseudo-​constructions of history, simulations, revalorizations, retouching and adaptations of the literary-​historical process. With the new historicism, even the validity of the interpretative method, literary theory, and arbitrarity of the interpretative position is questioned. With the Marxist position, the historical meaning of the text is opened. If history is not a non-​textual or pre-​textual exterior which assumes the form of ideology, then interpretation cannot discover the meaning of the given text as ideological production. If, for Derrida, nothing exists outside the text, for Foucault, there is always history and power. Foucault calls upon a model for historical and political critique to interpret them, to interweave the texts in correlation to the historically determined powers and to discard the regular hermeneutics in the service of the possible discursive practice according to the principle of exteriority. In that sense, the history which determines has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no meaning, though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible to analysis down to the smallest detail … Neither the dialectic, as a logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts.25 Political narratosophy takes Foucault’s analysis outwards from the text towards something else, which is not limited by the term history as a fixed and unchangeable term, nor does it understand reality as opposed to the language. Foucault connects the question of power to the existence of political

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  85 technologies in selfhood. From the perspective of context, power is a potential correlation with the production of life as narrative, or narrative identity. The relations of power are actualized through the principle of integration –​an operation that consists of connecting individual points and it always presumes knowledge. Factors of integration are the institutions in society that are not sources of power, but which presume the relations of power (for example: first comes governing, then the state, if under governing is implied: the power to influence in all aspects of power). The institution (institutional power) is dualistic, and signifies the visible (that which flows as visibility, as seeing) and the expressible, or rather the propositions, speech. Power, at the level of knowledge, produces problems: truthfulness, discourse, improvised speech. Integration opens the divergence and, at the same time, creates a formal system of differentiation of both poles: the visible and the expressible (for example, visibility in the state, art, and science, as opposed to their propositions which continuously change). Such attitudes towards power are close to Deleuze who explicitly juxtaposes the discursive practices (the utterable ones) with the non-​discursive practices (the visible ones), thus the propositions are never defined by what they signify or what they mean. Foucault’s philosophy comes close to Jameson who approaches literature as a socially symbolical act whose interpretation should penetrate that which is not explicitly expressed and focus on the union between literature and ideology (understood as a “mistake”, illusion, myth, mystification, but also an expression of social practice, “a secondary subtext”, an era’s view of the world, a view which is limited by society or class, ideological as a mark of the social), which is Althusserian of the subject’s attitudes towards the conditions of existence. Political narratosophy has accelerated through the ‘ideology’ to the context which also could be called subtext, as a situational context of the artistic work. Following Jameson’s method, political narratosophy represents the artwork (text) as an alteration and reorganization of the historical and ideological subtext which is not present on its own as a conventional external “reality”, but must be additionally reconstructed. The subtext for Jameson is a resultant of history; only after that it is a literary act (an artistic artwork/​fiction/​text). If the act of aesthetics is closely connected to ideology, it is not closed in (Marxist) ideology, but rather literature becomes an ideology of sorts (but also its extension, critique). Political narratosophy has a speculative nature, which means one can never have a direct interpretation of the text, but one always receives the texts as deposited layers of previous interpretations, and gives comment to already set comments. In such case, the object of interpretation is not the text itself and the ‘life as narrative’, or ‘narrative identity’ by itself, instead, it is the interpretation through which one tries to face the text. This is a qualification of Althusser’s anti-​teleological formula of history which is neither a subject, nor telos, and he comprehends it under the influence of Jacques Lacan. With these premises, I came to the claim that political narratosophy concerns the reality which escapes, which provides resistance and diverges from the processes of

86  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History symbolization, by revising the formulation of history: history is not a text, not a narrative, but an absent reason. It is not approachable only in the form of a text. Our relation towards it and towards the Real itself, necessarily derives from its previous textualization, through its turning into the fiction of the political unconscious. The history as “absent reason” (Althusser) and Lacan’s Real are not texts by themselves because they cannot be represented, and they cannot be narrated in their essence. On the other hand, history is only available to us as a text, which means that it refers to a previous re-​textualization. Political narratosophy opens a space for contradiction that culminates in the claim that the text is placed in the big, collective, social class debates in which it stops being just an address, a saying, and becomes ideologeme, the smallest unit in the essence of the antagonistic debates, just as the address, was treated at the beginning of the last century (Bakhtin), as opposed to formalism. Political narratosophy integrates the method of new historicism to show that narration and selfhood are approached as an historical occurrence. There is a possibility to re-​examine the ideological aspects of the identity of the subject of the narration, from the text towards the context. The artistic text refers to the relation between the signified and the signifier and it is not fixed, but that relation changes, dislocates and reacts depending on the aesthetic ideology (Eaglton). To explore the relation text –​ ideology, the importance lies in the macro plan of the relation between the textual significations (the form and content) and the present significations which we call an ideology, not in the micro plan of the text and some signified which is separated by itself. The signified in the artistic text is a pseudo-​real imaginary effect accomplished through the text. The pseudo-​reality is the effect, the aspect of the signifying process of the text, and that entire process is signified by the ideology which is, by itself, a signification of history. The displacement of the relation between the signifier and the signified, in the prototypical literary processing, is a result of the relation between the processing of the whole and the ideology. The text exists in the gaps between the text itself and history. History exists before the text and defines the text. The ideology of the text is defined in the text itself, not in its pre-​existence. The pre-​textual ideology is presented to the work in different shapes, in plain speech, in a symbol, convention, aesthetic, political, ethical explication present in everyday language. In that sense, if political narratosophy explores a certain formation (as in the next chapter, for example, soc-​realism) the aesthetic categories have a direct relation towards the general ideological union, producing the modalities of aesthetic processing. In such a case it’s as if the aesthetic categories only mimic the ideological modalities, but even then, the texts are not equal to ideological processing. Depending on the character and specifics of the ideology, the text assumes a relation toward it through its shapes, and with the transmutative operations of literary forms, the text determines the character of the ideology. In such a case the ideology is seen as a distorted, fragmented, deformed view produced for the interests of a specific social group. The ideology could be also seen as a distorted

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  87 reality that is represented and verified in the text. The “materials” that a certain text is processing signify the “logic” of the contents of the text (Jameson). The text can operate with an ideology that contains elements of something real and, at the same time, annul those elements. On the other hand, with the emphasis on aesthetic stylizations, the ideology is transformed, and recognized. Ideology’s nature (“processed” through the aesthetics of the narrative) is in the complex formational union, during which are enabled the special relations of homology and juxtaposition because there is no fixed, unchangeable historical relation between the text and the ideology. The actualization of the ideological clash and its resolving as a synchronic process in the artistic text is effectuated as solving the specific aesthetic issue. The narrative process is a complex mutual articulation of both processes within which the aesthetic modalities define and determine the ideological issues to continue the reproduction inside the borders of the text. In the roughest sense, the “materials” of the ideology function as the formal and aesthetic operation of the text. The ideologemic function of the text swells and exposes itself in the implied text (Lachman) which represents an intersection, and interference of the present and absent text. Even when the text is produced, when it is written out, it is reproduced for the ideology which allows it relative autonomy. This shows that the text is never equivalent with itself, but it is rather in a process of existing identical to itself. In that sense, the historical discourse, in its essence is a form of ideological or rather “imaginary” elaboration which is preformative (Austin) in its nature, and through it, the absoluteness of the discourse (or the pure linguistic entity) fills the place of the subject in the statement (the psychological or ideological entity). Metamemory. Politics of Memory Between Fiction and History Historiography can never fully imagine the past ‘as it was for real’, so it insists even more on fictive and imaginative aspects. Fiction has no ambition to announce something which could be factographically checked but, by also projecting a fictive world, it possesses an innovative property and it modes the action on human behavior and its relation towards reality which is not referential, but it becomes refigurative. The question that is posed in political narratosophy is: What does it mean to portray reality and what is the reference to past events? In the image –​trace relation, the verb to pass (transire) is no longer important, but instead the verb to remain (manet, in fixum manet). To present something means to represent it with one part as opposed to the whole/​pars pro toto. In such a case the trace is the past, but it also seems like it is an existing segment of reality. To present something means to create a mental image of something which no longer exists. The phenomenon trace is a culmination of the imaginary character of the bonds which signify the shaping of the historical time (in Ricoeur’s sense). The trace is a reminder of the past, a part of it that still has not disappeared and that is why the reference of the historian signifies it with its indirect character. The

88  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History historian always concludes based on the traces in the process of reconstruction of the past. On the other hand, when Hannah Arendt writes about totalitarianism, she defines historiography as the necessary salvation of the past. To memory practices, Arendt takes two stands. First, she integrates the theses of Walter Benjamin calling upon the method of fragmentary historiography which is on the side of memory –​to narrate the story of history in conditions of the failed desires and strivings, but at the same time to protect the past without imprisoning it in a superior (omniscient, auctorial) moral or political imagination. Second, Arendt is inspired by Heidegger’s phenomenology, according to which memory is understood as a mimetic recollection of the lost origin on behalf of the development of the humanistic experience. This interpretation refers to the ‘original meaning of memory’ or the ‘lost distinction between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, with a tendency to break the chains of the narrative continuity, placing in the foreground the fragmentariness and of historical endings.26 Following Benjamin, historical time is always full, so history is an object of construction whose place does not compose homogenous and empty time, but the time which is filled with ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit). Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History shows that history is not something that has passed, instead, it is passing, goes by n-​o-​w, and stands on the edge of disappearing. Following this discussion, history is something that is about to come. It is derived through active construction; her place is constituted with the temporal structure of the ‘now-time’. The ‘now-time’ signifies present time, it does not signify (substantive) presence, but it represents the present, or rather, it causes (makes) the present to appear. The ‘now’ time is taken to the structure of the factographic temporality in which the relations between the past and the present are dialectic, reduced to images. The possibility for the realization of history is connected to the disappearance of the traces of what has gone by; it depends on the degree of readability of the traces. The historical blind alley (impasse) is a synonym for the silence, the flaw, and the mistakes which become part of the mediation of history. Hence, history is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here and now [Jetztzeit]. The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state. In Benjamin’s terms, the image one reads is the image that is placed in the recognizable ‘now’, mostly signified by a critical, risky movement which is the foundation of every reading; history would be that to which we come through reading. A special type of imaginative operation in the phases of configuration and refiguration are the events that are significant in the shaping of the collective identity with an ethical and moral intensity in the discourse and the inviting of memory capacities.27 I called ‘metamemory’ these locations of the memory that represent an act that possesses necessary imaginative abilities but through a selective capacity (selective materialistic organization) of the politics rooted in materialistic traces. The forgotten is something that is repressed, but culturally active, it is a crucial

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  89 part of the culture. Unlike memory, remembering has an immanent force, it is a category within which all that has sunk into oblivion can be returned. The memory, concepts, ideologemes are created through politics of memory, since only in this place, is the memory play interwoven into the writing of history, filing the models of interpretation of the past through the methods of its (present) transformation. This is the place where the art of memory (ars memoriae) happens. Aesthetics of the art of memory develops through semantics and the arranging of the internal and external spaces of the text which is composed of other texts I use to consider the types of memory in the contextualization of the past and deliberating of the present.28 The concept(s) of ‘life as a narrative’, narrative –​ in –​ progress, narrative identities, and building the subject of narration is related to the precise analysis of personal memory on several levels: perception of memory, processing of memory, storing, returning, evoking of memory, continues this thought. The ability to percept sensory events (by definition –​ the visual always as primary) transforms into the encoding of the information and its reproduction in its complexity of signs, sounds, smells (in the present). The memory storing in the literary-​artistic work is accomplished through the encoding of a past event according to the principle of synecdoche (the part as opposed to the whole) as a part of the artificial mnemotechnical system. In a traditional sense and simplified, the function of history is to be a social act, a reminder, and a “memorial”, a curator of memory of public events that are fixed in the text (Burke). At that, remembering and writing are not innocent contact, because neither history nor memory is objective. The goal is to search the conscious and unconscious selections, interpretations, or distortions that are socially determined. Memory is constructed by the social groups which determine what would be “worthy to remember” and in which way it should be remembered (because in different time sets different things are remembered). Social memory is in union with the relativism of history, and the focus of interpretation turns toward the past, at the same time considering the collective images (Durkheim) taken from the current, present culture. In this way, the opportunity for an interdisciplinary redefining of history arises. On the one hand, memory is a historical source from which we start to criticize the reminiscent responsibility in the (traditional), “established” historical documents. On the other hand, it is a historical phenomenon to which the social history of remembering is connected. If we follow the logic according to which memory in society is a flexibly selective category just as the individual memory is selective (through synecdoche), the identification of the principles of selection is tied to their variability and changeability. This socio-​historic aspect of memory activates three dichotomies. The first refers to the models of transmission of the social (public) history and its ability to fluctuate, the second deals with the resultants, usefulness, and function of the memory of the past and their changeable nature. The final thesis, conversely

90  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History asks: What is the functionality of amnesia? These standpoints will be read when written history (not oral) becomes the focus of interest and when the documentary interlacing in artistic prose is questioned. In the first thesis about the transmissive properties of social memory, we also analyze the affectation of memories through the social organization of transmission through the recorded (fixed) writings which wouldn’t be “innocent”, pure acts of memory, but rather sketches about the testimony and memory of the other. In Ricoeur’s process of refiguration, the reader doesn’t read the memory of the author, but rather the memory which is processed, modeled, perpetuated, transformed, and mediated through recording and imagined images refashioned into photography, pictures in motion, or another type of artistic rendering of memory. Burke connects the second question about the functioning of memory in society to the legitimacy of the actions in the present, by referring to the past, the function of the witness’s memory, and the term “mythic time”. Some cultures, depending on the cultural code they evoke, call up the past much more frequently than other cultures which tend to forget –​ so-​called “structural amnesia”. Structural amnesia is a complementary opposite of the term “social public memory” which Burke calls “social amnesia”. If we follow the logic of the fact that history is written (in a restrictive, censored way) by the winners, then history can also be forgotten by them; they can “allow” themselves to forget, while the losers are powerless to accept what is happening, thus giving in to contemplation they reemit, relive history in a discrepancy which could be very different from the reality. In this context the concept of “interpretative communities” (Fish) appears. This is important for locating conflicts during the interpretation of the text with the diverse “mnemo-​communities” (Burke) in the society in which it is analyzed. This version will be accepted while others will be discarded. The usefulness of social amnesia is Burke’s term, whose etymological background of amnesia is in correlation with “amnesty” which approaches the “acts of oblivion” and the official erasing of the evocations around the conflicts in the function of social cohesion. Thus, political narratosophy opens a discussion in which there are no typologies of the dominant or constant models, forms of fiction, meta-​fiction, or historiographic meta-​fiction as post-​modernistic discourses by themselves. The conclusion elaborates on the core mechanisms of how the political thinking of narratosophy works. This chapter explains the political narratosophy as a discipline which is about extended aesthetic experiences and forcing the interruption of the narrative and subject of narration somewhere –​always –​already –​between –​ fiction and history. Notes 1 See Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation,173

Narrative Structures between Fiction and History  91 2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. 3 Linda Hutcheon’s thesis is connected to this Ricoeur notion, and it declares that the present and the past are always already irreversibly textualized, which means that the ontological line between the historical past and literature is not erased, but rather underlined. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 128. 4 See Hegel, The Philosophy of History and Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit but also the Oxford Latin Dictionary (historiography contains the etymology of ‘writing’ in itself, see: γράφω –​ γράφω -​ψομαι –​ έγραψα -​άμην –​ γέγραμμαι –​ εγράφην –​ γραφήσομαι –​γεγράψομαι (thanks to Antonis Nikolits and Maria Nikolakakis for the Greek translations). 5 See Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 46–​47. 6 De Certeau’s term “scriptural” covers the concept that historiography must exhume what it cannot know, or dig up whatever it can muster, to have a fleeting grasp of the present, the past will always enter the flow of current life because it is an absence on which the visible evidence of truth is based. 7 Connectors, bonds, connections, transfers –​such as Paul Ricoeur’s calendar. 8 Ricoeur Time and Narrative, 183. 9 Hayden White “The Historical Interpretation”, 187. 10 The concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ was introduced to political theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who argue that, in the absence of ontological grounding, identity constitution must take place against a “radical outside, without a common measure with the inside” (Laclau 1990, 18). 11 Difference and deferral, see Derrida, Positions and in Dissemination. 12 See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, 7. 13 Derrida, J. and Ferraris, M. A Taste for the Secret. 14 Jacques Derrida, White Mythology, 74. 15 See Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age” in New Left Review 212 (1995): 68–​93; reprinted in Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, 1997, 11–​40. 16 Nancy Fraser, in ‘‘Struggle over Needs Outline of Socialist Feminist Critical Theory of Late-​Capitalist Political Culture” in Women, the Stale and Welfare: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, 38. 17 See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-​Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. 18 In Jodi Dean’s essay ‘Politics without Politics’ in Parallax 15(3). 19 See Laura Hengehold, The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault, 212. 20 The critical position of the interpreter as a historical–​critical subject is implied in such a background. And again, we find everything in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, the novel is a sublimate of the entire modern culture and the most expressive form of ‘dialogized’ language. Namely, Bakhtin opens the problem of the limits of the text and context. Every understanding of the text –​according to Bakhtin –​represents its comparison to other texts and acquiring new meaning in a new context. At that, the dialogical flow of interpretation and reading has three stages: (1) starting point (given

92  Narrative Structures between Fiction and History context), (2) moving back (past context), and (3) moving forward (predicting and beginning of a new context). 21 See Dominik LaCapra, History, Politics, and the Novel. LaCapra is close to Bakhtin in the understanding of intertextuality and the ‘dialogical imagination’ of the past. 22 Fredric Jameson. “On Interpretation: Literature as A Socially Symbolic Act,”, in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 4. 23 See Louis Althusser, and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 39. 24 See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, 213. 25 Michel Foucault, Power, Knowledge, 114. 26 See Hannah Arent, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 27 Memory, anamnesis –​ in Greek Ανάμνησις-​ remembering, memory; –​ μιμνήσχω –​αναμιμνήσχω –​to remember, to remind someone of something; μιμνήσχωμα –​ μιήσθομαι –​ εμνήσθην-​ to remember, to remind yourself. In Latin anamnesis comes from rĕ-​mĭnīscor –​to remember, to remind yourself, but also to invent. The category anamnesis has appeared since Plato’s Meno. 28 See this in Renate Lachmann. Phantasia Memoria Rhetorica, on memory (mneme), forgetting, and remembering (anamnesis); memory is not only a slave-​like evocation of the events which took place in the past, but it is also a creation of the locations of memory (loci memoriae).

3 From Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices In Women’s Writings from East Germany and Former/Post-Yugoslavia

Obscure Theory. Communist Life as Narrative /​Narrative Identity. Aesthetic and Ideological Productive Contradictions Christa Wolf (1929–​2011) is a literary critic, writer of prose and essays, honorary doctor at several world universities, and one of the most controversial authors from the former East Germany who has a chain of ambivalent positions in her autobiography: as a writer, literary scientist, artist and active protagonist on the political scene during a period when the former East Germany went through a major social transformation. Christa Wolf is major female author in contemporary Germany. She experiments with literary genres and styles and brings innovations to the literary discourse with the complex “incision” of the plot in the novel, accomplished at several levels of narration. She was given a lifetime achievement award at the Leipzig Book Fair (2002). The essential autobiographic sketch of her is tied to many moments of her life and work: childhood and youth spent in fascist Germany (she was born in Landsberg, now Gorzow in Poland). the relocation at the age of sixteen to Mecklenburg province in Northern Germany (due to the Russian military invasion), years spent in socialism, reading Marxist school books, participating in the ideological restoration of socialist Germany (together with her mentor Anna Seghers, a radical writer in the Weimar Republic who goes into exile), participation in the literary–​critical social theories which at the beginning were radically prohibited in the entire sphere of social life in communist Germany), the internal confrontations while she writes the novel Nachdenken über Christa T./​ The Quest for Christa T./​ Thinking about Christa T., the censoring of her speeches and political texts by the communist party in Democratic Germany, the critique, her self-​criticism, her opposition to the banishing of artists from East Germany, her exclusion from the executive government of the Legion of writers and from the candidacy list of the Central Committee because of disagreement in views, the intentional imposing of feminist theory, and her inclination towards nuclear technology. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, Wolf “falls” from the position of an author who represents the “conscience” of the communist society. DOI: 10.4324/9781003374794-4

94  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices In 1993 “Spiegel” publishes that Christa Wolf was a Stasi collaborator. There follows persistent silence after which she decides to defend herself with her literary work, by writing brilliant artistic prose.1 As an author, how consciously (or unconsciously) does the most distinguished East German, now German, writer give a valuation of her times in her literary works, using the raw material from her autobiography? Don’t panic. One day I will even talk about it in that other language which, as of yet, is in my ear but not on my tongue. Today I knew would still be too soon. But would I know when the time was right? Would I ever find my language? … Don’t panic. My other language … –​my other language, which had begun to grow but had not yet fully developed, would occasionally sacrifice the visible to the invisible … This language would be gripping, loving, and protective, that much I thought I could foresee. I would hurt no one by myself. I slowly realized why I could not get beyond these scraps of paper, these individual sentences. I was pretending to dwell on them. I was not thinking anything … One day I would be able to speak more easily and more freely –​ I thought. It is still too soon, but it won’t always be too soon. Why not simply sit at this desk, take my pen and begin? What remains?2 The dissident passages in Christa Wolf’s literature and work can be read through her contradictory life experience; born and educated in the Third Reich, established as a writer in communist Germany, she remains without specific national identification. Her work is complex, the plot is intricate and refined and it is performed on several levels. Her socialist determination and the use of the sophisticated “mimicking”, “foggy” sfumato language are recorded in the skillfully deliberated contemporary viewpoint of narration and the techniques which require the reader’s active participation. Christa Wolf’s literary work is placed a priori contextually if one takes into account the political slide change of the communist background of East Germany. Against that background, Christa Wolf reacts and creates continuously on a literary and political level. Precisely because of that, the purification of her artistic prose is accomplished most often in a referential historical context. The novel Nachdenken über Christa T. /​The Quest for Christa T./​Thinking about Christa T.3 by Christa Wolf is a literary continuation of the story “June Afternoon” (“Juninachtmittag”, 1965) which was published in the year that Christa Wolf composes her first sketches for Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.). From the way the story is written, and later in the novel as well, it is apparent that Christa Wolf diverges from the socialist ideology of narration, the choice of narrative strategies refers to the status of the author’s self-​distance from her previous way of writing. The story speaks

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  95 of a woman who spends an afternoon reading in a garden. The reading is interrupted by voices that come from the background, from her husband and two daughters. The story is addressed to the addressee whom the author calls “you”. The reading in the garden or the “idyllic” atmosphere is constantly interrupted by the sounds of an airplane, newspaper headlines, and news of a train crash and in which a neighbor is killed. The narrative unveils the allegoric image of the story, lost perfection turns into an “exposed” taboo trope of soc-​ realism. With the strategies laid out like this, the story “betrays” the basic postulates of “existential socialism”, emphasizing the principle of individuality of the woman who is reading and thinking in the process during one June afternoon. After the novel Nachdenken über Christa T. was published in 1968 (by Mitteldeutscher Verlag) it caused an avalanche of criticism and political articles in the cultural and literary magazines in East Germany and scandalous pronouncements made at the Sixth Congress of German writers which was held in 1969. At this congress, psychological pressure was placed on Wolf and her novel was rigorously sanctioned. It was proclaimed as having “non-​functional” and “endangering” political aesthetics/​aesthetic politics. The critiques and essays on Nachdenken über Christa T. are restrictive on a broader level in the socially political context of East Germany, underlining the reduced dialectical connection in the novel between the woman author and society. The critics reacted to Wolf’s diverging from creating the literary work as a “collective work”. Wolf’s reality as an “internal world” is marked as “dangerous subjectivism”, and how the narrative world is structured in the novel is also criticized. At the Tenth plenary meeting of the Central Committee of East Germany the director of Mitteldeutscher Verlag states: “To be a publisher is to wage an ideological war”. He says about Nachdenken über Christa T.: This book indisputably presents the author’s attempt to seek answers to the questions of how one ought to live. But it cannot be overlooked that the protagonist of this novel is developed in such a way that it is difficult to answer the question in a socialist manner; the portrayal seems to make it a priori impossible for the girl Christa T. to become an example. In addition (to this choice of the protagonist) we note that Christa Wolf doesn’t emphasize enough the possibilities made available to the individual by a socialist society. Christa Wolf finds no distance from her protagonist. Pessimism becomes the basic mood of the book’s aesthetics. The answer that Christa Wolf ultimately finds remains generally humanistic. But, if socialist literature is to fulfill its function and find worldwide recognition, it can achieve this only if it provides specific socialist answers to the universally important problems. It is precisely in this that we can locate the publishing house’s decisive failure in its interaction with the author Christa Wolf.4

96  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices Christa T. by Christa Wolf proclaims free speech and dissent culture against censorship. At the representative forum of socialist writers in the GDR, the Sixth German Writers’ Convention, Max Walter Schulz summarized the discomfort generated by Christa T’.s narrative: We all know Christa Wolf as a talented collaborator in our cause. Precisely for this reason, we cannot hide our disappointment about her new book. However party-​minded the subjectively honest intention of the book is meant to be –​as the story is told, it is designed to cast our sense of life into doubt, to dislodge a past that has been mastered, to produce a broken relationship to the here and now and tomorrow. What good is that? From how it is written, she has the intention of questioning our feeling for life, of stirring up our conquered past, of severing the relation to this moment, with the present and the future. And where’s the good in that?5 There is an important correlation I want to make between communism and capitalism related to speech I have called an obscure theory. If in communism free speech was “under control” and censured, then free speech in capitalism is something that Wendy Brown explains as harmful in effect.6 The politics of voices that are unfunded and relatively powerless are not part of the discourse. In another sense, in terms of Wendy Brown, the speech of capitalism is speech that is restricted and controlled by the capital. From Plot to Politics Christa’s Juxtapositions. In the contemporary theory of fiction, there are points of variation (borderline conditions) in which the character stops being a character. In such a case, the plot enters the character and it is a matter of erosion of the paradigm into the so-​called fiction of losing one’s identity. The mutual approach of fiction (the Fabula) and live experience happens in autobiography as a referential discourse. Autobiography as a genre, by definition, signifies that an author is writing about their own life. Etymologically the word comes from the adjective auto (Greek –​ autoζ –​ self) which is added to the compound biography which means: to write about someone’s life. Autobiography signifies the identification of the instances of author and character, the subject and object of narration. The term coincides with the creation of the genre. Referring to theoretical analyses in autobiography as a genre is of key importance in this study for the research of life as narrative, or narrative identities, not only because of the transposition of life experience but also because autobiographic texts are understood primarily as pre-​documents for the real, true historiography. Thus, autobiography becomes a “historical” source or type, the shape of historical narration of social history or, that is a document is interesting for historiography –​ therefore –​ also for rereading of history. In this study the theoretical analyses of autobiography are

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  97 positioned in the function of illuminating the correlations: life as narrative –​ identity –​fiction, life as narrative –​identity –​reality, life as narrative –​identity –​ history, on one hand, and on the other hand in the function of proving the auto referential disposition of the autobiography genre to incorporate within itself the relations literary and real, fictive, and historical. The mutual approach of fiction and life as narrative, including living life through theory writing happens in auto theory. The history and practice of feminist theory is one of the auto theory events since it happens through the auto-​perceptions of the resonances of auto theory as lived experiences. The term refers to a twenty-​first-​century constellation (Lauren Fournier). It is a genre related to the critique of the context of late capitalism, post-​confessional technologies of social media, the artistic practice of embodying, enacting, processing, metabolizing, and reiterating philosophy, theory, and art criticism. Auto theory reflects on aesthetics and politics as a self-​ reflexive approach in the post-​medial present. If auto theory and autobiography connect the life (which is lived) and the written life, then narration becomes a focused problem when the real events are given the shape of a story. For Philippe Lejeune, autobiography (just like historical discourse) has the a priori intention “to inform of a certain reality outside the text and to test it.”7 On a contextual level, I am reading autobiography as a political act. If one starts from the thesis that everything is language (even a person’s privacy), that everything is a text, a code, then the individual autobiography also shows that the derived is conventional and public. In Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.),8 the subjective and objective are in cohesion, what “really” happened and the fictional narrativization of the even are both encompassed. This novel is accomplished between the “objective” facts during the creation of the character of Christa T. (from the heritage of the character in the novel) and the additional writing, recreation of the character by the narrator. It is accomplished by a relation between that which cannot be verified or forged and the empirical reality narrativized by the woman narrator. The novel begins at the end of the Second World War and continues for the first fifteen years of the regime in East Germany. The life and death of Christa T. are in focus. The plot is “fragmented” through memories, retrospection, and reflection. The language strives to achieve a “cognizant” attitude. On a structural level, the narratological situation is motioned by a woman narrator who “composes” the truth about her dead friend Christa T. and who introduces, apologizes, and recreates her narrative identity. Based on such narratological strategy, Christa T. is a provocative, hermeneutically “impure”, undetermined character, co-​memorized, pastiched from personal heritage (sketches, letters, diaries) and the author’s interventions (and thereby also her subjective impressions of Christa T.). That very impurity is so generative in her work. The author’s juxtaposition of both literary figures (the dead thirty-​five-​year-​old Christa T. and the living woman narrator who remembers and thinks) signifies the artistic manner in the autobiographical discourse. The sameness, corresponding in the first part of Christa T’s name with the name of the

98  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices author is a subsequent reference, a qualificatory component in autobiographical fiction. The narratological situation is accomplished through a synthesized, conventional autobiographic account of the author Wolf. The implicit voice of the narrator is announced in the relation between the subject and object of narration. The author’s splitting into the literary figures of the dead woman and the living woman who remembers her friend who passed away from an illness moves the autobiographic substance of the novel and opens space for the autobiographical “confrontation” of the author with the character. Christa Wolf, who was born in 1929, introduces the woman narrator who was born in 1929 and writes about a woman called Christa T. born in 1927. The character, narrator, and author are born in the same region, east of the river Odra, they have studied in Leipzig, they are readers and writers. The borders of their inter-​identification in fiction are blurred. The woman narrator, as a close friend of Christa T., is acquainted with the German literature studies in Leipzig, a wife with two children, and a writer, or better said, she’s everything that Christa T. has always wanted to achieve. The narrator thinks about Christa T. neglecting the moments from her own life, the present time in which she writes, her own ‘presence’ in the narrative present in which she tells the story. The empirical Christa Wolf gives the narrator the right to speak, while she can think only restrictively. She thinks about Christa T. only strictly depending on her powers of perception. The omniscient, auctorial perspective of narration is excluded. By naming the character Christa T., Wolf creates autobiographical fiction based on the autobiography of the other woman. She attempts to bring in ‘voices’ which would be strong enough and which would endure in the testimony that experience belongs to gender and that the way of ‘seeing’ and writing elicits revision of the event. The woman narrator owns the unpublished materials of the dead friend Christa T. and, as Anne Herrmann believes in “I/​She: The Female Dialogic in The Quest for Christa T.)”, the woman narrator takes over the role of a woman narrator who continues to write the story of Christa T. while taking the liberty of fictionalizing freely (258). The narrative is extracted into a manuscript derived from memory and inventions and it fills the gaps in the traces left by the woman determined not by silence and quiet but by absence. The ontological difference between Christa Wolf and the character (the dead Christa T.) and the structural difference in the text between the narrator and the one she speaks to –​ the addressee –​ allow the narration to become fiction. Thinking about Christa T. begins: “The quest for her in the thought of her” (3). ‘‘And of the attempt to be oneself. She speaks of this in her diaries, which we have, on the loose manuscript pages that have been found, and between the lines of those letters of hers that are known to me” (3). Christa T’s presence makes an initial appearance through her writings, embedded in a story structured as intertextual dialogue. This passage goes between “her” (ihr), “we” (uns), and “I/​me” (ich) the first and the third feminine, the second potentially so. As Anne Herrmann notes they appeared in opposition to the impersonal “one” (man).9 The passage begins with

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  99 the possible semantic of nachdenken and its semantic doubling “to remember” and “to follow in thought” and ends with the verb kennen (to know). Conjugated in the first person, kennen signifies knowledge as the juncture between thought and memory, a form of intersubjectivity. The narrator starts to write in the name of the absent character –​ the woman who’s threatened by total “absence”. The only defense against her permanent loss is the author’s decision to represent her, to bring the presence of the dead woman through writing. With the re-​scription of the already written fragments left by the deceased, the author “bonds” the narrator with the character: “I can summon her up quite easily with a quotation, more than I could do for most living people. She moves if I want her to” … (Thinking about…, 4). The way the narrator introduces the past and Christa T. enables a twist, i.e., the seemingly subjective privacy is turned into a context of social conditioning. The role of the narrative “I” in the first person denotes the subject of narration, the memorized friend, the sameness, complementarity of the subject of narration with the author or complementarity with Christa T. The narrative subject is simultaneously both object of the narrative and subject of the transformation of the real narrative “I” in the artistic figure. At the same time, there are confrontations in the narrative process of Christa T. with herself as an alternative narrative “I”. The Philosophy of the Referential Reality and Identity Thinking: Possessive and Disciplined Memory In Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.) temporality is postulated in the narrative process through thinking. In this novel, the narrative time is not interpreted through its temporal dimension but through the “time of memory” where all past events are portrayed simultaneously in the narrating disposition and not in the function of decoding a person’s life, but refer to the contextual chronotope in which the book was written. The images of Christa T. are a scattered composition of scenes, seconds, momentary experiences because the chronology is disturbing. There is a coincidental, unintentionally sufficient temporal reference that allows the narrator to intentionally reconstruct the life of Christa T. When reading Christa T. through Renate Lachmann’s theory of memory and forgetting, we are at liberty to say that death stands at the margins of memory, and the recollection of the absent images (phantasma, simulacrum) rip out forgetting and wake the dead. What Lachmann denotes as recollection is the thinking about Christa T. (Nachdenken) which suggests partial and never complete results during thinking. Thinking and remembering are the two principles, the two modes of building the identity of the narrating subject and the recapitulation of the narratological-​hermeneutical circle. Both words change in this context: thinking becomes less active, and remembering becomes more, they kind of merge. Or, according to Benjamin (in Arcades Project), the concept of ‘thinking’ that includes not only the flow of thoughts but also their stopping, because when

100  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tension, it gives the configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. The unfinished past is deliberated through re-​presence (re-​presentatio) of the absent. The re-​ semantization of memory and the signs from the past by the living narrator fill the blanching of the memory of the dead friend. Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.) is not a sustainable novel in the confines of the definition novel of memory/​remembering because the narrator doesn’t stop merely at the literary reconstruction of the reality of the dead woman, but she also wants to capture and make present “the truth” about the character, to elide, shape, recreate (Gestalt) Christa T. One remembers only that which one possesses, and wants to preserve. The subject of narration who remembers has a defensive attitude towards temporality, so she does not even preserve the reality of the dead woman; instead, she wishes to establish “the real” Christa T. Therefore, the remembering and processual re-​gathering of places (loci) and images (imagines) of memory (Lachman) are directed towards the future. The narrative “I” is divided between the documented “searching” and “digging out” of Christa T. and the longing direction of the character towards the future tense which will “breach” East Germany’s cultural politics at those times. The narrator has a selective role in the creation of Christa T. depending on her memory and the “objective” facts or testimonies about the character as well as Christa T’s diaries. “I can do what I want with her” –​ says the woman narrator (4). At the beginning of this novel there’s a combination of the risky borderline conditions of the narrator’s limited consciousness during the building of the character’s identity but, at the same time, the dependency on it is revealed: “Memory puts a deceptive color on things” (3). On the one hand, the narrator’s personal memory is risky, while she strives to possessively “own” the character as opposed to attempting to “get to know it”, and, on the other hand, the disciplined memory which is in a function of the character’s reanimation. The narrative “I” limits the narrator in the chain of memory unions, opens a new way of understanding. The author doesn’t assume her pure position (explicit voice), she quietly walks behind the narrator who never attempts to change Christa T’.s life. “The real” Christa T. is not an objectively represented entity, but rather a dialogized identity of ponderings, she’s a “dialogical” patchwork of the diverse texts she left behind, and of the speeches about her by the diversely focalized characters introduced by the narrator. The configurative Christa T. (such as she was in the past) is derived from the imagination which is constitutive in the portrayal of the past because. according to Hayden White. it has been noted that ‘to represent something as’ means to narrativize the metaphor or some other trope. The narrator opens a new topos, namely, that which “really” happened latently exists in the text, hidden, distorted, designed as missed “factography”. Therefore, reality becomes “confused” (first on the level of text, and then context). The reactivation, the reproduction of the

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  101 “real” Christa T. by way of memorizing is barely possible because she “blends” restrictively to the memory of the narrator’s language, in the neuralgic areas where the delusions of referentiality are confirmed. This position of the narrator (her angle of narration) makes the role/​function of narration questionable, in the laying out, proclaiming, and announcing of the truth about Christa T’.s character on the level of the narrative text. Referential Reality –​Fiction: The Crises of Silence, The Larvae of Language We narrativize what has ended. Unlike the historiographic text, the subject of narration in the artistic text is least susceptible to facts, and fiction is accomplished behind the determined factography. “One cannot, unfortunately, cling to the facts, which are too mixed up with chance and don’t tell much” says the narrator in Christa T. (23). In the fictional narratological strategy, the facts are abstract, and for the narrator, it’s impossible to produce objective” proof of the real details. Christa T. notes: “Facts! Stick to the facts. But what are facts?” (172). Of the dead woman the narrator adds instead: “Facts are traces which are left in us by the events” (172). The reality in Christa T. exists only in the narrator who remembers. When conveying of the story became possible, then Christa T. became a part of the past. The narrator writes of the “inner reality”, of the experience related to facts in her, because she is aware that one must invent in the name of the truth, the truth that is inside the narrator. In the first part of this book, I discuss that the semantic solving of the epistemological and ontological status of metaphor as poetical discourse creates relationships with the term truth which Ricoeur deduces to a semantical term truth, according to the logic that language is the only valid reality for objectification of literature by creating an immediate literary-​lingual reality. Facts as a trace have the imaginative property in the narration of the story. The subject of narration mediates the trace of Christa T’.s legacy to create out of it an imagined hypothesis about her narrative identity. On that basis, the narrator’s empirical time (it is the present time) is reinscribed into the successive time (the time that goes by) or the time without the present. The narrator interprets the remainder of the literary work (carrier of the value of the trace, resultant of the sign) on Christa T.’s identity by inscribing the empirical temporality in the cosmic flow of time. In fiction inventing/​fictionalizing is the vital stratagem that corrects the insufficiencies during the additional writing and producing of reality to translate the memorized reality into “truth” or a figure of the virtual Christa T. On a macro plan, or during the opening of the text towards the context, Christa T’.s character can’t be a character whose identity will be completely verified. She corresponds to the impossibility of completely referring to the “historical truthfulness” in a country with a social system such as East Germany’s because the restrictive “sanctions” by the members of the communist regime are violence

102  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices that cannot be ignored. On this “suggestible” level, the recomposing of the character gives the narrator the right to creatively intervene in the “facts” about Christa T. The principle of probability during the building of the “identity of the plot” (Ricoeur) is the connection for comprehending reality. It changes the attitude towards reality, the priorities are retrospectively rearranged, and the “unity” of the narrator with her dead friend is re-​established (after the narrator performs a verificatory realistic description of a specific scene). Ricoeur points out that the building of the plot is posteriori modus of a specific tradition (context) and the given cultural heritage. Christa Wolf intervenes with the literary-​artistic correction of the: “unsatisfactory” reality; she intervenes with repetitiveness, with narration again and again, with correction and remodeling of the remains of the memory: “I shall visit her in the hospital again, that Sunday, in the autumn, after her wedding day, in the search of what I’ve overlooked. I have a reason for repeating the visit: it’s because I was never with her when she was really sick” (130). The attempt to repeat the meeting is introduced on a structural level and it’s the narrator’s way of coming closer to a truth which she can’t fully “own”. The same impression is achieved through the “blurring” of fiction which is Wolf’s differentia specifica. In the scene with Gertrud Dolling, we are first told that the report dominates the (imagined) conversation of the narrator with her friend. The gradation of this effect is achieved progressively through the conjunctive (“I would”) which is then transformed into the future tense; in that way it opens the imaginary capacities of literary fiction in the present indicative. At the beginning, portrayed only as possible, the meeting with Gertrud Dolling –​one of the friends from university with whom the narrator wishes to speak about Christa T. –​becomes “very real” especially in her transformative negation and the final establishing into fiction: “I shan’t go to her, shan’t visit Gertrud Dolling. The conversation won’t take place, we’ll save ourselves the emotions. And the question, what Christa T. died of –​I shall ask on my account (50). Even when the narrator relies on her memories she doesn’t move in a neutral literary medium, instead, she imposes a dialogical situation. Further on, with the gradual opening of the text toward its context, Christa T. loses the strength to live in a “country of rapture”, she tests the power of “truthful” words such as ‘teacher’, ‘training’, ’university professor’, ‘publisher’, ‘reader’. She no longer trusts either the speaker or the language, she no longer trusts the “forced” words of the urge for adaptability, because: “she lost the capacity to live in a state of rapture” (56). Christa T. ponders about the reality of these words, the power of the word to think one thing and to say another. According to her, “naming” is rarely precise, rarely coincides, she’s afraid of public announcement, scared of being “marked”. In the mentioned quotations Wolf’s language is a “larva”, “insinuated”, metaphorical language sanctioned in the rigid political regime that she creates. Namely, the areas of the artistic text which speak in an “elusive” way –​ says Eagleton –​ are the crucial thing that connects them with their

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  103 ideological problematics. Then the ideology becomes present in the silence of the text. Eagleton’s position is confirmed by Christa Wolf in the opening words of the essay “Reading and writing/​the reader and the writer” (1968). She writes about the time in which the silence must end: “Our perception of things has changed, transforming even the memory which appeared unchangeable to us. Once again, we see the world in a different light (and what is “the world”?) (20). In this part of the novel one feels that emotions seem less bearable than in the past, and there is an immense reason for unrest. The unspoken things in this novel build the subject of narration as her ‘life as a narrative’. It has been noted that if there are things which mustn’t be spoken, then ideology and an attitude towards history appear. The relations between the text and the ideology can be historically variable, just as the “general” and “aesthetic” ideologies are variable in a certain historical context: If I were to have to invent her, I wouldn’t change her. I’d let her live, among ourselves, whom she, with uncommon knowing, chose as her companions in life. I’d let her sit at the desk, one morning in the twilight, noting the experiences into which the facts of real life had crystallized in her (174) … If I’d been allowed to invent us, I’d have given us time to stay (175) …. One becomes acquainted through a (female) friend (83).10 Anne Herrmann researches the Freundin, as a concept of feminine gender that portrays the other woman –​ the female writer who enables the narrator to write the novel: “If I were to invent her, I wouldn’t change her ... I’d let her live” (175). The inclination towards the conditional sentence is a signal of the fictionality through which the text is shaped –​fictional, therefore it is also called a fictional trope. The fictional trope functions through transformation or through the simultaneous confrontation and reeling of conditionals and indications in the artistic text which is a direct parallel during the referring once to the real, and once to the possible. Reality exists on one side, and the narrative “I” exists in the conditional which is its modus of life in the expressing of the possible –​which could happen. The metaphorical sentences in the fictional context of Christa T. multiply fictionality. Precisely because of that, the narrator’s narrative “I” exists simultaneously –​ as real and as illusory. As its analogon, it has the existence of Christa T. which is also both real and illusory. And the metaphor exists as a common denominator of the “existence” of the narrative “I” and Christa T. and it supposes both the literal and figurative meaning. And because it is subject to so much scrutiny. The autobiographical discourse is amenable to reading the autobiography as a figure, and to writing the history of the autobiography as a history of the figures. Those figures are embodied in the autobiography as ways of self-​portrayal in front of the public, in front of the others, while the self-​portrayal in such cases counts upon the public masks that individuals put on when presenting themselves in a certain social context and a specific political time. That is why there is

104  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices a necessity for a contextual reading of the autobiography which doesn’t aspire to be a genre but rather to be a dispersed figure in cultural history. On a contextual level, through the conditionals, the subject of narration in this novel becomes resistant to the conformist attributes and framed verbal finalizations which become legitimized in the global meaning of the narrative identity and the novel as a genre, from the position of the literary character on the level of semiotics, all the way to the culturological, metatextual reading of reality and history in fiction. As Anne Herrmann points out: “the conditional is transformed from an obligation into a privilege, from the pronoun “her” into “us”, through a dialogism which maintains the conflict derived from the contradiction”. The ambiguity opens the door to the tropical use of language, to think one thing, and to say another. There is a reason why the narrator has the legitimacy to fictionalize Christa T., and it’s not her personal obsessive narrativizing of the absent woman or her permanent transformation into a literary figure, nor her melancholy aspirations and feelings about the dead woman. The literary-​ artistic plot is not exhausted here. The narrator intermediates with a sole purpose in the narrative process, namely she intentionally strives to make public, announce Christa T. as a social figure. Christa T. is presented, exposed, and introduced in a public dialogue with the narrator in front of the public: “so, that people may see her” (124), “the doubts are silenced and she is seen. When if not now?” (185). Thus, this novel slowly opens toward its ideological context –​East Germany. It is not by chance that the introduction (initiation) of Christa T. as a public, social figure is revealed in the scene of the costume ball when Christa T. is not wearing a costume, but she “presents” Sophie von La Roche11 “on her own”. At this point in the text, the reader is dislocated, invited to face a net of resistance on the level of the text and the historical code on the level of context. Namely, through the character of Sophie La Roche in the artistic text, Christa T. exists in a double register –​ both as real and as illusory and (just like metaphor) has a figurative and literal meaning. In this case, fictionality and metaphoricity become doubled once again, i.e., the metaphor is invoked almost to the limits of the empirical. It is as if Sophie von La Roche “lends” Christa T. her indicative for life, and Christa T. gives a fictional (real or illusory) existence. She gives her one of her possible shapes of life at the costume ball. Thus, Christa T’.s textual “split reference” goes into empirical split reference, namely Ricoeur’s metaphorical “to see as” enables us to read Christa T. as Sophie von La Roche, or rather, as her metaphor. The costume ball itself is a metaphor par excellence. The aesthetics in this novel are not in an “according to value” role with the ideological strategy of soc-​realism. On the level of the form of the text –​ the ideology is distorted on the level of content –​Christa T. is an attempt to speak of an identity that cannot be taken as an example (in the specific time, the specific state, and the given historical frame).

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  105 Ideological Mimicry Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.) does not correspond to the official strategy of soc-​realism aesthetics, it is not productive to the basic principles of soc-​realistic poetics.12 Christa Wolf is pro East Germany; she is one of those authors who are carriers of the national cultural politics, but she writes the novel about Christa T. intentionally “against boredom” in literature and she deliberately “betrays” the expectations of the East German reader. Literature in the context of soc-​realism in East Germany is defined by statute. First, “successful” literature is rigidly connected to the past, history, and construction of the new socialistic society in the name of increasing the socialist historical consciousness. Second, the novel must demonstrate that it is in a potentially productive collaboration with the conflicts of the present and point to the “right” or “wrong” behavior. So, the novel is a function, a paradigm. Third, the writer should be engaged and incorporated into that environment in a “cooperative” system. Thus, all forms of “subjective idealism” are devalued, marked as “inflexible”, “covetous” deliberations, “leftwing radicalism”, condemned to failure, and “subjectivism” which could only serve the enemy. In Nachdenken über Christa T. the narrator constantly expresses that she is far from an exemplary case and her life should not be used as a model. The context of interpretation in this novel should be read through two modalities of aesthetic production: (1) the context of reception; and (2) the context of writing. (1) When the interpretation is through the reception of the artistic plot/​artistic text, the reader is the priority. The narrator calls the hypothetical reader who denominates the generation which remains in East Germany after 1945, after fascism and the period of reconstruction of socialist Germany. In a wider context –​this hypothetical reader (fellow citizen) is the contemporary reader of the author Christa Wolf who codes the content in fiction which can be decoded only by the readers she addresses. According to Ricoeur, during hermeneutical interpretations, the reader absorbs both the meaning in fiction and the interactive cohesion between the text and the world which is accomplished on a referential level and communication. The reader takes in both the reference and the capital inserted by the artistic text in the language. The reader’s position oscillates between two poles –​ fiction and reality. The narrator must “lose” Christa T. on a personal level as a reader, to make her present on a social level. Christa Wolf does not explain the personal; instead, she simultaneously verifies general areas in the explanation. The inclination to polemise allows her to build antitheses that become questionable while the author gives them separate theoretical articulations. Christa T., the narrator, revitalizes the story several times by offering variations of the same event and she relies upon the final shaping of the story in the refigurative stratagem of the reader with the direct reference that she needs a person to whom the story has been told.

106  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices It has been noted that reference for Ricoeur is the refiguration which transforms reality which was, in the first-​place, prefiguration in the consciousness of the writer. It was configurated in the poetics of the text as political narratological strategy, and only then it was reshaped in the virtual experience of cognition which happens during the process of reading, through the intersection of the horizon of the text with the horizon of the reader. Christa Wolf also actualizes herself as a reader and redefines herself in the act of reading. At the same time, the reader changes during the act of reading. Christa Wolf redefines the contours of the reader while changing her contours in the process of reading. The confrontations between the reader and the text are opposed in their synchronicity, and the text is reshaped through the process of reading and writing. The reader and the writer are mutually situated in a joint “home”. Christa T. is portrayed as “one of us”. The quick transition from “me”/​“her” into “us” connotes the estrangement of the author and the reader vis-​à-​vis the protagonist or the narrator in co-​partnership with Christa T. or rather, the representatives of a social group to which the narrator and Christa T. do not belong. In the co-​living with the reader, Christa Wolf shares figuration, minimalist language, the destruction of the dialectic potential, the decreasing of its “reality”. The narrator counts upon the reader who is supposed to finish the process of refiguration and building of Christa T’s life as narrative and narrative identity –​through demonstration of fusion, interweaving, a crossing of the identity of the text with the identity of the reader, thus creating the relation between narrativity in the artistic text, the referential reality, and the real reader. If the configuration of the artistic text refers to the existing historical context, then, as Barbara Foley discusses, the reconstruction of the text is pointed first of all towards the context of the author, and then towards the context of the reader who interprets. Foley maintains that Marxist theory has yet to produce a satisfactory theory of mimesis or the development of genres, so this could be the issue of reference. The addressing to the reader –​ the subject –​ is carried through the ideological background of the text. On a contextual level, the narrator’s restrictive point of view is not in favor of the contextual socialistic ideology. Namely, the general dimension of the already known point of view of writing is nullified, the expected standpoint of narration and utterance (Aus-​sage) is interrupted, Christa T. is not an example character, a model suitable to the soc-​realistic ideology which should say how to live a certain life. That is why the narrator wishes to show what a life which cannot be used as an example looks like. The context in which this novel is written anathematizes the figure of the narrator as voiceless, faceless, without a personal history or story. Such a nameless, anonymous, suppressed narrator in Thinking about Christa T. exists only in correlation with the female character Christa T. and only when she addresses and “brightens up” herself, referentially, in the statements with the personal pronouns “me” or “we”. This anonymous position of the woman

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  107 narrator is the cost that Christa Wolf has to realize for the personal presence in the novel and for taking the ethical-​political strategy of establishing a certain “truth” through fiction. The transformations to the narrator are suppressive, she is not demonstrative on her own and remains without an intentional contour, but she is incorporated within the artistic figure of Christa T. (2) The interpretation of the text through the second modality –​ the context of writing –​ is connected through the autobiographical intentions of the author and the author’s inclination to interpret the political and sociological cultural phenomena in a certain social context, and therefore reading the ideology of the discourse. The correlation of the artistic text with the context is accomplished through the modus of narration, and not in the specific representation of the context. The narrator’s writing through the imaginative variations about Christa T. is an act through which she leaves a trace; a script, through which she tries to find herself (inside herself). At the same time, it is about her writing using mimicry as a method, because Christa T. looks upon writing as an opportunity to surmount things which at the same time implies an attempt to overcome them. Writing in the communist context is “necessarily” affirmative, and that leads to settling (Heidegger) and safety in one’s own country. Christa T. remains to write in her own country, and she dies there. At the same time, writing becomes her mimicry, a seal of exclusion, not because of the incompatibility “to say things as they are for real”, but as an active defense against them. Narration and the desire to narrate are maybe the only possible modes for the construction of culture and personal identity in such circumstances or, as Nira Yuval Davis says in Gender and Nation, narration handles borderline conditions inclusively and exclusively. Christa Wolf in Thinking about Christa T. continues: Among her papers are various fragments written in the third person: she, with whom she associated herself, whom she was careful not to name, for what name could she have given her? She, who knows she must always be new, and see anew, over and over again; and who can do what she must wish to do …. I understand the secret of the third person, who is there without being tangible and who, when circumstances favor her, can bring down more reality upon herself than the first person: I. The difficulty of saying “I” (169–​170). This deep turmoil in the human soul is due to precognition and the power to feel that a person is not aware of himself/​herself. To be aware of yourself, what is that? Christa T. speaks about the big hop and the difficulty of saying “I”. The transformation from the narrative “I” into “she” enables the narrator’s narration and confirms her nameless position. The anonymity of the third person allows the pluralization of the entities. The author’s mimicry with the third person points to the context of interpretation and the author Christa Wolf’s responsibility as she is revitalized through positioning the subject in politics (society). The ideology of the text exists in its configuration, not in prefiguration, the precognition of the

108  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices text. During the careful reading of Thinking about..., one notices that which is unspoken, which is implicit, hidden between the text of Christa Wolf’s script or announced through metaphors. The metaphorical language is her mark. This is the motto of the novel –​ becoming aware of oneself and the difficulty of saying “I”. At this point literary fiction opens up toward political ideology and the contextual dimension of the novel. In Marxist terminology “becoming aware of oneself” is the abolition of estrangement, therefore the triple variation of the narrative identity is inscribed in this novel –​ communist ideology, the life of Christa T., and Wolf’s autobiographical discourse, i.e., self-​fulfilment. The key aspects of Christa T’s narrative identity can be read during three scenes in which she “becomes aware of herself”. In the first scene, she is a little girl, blowing through a newspaper tube, making a sound which has “erased everything and for a fraction of a second lifted the sky higher” (10). The woman narrator emphasizes what makes Christa T. different from the others, is the way she promised to stick to the truth. The narrator will go back to this scene in the last letter to her dead friend. In the second scene, the narrator wants to fully “document” Christa T. in the state of expressing her happiness, the way she runs after the huge red-​and-​white ball, while windy weather is driving across the beach, the way she reaches it, laughs aloud, and brings it back to her small daughter, under our gaze, which she feels and to which she responds with a side glance, in no doubt as to our admiration. The third image is a suspension of the real scene, of the transit and poetic invention, Christa T. is wearing a worn-​out red robe, at the end of a new year’s morning and she writes the sentence: “The Big Hope or The Difficulty of Saying “I”” (169). She has the same expression on her face as when she was eighteen and blowing through the newspaper tube. This time the narrator recognizes Christa T. more clearly and she believes that her secret is being discovered through the writing which should mark her self-​fulfillment, this long and never-​ending journey towards self, can be reached only through the act of writing. The opening of fiction towards the contextual reality –​as Heinrich Mohr puts it –​can be redefined by the author’s long journey from East Germany to herself. Christa T. makes a politically ideological new beginning after 1945, in the new world, with a paradoxically utopian situation: a partial consciousness inside the individual living in a society based on principles of community. So hypothetically, if the aesthetic act in the artistic text is ideological, it doesn’t close itself completely to (Marxist) ideology, but instead, it’s a kind of an ideology by itself, but also its appendix, its criticism. This is close to the thinking of Frederick Jameson, who believes that one does not experience texts as objects on their own, but that we receive them as piled up layers of previous traditional interpretations, and the object of interpretation is not the text itself but rather the interpretation through which we are trying to face the text.

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  109 When the subject of narration speaks of her dead friend from the position of the narrative present, she introduces her with the pronoun “we”. Susan Lanser calls such a voice that appears through the prism of political recognition and persuasion a communal voice in female fiction, i.e., it is the voice of the female narrators who construct themselves in plurality. This theoretician emphasizes that still, the communal voice is listed in one point of the notion of the goal and the identity compared to the voice of the narrative community.13 In Thinking about Christa T. one reads: For the new world … it exists, and not only in our heads, and that period was for us the beginning of it. But whatever happened or will happen to that new world is and remains our affair … What she wished for more intensely than anything, and I am speaking now of Christa T., was the coming of our world; and she had precisely the kind of imagination one needs for a real understanding of it (51). Regardless of all “principled” agreements, Christa Wolf, whether on purpose or not, allows the narrator to “show” Christa T. in the external position of a social outsider. There is a distance between the observer who experiences and the observer who asks and questions the world around him. Christa T. focalizes “unusual” things, and notices that the behavior of the people becomes “unreal”, determined by norms and molds to which they adjust without thinking; they then pull back, leaving only their names behind. The reflexive pronoun herself/​ himself (into the attempt of Christa T. to be with herself), by definition, signifies a non-​identified character, implies an undetermined and changeable plural. In the novel where the scenes of subjectivity are connected to writing, they acquire meaning through the figures of speech and grammatical conventions. “Becoming aware of herself” activates the traces of memory through the writing which is complex dividing and transfer. Christa T’s refusal to accept the political system as a leading principle can be read in “the difficulty of saying “I”. During the narrator’s switching from the third into the first person, we get the impression that the narrative “I” is not complete, that it is an unfinished contour to the exterior. The difficulty of saying “I” happens in the narrator’s specific historical situation which allows her to conclude that Christa T’s internal essence does not correspond to the social role and she needs to be occasionally “herself” and to express (Aus-​sage) herself in the artistic expression: “it is important to have the power of saying “I”, without arrogance, but with your head raised” –​is Wolf’s attitude in her essay on Ingeborg Bachmann –​“The Truth That You Can Expect” –​to regain the sovereignty lost in submissiveness” (1993, 87–​88). The difficulty of saying “I” is another variation of the pseudo-​real imaginary effect of the artistic text (Eagleton). On a micro plan, it is the aspectuality of the practice of signifying with the text. On a macro plan, it is the ideological process that the text itself has penetrated. Christa Wolf in the essay on Ingeborg

110  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices Bachmann (1993) writes that if things are overcome by writing, it can stimulate and conquer banality in the course of writing. And banality –​as Hannah Arendt points out –​ suggests relations between the crisis of the subject and national socialism –​a theme that is present in the entire works of Christa Wolf. For Wolf history is a potentially swollen subject, and literature cannot be written outside of the historical situation. The historical situation breeds in the basis of Christa Wolf’s opus, and it opens the question of the writer’s ethics. The death of Christa T. is desired as a disease, it comes from the diminished capacity to adapt herself to the circumstances of life. The doctor advises her ‘to adapt’. Adaptation and disease are in union with the conditionality of living in the socialist society. This part is powerful against conformity as the means of survival, adaptation, conformity at any price. The woman narrator in the process of thinking transforms the death of her friend giving it a different meaning; she moves the meaning into a social context. Therefore, sickness, death, as well as accepting the misfortune of Christa T. are “a reasonable price to pay for refusing assent” (157): Or do you think that she died from this sickness? No …. The question, what Christa T. died from … was the thing she couldn’t deal with or bring to a stop (50). What illness? The sickness that Christa T. dies from is just another gap between the reader and the narrator. At one of the writers’ conventions held in 1969, the representatives of soc-​realism are radically opposed, and they say: “let’s say it clearly: Christa T. dies from leukemia, but she suffers from the disease of the German Democratic Republic. Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.) resists any type of classification, the female narrator only intermediates in the recomposing and continuous thinking about the narrative identity of the character Christa T., and death happens only through the consciousness of the reader and through the imaginary conversation with him. On the level of the text –​the narrative “I” is split between the figure of Christa T. and the narrator, to minimize the auctorial narrative situation. With the contextual reading of the novel, the paradigmatic dying of Christa T. is necessary for the author to continue to “really” live, because: “she knew that soon people would not die from this illness” says the narrator (182).14 Just before the end of the novel, there is a scene with the house which is the crucial part of the text, an argument for the fusing with life. This scene describes how Christa T. has a double need –​ she’s divided between (1) remaining in socialist East Germany on one hand and (2) on the other hand, wishing to retreat into her “own home” (ignoring the general “state” home) in which she will be able to fulfill herself as a writer. Wolf projects the home on a macro contextual level of East Germany (not outside of it), and therefore the self-​fulfillment/​self-​ realization of Christa T. gains utopian dimensions. After moving into the house, Christa T. dies, and precisely that nullifies, interrupts the possible interpretation in which the home will be seen as a fulfilled home. For Christa T. the house is the Home, but she cannot attain the individual in the context of the state, she narrates that the house is a sort of instrument that she wanted to use to link herself more

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  111 intimately to life; this is a strong bond because she imagines the house as a place with which she was profoundly familiar because she had created it herself. Building a house is what Andreas Huyssen calls breaking through that which was and anticipating that which will happen (1989). It is a possibility for Christa T. for the longing of the individual subjective anticipation of the home –​Heimat. Heimat –​ a term which directly translates as “home”, central to the German thought (in a nationalistic sense), in a wider frame, signifies an individual feeling for space of belonging, security, connection to a certain chronotope. Christa T. is intimately connected to the house and from there she can finally think about her own will. Nora Rätzel in the essay “Harmonious ‘home’ and disturbing ‘foreign land’ ” explains that in the sociological research of gender images the term “home” (“homeland”/​Heimat) is generally connected with harmonious images which places the studying of the cultural identity in a social frame. What are Christa T’s harmonious images? Are they announced, signalized, polysemic archetypal hideaways for the author Christa Wolf? In Rätzel’s terms, the homes incorporate the “home” in which one lives, but at the same time the homeland. This term connects both meanings because, it can be “passive enjoyment” connected by association to nature, but also a primary symbol of the nation.15 Reading of the relation between Christa Wolf’s ideology and the discourse of the text reveals that the house in Thinking about... has utopian dimensions which are emphasized in Christa T’s attempt to become (self)accomplished through retreat. This contradiction is interpreted through the aporias of Christa T’s self-​ re-​accomplishment. With “latent possibilities”, “unconditionality” and “unrest” –​ Christa T. is in a constantly tense correlation with society in the GDR towards which she assumes an affirmative attitude. She could not accomplish the individual which is established through the context of the general collective achievement and collective responsibility. On the other hand, the death of Christa T. –​ as Huyssen notes –​ is “the hardest blow on the utopia” or it represents a beginning, because Christa T. dies when the socialist phase of the reconstruction in East Germany ends when hope and utopia are strictly controlled, and with that, they have been forgotten as unconditional terms for the fulfillment of the socialist home.16 According to Ricoeur, the bonds, ties, and connectors such as the third person of the narrative “I”, the illness, and the house, point to the metatextual level of the text and of the “opening” of the text. The house by the lake is marginal for the events, it is the corner of life. Christa T. is a prototype of the conflict between desire (longing) and the inability to do something; her fulfillment as a writer in the socialist society is hindered precisely by the society which requires “centering” and “regulation” in conformity. Christa T. is attributed that she is at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, she’s amazed, she is dynamic with precise insight into reality, at the same time fascinated and scared of life and the complications of the conformed reality in conventional definitions, because some say that she has no sense of reality, she sees things as they were, she lives according to her view of life, she resists everything that is “shapeless”.

112  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices Considering these two contradictions, the final thesis applies that in this novel, memory is not a sentimental recomposing of the past, but rather a memory directed towards the future. Namely, the house refers to retreat, it has its function, it’s not a “leisure place” in another time, but a refuge with deliberated future activity, it demonstrates Christa T’s inclination towards the future –​ as a protective place of hope. The “real” accomplishment of Christa T. in the socialistic context is only possible in the writing of the artistic work or only existing in the process of narration. The authorship of Christa T. is the “loophole” for the hermeneutics because the reading of Nachdenken über Christa T. (Thinking about Christa T.) as a novel about the artist Christa T. becomes complicated. The inventive artist in the GDR, more or less, remains a foreigner and an outsider. Authorship becomes the reversible union between the character Christa T. and Christa Wolf. Both the character and the author want to fulfill their social duty in their “own currency” in literary narration and fiction. Christa T. is transformed into an artefact that is presented in the GDR society (as “essence”, “truth”), imposes the contradiction of the past which instigates the present and the future and impedes the “self-​ awareness” of the character in that past. Wolf in her subversive essay “Subjective authenticity” writes that it is more useful to follow the act of writing, not the final result, that writing is a process that continuously seizes life and helps shape and interpret it.17 In “An interview with myself” she gives parallel remarks about the process, while she wrote Christa T. and she points to the blurred borderline in the narrative protocol and that which is narrated: “Later on, I noticed that the object of my story was in no way clear or it never became clear for Christa T. “Suddenly I was faced with myself. I didn’t anticipate this. The relation between “we” (Christa T. and the narrator’s ‘I’) is dislocated”. The resistance towards definitions, the resistance to labeling, giving in to imagination, the inability to blend in the collective society, the doubt in the language, and doubt towards herself –​ this is the illness that Christa T. suffers from, and is the reason for her death –​reductive ideological normalization. Thus, we read the derivation of her last name to the initial T. In German Tod means death. Death is the essential “determination” of the author and narrator Christa. Independent of the social impulse to write about the friend who meets an early demise, comes society’s objective challenge, especially in the shapeless form “people” in the last passage of the novel Thinking about Christa T.: The quest for her: in the thoughts of her... (3) ... One day we will want to know who she was, who is being forgotten … Will, then, be compelled to create her, for once. So that the doubts may be silenced, so that she may be seen. When if not now? (185). In the essay “The reader and the writer” Christa Wolf lucidly develops the thesis that the subjective creation of history and “truth” happens through

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  113 factographic records, biographies, pile of documents, newspapers, memories. The narrator in Thinking about ... particularly expresses herself through the sentence “to remember the future”. This is revolutionary and realistic; it lures and encourages people to reach the impossible. Christa T. was “born before her time”, she carries the future: Christa T. began very early to ask herself what the changes meant, the new words, the new house? ... and she has begun to look into herself. Christa T. is also divided in the expectations of a future time, as a well-​ deliberated character from the future. Artistically the two levels of meaning in the reconsideration of her are interspersed: She was all for real, that’s why she loved the time when real changes were being made. She loved to open new senses for the sense of a new thing … She carried many lives around with her, storing them in herself; and in herself, she stored many times as well, times in which she lived partially unknown as was the case in her “real” time; and what is not possible in one time becomes real in another. But she called all her various times, serenely: Our time (174). It is a never-​ending novel of self-​realization of Christa T. who is remembering, with a utopian dimension, as long as a never-​ending journey toward oneself. Through the perspective of speech, the novel refers to the future, with the scenes represented through prospect and anticipation (remembering youth and expecting the future). H. Mohr emphasizes that Christa T’s diminished strength has a social and political nature and is not just individual as she knows people won’t still be dying of this disease. However, she seems to write this as ‘a fact’, and this is a challenge for the future and directs the reader towards reading the individual in the referential frame of his home in East Germany after the socialist intervention. Also, in the passage last mentioned, the author continuously comments that fate can be overcome only by writing and that the real changes don’t end in introspection and intimate dialogues of their own, but that it’s only a beginning; the chance to shape an attitude, to liberate the narrator’s I –​ through writing –​ the new feelings for the future to come. It is precisely this point in the novel which “illuminates” the reasons for the reaction of the East German critics, which emphasizes Christa T’s “escape” into active resignation (through writing) as a definite distancing from the socialist regime. Identity Thinking as Counterpoint to Documentation Kunstprosa: Proto-​Narrative Discourse

The social context influences mimic or repress the distribution, encoding, and reception of the artistic text. The texts of culture (seen as text) mutually intertwine and point to the social reality, therefore the situating of the literary act in the context of the text relies upon its flexibility, especially when it comes to the

114  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices genre of autobiography which changes depending on how the author intervenes. In that sense, in this part of the analysis, we’ll talk about Christa Wolf, the confrontation between autobiography and biography in the text and her focus on the aesthetic and political signals. Patterns of Childhood18 is a novel in which Christa Wolf evokes the years spent during fascism and national socialism during 1929–​1945. The writing of this novel is an attempt to re-​evaluate the past (the attitude towards fascism) and her present life in the socialist GDR. The novel takes place on several levels. On the first level is the focalized grown-​up narrator who lives and writes in the GDR. On the second level, the adult narrator one day (1971) returns to her hometown L. (now in the Polish border zone), and decides to write the novel four years after that journey; through remembering she “reads” her childhood once more. On the third level, we follow the focalization of the girl Nelly Jordan (during Nazism) who is a real character, but also the “internal voice” of the woman who narrates from a distance. The adult narrator and Nelly both are and are not the same figure. The voices often concur semantically; they do not differentiate; they intersperse and incite a gap in the logical chain –​who speaks and when. In the foreground, we read the genealogy of the women/​female narration (those who narrate are the narrator, the mother Charlotte Jordan, the girl Nelly, the daughter Lenka, the daughter Ruth). Female narration dominates; statements from the narrator’s husband and brother are minimized in the novel. The testimony of the girl Nelly is a “childish passion” for the facts about Nazi indoctrination because her childhood was not unaffected the political-​fascist influence: “the past has made us what we are today” –​the narrator says (43). Fiction is different from historical reality.19 Patterns of Childhood identifies the fictive, imaginary dimension in the explanations and the reconstruction of factographic events. This novel is a novel –​ memory, an experiential recording of the past, going back to the event, after it has happened as a fact. First, in Patterns... the narrative “I” is divided between fiction and history. Christa Wolf tries to create a historical continuum for herself through the corrections of the past. There’s a juxtaposition of the war years, defecting, witnessing the victims (mostly women), the changing of governments, a new mapping of territories (her home town moves from the German border into Poland), a reassertion of borders, experiencing immigrant status –​ the feeling of guilt, the feeling of dividedness between the political borders (the dividedness of something which should signify identity), a distortion of the past, present and future, because “the person is the one who remembers, not the memory” (142). It is noticeable that history is rewritten through a woman and her daughter (her-​story). At the very beginning, a contrast is given to the story of the divided figure of the narrator as opposed to the quasi-​historical characters or quasi-​autobiographical portraits of the Nazi leaders Goebbels, Eichmann, Hitler. Christa Wolf’s autobiographical images and statements are an intrusion into the factographic records, and she is reemitted and redeveloped through the narrator:

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  115 ...The street Adolf Hitler and von Bismarck, Schlageter Squere and von Moltke Square and the school Hermann Göring and the military barracks Walter Funk and the settling SA; that street net of the childhood city, the same for everyone, is imprinted once and for all as a model … here that model can be applied only partially, only changed, because it betrays, points to the traces which nevertheless had to be erased; because it is your duty to muddle the facts in order to come closer to the real events (69, italics by S.A.). The narrative “I” is pertinent in its dividedness, to narrate and comment on the fiction and the fact at the same time. The narrator completes the building of her own narrative identity which is already inscribed in the documentary records (photographs, radio records, newspapers, children’s Nazi songs). For the narrator, the narrative is necessary to represent that which “really happened” in the domain of the historical event. The process of interpolation of historical facts points to interaction, the correlation between the desire for unity, the longing for identity, and the forces which deny it. The return to the hometown opens the net of the childhood city which exists as a partial model, a matrix according to which one’s past reality continues to be narrated. The figure of the divided adult narrator and the girl Nelly opens the dialogue in the novel because both the mother and the daughter are aware that they must fiercely accept the past because their voices must be respected, especially when they diverge from the interpretations we’re trying to impose. In the predicative assimilation of the history of fascism (the childhood of the adult subject of narration) functions in the fact that the truthfulness of the factographic statements is proven based on people’s testimonials (the public doxa of the historical discourse which is called a “real” story), whose credibility can’t be completely guaranteed. In such cases, such factographic truths, which are politically most relevant, are most often the victims of political power, and the clash of truth and politics for the first time is discovered in the domain of the rational truth. I agree with Hannah Arendt who, in Truth and Lies in Politics, says that the governing attacks the rational truth, it steps out of its supposed domain, while it fights a battle in its territory when it forgers the facts or shows them in a false light. Every attempt at intelligible and semantic detections of the fact in Patterns ... is a hermeneutical problem and an intervention. Longing for a Falsification. Compressing the Reality: Quasi-​History, Quasi-​Characters, Quasi-​Events, Quasi-​Plot History reduced to the category discourse of reality is the opposite of the fictional discourse of the imaginary or to put it in a Lacanian way, of the discourse of desire. Christa Wolf’s affinity for historical discourse can be read to how much reality is desired and up to what point it turns into an object of desire, imposing the formal coherence of the story and the quasi-​events which are represented

116  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices as real. The narrativization of the historical events in medias res points to the incompleteness of the story, the analogical infiltrations of the chronicle which on the other hand implies an impossibility of a narrative closing of the historical facts and their final conclusiveness.20 In Patterns … one reads that the sense of reality is a sense of a need, as a success which one confirms. The narrator deliberates about the facts which we have carelessly, silently allowed to be called facts, all the way to those facts that “sleep” deep inside us, which are the risk for contemporary history to go into forgery. With the process of writing comes a transit of the real event into the technology of the narrative (the narrated story, the discourse). In such a case it becomes logical to refer to tropology or figuration on their own. This transition of the fact from one level to another (the quasi-​plot of the structure of the text) is effectuated by moving, rearranging, or oscillating the facts in literary fiction. This question of whether facts make any demands upon us at all is very important for political narratosophy. In Patterns of Childhood, the adult narrator speculatively, pensively, on the border of an essay, develops the thesis of the forgery, much more than the description and development of a specific historical event. The “transit” of the fact from history into fiction is effectuated by the process of transcoding in which the real events are “originally”, “innocently” transcribed in the code of the chronicle. The classification novel chronicle is an additional attribute of this novel because the structure has no beginning and no end, it is a spiral. For example, the subtitle of the Eastern-​Berlin edition of the novel doesn’t contain the label “novel”, so it’s as if this book represents a subjective report about the explorative journey of consciousness towards the danger zones of a past in which there was more silence than words. The danger is grafted to the risk of losing one’s own “self” torn between psychological crises and the compulsion to adjust that “self” to the new historical situation. Above all, there is the adult narrator’s fear of remaining trapped in the past and having a new version of the horror repeat itself. Only after moving from her hometown does the narrator rewrite events in the code of literary fiction. The concept of temporality organized as present, past, and future time is situated symbolically in the narrative discourse, but the model of logical conjunction of the historical events remains as a hybrid chronicle which follows the paradigmatic flow of events “and then ... and then ...” even through techniques of their combining. Such combination (choice) of a chain of events functions as the coherency of the artistic text. Up to what point does the fact in this process in Patterns ... remain “pure” and unchanged? The narrator paraphrases the power of the proto-​historians (narrators) for writing and detecting history which passes through their “insides”, and which always stands riskily between the “real” and the “imaginary”, between the real value and the literary statement, the combinatory paraphrase of the literary ambiguous, figurative language which is often also logically (in)consistent. In

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  117 all of that “evoking” of the past in Wolf’s work, there is a feeling that she is often reaching for a certain undetermined (mythical) past which is equal to the stadium of the childhood of the girl Nelly who watches and detects: “sometimes you feel a longing for the time in which nothing was decided yet, the time before the beginning, when you could have hoped for the decision that one possibility won’t exclude all other possibilities” (132). This signifies that meaning is not distributed through “false history”, but rather through a palimpsest, symbolic history supporting the shift of meaning from the oral (spoken) circular level into fixed text. Christa Wolf in Patterns of Childhood writes: ... the description of the past –​ whatever that layering of the memory which grows might be –​won’t succeed in an objective style. The double meaning of the word “to intermediate”. You write by intermediating between the present and the past … (195) … This chapter which has been determined to speak about the war a long time ago is prepared –​like any other –​on the pages that carry the title: Past –​ Present. Journey to Poland. Manuscript. The auxiliary constructions are devised to organize the material if not by way of a simple mechanism of cause and action, then through this system of levels, which by interweaving, separate from you. The form is a possibility of gaining distance. And never accidental, a never-​arbitrary form of gaining distance. The naked capriciousness that rules in life: it doesn’t belong here (195–​96). These passages are a treatise on writing which can only be placed in correlation with the past, to be shaped to gain distance. The principle of the plot is set through the strategy of pre-​structured reality through language conventions, and the event of the plot has sole legitimacy only through the conventionalized logic in literature. In that way, the past is intermediated only through figuration, through the tropics and figures of the thought itself. Through these is intermediated the historical narrativization and transformation of the chronicle into a story. However, the tropics and figures have a double meaning and become an unsuccessful objective approach towards the past, in Patterns … it “will not succeed in an objective style”. In Wolf’s work, there’s an accentuation of the imaginary variations of reality, and the capacity of narrativity gains “at the expense” of figurativeness. Even the “categorical historic mistake” in fiction gains validity as literary procedure and protocol. The adult narrator separates and holds until the end the right for possible fictionalization and writing at the expense of her own life. Is the form of the artistic text flexible enough to take the necessary distance from history and to reorganize a certain life, to play it out again through the perspective of childhood? The narrator decides to write down the journey to her homeland, four years after having visited it. In this case, the writing is a sort of refiguration of the “flesh” of the real events which connotes the primary real historical referents out of which an entire life is created. From that, from the quoted passages it can be read that the adult narrator’s writing is

118  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices an attempt to distance herself from “the capriciousness of the real events”. The capacities of narrativity transit into an allegorical reckoning with the past, in the performances of the language, in the choice of the form of narration, and in the determination of the personal truth. In the Patterns … the realia are transformed into some type of meaning. That doesn’t mean that the historical discourse is not adequately rated, in terms of the “real” values of factography which are taken and transmitted individually by the adult narrator, as a conjunction of the distributed facts. The interpreter (reader) reads the artistic text with the historical implications as a logical conjunction of the facts and confirmative statements. The true value of the text, in that case, is the logical unraveling of the truth or the “forgery” of history as a product of the narrator’s assessment: In an ideal case, the structures of experiencing should coincide with the structures of narration. That is what we strive for: fantastic precision. But there is no such technique that would allow transmitting such incredibly complicated conjuncture… in a linear language, and not to hurt it in the process. To talk about levels layered one above the other –​ “narrative levels” –​ means to diverge towards the incorrect significations and to forger the real event. The real event, “life” has already continued; to catch it at the last minute remains perhaps a forbidden desire (324). The literary artistic plot (configuration) is necessary not only as a structural component of fiction but also as its basic element. The plot must happen for the “narrative levels” to become layered and to diverge towards the incorrect significations in the name of the subjective (but “real”) representation of reality. Incorrect signification is a subversive concept because the very idea that signification can fail or be wrong challenges the idea that it can be right. The adult narrator and the girl Nelly show that only through configuration is it possible to “fix” and remember a part of life. An event can enter definitional frames only depending on the contribution of its development. In that sense, for the narrator in Patterns …, the more life is put on paper (in a fictional plot), the more it can be “empathized” with in real life. Therefore, life “desires” the coherency of the story according to “plot, quasi-​plot, pre-​plot, betrayed plot” (Ricoeur). With the narrativization of personal life and commenting on historical facts, now reversibly, historic events are intermingled and altered by personal testimonies. This is important since it suggests that life which is lived as material for a future hagiography now gains a certain meaning and can create history. That is why the metaphor of the matrix is a “preparation” for the pattern of life, but also an opportunity to intervene in the parameters, to “check”, regroup, reinsert the facts out of which the sample of childhood is created, from the viewpoint of how a woman narrates. Prospectively, Nelly prefigures and exteriorizes her life as a story with the plot a quasi-​history of a childhood spent in fascism (historiographic entities,

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  119 peoples, nation are reread through the quasi-​character of Adolf Eichmann) i.e. “through those who through the unconscientious language can kill without a feeling of guilt” … If we read the previous comments, the fact that the plot of the historic event is a poetic activity is confirmed. Namely, as Kant would say, it belongs to the “productive imagination” much more than the “reproductive” ability of a passive or self-​associative narration and imagination of the one who fictionalizes in a configured way. Wolf has the unique position of narrating Patterns of Childhood, she is aware that the internal distance that exists is there to keep separated something that mustn’t be mixed, and which separates the process of copying from the process of writing –​the notion of that which could have come from memory, of that which happened for real; the past –​as much as it is possible –​from the present. Ricoeur’s political hermeneutics could be applied to Patterns …, but not White who thinks that history and fiction don’t blend into one, but are on the border of the category of the symbolical discourse and the mutual final referent (Sinn) –​ the experience of time or the structure of temporality which is equally valid for both history and fiction. Still, in the works of Christa Wolf, there’s an emphasis on the directness of the expression and the idiom of the symbolic discourse or the symbolic in speech which is its differentia specifica. She does not trace the textbook of history in which there is a recapitulation of fascism, rather she carefully observes. And she questions the flexibility of the statement out of which history is created. This strategy introduces the performative (the performing activity, the performing function) of the narrative discourse as opposed to the constative (Austin) which further on is a basis in the metaphorizations of the language and the symbolical discourse in the works of Paul Ricoeur, which is completely kindred to the language spoken by Wolf. The historical event is an index of what we want to call historical. The scene with the imagined white ship is significant. In this scene, the narrator signifies the desired pre-​war time. But, the metaphor of the white ship anticipates ambivalence: as much as it is a careless summer image for the girl, and even more the narrator, the term s-​h-​i-​p is filled with fear and foreboding: “it sailed under the bright and blue sky lightly, floatingly … and it was very pretty … and it meant war” (Patterns …, 172). The white ship indexes the adequacy of the symbolical representation of the real events or the tropics of displacement into the war (tropics of displacement, from “tropoi” –​ limit, limitations). The white ship doesn’t just mean fear from war, but also obvious longing for the homeland (Heimweh) which the narrator rhymes with the longing for the Baltic Sea (Ostsee). The ship assimilates the symbolism of opposites: fear and beauty, life and death expressed through the symbolical meaning of people’s destiny in war and the destruction of the childish ship phantasm and feeling of security; behind is the stage of war, the bombing of a German battleship: the number of those killed on summer vacation on the Baltic Sea. Nelly pines for her homeland and she will keep inside of her two images, one of the “white ship which she saw in

120  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices the newspaper, and she connected with a false news, and the other, of the dead mother in the coffin” (175). Pining for her homeland blends into the imaginary notion of the abandoned place which is relived through the evocation of the retelling by the mother, and gains intensity with the incision of the retelling about that end –​now of the mother’s death. With that, the evocation of this scene ends. Precisely because of an intervention in the event, the narrator writes about the need for “false significations” and “forgery of the real event”. With such a flow of writing the author legitimizes her position –​ to personally witness (and correct) a certain past. The priority remains the impression of permutation (heterogeneous narration) of the narrating subject through the chronicle which at the same time signifies the identity of the narrating subject which is like a spiral –​ with no beginning and no final ending of the voice. Patterns of Childhood is a novel in which is valid the oxymoron “her historical novel” which stands as a contrast to heroic communism and is an irony of the latently indoctrinated fascism. The quivering of its genre –​from a novel –​to chronicle –​ to essay –​ and autobiographically documented record –​ at the same time closes the plot (the quasi-​plot), but it also annuls the completion of the story and impressively persuades that, at that moment, it can begin again. In Wolf’s essay “Subjective authenticity” we read of the “impure” forms of narration in Wolf’s work, she says: “There is no fundamental difference between the aspects of artistic prose and essay in my work … they interweave. The root they share lies in the experience which needs to be reworked: experience from life, I mean experience in the physical reality, for a specific time and in a specific society; the personal experience, experience from writing …, experience from literature and art” (56). The interweaving of historical and biographic facts muddles the distinction between art and life, aesthetics and history. Such continuity is axiomatic for Christa Wolf as a later narrator (narrator from a distance) who doesn’t stand outside of history and political events. In such a case the social “I” is not separated from her narrative “I”. This alone is a kind of elision of subjectivity. In the essay “The writer and the reader” Wolf says: “no one, and writers at the least, mustn’t search for freedom behind the coordinates of space and time, in the background or outside of history” (208). These hypotheses on writing in continuity have consequences in her open, procedural narrative forms and the endeavor to hybridize them, to mix the genres, to write prose, instead of a pure genre. That which happened during Nelly’s childhood and the journey to Poland exists only in a manuscript, told in a story. On a first textual level, the key area of the divided “I” in the Patterns … can be read in the speech act “I speak”. The textual level suggests the double (authentic) narrative experience, on the one hand, to narrativize, on the other hand, to be narrativized. Autobiography enables the subject of narration to create a paradigm for “I” which is on its own the subject of statement in a given temporality. “To remain voiceless or to live in the third person … The first is impossible, the second is uncomfortable” (7).

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  121 The interruption of the personal and historical continuity is accomplished in the narrator, through the grammatical form of the subject of narration: The real reason for noise in the language is discovered in the cross listening of herself: between the conversation with herself and naming, happens the astonished oscillating of the voices, the fatal change of the grammatical relations. Me, you, her, which in the thoughts flow into one another, should be separated from each other in the spoken sentence (7). History is narrated not only in the third person with a chronological flow of events, but also with the unspoken intersubjective experience of the chronicler/​narrator. In the quoted passage, the narrator, when addressing herself as “you”, and the girl as “she” creates a game in and with the third person in the name of their fusion, in the name of the newly defined “I” which is uncovered in the listening of herself in the noise of the language. The need to narrate in the third person has the purpose of telling a personal story. The narrator which is named “you” is in search of her own “I” in her childhood. The writing in the third person (“she”/​Nelly) enables the author Wolf to approach her childhood from an epic distance and to come to trace the creation of her personal identity. In that way, the text is re-​inscribed in the real reader: “is the hegemonic power of the past conquered, the one that can assert the rules of the language –​to separate the first person into the second or third person? To quiet down the voices? I don’t know” (490). There are several variations for the interweaving of autobiography and fiction. Wilhelm Dilthey in the Delimitation of Human Sciences speaks about the spiritual consciousness of the historical era and social sciences are encoded in the theory of history, and autobiography is only one step before historical pertinence (history) itself. Speaking of autobiography, Dilthey poses the question of the hermeneutical circle of precognition: not to start a priori from the genre of the autobiography, but from the idea of life. Because, the basis for the historical view is the power and broadness of one’s own life, and that is the only thing that enables one to insert new life in the pale shadows from the past: “The greatness of the historian is created by its connection to the endless human need to get involved in the other’s existence and to lose one’s personality in it” (262).21 Christa Wolf’s autobiographical record is a board game of politics developed by Hannah Arendt. Both ladies take the risk and don’t avoid speaking about the complicated moments in history. They both speak and narrate about a specific or particular life. As opposed to the empty abstraction of historiography, narration invites the listener or reader to share in the actor’s experience, instead of adopting the stand of the observer. Wolf tries to materialize reality and to prolong the search for the absent childhood (and with that to continuously keep searching and discovering herself). At that, the speech of the mother flows into the speech of the girl (in the eponymous figure of the mother) or in the speech

122  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices of the daughter and vice versa, thus imposing the impression that history can be “truly” seen even through a woman. The adult narrator again relives the fear of the misspoken sentence (with every ringing of the bell, there is Nelly’s fear which she absorbs from her mother’s eyes, fear of the Gestapo, fear which is rated as neurosis, by her husband: an “authentic event which needs interpretation” says Nelly (188). The pattern as a metaphor schematizes her childhood in fascist Germany, but it also sucks in the return process of reading the childhood from a distance. The integrated historical passages are an attempt to reread childhood, and with that to reinterpret the present. The dates and facts are vividly connected to the present state of the subject of narration. Here history is called upon to focus attention on memory and raise it to a monument and a necessary process that has to be continuously repeated to survive, to endure in the present, and to attain a critical attitude towards the contextual position of the subject of narration. That necessarily imposes the sense of time as a passing category and a redefinition and questioning of the identity. From this relation autobiography –​ writing –​politics, comes the feeling of responsibility. In the Patterns … the adult narrator asks where does the responsibility of the one who records begin, who is the observer, how is that in the war context? “Chronic blindness. The question isn’t: how will you deal with your conscience? But: how to fulfill the relations which have the consequence of massive loss of conscience?” (380). Hannah Arendt works on the years of the Nazi regime that she explains as years when the regime and the world in which it existed coincided perfectly.22 The totalitarian regime in Germany during Hitler’s time was the furthest it went with the demolition of reality. At the end of Patterns of Childhood, the narrator powerlessly confirms the insufficiency of reality and of the language which describes that reality. The woman narrator imagines a human being who will be more than a grammatical person and less than a defined shape. This human being won’t affirm itself from a superior auctorial position, but it will deny itself from accepting the world as right –​as an unlimited Other. The difficult temptation of stopping. It isn’t a matter of a history that necessarily has to lead to an end. Or, what would be that imagined point up to which history has to be pushed? ... The final point would be achieved when the second and third person would meet again in the first person and much more: when they would coincide with it –​ where it will no longer have to be said “you” and “her”, but openly, “I”. To you it appeared uncertain, could you reach that point, does the road you have taken even go there. It doesn’t seem appropriate to you to leave the world before that –​ that wasn’t even an issue. Continuous calculations which appear only in times of disbelief: disbelief in the endlessness of certain powers and impulses. Or pressures. Repulsion to the word “creative” (417).

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  123 (…after the fall of the wall…) I was born and grew up in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. As a girl, I used to live between Skopje, Zagreb, and Ljubljana until 1990, when the war happened. Nothing was the same after the end of Yugoslavia. For a long time, I wasn’t able to visit my family in Zagreb. Later, as a philosopher, I focused on that historical period and developed theoretical concepts, just to understand better what happened with the mammoth country that Yugoslavia was. I see the process of discussing historical methodology as epistemology critique, as an “epistemo-​critical prologue” developing theoretical concepts of thinking that allow accomplishing more than a historical re-​reading of the past. My discourse here is grounded in a synchronic way of semantic thinking, not diachronic. When you think about narratives, identity, and history, the basis is the Hegelian dialectical method that implies that the present and the past stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, where one influences and reshapes the other. The term history signifies reality, an event that really happened, and historiography (récit historique) is the materialized text about this reality. History is an ambiguous term which unifies the objective and subjective sides of narration and equally denotes both historia rerum gestarum and res gestae, i.e., it points out that historical narration appears at the same time with the historic events. Thinking of the concept of “narrative identities” means a philosophical reflection about building a nation through narrative, memory and language; first in theory, and later in praxis. I explore this concept in my book Narrative Identities where I applied a theoretical approach to the concept of the nation through the “auctorial” position of narration, positioning the narrator in history as “objective” and “personal” at the same time, with differences in the re-​telling qualities of memory. Every nation is a construct in history; every nation has the right to stretch this concept of nation and its definition. The extension of the memory practices of one nation depends on what is framed as historical trauma, cultural politics, and cultural norms. One performs meaning in history while acting through the language of expression. French philosopher Jacques Derrida shows that complete meaning is always “differential” and postponed in language. Derrida coins the word différance to express the nature of language, both as a system of differences and as the endless deferral of meaning. To understand this is to understand memory of cultural tradition in a strongly contextualized complex geolocation of materialized artefacts (through discourses and practices), out of which a certain type of plot for the nation is derived later in praxis. Hence, understanding memory narration for a nation is in accordance

124  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices with the explicative potentials of memory politics. Namely, it institutes a cushioning relation between the rigid denial of the memory narrative through history and the leveling of historiography. In the Macedonian context, there was a process of ideological transformation and transgression from the socialist “yug” (“south” in Slavic languages) as essential unity, despite differences in cultures and historical experience, to the contemporary memory context. If every nation is an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson’s (1983) sense, then national identity is always potentially up for grabs. Paradoxically, national identity is, as Anderson puts it, conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship; the elites who forge a nation must always assert that their nation is not a created object, but rather the expression of an already existing unity. Building a nation happens on the level of collective memory practices that provide an ideological base for unity. Memory organizes democracy through making a nation and breaking a nation (as a prison). In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1999), the future is not conceived as the aim of history, as an end that fulfills the promise. Walter Benjamin opposes the idea of a memoryless subject incarnating the future –​ that is, to the very opposition between the past and the future –​ a suspension of the past to save its promises and its possibilities. What has to be elaborated in greater detail is the intrinsic connection between these two gestures, the one that refuses future goals as teloi of history, and the one that “rescues” memory and inherited promises. Political hegemony comes to the stage to produce nationalist reactions, recognizable and often exposed in authoritarian regimes. In this sense, this theory allows the interpretation that the “name” is not equivalent to the “identity”, hence, the meaning is not bounded to the signifier; one can never catch the meaning in the chains of language. The Republic of Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia on September 8, 1991. In 1993, the country was named Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (with FYROM as an acronym), as designated by the United Nations (UN) due to the bilateral and international issue that appeared, i.e., the dispute between Greece and Macedonia that lasted from 1991 to 2019. In political discourse, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia became a provisional reference that formalized bilateral relations between Greece and Macedonia in order to start negotiations on the naming issue under the auspices of the UN. The FYROM implied substantives of the Yugoslav past in the (still) never-​ending process of transition towards the European Union. The process of aspiration for integration of the country into the EU has become a tremendous saga, an irrational agony for the country that was one of the first ex-​Yugoslav countries that were invited to sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement. Now, the country is lost somewhere in the “waiting room”, together with Serbia, Albania, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The country changed its name to North Macedonia following the Prespa agreement in June 2018. With the subsequent ratification

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  125 by the Macedonian and Greek parliaments in late 2018, the amendment entered into force in February 2019, following the ratification of the Prespa Agreement and the Protocol on the Accession of North Macedonia to NATO by the Greek Parliament. The official renaming of Macedonia into North Macedonia happened on February 12, 2019. Changing the name has been a condition to start the process of joining the European Union.23 My first hospitalization was in Sarajevo in 1984 when there were Olympic Games. I and my mother were staying for a year in Fojnica. I keep the diary with stickers and images from then. We were going from the rehabilitation centre to the town every weekend. I was doing my physiotherapy with Mira, the therapist. Jasna, a girl from Sarajevo who was in a wheelchair was keeping me by her, on her knees, all the time. When I had infusions days my mother was reading me books, the poem “Mala moja iz Bosanske Krupe” by Branko Ćopić. When I was not infusing, I had squirrels in my hands. And my mother and I were walking through the long fields with flowers. Album shows I have had a dress with black and white dots. I was six years old. Adela was my best friend. My mother’s best friend was Vishnja. She was an artist. She gave her an art collage of women, my mother still keeps it in a dining room. Since my sixth-​year old, I knew there is something different in women than in men. The first time I have tried Coca-​Cola ever was at the hospital’s bar in the yard. I felt guilty. That was the first influence by the American culture.24 Post-​Yugoslavia Identification and Disidentification. Post-​Communist Theory of Discourses: Erosive Fiction –​Schism of Un-​identity Who Needs “Identity” Thinking?

Rancière’s subjectivization oscillates between identification and disidentifi­ cation. It’s a subject in the process of becoming that is a subject understood as a political process. Disidentification happens at the stage of politics. Political narratosophy deals with the stages of politics that reject identification and interrupt already constructed identity thinking. In this part of the discussion, I shall take the work by Dubravka Ugrešić, a former Yugoslavian and Croatian author. The order of writing first about Christa Wolf, and then about Dubravka Ugrešić –​ isn’t accidental. Both authors have “red” points of contact which interweave on the scene of history. Namely, if the reader decides to travel through this period of history (even if he continues forward, to pass it and exit from it), then he’ll irrevocably meet the author of The Museum … as a visitor of the event (or the life) which Wolf remembers in Patterns of Childhood. That life or historic event has ended up as a museum exhibit in the capitulation of Germany in 1945. Ugrešić is one of the observers … and chroniclers …

126  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices It has been noted that the history which can be paid for with life itself is a form of re-​inscribing the present in the past or an attempt to reevaluate the past values out of which an entire life has been created. In this part of the analytical study, the focus of interest will be the analysis of a part of the literary work of Dubravka Ugrešić (1965–​2023) who is a living “remains” from the disappeared country –​ex-​Yugoslavia and who fictionally inserts her own life into something that no longer exists. Ugrešić leaves Croatia in 1993 and due to political reasons, decides on permanent exile until the end of her life.25 The Museum of Unconditional Surrender in East Berlin is a real museum in which the capitulation of Germany was signed (8/​9 May) after the Russian invasion. The Germany in which Christa Wolf lived her childhood is gone, it was replaced by the divided East and West Berlin. Wolf’s and Ugrešić’s books are warnings of the danger of forgetting. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a topos in which there is sublimation and the ending of the time featured in Christa Wolf’s Patterns… (through an interweaving of the subjective into historical time). Ugrešić visits this museum in 1994 and in her interview in Zarez she says: It was a Soviet museum. When I visited it in 1994 it was almost emptied apart from the basement cafeterias which the Bosnian refugees visited. Why? Because many of them got temporary living quarters in the apartments which belonged to the Soviet soldiers. Those tenement buildings which the Soviet soldiers gradually deserted were located near the Museum. When I saw our people playing chess or cards in the basements of the Museum, with the occasional accidental visitor such as me, I realized that I couldn’t invent a better and more symbolical set from the one that life itself has brought.26 In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić starts the narration from the position of an exile to speak of a political society in which the private is no longer separated from the public and the most intimate is endangered. In the analysis of this novel, I shall attempt not only to question the correlation between the literary text and history but also to see that fiction is a privileged zone where the question of history is interrupted, broken, distorted, and put to the test. Therefore, the key question is whether truth can be resistant to the “organized” lie in conditions of creating identities (monolithic national, political identities). That is why the reading of the narrative identity in the works of this author unavoidably and necessarily opens through the commenting on the cultural identity projected in a specific society, in a dying era. The position of the narrator’s retelling is linked to the fall of communism, on the one hand, and the rise of neoliberalism on the other, bearing in mind

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  127 the critique of postcolonialism that is part of the larger historical transformation (from communism) associated with globalization and critique to it. On a methodological level, I go further from the hermeneutical and phenomenological procedure for the interpretation of reality (as was the case with Christa Wolf), entering the philosophy of new historicism. The other of the other but of the other that no longer exists. At the beginning of 2021 I gave an interview titled as: Memory Landscapes in (post) Yugoslavia, for the Historical Expertise, a Journal of History. In the Editor’s notes of the interview, it is written: Yugoslavia as a state existed twice, once as a monarchy and once as a socialist republic. Different historical legacies, state regimes, cultural and religious heritage are woven into the region –​ there is a myriad of different political entities and also a plenitude of political and/​or national/​ethnic identities. The dissolution of the socialist republic, responsible for an advanced modernization of the country and an unprecedented development of the region, ensued during the crisis of the 1980s, and continued all the way into the violent wars of the 1990s. In January 1992, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia fell apart. The end of the Yugoslav state, however, did not feature the end of the Yugoslav idea or the end of Yugoslav memory. While all are marked by “political abuse of power and the deeply unjust privatization processes” (Dolenec 2013, 7), each of the seven republics of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo–​reveals a particular memoryscape, abundant in internal battles, which sometimes converge and sometimes diverge, weaving a complex net of (post)Yugoslav memory. In line with Catherine Baker’s observation that “nationalism was an instrument, not a cause” (Baker 2015, 129), (post)Yugoslav memory continues to evolve in dialogue across the borders of (post)Yugoslav states. Although our approach in this series of interviews remains “republic-​centered”, this does not in any way imply that we do not believe that (post)Yugoslav memory works as “nœuds de mémoire” (Rothberg 2009), producing new solidarities and possibilities for thought and action. The case of North Macedonia. In the post-​socialist gender regime, struggles for memories turned into a re-​reading of the legacy and the memory practices related to the concept of ‘work’ in the socialist period, and present Macedonia. Therefore, I would propose to focus on investigating what aspects of social reproduction theory from the socialist Yugoslav days could serve as a potential concept for understanding today’s democracy. This entails pointing out the social benefits of low-​wage jobs, ‘female’ jobs, secure/​insecure jobs, flexible jobs, the labor of care, the feminization of labor that includes the political, social, and economic involvement

128  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices of women in labor. Hence, anticipative memory practices, or the ‘memory of awakening’, would have the potential to emerge as a potent tool in the fight against capitalism today.27 Theory of Political Discontinuity. A Disclosed Auto-​Bio-​Narrative The theory of autobiography implies the convergence of the aesthetic and the historical. I come to the question what is the correlation of narration to the building of identity in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender? In this novel the choice to narrativize one’s own life or to auto-​bio-​ narrativize is read as an attempt to show that life is a historical variable that is not resistant to the changeable nets from the social practice through which the life of the individual is articulated, and the identity is “torn” from itself like something foreign. Autobiography is an interpretation of a singular, unique experience. A precondition for the existence of autobiography is the reference to the identity of the one who writes and lives that life, but are we certain that autobiography depends on reference just as photography depends on its object (the real image of its model)? In De Man’s terms, one can equally rely on the logic that life produces autobiography just as the act causes all its consequences, but also that autobiography can’t produce and determine life on its own, because the writing of the author is also positioned by the technical media rules of self-​portrayal. Because such mimesis is just one of the modes of figuration, the image can be turned. Namely, De Man asks whether the illusion of reference isn’t more kindred to fiction, which then reaches a degree of referential production. So, the distinction between fiction and autobiography is unsolvable, it is an either-​or polarity. In De Man’s terms, autobiography is a figure of reading and understanding which appears as a variable, to a certain degree, in all texts.28 Philippe Lejeune offers one possible reading of autobiography; he believes that the name on the front page, i.e., the identity of the autobiographer, depends on speech acts, and it is not self-​representative and cognitional, but a pre-​agreed identity. The name and the signature on the book are not the author’s epistemological authorities, but rather acts of agreement, transitions from the level of ontological identity to the level of contractual, legal identity. The relevance of transcendental authority is introduced to the scene, which means that we are re-​entering the system of the tropics at the same moment when we think that we have managed to avoid it. The polisemicity can be read as the way to re-​ question the tropology of the subject and in the re-​inscription of duty in the spectacular model of cognition. The thus posed theory of autobiography in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender opens a position for re-​questioning the borders between the life which is lived and the life which is written. Dubravka Ugrešić writes: “Autobiography is a serious and sad genre. As if the notion of

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  129 the genre has been infiltrated in advance somewhere deep inside of us. The author and the reader yield to that notion: they balance the rhythm of the pulse, the heartbeat, they slow down their breathing, together they lower the blood pressure” (37). In the quoted passage above, autobiography has the purpose of starting the relation praxis–​bios, using a bond between play, art, writing, and existential questions. The Museum … points to the fixation and fabulation of Ugrešić’s life. Namely, the plot and the character in fiction (autobiography) refer to a subject of narration and action that comes from it. The focus is on the questions: does the unity of the story create the unity of the character, or does the identity of the character create the completeness and coherency of the story? Is it possible that the story and the character, i.e., life and the person, are not in a causal relationship but a continual correlation? Part of these theses can be found again in the works of Ricoeur, who counts upon the plot which helps in the organization of the history of life, and life is organized additionally and retrospectively through fiction. In The Museum … narration is posed as a domino effect: the images go by and uncover the truth about the ex-​Yugoslavia, which no longer exists from the point in which the narrative “I” is positioned through the experience of an exile. During the portrayal of these real events, the situation appears from the desire of the narrating subject to portray the coherency and completeness of stacking up imaginary images of life. In one of her interviews in Feral Ugrešić says: In general, it’s not often in novels for the political destiny to reflect in female characters. Usually, those are the male characters. My novel, even though it speaks of the intimate destinies of the female characters, the biographies of women, of exile, it is also a “political” novel. It doesn’t have many similarities to Milos’s Entrapped Mind. It is a matter of personal choice in an extraordinary situation, such as the falling apart of Yugoslavia and the war. And there aren’t many personal choices like that. In the end, they can all be deduced for several reasons. Yes, alpha, beta, gamma. In the continual slip from reality to unreality is where lies the vast area, which is neither truth, nor lie, but fiction. The Museum … functions as fiction according to the rules of the mimetic, representative function of the kingdom “as if”. The relation metaphor–​mimesis is uncovered in the “as if”, according to the principle of similarity between metaphor and mimesis. “As if” refers to something as if it exists, and it doesn’t. The disappearance of the subject which is a carrier of the identity is analogous to the exclusion of referentiality in the fictional discourse. For a text to be signified one starts from the writer’s intention that “what I’m writing, I’m writing as fiction”. Further on, one follows the reader’s intention that “what I’m reading, I’m reading as fiction”, and the intention of the text

130  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices which “throws” signals, saying “read me as fiction”. Or, as David Lodge says, a text is read as fiction, evenif it refers to a real event.29 The author ironically suggests that the reader should read The Museum … as fiction, as the visitor to a ZOO tries to assert some signifying coordinates and reconstruct the historic events, for example, that the elephant “Ronald died eight days after the rising of the Berlin Wall” … or “the question whether this novel is autobiographical could in an eventual, hypothetical moment come under the jurisdiction of the police, but not the readers” (7). Precisely at this level, this novel produces the deposit of fictionality which is a deposit of reality or that which, for Roland Barthes is “L’effet de reel”, is, in fact, “l’effet de fiction”. So, the positioning of the relation of the real, as opposed to the fictional, is accomplished through the imaginary, the probable, the possible, as if, the double reference, the referential illusion. In this constellation, the question I am interested in is: Does the author have the right to be “attracted” by ethics? Does art have the right to be ethical? Ricoeur, in the foreground of prefiguration of narration, intonates the principle of ethics. In the first part of this book, during the process of creation of the narrative identity ethical implications could be referred to, which are in intersectional correlation with the aesthetic function of narration. Further on, in the domain of configuration it is possible to elide, to throw out ethics in favor of aesthetic determination. This is precisely where we see an emphasis on the borderline conditions of narration that question the narrative identity and don’t rely solely upon the ethical identity or they even seize its every foothold. The interrupting of “real” life in The Museum … is solved by bringing the ethical implication into the fictive field and accomplished with the intermediation of reading/​the reader. With the change of the medium (to narrate in a foreign instead of a native language as in The Museum …) the subject of narration influences the ethical nuancing of the statement. Up to what point is the sense of writing only in a native language an ethical possibility for survival? Ugrešić in The Museum … solves even that, a little sentimentally, by writing: “The reason partially lies in the good taste: the genre inconvincible nostalgia when passing through the filter of foreign language gains instead of wet a nice, dry quality” (40). In this direction, ethics is the model for studying the bloodstream as opposed to the collapse of reality. Narration becomes a way of creating meaning and life. How do the ethical implications in The Museum work? There is an abyss between fiction and life that might be solved if the unity of fictional narrative and praxis happen.30 In this context applies the principle –​ to collect the experienced life in narration, to narrativize, and with that to comment on real life. The narrative unity of life is composed out of a collage, fable, and life experience. Because of the passing character of real life, Bubi strives for “certain” fixation and fictionalization of experience, to reorganize it retrospectively, with an additional initiative of words. In such a case pain and nostalgia in The Museum

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  131 … are derived from oblivion, and the narrative identity is from Proust’s thesis that a person is at the same time both the reader and the writer of his own life. This thesis can be found deep in Bubi’s thoughts as a narrating subject on one level, and it continues to develop through Bubi’s mother on another level. It’s as if Bubi repeats the life of her mother who has moved from Varna to Zagreb. Bubi becomes the reader and the writer of the life of her mother, and at the same time, we become a part of the chain of readers and writers of such narration. Nostalgia for Yugoslavia is longing for a lost Home. With the juxtaposition of the categories of fiction and discourse, we question the stability of the traditional bond between literature and history in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and with that, the borders of the novel’s genre are questioned. The understanding of reality for Ugrešić is actualized through counterpointing the category reality with fiction and the category reality with history. The reality in Ugrešić’s work is first deconstructed and then deliberated through fiction. New historicism as a method converges, hybridizes fiction and history in a way that doesn’t question only facts in literature, but directly tests the “true” qualities and actions of history and its fictional dimensions in the domain of the scientific sphere. I was struck at how losing the country and political system that gave birth and life to you, even if it was not something that you always valued, offers a radically different perspective on narrative –​says James Martel to me.31 The theory of new historicism offers operative definitions and categories through which we can question the blurred borders between history, historiography, and fiction, in a sense of the meaning that history takes different people differently, even the same history (West, Hitchens). With the analysis of The Museum … through the apparatus of new historicism in the works of Ugrešić the term reality is loosened and relativized, it is “uprooted”, the viewpoint and the superior position of the writing of reality and history are disseminated forever. In the works of this writer, the filters of announcing the truth in reality and history and the domain of fiction through narration come dangerously close. Ugrešić’s writing, seen narrowly through the deconstructivist current of Jacques Derrida, insists upon processing the objective reality, which is pixelated to infinity, to a degree of fiction. In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the talk of history and the past does not refer to summa summarum, to that which happened, but it is a direct intervention in it. When Bubi or the mother narrate then they use the language of photographs through which is organized one world of living with the need for subsuming into a narrative world. The poetics of the photographic negative is the only “valid” reality in the fictionalization of Bubi. As Walter Benjamin

132  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices says photography doesn’t belong to history, instead, it offers one history, and the truth of history is nothing but photography. If we start from the relativity of the signification and the signified in language, then the testimony of the image stands against the testimony of verbalization and demonstrates the contingency of fiction. Through Bubi and her referring upon her mother’s narration the words of the women included in the symbolical order of a certain culture and politics are born. These women have a way of questioning the way history is looked upon, including the personal inventory, leaving an intimate mark in language. Rada Ivekovic gives a feminist afterward for the women who are excluded from history as active or recognized participants. Such women don’t have the consciousness for continuity of the act of giving birth, and action which is not interrupted and certainly isn’t interrupted in the history of man’s actions.32 As a continuity of this Ivekovic’s thesis, the scene with the Home museum is significant, through which Ugrešić decisively shows that the continuity (of birth, as symbolic of the paradigm of creation) is confirmed with “evoking” of the mother’s speech. This specific continuity is remembered in the code of the very tissue, in the memory which precedes the mnemo-​technical methods of remembering, as opposed to the historiographic “care” which is rigidly selective. The journal of the mother and the intimate conversations are strengthening the soft conversation which is based on historical documents, it is peripheral, shamefully marginalized, and suppressed to the point of disappearance. The year 1949 In the year when I was born, in the dictionary of the world, exists the word world. Harry Truman becomes the thirty-​third president of the USA which is celebrated in Washington with a seven-​mile long parade; the earthquake in Seattle is declared “a ten million dollar disaster”; the European Council is founded in Paris, a union of ten European states, the origin of the idea for future united Europe; In Great Britain coupons are phased out, the restriction on candy ends … In the dictionary of the world, we barely exist. In our dictionary, the word world barely exists. The day when I was born, March 27, at the agricultural estate “Belje” calisthenics is successfully developed, there are noted progress of the cooperative Velimirovce, the soil is ready for full implementation of the spring seeding plan, and 10,000 women from Split join the front brigades. In my mother’s dictionary, worlds do not exist. In her dictionary I exist, a man who doesn’t want to die –​and the soup with cumin (67–​68).33 The inserted factographic passages are imitations of so-​called “open” structures or “imperfect histories” which discard the plot in favor of the principle of accumulation of narrativity which, on the other hand, formally enables its representation and strengthens the coherency of the narrative world in The

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  133 Museum… The counterpointing of the personal world of the narrative “I” (Bubi’s small narration, the mother), as opposed to the historical facts (grand narrations), is an attempt to speak of the personal worlds, the personal stories through which the real ontological historical date is deliberated. In that way, the objectivity of the historical portrayal is “disturbingly” diminished. This approach to reading “big” history offers an incision, a provocative visus, because in the definition of history enter not only the “battles” which were won but also the personal, deeply intimate stories between one woman, one mother, or her friends. Bubi inserts her mother’s dictionary into the “official” dictionary of the world in an attempt to show than an intimate, personal world can also become history. The real events exist here as referents of the discourse; we speak of them, but they are not imposing indicators of the narrative world. “Without classification, not even memory would exist. Without classification we couldn’t deliberate reality” (42). Through classificational narration Ugrešić narrativizes reality, she deliberates her portrayal of the past and the present, having first deconstructed them.34 This flow of the story is contemplated through pastiche, sticking together and commenting on the clippings of realia (real –​ life –​ objects) of the historic reality during the building of the plot. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a collage novel or a novel –​installation –​says Ugrešić –​compiled of fragments and stories which are connected, not according to the principle of fable, but according to a thematic principle: each fragment, as in a collage, urges and deliberates the other. In such a case the novel is exempt from the pure genre and it strives towards essayization. The inserted realia through the life stories of Ilja Kabakov, the house of Gabriela Munter and Wassily Kandinsky, and the artist Rebecca Horn … are figures through which it is pointed to the transition from a novel into an essay (essayization of fiction/​genre mixte) to write the history of everyday life. Through giving the right to everyday language, fiction moves into the essayistic document, and the novel slips and moves into an essayistic record. That is one of the precise focuses on which the interest of new historicism is kept. Through these “readings”, narration approaches a degree of annulment, and the novel as a genre loses its classical narrative properties. Ugrešić goes even further, she “shakes up” the narrative “I” in building the autobiography of triviality, by gathering the everyday. On one hand, she indicates the kitsch of everyday “trivialities”, the bizarre soc-​realistic prose (in which and out of which life was lived) but, on the other hand, she offers a requiem for a “disappeared era, its sad résumé, the very heart of the system… the painful noise of a disappeared culture” (45). This repeated summarizing of the scenes is the basis for the creation of a new face of history –​the guarantee for a sentimental fact –​which keeps escaping. The discontinuity in Bubi’s narration is confirmed by the fact that she narrates from a position of exile, which is a reference for the strengthening of her fragmented state and the feeling of not belonging which stipulates the dislocation, the transfer of the subject of narration. Michel de Foucault connects the problem of discontinuity in the discourse with the loss of the configurational

134  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices flow of the story and the crisis of its closing which responds with the crisis stages of identification when the referential axes are lost (1998). This thesis, on a formal level, questions the novel as a genre, “dilutes” the coherency of its identity, and points to the trap of the character’s identity. Dedication I would like to dedicate this interview to my aunty Niki from Zagreb. I haven’t seen her for more than ten years. I visited her often during Yugoslavia days by night train Skopje Zagreb33 I am speaking from the position of a political philosopher; I am not a historian. By the term “political” I refer to the series of encounters between philosophical concepts and political events in history that require sometimes subversive conceptual inventions in contemporary political regulations.36 Theory. Praxis. History Against Itself Schism: Nationalism, Truth and/​or Lie

The historical conditions in Former Yugoslavia through the autobiographic records of Ugrešić are not only an auto-​statement but also an attempt to place within quote marks the objectification of the spirit of a certain political time as existential testimony of the individual which is projected in another time expressed in language. Existential hermeneutics gains strength. If we start from the logic that the natural referential discourse is susceptible to reexamining the truth and lie, then the non-​referential discourse (fiction) is a space for an invention that moves on the border with lying and at the same time takes into account its truthfulness in correlation with the real (existence of reality). According to this logic, Ugrešić’s autobiographic narration is a story (statement) of the past and present which is not exhausted in the signification of that which “really” happened. In The Museum… one reads: Fiction on its own also opens the question of its terminological identity, and in its subtitle, we read “ideality” of its meaning. Fiction oscillates between the terms truth and lie. Mimesis for Ugrešić is the solution for the relation of art (artistic truth/​lie) and reality. The Museum … doesn’t argue foremost with factographic and logical moves, but it offers fantasy, intuition, it finds allusions to the cognitive which couldn’t (and can’t) be represented. Through art Ugrešić grasps the ungraspable, represents the unrepresentable, and opens the abyss, the slit towards reality: “Was ist Kunst? –​ I ask Sessile. I don’t know. The artistic act is a certain change in the world –​she answers” (168).

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  135 The ontological question of identity and the epistemological question of truth is reduced to the semantic question of truth as reference. In the (post) Yugoslav Feminist Political Economy thinking, the critical discussions touch on the economic policies of socialist thinking of identity in Yugoslavia, public sphere of socialism, and former Yugoslav political history. Foucault in “Truth and Power” unfolded the truth related to the historical discourses, so each society has its regime of truth that is administrated through mechanisms (131). The term truth in the works of Ugrešić is read as a semantic term truth because language is the only reality, the only immediate objectification of literature, so The Museum… focuses exclusively on that term truth which enters the language. The immediate reality of literature is the lingual reality, accordingly, the term truth is a logically semantic term that enters the ontological fundus of the poetic discourse. By telling the story of Brodsky, Kundera, Conrad … Ugrešić at the same time tells the personal story by actualizing the axis of East-​West. She who comes from a marriage between an orthodox Bulgarian mother from Varna who comes to Yugoslavia, and a Catholic father continues the schismatic, “heretic deviation” (Maria Todorova) placing herself as a hybrid connection to the West: Berlin, Amsterdam, America. The position of leaving opens up new space for analysis of the country she comes from –​ the Balkans. Ugrešić entices the past as some figurative other, as a confrontation with the other history. However, Ugrešić doesn’t limit the past connected to the former Yugoslavia only in the analysis of the imagological, heterological construction of the Other country; instead, she becomes radically analyzed as “incomplete selfhood” because of the racist cause. Ugrešić herself becomes a borderline zone, daughter of Yugoslavia because all of that which was true now disperses towards the West –​Berlin, and Amsterdam. In Forbidden Reading she writes: Really, what happened to reality? Reality is irradiated by the media. And with every new dose, it becomes more irradiated. People don’t notice the changes. Because they are not easily noticeable, same as the radioactive radiation. They become visible when it’s too late (137). The superior narratives have the power to erase the fact or of portraying it falsely, but they can’t create a new “truth”. During the counterpointing of the terms real and reality, in a Lacanian sense, the first denominates the non-​ reductive addition to the real in theory, i.e., its spectralization, the second is the exterior, the façade of the first. That means that the real isn’t covered by the symbolical practices of the language, but it breaks through the lingual systems with a multitude of its excess, and reality appears as incomplete symbolization which is always intermediated, the referent is always already in continual escape or as Ugrešić shows in Culture of Lies: “One of the strategies with which the culture of lies became established is the terror of forgetting (they make you forget that

136  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices which you remember) and the terror of remembering (they make you remember that which you don’t” (92). Therefore, the politics of knowledge is to hold back that which shouldn’t be said. The outcome can be read in the immanent absence of the referent, the object, out of which the substrate remains, the synecdoche which is a part of the whole of one truth, one identity. Likewise, the work of Christa Wolf follows the dichotomy real –​ reality related to East Germany which, according to the masked reality, enters the borders of West Germany, but according to the rest of the ambivalent real, it doesn’t. Such is also the case in the reshaping of the maps of East Germany and the former Yugoslavia, the post-​ communist stratagems of Ugrešić. The identification of the subject of narration in this novel shows that the regimes that have built their existence upon the grounds of “unreality” and lies fall, and with them fall all of their lies: “the wrong side” experienced its historical retouching when the photographic light of the new era moved towards the “right” side says the narrator in The Museum… (31–​32). Although they didn’t have direct intertextuality in her artistic writing, Ugrešić is close to the philosophical attitudes of Hannah Arendt who explains this daintiness of “true” and “false” belonging through the records/​volumes of those who write history, and when the generalization of the discourses becomes conflicting in a culture of a totalitarian regime –​says Arendt –​then we read the “pure” cultural signs with their ambiguous character and historical above determination. The historical narration in The Museum … is understood as discursive fiction or rather, as turning history against itself (Foucault). This means that the individual and subject of narration, in such a case, can’t exit history, but it can oppose it in a critical way in which it will show the contingency of its knowledge (and therefore also the restrictive focalisational point of narration or the excluding of the auctorial situation of narration: I, to tell the truth, destroyed my house personally. I have predicted that war and dictatorship are siblings, as old Remarque knew. Yes, I wrote something I wasn’t supposed to. I did it, I admit, more out of an inability to adapt to the general lie, than out of the desire to be a hero. I was in the times when lying, as a legal strategy, could be tolerated only in literature, but no longer in life (144). If one decides to analyze the hidden and unspoken totalitarian tendencies of the communist government which imposed its superiority through the stratagem of “organized” lying or through the “power to lie” actualized through public opinion, then the reading turns –​ from history –​ towards phenomenology and political hermeneutics of the subject of narration. Ugrešić now questions the deed, the act, the process of writing history, to conclude at the end that it is a question of power: “I have predicted that war and dictatorship are siblings” (144). When she can no longer abide lies in her life, Ugrešić decides to leave Croatia, all the while keeping in mind that the creators of images continuously

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  137 need to change falsehoods which are offered as a replacement for speaking the “truth”. Both Ugrešić and Arendt believe that the changed circumstances extort replacement of one book of history with another … disappearance of certain names in favor of others which were previously unknown or less familiar… No matter how destructible facts are, they are still permanent, they extort recognition and that makes them superior to the government. For Ugrešić facts … in The Museum … no longer produce an image” (80), and that allows us to reread the terms truth and lie. So, unlike Christa Wolf who uses the tropological discourse for resolving reality, Ugrešić emphasizes the performance between fiction and history and –​according to the theoretician of culture Claire Colebrook –​ such a performance, discursive practice, or action creates a persuasive response to the burden of the historical legitimacy between knowledge and power. Wolf is closer to Paul Ricoeur’s theses, and Ugrešić to the claims of new historicism. If, for Wolf, history and the past are unavoidable substrates of the present, then for Ugrešić, history is performative and can be history in as much as it continuously escapes us. If history wasn’t a disappearing trace of its own transience, it wouldn’t even happen. That is the point when politics comes onto the scene. The author of The Museum … in a similar way, with a dose of excessive irony, depicts her own “coherent” historical identity in the background of the autobiographic referential authority. She retreats behind it and allows it to disperse into deconstructivist dynamics. Thus, she questions all the systems in which function the referential authority of the one who writes and blends himself in the focalized speech of all his accidental fellow travelers (subjects of narration). Therefore, if the narrative identity is intermediated by a story that is read with understanding, in the deconstructivist portrayal of the signification and the signified it bursts –​ it gets crushed –​ it is pixelated in the dispersed points of time and space during which the integration of the story in existence also becomes deconstructed, and therefore the position of the reader (or “subject” of the Ex-​Yugoslav space) is destabilized. Ugrešić says: The truth broke into parts like a mirror. Each part reflects its truth. At this moment the people of ex-​Yugoslavia try to convince themselves that everything was a lie. And it never existed, they say. Because, if it really existed, could that which happened after have happened?... And what happened after –​ after all? If, according to Hannah Arendt, the factographic truth is by nature political, then the one thing the factographic and the rational truth have in common is that all truths oppose their way of denial of that which is irrefutable. That’s what the scene in The Museum … points to, the one with Doty, Bubi’s friend who, after three years of voluntary exile, returns to Zagreb to receive an award for the poem from a local jury. Gradually, Doty from a Bonny and Clyde role turns into a

138  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices political martyr, a recorder of who is Croatian and loyal and who is not Croatian and loyal (“and two minuses for a Serb quisling”) (212). I will find out, of course, about Doty’s newly gained honorifics. Doty took the right side because she simply couldn’t take the wrong side, and she fully became a naturally loud reference of the culturally political life (those two things couldn’t be kept apart), member of this and that, editor of this and that. The honest Doty will also take the flag of her husband, who at one point has tripped and dropped it (213). The figure of Doty as a “protector” of the “new, moral postmodern” discovers that truth carries in it, namely, an element of compulsion. At the same time, the “gigantic lies and monstrous forgeries” of a totalitarian regime are accepted. On a second (illusive) level, Ugrešić emphasizes the ironic distance towards Doty with the attitude that Doty thinks she’s changing the past according to her own beliefs, that “everything has somehow come into place” (214), but precisely then the difference between truth and lie is no longer objective; instead, it becomes a question of power and deliberation, a matter of pressure and repetition. In such a case Doty resembles “Stalin who dreams of his delayer” (214). Thus, Ugrešić is in front of the door of something that Nancy Fraser develops in Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World: the idea that we are no longer clear about how to fill in socialism’s substantive content … it reveals a hidden connection between socialism and deconstruction, on the other hand. From another point of view, Ugrešić at this point completely approaches Hannah Arendt who believes that facts exist only in the non-​totalitarian world, and that the borders of truth are imposed by forces and power. “I create opinion by thinking of the given question from a different viewpoint, facing my spirit with the views of those who are absent, i.e., I represent them … (it is) a question of my thinking and existing where I am for real”. In such a case, the truth of human thought (spirit) becomes greater than the destroyed books, the burning at the stake … The more I imagine others’ views upon my spirit while I deeply ponder a certain question … –​says Arendt –​the stronger will my power for representative thinking be (representative thinking –​thinking from the viewpoint of others) and the more exact will be my conclusions. Because the ‘political’ should always open the concept of others/​different thinking, unlike the thinking of those who rely upon ‘factographic’ truth, focusing only on ‘facts’.37 Ugrešić in The Museum … desires to see the world as it appears in the eyes of others, she wishes to assume the position of the other. Besides, she builds identity “through a view”: They are all Bosnian. Only I’m from Zagreb. I omit to say that I am not a refugee … We laugh for no reason, we stare at each other, we sniff each other, we wave our tail joyfully. And then suddenly sadness grips us, we pace in one spot, we drop our shoulders, nod our heads, as if at a funeral (235).

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  139 Autobiography becomes a key stratagem for evasion of the authoritative position during narration. Autobiography’s strategies for focusing on narration in the cultural context are in the function of narrating personal family stories. And, to narrate these autobiographic stories, as Clive Thomson notes, is at the same time questioning the normative model of academic criticism for autobiography.38 The author in The Museum … develops narration from the position of an exile, the context of narration is exile, the feeling of not belonging points to the inability of making identification and “pressing” in the final identity of the character. Exile (ex salire) –​ signifies a cultural chronotope which includes complex temporal and spatial components, it points to ‘flowing out’ towards something, somewhere else, at the same time including the exile’s own will. In this context emigration signifies legal residence somewhere, and immigration illegal residence. The position of an exile –​ the position of transit, the state in between, between different signifieds, different cultures, different cities, streets, nations, and dislocated signs –​becomes a focal point of the cultural identity and connection of the past, present, and future in a somewhat mythical space where Ugrešić “floats” in alcera –​the dreamtime: Exile is a history of the things which we leave behind, buying and leaving hairdryers, small, cheap radios, coffee pots … Exile is the history of our temporarily rented apartments, the first lonely mornings when in silence we spread the map of the city, on the map we find the name of our street, we use the pencil to draw a little x sign (we repeat the history of the great conquerors, a small x sign instead of a flag). Those little firm facts, the stamps in the passport pile up, and at one point they turn into indistinguishable lines. And only then, they begin to write the internal map of the imaginary (117). For Ugrešić, exile is an anathema of the political communist condition in which the subject of narration finds himself/ herself. Exile is a journey from home –​to outside, a state of a new beginning and leaving of one’s “own” country, going into a new post-​communist reality. Exile is the eye for freshening the identity, which is in passing, which goes by –​ in passing … Bubi writes while she passes, and such identity en passant is a matter of resistance and affirmation of the writing through negation of the surroundings in which she previously lived. Derrida explains this affirmative resistance with the necessity for passing which erases all determination. The accusation of the political society in The Museum … imposes not only reinterpretation of history, but also of the identities which are created in that history. Hall represents the narrower deconstructivist thesis in the explanation of the term cultural identity. Namely, identity is erased in the interval between its interruption and its reappearance. The irreducibility of the identity introduces politics to the scene, i.e., the politics of the “location” of the identity decentered by its primary paradigmatic position.39

140  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices I am longing for a narrative, for a voice. I don’t want to be burdened together with the failed post-​Yugoslav system and wild capitalism in North Macedonia. This is longing for an honest narrative –​ in –​ motion, while I am writing this, I am building my identities related to the narrative of the country that no –​longer –​ exists, related to other of the others from the country that no –​longer –​exists, and even if exists, there is a country with no name, or, the name doesn’t mean anything. I wrote to Ranciere, telling him I am longing for narrative. I wrote to my boyfriend telling him that my name Senka, means Shadow, in the Macedonian language. And that is not my real name, but a chosen name that exists only if there is a Light.40 I am invited to speak at ‘Collecting Heritage of South-​Eastern European Women Philosophers’ meeting in Zagreb, Croatia. There is a discussion for post-​Yugoslav feminists. I don’t think there is European vs post-​Yugoslav vs American feminists. The real experience of life under socialism and now, in wild capitalism, is something that gives me double skin. I only know I left my country three years ago for America. I don’t feel anymore that I belong to the North Macedonian or post-​Yugoslav zone of narratives. My past position of narration has been bombed. Completely vanished. A few months before Covid-​19 started. Now, I carry with me the narrative –​ in –​ transit, with one leg in the United States, waiting for a green card, with another leg in my born country where I am in a waiting zone, only giving time to Time. I am not even an immigrant. Shall I be always in this narrative –​in –​transit, heavy stuck in this ‘motion’ at the place where nothing happens? Can someone adopt me? What would my mother say? Should I marry an American for a visa? Shall I find my real love?41 In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the narrative identity is constituted as the social identity, and it’s perpetuated through the ensemble “positions of identity” which are final and fixed in the closed system of differences. The cultural identity of the narrative “I” in society, by definition, is constructed through the diversity of discourses (those are the statements of the fellow travelers in The Museum…). Between the diversity of discourses, the identity is not developed through the necessary correlation between them, but instead, it functions and “flows” through the continuous above-​determination and flexible shifting of the discourses (that is why art can be a decisive arrow towards the postal stamp, in the statement of a mailman, but also a secret bond between the pinkie fingernail of a woman and the earthquake in Kobe, in the statement of a writer … (163–​64). Ugrešić, in Kultura Laži, retells that some have lost, some have found identity, speaking about identity seems ungrateful when many lose their lives, the roof over their heads, and their loved ones, everything began with that question and, as on a noose, everything ends with that question.

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  141 In the scene with the friend who is married to a rich American doctor, Ugrešić points to the problem of changed identity or integrated alterity which has become dominant for the acquaintance from Zagreb. The tone of the friend’s statement is filled with persuasion, illusion, a need for the past that is gone. This transformative moment of the discourse appears when retouching has become reality, and the friend has believed in it. In this circumstance, the remake, the re-​editing of the past points to the allegory of the identity of the acquaintance which becomes a contradictory, contingent subject. To her, the subject of narration Bubi is also positioned as a hesitant, temporally fixed subject in the knot of the intersection of the positions of this and other subjects of narration with which she is identified. Namely, this plurality doesn’t suggest the coexistence of the plurality of the positions of the subject of narration, but instead, it introduces constant subversion, dualist movement among them. The need for identification of the subject of narration opens the “painful incision” of the identity through the processes of construction and reconstruction which never end. The identification of the subject of narration Bubi in this novel is above determined to other identities so, according to that, the identity of Bubi and her fellow travelers can’t be read as complete, but as fragmented. It isn’t singular, it’s not homogenous, instead, it is antagonistically multiplied through the different practices, discourses, and positions of the subject of narration. It is accomplished “through” the difference, just as the identity of Ugrešić is accomplished through the different reverse looks from the fellow-​traveling subjects of narration. Identity postulates also an act of separation, parting from some previous whole, and a certain trauma of the identity, i.e., a traumatic experience of initiation (J. Deleuze/​F. Gatari), as well as stigmatization of the individual to some Other, hypostatized in the face of society. Nancy Fraser identifies what she sees as a major shift in political imaginary. The subject of narration Bubi is denominated in the contemporary political context (democracy in Berlin at the end of the twentieth century in which different cultures clash) and isn’t neutral, but instead, it is articulated through identification with the “constitutive exterior” (Berlin/​Yugoslavia). The narrator in The Museum … narrates to the diversity which is an extract of the loosened substantives in the notion of Berlin as a mutant city, a surrogate (seen through the statements of her neighbors, the Russian Ljova –​a writer, the Chinaman –​an exile, Simone Mangos –​an artist from Berlin, Herr Schroeder –​ the mailman …). White Jamaicans with braided hair walk down the streets dense with the shadows of vanished lives … In the smoky café in Oranienstrasse the Turks are listening to Turkish music and playing cards. At Kottbusser Tor, the unavoidable wind licks the posters with the joint profiles of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung. In front of the sparklingly lit BMW store in Kurfurstendamn the young spoiled Germans take photographs as mementos … (238).

142  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices The context is “mutated”, it is the causal construct for the radical interpretations of the narrator which refer to the principle of freedom and the feeling of personal non-​belonging. KITCHEN. In the experiencing of Berlin, which is in constant quarrel, Bubi experiences the history of one of her characters –​ fellow traveler Christa from East Berlin. The kitchen is the “dangerous” trope and is the differential stigma because it integrates the cultural difference which obliges (Todorov 1986). The kitchen is a cultural seal for tolerance, it is a mutual space (“sol commun”), a temporary homeland, a place for intimate dialogues of the “divided”. The kitchen is a transformed space for dialogue, and it transforms other identities. In the kitchen, the character Christa (ostberlin) relives her nightmare with a “double knot”, one unsolvable connected to the Berlin Wall, the other solvable (connected to the desire for a home). The kitchen –​ the boat is the testimony of a capricious memory, of the unconscious archiving of the accidental biographies which confirm the deep connection with things. In this scene, the field of truth is no longer an ideal, but it becomes topos, a space of location of the identity in the argumentative plot in the text. In such a case Ugrešić’s language with which the identity is verbalized is idiomatic, the universal isn’t closed in the categories of citizenship, man or being, but they are potentially present in that which “follows” as its discursive and practical playing out. The kitchen in The Museum … is the hypotext for the intimate female dialogues. But, on an intertextual level, there is a “secret” bond of the kitchen with the “kitchen series” of Ilja Kabakov which actualizes the day-​to-​day life of the kitchen in the “communal apartment” (komunalnaja kvaritra) (42) –​ a project which testifies of the bizarre language of everyday life (ironically and truthfully) inserted in the transmedial hyperreality. Therefore, the “serious” life stories of the women, narrated between the kitchen inventory, easily jump to testimonies of the “brutal aesthetics of everyday life:” (43), of the “biography measured by trash” (44), or “the kitsch of personal life” (44). The “mutual, communal apartment” is an aesthetic recoding of the east European trauma which is equal to nostalgia: “The traumas gained in the formative years are never forgotten” says one of Bubi’s fellow travelers (45). The political investment in identity fall apart at the moment when Bubi understands that even the dream of home has disappeared, and now all that remains is to call the vacant name of the other which is a wall –​in the lost Yugoslavian homeland.

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  143 A few years ago, I visited The Museum of Communism in Prague; I was invited to give a lecture on women’s labor and dissent cultures in the former Yugoslavia. The first room I entered was a red one, with an empty corner and only an old model of a telephone left at the desk that was suggested to have been ringing in communist offices. Nostalgia or post-​communist nostalgia should be a reminder of socialist times, of the system that was destroyed, of the whole symbolic representation that was destroyed in capitalism. Yugonostalgia, for me, is nostalgia for the healthcare system, which has been ruined by capitalism, nostalgia for social care protection, for high standards and values in higher education. The post-​Yugoslav people miss the socialist world in post-​socialist societies. Yugonostalgia has been raised to the level of a symbol of socialist times in Yugoslav popular culture; encompassing summer family trips with our red Fiat or Lada to Dubrovnik or Montenegro; brotherhood and unity (bratstvo i jedinstvo); socialist job security; paid summer vacations; paid sick leave; the right to free education and to healthcare; comradeship; the marginalization of nationalism and solidarity actions; a good living standard; and the Yugoslav self-​management system as a real alternative to the Soviet model of communism. The Yugoslav self-​management system gave the workers the right to have democratic control over the factories and their workplaces. The Yugoslav model was an outstanding model of socialism in Eastern Europe, a kind of a hybrid model of labor socialism and the self-​management system. In mainstream discourses, as Maria Todorova (2009) says, nostalgia is an anachronism, it is the ideology of the slaves or neglected people. But not Yugonostalgia. Yugonostalgia is something that we discuss among US scholars these days; remembering Yugoslavia as a model somewhere between the United States’ capitalism and the Soviet Union’s communism. All the memories grow around Yugo-​Communism or are about the Yugoslav welfare model: health services and healthcare rights, including national health insurance; social security and care; the right to paid leave; the idea that the increase of the health budget automatically meant a pay rise for the healthcare workers; decentralization through self-​government processes; the economic stability; workers’ participation in the economic sphere; the democratization of the workplace through workers’ participation in the decision-​making processes; peace; no borders; free travel and no visas. I shall limit myself to cultural memory here. Memory theory distinguishes between personal and collective memory (Assmann 2002), so I understand cultural memory as externalization and objectivation of memory, which is individual in images and other lieux de mémoire. In cultural and political theory, every image of the past, which is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns, is threatened to disappear irretrievably. Human memory is always related to time and identity. Each form of memory has its specific time-​range.

144  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices The distinction between different forms of memory refers to their structure and it works more as a dynamic, creating tension and transition between the different perspectives of the discussion. Personally, I didn’t want to look at Tito’s portrait above the refrigerator in the kitchen in the everyday households when I was a girl. I didn’t want him to look at me while I was eating pink strawberry ice cream with my little sister. I also have a traumatic experience from the blue uniforms that we had to wear to school –​ I wanted anarchy at that moment, to use that weird material and to transform it into a short skirt, into a blue flag, putting on my blue lipstick and dyeing my hair blue at the same time. Macedonian nostalgia today is a socialist nostalgia against capitalism. Once, I gave my Yugoslav boyfriend the book Lexicon of Yu Mythology[4]‌as a gift on our first date. But I don’t only make romance with raw communism. Jodi Dean, a professor and a strong voice of left-​wing critique, the author of Comrade (2019), while speaking about Vivian Gornick’s book Romance of American Communism (first published in 1977) mentions that American communism is an “enduring human feeling” rather than a set of specific principles. Jodi Dean refuses all accommodation with the language of identity and self-​realization, as Gustavus Stadler mentioned in the great essay “A Communism of Feelings” (2020). Why is this important for my understanding of Yugonostalgia? Political memory shares its externalized quality with cultural memory, but it depends on the political context that institutes it; whereas cultural memory grows over time, as an interaction between nostalgia, a structural organization in society, and political actions. Yugonostalgia is about being a communist, but it is also about being fully human. Yugonostalgia is also about the commodification of the Yugoslav past (in the sense of kitsch), from the contemporary point of view, but also it is about consuming transformative epiphany, an evocation of private museums of vintage Yugoslav books in our homes, vinyls, collectible shoes, the culture of everyday life, the memory of the socialist past and the quality of life and solidarity in the post-​socialist narratives today in a sepia soc-​realist filter. Grandmother’s and grandfather’s white Fićo, aunty’s red Yugo, Dupa’s Dio video club, small rock clubs, bars 2F, Café ZZ-​Top, Visage, Bazar magazine, Politikin Zabavnik, Vuna magazine, “Pletenje” books, vacations on the Island of Mamula (Montenegro), Solidarnost posters, Black Wave movies, Partisan movies, Crvena Zvezda and Partizan football teams, learning Cyrillic vs Latin script. Linda Hutcheon (1988) pointed out that nostalgia is always “transideological”, or something that could be described as longing about “identity illusion” (Sen 2006). In my first theoretical book Narrative Identities, I write about the museum of memories, a socialist daily life journey built in the narratives of Dubravka Ugrešić, a writer from ex-​Yugoslavia, and Christa Wolf, a writer and director from Germany. I work on memory politics not as a representation of memory, but rather as the enactment of the operations of memory, in the sense of Renate

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  145 Lachmann (1997), reading colonial and postcolonial discourses and cultural artefacts. In a philosophical sense, I pointed out the differences between history and historiography, and how the past that is “not” recognized by the present will be lost. Memory functions in the direction of identity which, in all contexts, always implies a notion of difference. In this sense, to speak about Yugonostalgia today means to speak about a belief system of a certain time, it means to speak about these times through memory-​preservation practices. A few weeks ago, in an a public social-​network-​aired conversation about the essay “What the end of Yugoslavia taught me about belonging” by A. Baric (2020), Patrizia Nobbe (executive director at the Alliance of Seven German Universities of Applied Sciences –​UAS7) mentioned that almost the same painful sentiment resonates within the Eastern Germany. She was right. It is easy to romanticize a state that no longer exists. The GDR example unveils a micro-​level of societal relations that was only possible due to non-​autonomous entities such as the work brigades, or social organizations, with limited freedom of expression. In post-​ communist times, the rhetoric of totalitarianism wanted to make people believe that their lives under socialism were misery, which points to a tension between freedom and oppression. Today, the global left should build the economy on the basis of democratic socialism. At this moment, I can only note this approach in the campaign of Gloria La Riva, an American socialist activist, focused on how to save the periphery from the pressures of the global market; how to strengthen solidarity within the women’s labor market in post-​socialist gender regimes; how to fight against unemployment and against precarity and to build a strong radical mass movement. This plan for a broader vision, beyond the European Union project, requires a renewed cooperation between the post-​Yugoslav nations across the Balkans.42 If Christa T. in her thoughts escapes the nightmarish home –​in another (utopian home), then Bubi loses her home, as opposed to the invisible wall which rises in her homeland. Christa T. looks for harmonious feelings within the state, and the longing for home is an escape from the totalitarian communist regime, but again, unavoidably within its frames. In spatial dimensions, for Bubi there is no refuge in the home, the experience is disharmonious to the country she comes from, she becomes homeless. Both homes, Christa T’s and Bubi’s are demolished, Christa T. dies and Bubi continues to temporarily inhabit the border between the idea of the home and the temporary refugee residence, but it is clear that to be homeless (un-​homely) for Bubi is a new provocation for writing and creative existence, experiencing the poetics of homelessness (unheimlich). Exile is the threshold from which she will see the conditions in the country she comes from, the place where she’ll become accomplished as a writer. In this case, leaving the home is understood as un-​homing, seen as an inevitable heuristic route (or epistemology) to self-​discovery.

146  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices All these paradoxes are reflected in the context of the narrator in The Museum… The context (Berlin/​Yugoslavia) is Bubi’s formation which is always constituted in correlation to another individual or culture. Rancière calls this process un-​ identification, de-​classification, but in the same sense functions the term dissemination –​ DissemiNation. The political identification of the narrative “I” in The Museum … is located in an in-​between position (kinsmen to the feeling of not belonging, in a broader sense would be a refugee, the remaining exiles in Berlin, the immigrants, compatriots). The identification of the narrative “I” is placed in relation with the “borderline” identities and “borderline” names which connect the name of the “group” with the name of the non-​group or non-​belonging: “they are all Bosnians, only I am from Zagreb. I avoid saying that I’m not a refugee” (234). For the narrator there follows a feeling of unclear belonging, being an outsider or non-​belonging, she identifies neither with the compatriots from her own country nor with the Berliners. In the philosophy of political identity, this “net of non-​identification” which is problematic in Ugrešić’s narrative –​ has the property of involving “impossible compositions” (Rancière), namely –​ to promote the exile who always has the advantage (Said) or the thesis: I belong to more than one history, more than one group, but, to none completely. Conceptually, this kind of contestation rests on the capacity for reflexivity, or as Nancy Fraser thinks on the ability to jump to another level and reflect on one’s first-​order practice. From the point of political narratosophy, one way to understand the politics of non-​belonging is a kind of meta-​practice, which seeks to order –​first-​order social practice through an intentional process of actions of the (always –​ already) new society. Non-​belonging status is one way to understand politics and reflexivity as a hallmark of political radicalism, to make nation-​state-​belonging an object of critique and political action. From political narratosophy aspects this “division” of personal identity of characters in fiction opens several positions of interpretation: spatial-​geographic position (leaving the hometown, leaving the sense of belonging –​forcibly or voluntarily, through the life which is lived at the same time at two places, through an analysis of the ambiguity of living in a divided option. The radicalism of ‘non-belonging’ signifies one who doesn’t belong anywhere, with the capacity to interrogate the frame, to make it an object of critique, not to treat problems in the form in which they are given and established in the frame, but to be an observer and to make the frame itself the focus of attention and potential reconstruction. The observer always remains outside, as a split of the whole, the one who continues to live as excluded from the ordinary political practice in society. In Ugrešić Culture of Lies, one reads: “however we are not interested in the third kind: expatriates, nomads, bastard, wossies … The ones who unite within them are the genes of the traumatic Wessie and Ossie. They belong to the new tribe, to people without permanent addresses. They feel at their most natural in an airplane. It’s hard to recognize them because they mimic easily” (272).

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  147 It is like deconstructing the meta-​contestation of the ‘politics of framing’ (Nancy Fraser).43 During the demonstration of the political identity, according to Rancière’s model of understanding, Ugrešić’s Museum … follows the syllogistic logic (one or the other, I am a citizen or I’m not), especially in the identification of self in the foreign language: “Ich bin müde, is the only German sentence I know so far. At this moment I don’t even want to learn more. To learn more means to open up. And I want to remain closed for a while longer” (11). So, the space of identification of the political identity happens in an interval or a gap, to accomplish the personal identity up to a degree in which the subject of narration will “find” itself in an in-​between condition (Homi Bhaba) in which it will be able to speak between different names, nations, cultures. The refugee status in The Museum is connected to the borders of immigration, homelessness, where in terms of postcolonial critique “human beings create their history”: I had lost my homeland. I still couldn’t get used to the loss, nor to the fact that I gained another one that is the same, but different. In only one year I have lost my home, my friends, my job, the possibility to return soon, but also the desire to return. All in all, a story too long to be told here … Namely, Europe was full of the likes of me. I met my compatriots everywhere, Bosnians, Croatians, Serbs. Our stories were different, and somehow they all came down to the same thing (144). The exile is determined by the potential (longing) for narration typical for the re-​writing of history. Ugrešić knows that it’s impossible to reconstruct the past in its complete reality because there is a multitude of intersections through different interpretations. The facts are interfered with by politics (but also by fiction) and naturally, they demand to speak themselves. The destabilization and disturbance of the monological uniform historical representations (Foucault) place under a question mark the relations between truth and the systems of power. The relation between the signifier and the signified is loosened, and language gains uncertain nature. It makes Ugrešić’s story “too long to be narrated”. Politicizing ‘the personal’ (Nancy Fraser) through exile is something that has an ambivalent relation to social democracy. Talking about reasons for exile is a way of giving space to the socialist imaginary analysis as a basis for the more radical imagination of the real historical movements to which this novel refers. The hesitation of identity in Ugrešić’s writings happens according to the pluralism activated around the area of political and aesthetic valuation (thus happens the fluidity of history and its rewriting). This “uncomfortable” position or displacement, division, the discomfort of the subject of narration motions the discourse of heterology (of the other subjects of narration) as an illusive strategy, and the intervals or gaps in history are produced as signifiers of untruthfulness/​ fictionalization in The Museum: “we repeat the history of the great conquerors,

148  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices instead of a flag (we draw) a small x sign). Those little firm facts … pile up and at one point turn into indistinguishable lines. And only then, do they begin to research the internal map of the imaginary” (117). The logic of political (and hence national) identification is accomplished only as a logic of heterology, or rather narration, accomplished through the logic of the other. Rancière connects this logic to others on three levels. In the theory of nationalism and discourses of national identity thinking, erasing the Yugoslav identity became the only possible way to create new national identities and legitimize the wars and trauma of the nineties and the disappearance of the country. That is something I call the erosive fiction of nationalism. Denationalization leads to a space that doesn’t necessarily require a new national identity. First, there is no a priori simplified announcing and acceptance of the identity, but instead the identity always denotes a certain refusal, a questioning of belonging (a feeling of belonging or a feeling of non-​belonging, and therefore comes the divided feeling –​ the divided “I” (both for Ugrešić and Wolf). Identity in a such case needs to comment on the protocolar order of politics, the imposed master strategy for identification –​ the national-​socialism which Ugrešić introduces in Culture of Lies to ironize it: “Identity, national identity, that is the keyword for war … Identity, national identity, in all of that lies the key reason and fuse, the key delusion and defeat” (217). Milan Kundera’s thesis also functions in this interweaving of the national-​ideological strategies, namely, ideology belongs to history, imagology begins where history ends. On a second level of reading Rancière I would point to the display of the identity which, by definition (always) assumes the other, even if he refuses testimonials and arguments. Rancière stages a general polemical area that will not be a space for dialogue, but rather a place for manipulation with injustice and portrayal of equality (which is why Ugrešić calls the culture of the ex-​Yugoslavia the culture of lies). Thirdly, the logic of identification always strives towards complete identification. The opposition of the superior narratives supports the personal story in a certain historical time and place such as those found by Ugrešić. Ugrešić’s understanding of time and space (chronotope) is as a postmodern meta-​critical reading of the past and present, as palimpsest additional writing, simulation, and mystification of the Russian authors, the Russian avant-​garde while rereading her personal story through that of the writers in exile. At the same time the axis East-​West is actualized and “brought down” to a plain fitness club in The Museum: In this town, the fitness club is my temple for healing, I notice that I come here more and more often, the price of calmness is cheap … Here come female samurais, strong, tall, young women with perfect muscles, flaws, tight jaws,

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  149 and impenetrable gazes, so different from me. One-​two, one-​two. We march in a line, us moving dolls, each one determines her rhythm. The Mercedes triple star revolves slowly, its revolving throws me into a hypnotic half-​ dream. As if with a laser, the metal deity polishes the rough scars of the city, calms the times and the sides of the world, the past and the present, the East and the West (238). The fitness club (just like the kitchen) is another bond, a connector with the context of the text, it’s a syncretic “union”, a “culturological paradigm” in which differences in cultural identities are essentialized. The referential frame is broader than the borders of the Former Yugoslavia; the East–​West dichotomy is now reread through a woman and, as Rada Ivekovic allusively states, the East becomes only an exterior, a façade for the West, and the woman is the essence, the “core” of the other, of the West.44 Every narration about the identity is unavoidably conditioned by the existential position, by the status of its author and narrator. A fitness club is a small place where people have the right to have rights, a space for the stateless people. In Scales of Justice, Nancy Fraser talks for a moment about Hannah Arendt when, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she noted that, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nations does not exist. But this Arendt formulation, the phrase “for the time being” opens the cloud of the possibility, of some new developments, some different emerging of basic human needs, started at the fitness club, not mediated through places where the statelessness regime is prevented. On the other hand, reading the fitness club through Hardt and Negri’s view this would be one more global space lacking democratic accountability, giving space to the interests of capitalist logic, the addiction of market demands and corporate capital. Or, reading fitness club through Jodi Dean’s theories of democracies, it is a place where imaginary identities are built (Hardt and Negri use the term ‘singularities’). In Žizek’s Politics, Jodi Dean argues that neoliberalism relies on imaginary identities; they replace symbolic identities. These identities do not show that subjects are somehow freer or more liberated than they were under the discipline of the welfare state. Rather, they come under different sets of controls, different organizations of enjoyment. Read together with Hardt and Negri, Jodi Dean and Žizek’s notion of the decline of symbolic identities, there is a ‘new way’ of imagining ourselves. As Jodi Dean notes, we thus encounter under neoliberalism a situation where symbolic efficiency declines, where symbolic prohibitive norms are increasingly replaced by imaginary ideals (of social success, the best fittest body), and neoliberal ideology does not produce its subjects by interpellating them into symbolically anchored identities (structured according to conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship), but new norms of ‘freedom’ appears.

150  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices After writing this book, for the first time in life, I don’t feel blank that Socialist Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore. My country has disappeared, but a new discipline of political narratosophy has appeared. And that is my home of narrating again, now. Like those Yugoslav trains that still keep narrative –​ in –​ transit –​ alive.45 The transition experienced by the post-​socialist Yugoslavia is rooted in the ideological paradigms and political practices that, in the Macedonian case, give space to the grey zone of economic capitalism and ethno-​­nationalism (including patriarchalism, xenophobia, nationalism, traditionalism). The hegemonic narratives of recreating historical heritage were most visible during the rule of Nikola Gruevski (2006–​2016), when Macedonians experienced an authoritarian government and a political constellation that encouraged severe revisionism and anticommunist readings of history, rewriting it through antiquity. The revision of the history by Gruevski’s government started by the validation of identification with antiquity, as an “adopted” part of the past interpreted as “ours”. This deepened the conflict with Greece at the level of diplomatic discourse. Skopje 2014 was a massive project of public sculptures, monuments, offices, administrative buildings, historical museums that gave off the aura of Disneyland. Skopje 2014 was a project of pop-​hyperreality of simulated nationalism to be built, in Jean Baudrillard’s (1981) terms. In front of our eyes, we saw the semantic Disneyfication of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, with its most communist architecture and brutal modernist buildings (like the Central Post Office by Janko Konstantinov). Disneyland here is presented as an imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and America that surround it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation associated in our case with Ancient Macedonia. Project Skopje 2014 has become a project of empty signifiers, of empty identification with antiquity, understood in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994). It shows that the sociality of desiring production is to amend the Freudian conception of the libido structured around antiquity as trauma. This process of building Skopje 2014 does not civilize the traumatic experience but is the effect of distortions arising out of the system of antiquity itself. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Sigmund Freud (1994), what was ultimately repressed now exists in the visibility of mass visualization. In the terminology used by Freud, this is where unconscious activity takes place, where ideology is produced and where the regulation of the economy of sexual drives reproduces the distortion with fascist tendencies over the people. It is a restrictive set of traumatic memory practices at imaginary and symbolic levels. As Slavoj Žižek

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  151 (1989) puts it in his reflection on ideological hegemony: it is thus not the case of some particular content directly filling the void, but rather, the very form of ideological universality bears witness to the struggle between (at least) two particular contents: the “popular” content expressing the secret longings of the dominated majority, and the specific content expressing the forces of domination. All forms of fascist, imperialist, dictatorial mysticism can be traced back to the distortion caused by the patriarchal and authoritarian organization of the state. Skopje 2014 is about the crisis of identity, the crisis of the interpretation of identity. It was a project based on the principles of reduction ab absurdum, where the motto of “organization” of society by the “narcissistic leader” (authoritarian) have the same status in Freud’s libidinal economy of meaning. Antiquity was never at the forefront of Macedonian history; Macedonians have Slavic roots which are reflected in the language, in the cultural context, and in the Orthodox religion. The process of inserting antiquity started with forced street-​name changes and with the erection of the grand Alexander the Great monument in the center of Skopje. In Lacanian terms, an object was elevated to the dignity of the Thing. Hence, the object of hegemonic investment is simply the name that is appreciated within a certain historical horizon; this is a politically motivated approach. This was how national homogenization was approached by the right-​ wing and nationalistic political parties. Avoiding the resolution of the “identity crisis” in the negotiations with Greece and transposing themselves into antiquity provoked the return of cold diplomatic relations. Skopje 2014 was also a project that removed certain monuments from the period of socialist Yugoslavia. One of the famous monuments that were removed was “Obelisk” –​ a symbol commemorating Nazi occupation. For more than 40 years, this monument was a symbol of World War II, until it was replaced with a statue of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, and his family. The reason for its removal was not given. “Officially” it was part of the reconstruction of the city, but behind the operation was the Gruevski government’s aim to make money off the project. Just recently, the new left-​wing government decided to demolish the monuments of Skopje 2014, which is another politics of erasing the past, erasing memory, paradoxically leaving traces of another ideology. There is no hegemony without the construction of a popular (grand) identity out of plurality within the relational complex which explains the conditions of both the forces from the below and above. Hegemony is merely the positive reversal of a situation experienced as “deficient being”. The logic of the objet petit a (empty signifier in the Lacanian sense) and hegemonic logic are not just similar, they are identical. In political philosophy, there is an attempt to polarize in terms of opposing revolution and reformism, but what escapes this line of thinking is the alternative logic of the objet petit a –​this is to say, the possibility that can become an impossible totality (in other words hegemony). This is the way, in the Marxist tradition, how the Gramscian representation of hegemony

152  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices acts as a crucial epistemological break. The only possible totalizing horizon is given by the hegemonic force, which enacts the representation of a mythical totality. As Ernesto Laclau explains in On Populist Reason (2005), the popular symbol or identity (expressed as antiquity in the Macedonian case), being a surface of inscription, does not passively express what is inscribed in it, but actually constitutes what it expresses through the very process of its expression. In other words, expressing “unity of the nation” through antiquity and monuments is the decisive moment in establishing this unity; through the process of inserting antiquity in overlap with the previous historical layers. I have recently attended a Zoom promotion and discussion on a new book, The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century, Vol. 3 (Intellectual Horizons of the Twentieth Century). In the discussion that I had with Holly Case, a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on the relationship between foreign and social policies in the European state system of the twentieth century, we addressed precisely the issues raised here. Post-​Yugoslav countries, in an attempt to overcome a traumatized history, have continued to build hyper-​politicized memories. I am interested in the question that is related to unfolding the collective memories of a nation: from which position of memory narration do we speak and teach about intellectual history, hegemony, margins and dominant cultures? What is feminist there? I think the answer lies in the recognition of suppressed memories and relations to the force of the state’s hegemony, both political and economic, within the discussion on revisionist cultural memory politics. The socialist society that we had in the former Yugoslavia started to disappear with the transition and the privatization of socially owned property through wild capitalist and corruption processes. After the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, Macedonian factories were shut down and destroyed by privatization, notably the textile and garment industry, which has traditionally been feminized and related to women’s labor. This happened under the former Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski’s government (1992–​1998), when the middle class began to vanish, immediately after the country’s independence. The privatization processes in Macedonia have been worse than in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. History says that in April 1949 in Washington, D.C., 12 states from both sides of the Atlantic founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Pact. One of the tasks of this group was to challenge the threats from the communist part of the world and to stop the spread of communism in the rest of Europe. Eastern Europe was a euphemism for real socialism. The term was used for the first time by Soviet and Eastern European theorists focusing on Marxist-​Leninism in Yugoslavia, China, and Third World countries; all of which also called themselves “socialist”. There is a difference between a communist

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  153 (revolutionary) totalitarian regime and a socialist republic as its antidote. The construction of long-​term hegemony is the process of emptying cultural and historical signifiers in the construction of a historical singularity of the dominant narrative, and this is structural pressure of forces in a society. These are the official historical tendencies in populism today; in terms of what it lacks, its ideological emptiness, empty signifiers and hegemony, its anti-​intellectualism, its transitory character, and generalized rhetoric. The official politics in the former Yugoslavia was based on “internationalism”, international relations with anti-​ imperialist social and political movements fighting for solidarity; and on the global struggle for socialism, self-​management, freedom and democracy.46 Changing the name Macedonia into North Macedonia is a surgical political act that shows the process of identification depends on the exclusion of differences in praxis, and, unfortunately, a hierarchal opposition in political decisions. The name-​change implemented by the political elites is a successful ending to the Macedonians’ agonizing dispute with Greece over the name issue. But, it is also a painful process for Macedonians that has made them feel odd, humiliated, with ugly feelings (Ngai 2007); especially with the current blockade by Bulgaria that took place at the end of 2020. This happened after years of the country’s “pending” status in front of the doors of the EU. Hence, due to the existence of the conditions for “calculative” possibilities towards history, I see the memory politics of interpretation as being at the forefront of political philosophy. This is not equal to the interpretative practices of political theory and political comments but means addressing the correlation of the authority of the interpreter (elites) vis-​à-​vis the established social-​political authority of the other interpreters and contexts. The Macedonian case shows that this name change only happened because of the anticipative praxis towards the EU, which means that this decision cannot be abstracted from the political and the contextual drama of the present. The political discourse of revisionism in the Macedonian context is realized in the palimpsest manner of transitional practices towards the EU. These practices also demonstrate the obscure processes of dealing with the historical heritage that Macedonia shares with Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia; in the contemporary wild “grey zone” of global capitalism. There is a tension between memory as a distinctive force on the one hand, and memory with its integrating and prospective tendencies, on the other hand. The Greek veto on the name of “Macedonia” lasted for years. In October 2019, France, led by Emmanuel Macron, put a veto on Macedonia continuing the process of integration into

154  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices the European Union. In late November 2020, Bulgaria blocked the opening of Macedonia’s negotiation process over integration into the EU, questioning the concepts of the Macedonian nation, identity, language and history. Bulgaria has demanded negotiations on these issues before the integration process is resumed. The EU could “exclude” these bilateral issues and mark them as “venues between two neighboring states”, that is questions that must be negotiated in the future, but simultaneously allow Macedonia to continue the accession process. Contrary to this, I see a quiet demonstration of power by the EU over Macedonia at the moment. This is not a porn trade parade. Do they want pathetic discourses, or Macedonia asking for mercy? Or, they are forcing a nation to be auto-​corrected (erased in history) in order to later be invited to dinner? No, thank you. I see these “Europeanization” processes as a demonstration of power over the “generation of transitions”. Bulgaria, with its empty rhetoric, is thus allowed to have a night of bad-​quality fun. The periphery of cultural memory politics has the strength to transform Europe from the inside. From a democratic perspective, cultural differences that come from the small countries should be left to exist in Europe. From a left-​wing perspective, the process of EU integration has uncovered another angle of the “new” peripheries of the South-​Eastern European countries and countries in transition. One of the questions that concern me the most is: Could one speak about global memory practices while there is an awareness of post-​ colonialism? In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova talks about imagology, an entire discipline that deals with the images and memory of the Other. Vetoes from France and Bulgaria testify to the domination and power of the European Union. In terms of symbolic conventions and the semantics of political discourse, it implies that Macedonia is “not ready” –​ as states the rhetoric of the Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva. In the context of memory practices, the process of Europeanization itself implies an obvious difference from the European “family”. The EU should be more pragmatic in finding a way of integrating “the rest” of South-​Eastern European periphery memories and the peripheral position of these memories, a place where the past is located in the present, a space where experience and the yet-​to-​be or not-​yet-​experienced future converge. The never-​ending pending status of Macedonia is worse than “to be colonized”. The EU has its balkanizing gaze of keeping some parts of Europe at an inferior stage; it seems that not all Europeans are equal, some of them are more European than others. Edward Said says to be colonized means potentially to be a great many different, but inferior things, in many different places, at many different times. Actually, through the Bulgarian veto, Europe speaks without speaking, you can sense the dominant position over the other countries, as in the case of insisting on changing the Church’s calendar from the Julian to the

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  155 Gregorian variant, a demand that Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria accepted. Most Macedonian Orthodox people find this a sensitive question. All this takes place in the context of democratization strategies, and to construct homogenous “European” citizens. Memory is invested with “unification” claims, in other words, unification has an impact on memory production on different levels, and not only in the global arena. Through the rhetoric of Bulgaria’s veto, the European Union insists on shaping and transforming all local and national memories in response to the challenges of a homogenous “European” citizen and the colonization of memory cultures and memory politics. What move should be taken now? Is it the European Union’s official demand that all differences (language, culture, history, nation) from the prospective EU countries be “unified”? If the answer is yes, then Macedonia should stop this political saga towards the EU and should try to find an alternate set of moves.47 Schism: Dispersion and Spectralization If the first part of this book polemized that history is verbal fiction that is half-​ fictional, which is a persuasive portrayal of a certain viewpoint during the intermediation of language, then new historicism has offered a transformed modus of history, namely that its truth becomes a construct, a constructed story which isn’t already contained in the data about the events. Can’t we say that if the past is taken as a story, then history becomes historiography or a scheme for reading practices that deal in a dialectic way with the existing texts that are a compound of the culturologically constructed forms of knowledge, beliefs, codes, and customs? Michel Foucault shows the “slipperiness” of language which is the manipulative fan in this situation. He believes that history isn’t an unavoidable explanatory horizon, not a way for the discovery of the inherent truth or the meaning of the event. The forms of thinking, truth, and explanation may appear in a different form than that of the historical narrative. For Foucault the historical understanding doesn’t refer to the event, but rather to the development of thought, thus emphasizing the discursive practice of the text. In this sense, in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the subject of narration, Bubi, empathizes with the “fear”, with the tone of the uttered which at the same time holds the power of the written. The sentence spoken by the mother “directs” the cruel arrow of destiny: I added the sentence –​ Now I don’t even know who I am anymore, or where I am, or whom I belong to –​in the already written text, on the day when my mom spoke it, on September 20, 1991 –​ aware that it could be the last sentence I will ever write ... The sentence is entered in the text between two air-​ attack sirens ... The sentence from her diary written two years earlier –​ God forbid that which is being whispered of to happen –​happened (60).

156  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices If we call upon the writing of history as heterology, as thinking about otherness, the other face of history and language (de Certeau) then Ugrešić studies/​writes history through the language of fear and uncertainty, but also irony. According to Jacques Derrida, by the very fact that man thinks about the origin of reason as a term, about history or truth as terms, he has already used the language of reason and history and has included himself in them. Ugrešić doesn’t venture into this “reasonable” language. She remains outside of it, at first attempting to protect the native language (the mother’s talk), to afterward, at one point, saying that that language too is dispersed in relativized entities and is auto-​referentially undermined because her native Serbo-​Croatian no longer exists. That is why she needs to be quiet at the same time, following the logic that “history is ... suppression in the unutterable”, (Ivekovic 1986, 101), but also to look for a way out and contact publishers outside her native lingual area. At this point the thesis that Ugrešić attempts to “look” for identity at the same time in writing and uttering becomes valid, and precisely that polysemic position (that any writing is also representing) confirms the inventive implication of the facts in fiction, forcing the multiple possibilities in writing. Ugrešić’s narrativized identity is always in correlation with its contradictions, it is conflicting in its own internal and external divisions which are compared through the projection of herself in the “diverse” cultural unity. According to the logic of Jacques Derrida, it is impossible for the narrator of The Museum ... to “grasp” culture as a theoretical object towards which identity strives. Namely, during this research so far, we saw that it is impossible to translate “culture” as a complete “semantical horizon” of all discourses of narration that attempt to determine identity. In Ugrešić’s work, the identity of the subject of narration moves from language to practice/​performance. Memory and the Museum: Politicizing the Memory, the Matrix, the Monster, the Museum Real events (or those that appear to be so) within the frames of the historical discourse are marked as real, not because they actually took place, but because they are remembered as such, and placed in a certain chronological line. The trace, the image traces (vestigia) are connected to the images which additionally are yet to appear (the images anticipatio). In this process of “awakening” of the notions which have happened and those that are about to happen, appear the aporias and the need for a collision of the temporal time (the personal mortal time) and the historical public time in the linear line of the moment. What are the traces of memory in the works of D. Ugrešić and Wolf? Up to what point can the trace be an extreme memory capital for the doom or sustaining of the identity of the narrating subject? Why are the mechanisms of memory important for the analysis of narrative identity? If the event exists only in the anamnesis/​memory, then memory is an evocation of the images, the external becomes internal, the past becomes present, and annuls the spatial and temporal axis, paradoxically,

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  157 by becoming modus of the present. As Aleida Assmann thinks, the images from the past exist in the spiritual world of man in the same way as the learned, received, philosophical experience exists.48 The Centre of the anamnesically distributed space is the unpredictability, the unexpectedness, and repetition of the historical events in the present. Memory becomes a continuous renewal of the present confirmation of the past, and it’s as if the past doesn’t even exist. Ricoeur’s thesis states that memory “overturns” the natural flow of time. What exactly does that mean? Grammatically analyzed, the present of the narration is an artery of the past (the perfect) of the summarized autobiographic narration. Remembering is struggling hard to re-​experience history. That doesn’t mean to avoid talking about the past, but rather to activate the vital, juicy material, the trace of history which reminds us of the present, and then to narrate it with new dimensions in reality. In the novels The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Thinking about Christa T.) and Patterns of Childhood the traces are stretched through photographs, through the documented institutionalized archived records (institutionalized, because in a given social formation they carry within themselves their ideology), video materials, performances, artistically exhibited works, old objects … According to Ricoeur’s definition, the trace becomes a mark by the status of the remainder of the thing which existed and passed. For Ugrešić, the traces are a summary of the past and passing, same as the certain permanence and the existence of the trace as a mark. The trace has its mathematics, it relies upon the dialectics of the simultaneous uncovering and hiding, it is something that can signify, but not enable the appearance of the entire past. Because of that Ugrešić creates a decomposed, almost completely dispersed narration of traces/​ memories. In the novel there are two photographs that the author always carries along, the first is the picture with the three unknown female bathers, and the second is the scene “Group photo”, a photograph from the last meeting with her friends and the angel Alfred which comes down in the story. These photographs in The Museum … are a snapshot into the emptiness, the whiteness of the life which is no longer there. They are proof of the lost identity which exists only in the memory as a sole relevant reality. … The very act of arranging the photographs in the album is guided by our unconscious desire to show life in its total diversity, and life in the result (i.e., the album) is reduced to a chain of dead fragments. Autobiography has a similar problem, in the technology of memory; it deals with that which once was, and that which once was is researched by someone who is now (36). The photographs which Bubi carries along are the trace that is necessary to be carried along as proof which is occasionally “looked” at, with the conclusion that the past existed after all. The narration through which the narrative identity in Ugrešić’s novel is constructed is accomplished through

158  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices the multiplication of the photograph. This type of narration is an attempt to edit and organize (the arranging) of the life that has already gone by, and placing them in albums is an additional chronology of the events, an attempt to retouch, remake history in the quasi-​world of the narrative (or the world of fictionalized statements). Through narration and photography is motioned the subjectivity of a specific “I” which through a multitude of fragmented relations, meetings, and confrontations with the “other” in its cultural identity, is made aware and shapes its own “narrative”; if not real, then at least imaginary in the space of the book/​museum. In such a case, the dilemmas about the identity and decentralization of the subject are based on the text of words and images. If history is made of personal memories then, as Benjamin exposes, photography doesn’t belong to history; instead, it offers history. Photography is reducing the immense world to a little square, photography is our measure of the world, memory is reducing the world to little squares, and arranging those squares into an album is autobiography in Ugrešić’s work. Christa. On the other hand, the photography in Fascist Germany and the GDR has the function of a documentary testimonial. Photography is proof, brutally burned, and destroyed. The adult narrator in the Patterns … doesn’t have many family photographs to remember the past with, because the family photographs are harshly censored (as are the books) and burned by the government so that there could be no documented testimonial of the Nazi regime: Facilitators of memory. The lists of names, the sketches of the cities … You have begun to separate the few photographs because the thick family albums are probably burnt by the later inhabitants of the building in Soldiner street. So that there’ll be no talk about the endless information from that time (13) … still … photographs are imprinted in memory as constant statues and it’s insignificant whether they can be exhibited as proof (34, italics by me). The mechanisms of memory in the works of Christa Wolf are very close to those in the works of Ugrešić. Wolf relies solely upon the fact “imprinted” in her memory, and she reconstructs the past as an artistic imaginative variation (not factographic). The proof is extracted from memory, instead of the referential reality. Through the story Christa Wolf reconstructs temporality or, to put it another way, the re-​inscription of each already given reality is accomplished through metaphorization that starts from the heterogeneous “invention of similarity”, while the syntagmas “to see as” and “to be as” come together. That enables the occurrence of a world in the making (Ricoeur), which is variable depending on the variation of the sensibility that constructs a heuristic fiction, which then organizes the plot that further develops in accordance with the essential primordial modes of temporality. This freedom of the narrator to fictionalize to the past or present is entering the risky neutralization of the historical time –​a theme which is present also in The Museum … of Ugrešić.

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  159 The narrator in the Patterns … says: “we differentiate the following types of memory: mechanical, creative, logical, verbal, material, active memory. The type of moral memory is missing” (47). What is moral thinking? What must be forgotten on purpose, what has to be remembered? Up to what point do memory and amnesia have the function of a painkiller? Moral memory is that which rushes into the abyss of Nazism, and later communism, both for Wolf and D. Ugrešić. This type of memory expresses the power of dominion. Therefore, the phenomenology of lying is clear –​ why do entire eras and cultures insist upon saying one thing and thinking another? In the Patterns … the adult narrator reexamines the power of permanence in memory, asking herself in what correlation is memory with the phenomena of political cynicism? That is why at this point it is necessary to call upon the unions that are facilitators of memory, names, cities, sketches. However, in Fascist, and later East Germany, in the time when Christa Wolf writes, everything is under “optic control”. Fascism, by definition, suggests potential multiplication of factography and carries a potential responsibility for a specific historical moment. Benjamin notes that no fascism is not affected by the ideology of the facts (read: realism) that at the same time belongs and doesn’t belong to the technical reproduction of the history of photography. Photography in the German fascism and soc-​realism should fit into the program of self-​information and self-​production of the fascist regime politics. But, Christa Wolf politicizes, in her way, this factographic aesthetic and she answers through writing and metaphorization of the language. Language is her medium, rather than photography. Betting on language instead of photography makes sense in accordance with the attempt to abandon factographic control and censorship, which, certainly, has consequences in the texts of Christa Wolf, but is also a bold creative intrusion into the technology of danger; this time in the domain of the verbal medium in a rigid political context. How does this work through narratosophy? What radical inclination might it lead to? First, fascism could not be clear politics. I am inspired by the Rancièrian concept that fascistic or quasi-​fascistic movements of the extreme right are not political, but rather contemporary parapolitical modes of social policing. I would like to address Jodi Dean’s Leninist-​Lacanian interpretation commenting on Rancièrian work that politics can never be pure because it takes place within spaces that are also policed –​ as its main failing. For Rancière, democracy is an abstract line, it is a synonym for politics, for Dean, politics can be fascist, anarchist, imperial, or communist. I am reading Rancière’s politics through discursive, symbolic meaning, so fascism in Dean’s terms is not accommodated by the system; it is not political, instead it’s a form of policing. Language. In Thinking about Christa T. the language is disguised, masked, coded, inhibited, weak, but it is indicative language –​ a premise according to which, from a present point of view, the truth about the contextual confines is evaluated. Paradoxically, in The Museum … Ugrešić attempts to develop the language of photography which will be closer to the truth because the verbal

160  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices native (ex-​Yugoslav) is “castrated”. That is why Bubi is liberated in the speech when she talks through the “filters” of the foreign language because it is clear that the language of photography is at the heart of reality since, through it, the “facts of life” are reengaged. That is why Bubi’s pain and nostalgia now become sharpened in a configurational validity of these photographs. In Patterns of Childhood the adult narrator comments on the power of masking of the speech in the language which decides on its own what to say, and what to keep unspoken: Memory betrays in an incredible, it has to be said, disagreeable way … Not to think about it anymore. Instructions that are faithfully followed for years. To avoid certain memories. Not to speak of it. To stifle the words, the chains of words, entire lines of thoughts which could cause remembering … And the realization that the language separates, that it filters by eliciting naming: in the sense of desire. In the sense of punishment. In the sense of determination. How can the established behavior be forced into a spontaneous expression? (275–​77, emphasis my own). The language of Christa Wolf has a polemic background (with a disagreeable silence). Her language is sanctioned by the ideological institutionalized revisions: “That lingual silence. The good lighting of the family pictures without words. A silent play of movements of the well-​prepared and dusted scene … A silent movie, instead of speech in Patterns… (183). This principle –​ to be silent through language (and to express protest, resistance, through silence) –​is possible only through the narrative foreshadowing sense in the “interfamilial” basis of narration. In the intertext. In the gaps, the holes in the text. When the photographs are activated, we speak of the unspoken (Foucault) through story and autobiography. For Christa Wolf, the root of the language is translatable in the same root with which the predicatives denken –​ to think, gedenken –​ to remember, danken –​ to thank are connected. At that, Wolf reduces them to one –​the research memory, the scientific premise of it, and the feeling, empathy, identification with the moment. In one of her most “notorious” stories, “What remains” (1979–​1989) which she wrote in the GDR, and published after the reunification of Germany, she longs for a “new language” in which she will be able to move freely and without censorship. Christa Wolf’s “new language” is the same language that Hannah Arendt wants to elaborate on in one of her interviews, at times when there is a crisis of speaking. To the question “What remains?” Arendt replies: language remains! (2002). The powerlessness of the direct referentiality is compensated with the semantically aesthetic relevant “as” and again through language. The transfer of the tropological meaning for Christa Wolf becomes contextual, coded with the culturological–​historical dimensions, and meaning in her opus isn’t impossible, but instead, it is intermediated by metaphor and tropology and the magical “as”.

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  161 If one goes back to the position that for both women authors the past is a product of the narrative plan (that means no deduction of the facts), then it is important to comment on White’s “Historical text as a literary artefact” according to which the historical context is characterized with concreteness and availability which the literary work could never have (142). Then, the historical context is a product of the historical powers of the historians who research the tropological changes in the context. History as a photo-​session of the past for Ugrešić surpasses the limitations of documents and facts, but no matter how much it is framed in the historical course of documentation, it remains connected to language and that is why it is a fictional autobiography –​a novel. The keeping and carrying inside herself of the memory banks (photographs) for Ugrešić seems not to be representing the “eternal past”, but rather connecting “that image” with the living present. This is a good opportunity to traverse the vocabulary of history. Because the truth of history happens when we see historicity as a performative (something that should be thought of), and not as “Finite History”, a story or a form of cognition. This twist, this transition to historiography says that historical existence is never really a state of presence, i.e., with it, the present doesn’t happen. For Wolf, the questioning of memory in Patterns … is also a questioning of the personal identity through time: “Time flows. We often don’t live really ... When the “time” for remembering comes, that means to additionally live the unlived time or to “enliven” it”(459). History, which is supposed to throw a bait for the “now-​time” (Jetztzeit) doesn’t connote substitutive present and presence, but it helps the present to appear. The present of the “now-​time” is filled with open and heterogeneous time. That is why history is something that is about to happen (Benjamin). The truth of historical images isn’t timeless, nor is it connected to the time of the historical subject; instead, it is inscribed in the temporality of the photographic structure which acts at all times, determining the readability of the image or photograph, just like the photograph of the three women bathers on the river Pakra which Ugrešić always carries. “History happens as it is photographed. When the readability is interrupted, history is interrupted as a process of appropriation and self-​accomplishment” (121), in The Museum ... Based on Ugrešić’s entire aesthetics lies the thesis that the “true” image of the past doesn’t come from history, but the “true” image is always created on the go, in motion. That is the narrative –​in –​transit. As opposed to memory, amnesia happens as necessary erasing of those moments that mustn’t be remembered. And, as we know, history begins where memory is questioned. Amnesia gives precedence to the new history, and writing abolishes the pain of memory. But one thing is equally clear, that both remembering and forgetting are selective in their powers, because, as Ugrešić says in The Museum, “There is symmetry between remembering and forgetting” (81). By definition, amnesia extends to what is unpleasant to remember in the times of Nazism. The anamnestic memory is determined by selective

162  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices choice –​what to remember, and what to forget. These memory models have no temporal dimension, on the one hand, because the trace is imprinted in them, but on the other hand, they are temporal because they also refer to a temporary loss (Assmann). In that sense, both history and memory seem questionable. The memory of the past and the writing of it are no longer “innocent acts”. The social groups determine what is worthy of remembering and how it will be remembered, although, in those histories, individuals and women, Wolf and Ugrešić also remember. My little sister and me are watching a new episode of Lynch’s Twin Peaks. After the War in Sarajevo. I am just writing the script for our underground movement theater “The Time of the Rocks”, based on the music of Joy Division. It is about finding alternative movements, about dance through scream without scream, about life disorder after disappearing Yugoslavia and Yugoslav six republics.49 Yugoslav Collective Memory and the Museum Shadow, Christa, Bu A museum as a public space shows a strong connection with cultural hegemony whilst creating a conception with the subculture, submemory, and nostalgia. The Museum’s contextualization changes the signifying status of the object. And it’s not only that the poetics of the museum imposes the exhibiting of the objects, not only that the text is a practice of acting in the new historicism, but the position of exile also refers a status of personal performance of the individual, so the exile logic of the narrative subject in The Museum ... would be confirmed as “moving/​living museum exhibits” (235), with a “walking biography” (139) exposed to observation and deepening of the horizons. The intermediation of narration through the essence of the photograph and the category time implies a fixation and stopping of the time which is a prerequisite for uncovering the truth on a higher level, the level of sublimated paradigm. That is why it is insisted that the topos of the museum “magnetizes” the memory of life in a new semantic pertinence which Ugrešić in Culture of Lies ironizes as museisation, referring to Andreas Huyssen: “the museum in its broad and amorphous meaning has become a key paradigm of the contemporary cultural activities” (246), and the transgression into kitsch fetishes in the political and cultural context. ‘Museum’ and ‘patterns’ are topoi, culturemes connected to the great “times of crisis” that impel destabilization, insecurity of the concepts for identification of identity. The museum is a space of cultural hegemony, a hegemonic space of antagonistic thinking, it’s a space of the visual (artifacts/​artworks) and the textual. The ‘pattern’ refers to the experience from the communist and post-​communist

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  163 period in the Macedonian political and historical context, it is a model, scheme, uniformity, “density” of the cultural discourse or political one-​party rule in the name of affirmation of the national cause. The ‘pattern’ should show how to fit the identity in one single sample –​according to socrealism –​how to gain idem –​ identity (Ricoeur). In The Museum … Ugrešić, through artistic narration, shows the options for questioning the master narrations of the West and East; she points to the constant check of the autoimagological notions in the transitional countries, living the change of selfhood (ipse –​identity), risking to fully split the identity up to the point of its total annihilation (identityless) which is an additional reference in the culturological analysis of the Macedonian transitional context. It reopens the questions of the reference points and criteria in relation to which the identity is created, here in the Balkans. In this atmosphere the art and aesthetics of the text (seem to be) the only fields for integration and confrontation of the “yearnful hesitation”. Both the museum and the model are analogous to the schematic category Other in Ricoeur’s writings. It allows the alterity of the past which has its conclusion in the impossibility of surpassing the temporal distance of a past time to stand out, (de Certeau), and also the potential necessary apologizing of the difference in the present time which includes its spirit in the interpretation. The divided “I” of the ‘life as narrative’, or ‘narrative identity’ signifies the breaking of the sense of belonging which is activated in the novels of both authors. Christa Wolf builds her identity and splits it through history with a strong influence of ideology. Fascist Germany, East, and West Berlin –​are the connections/​ shifters (Ricoeur) that are necessary for rethinking one’s position (in the case of Wolf), or the desire to remain in that part of Germany where her family is but, at the same time, the desire to break the wall, the border to find the new, “free” language that she’ll use to express herself or to narrate of herself. The ideology for Wolf “interpellates” and addresses the subject of narration and it plays a significant role in what Dominick LaCapra calls constitution of the critical sense for the creation of the identity. The paradox of the definitions of identity in the case of both authors is read through the dialectics of equality and the changeable selfhood in which the internal other appears. Through the examples given in this study, the internal other in the case of Wolf is the girl (Patterns of Childhood) or the dead friend who lives inside the narrator, in a relationship upon which she builds and understands her personal identity (Nachdenken über Christa T./​Thinking about Christa T.). It is the “I” that reads, understands, and interprets the world, at the same time interpreting itself in the world and in time. In that kind of process, that “I” always becomes someone else. The meaning of the other in the ethical sense of the word has opened the question of the “I” that has to be placed in the position of the other, to read itself as other (de Certeau). The identity for Wolf corresponds to the open narrative string of the chronicle, to the impossibility of a narrative closure of the historical facts. I call this Wolf’s identity a spiral –​ an identity with no beginning and no end, but rather

164  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices one that exists in continuity and critical questioning. Christa Wolf’s discourse is tropological, the reference towards the external world is represented through metaphor. Metaphor is a principle of writing which assimilates, substitutes in the self-​representation of the narrating “I” in the works of Wolf (namely, the character Christa T. just like the metaphor –​both as real and as apparent –​ has a figurative and literal meaning). Therefore, history in her poetics is palimpsest with large doses of simulation of factography and tendencies to merge the past and reality. Ugrešić’s position is other and different. With this I point to the fact that both authors in this study have differences and common points, they are narratively identified, completed, and distanced, divided on the level of my narrative/​story. Ugrešić doesn’t give in to sentimental nostalgia; in the Culture of Lies she ironizes the ethnic and national identity: “The cultural identity, the ethnic “schizophrenia” the multiplied, transcultural identity –​ is my natural choice. And I’m not lonely. The heavy drumming on the drams of national identities has received its answer: deafness from the noise, today the many citizens of ex-​Yugoslavia, especially the ones dispersed throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnical or national identification” (290). It becomes obvious that in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Ugrešić continues to “experience” the destiny of the “divided” one (“the nameless”/​dead/​one who existed and doesn’t exist, the one who is absent and dead and the one who lives and experiences transformations only through the plot and the story and never again in life) once called Christa …, the one who is between East and West Berlin. On purpose, and maybe spontaneously, accidentally or unconsciously, in one scene of the novel, Ugrešić “relives” “the same” destiny of Wolf, in the identification of the subject of narration with a character that in The Museum … is also called Christa –​ in the scene with “Gutte Nacht Christa”). With the application and counterpointing of theses from Jacque Derrida’s philosophy on this novel, it is demonstrated that the deconstructivist current (vis-​à-​vis Ricoeur’s hermeneutics) reduces fiction to language and selects continuous crisis and incertitude of the identity. Unlike Christa Wolf who remains and writes in the GDR, Ugrešić leaves the regime of ex-​Yugoslavia and takes up a position of writing from a distance, of her own will. Hence, the subject of narration is necessarily placed in the frame of the passing of time. We see that the subject of narration in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is neither present, nor absent in the temporal dimension, but instead, it is read –​ in the rhythm of blinking. The identity of this subject of narration is neither complete nor completely divided. It is susceptible to erosion and is constantly hesitant. I call this identity pixelated identity –​crossbreed. Ugrešić’s discourse, unlike that of Wolf, avoids, leaves, evades the metaphorical principle and suggests division, the irony of the nostalgic feeling and separation of the ethnical and national identity. This identity doesn’t point to the stable selfhood which develops through time, from the beginning to the end. The reference to the

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  165 external world is accomplished through irony, the twist, the erosion, collapse, and negation. Irony as the basic principle in Ugrešić’s discourse globally weakens the meaning which was extended (grasped) through Christa Wolf’s metaphor. Unlike Wolf’s palimpsest history, Ugrešić’s history (as well as selfhood) is performative; it isn’t finished, but instead, it is politically created –​on the go, in progress, and motion. The endless performative selfhood is quite unstable, it leaves a trace while it writes. In this process of inscribing, the subject simultaneously expresses and represents itself, it shows itself, and therefore the narrating subject is a living museum exhibit in motion, who carries a suitcase as a stole stable reference point. This kind of narrating subject moves from language to praxis/​performance (living performance). Iterability brought the contingency of otherness (itara) to the scene. The divided narrative and social identity in the works of Wolf and Ugrešić is an additional argument to the point of the contemporary political narratosophy that the crisis of the identity thinking of the subject of narration responds to the loss of the configuration of the story and corresponds to the crisis of its closing. Ricoeur’s methodological approach (closer to Wolf) relies upon the tropology and function of the metaphor (Aristotle) in the grasping of the entire past. Like in the writings of Wolf where identity thinking can only be finally shaped through fixation of the narration and in that process, the essence of the meaning of everyday life is fulfilled, even in a politically rigid communist context. Derrida’s methodology is closer to the writings of Ugrešić, whose position of non-​belonging of the script, the position of writing to the practices of relocation and displacement, correlates to the performativeness of the language and the iterability of the text. That means that meaning is constantly multiplied in the text and forced through the principle of difference. In Ugrešić’s case, the narration isn’t a stable property; instead, it’s transformed into action, movement, flow, into a constant search for the meaning that keeps escaping. Therefore, the change of selfhood which is seen dynamically in the dialectics of the identity and the equality of the change of the narrative identity, was best expressed here through the analysis of the narrative identity in the autobiographical statement of both authors. Notes 1 After the novel Der geteilte Himmel, 1963 (Divided Heaven/​They Divided the Sky) was published, a novel in which the soc-​realistic inclinations of Christa Wolf can be read, she published a series of novels with changed aesthetics, refinement in the expression, she published numerous essays, a corpus of polemics, critiques. Part of her work are the books: Lesen und Schreiben Aufsätze und Betrachtungen, 1971 (The Reader and the Writer, essays on literature), Till Eulenspiegel für den Film, 1972) (she stages it together with her husband Conrad Wolf), Unter den Linden, 1974 (Under the Linden) a collection of short stories with fantastic elements, influenced by E.T.A. Hoffman), Kindheitmuster, 1980/​84, Patterns of Childhood –​novel, Kein Ort.

166  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices Nirgends, 1981 (No Place on Earth), novel, Medea. Stimmen, 1995 (Medea’s Voices), novel, Liebhaftig, 2003 (In the flesh –​Liebhaftig), novel. She is also the author of several adaptations, books on film and several plays for the radio. 2 See Christa Wolf. What Remains and Other Stories, 231 3 Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) –​from the German nach …, denken … –​thinking … deliberating, pondering; denken (n) as a noun signifies deliberating, pondering, considering, way of thinking, imagining. I have also used the English translation Nachdenken über Christa T. /​The Quest for Christa T. 1992. New York Farrar: Straus, and Girouox. In English the verb ‘quest’ –​signifies searching, looking for something. In this study I have decided to stick closer to the original translation of Nachdenken, so instead The Quest ... I would imply Thinking about Christa T., thus, emphasizing in the further analyses this thought process, thinking and deliberating of the female character and its dialectic connection to remembering and the traces from the past which are an important element in the entire poetics of Christa Wolf. The German alternative for translation also seems closer to what M. Heidegger calls besinnliche denken, and it signifies thinking, remembering, pondering which breaks the linear forms of thinking and temporality. I would refer to English translation in the quotes, as a base, but I would use my intervention in translation whenever possible, and here, I would have in mind the German version of the book. In my manuscript I am not using “The Quest for Christa T” but Thinking of Christa T. which is actually my intervention in the English version of the book mentioned above. 4 See Heinrich Mohr, Heinrich. “Productive Longing: Structure, Theme, and Political Relevance in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T”., in Responses to Christa Wolf (Critical Essays), 217 5 See Heinrich Mohr, Heinrich. “Productive Longing: Structure, Theme, and Political Relevance in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T”., in Responses to Christa Wolf (Critical Essays), 219. 6 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, 159. 7 I explore autotheory and autobiography in the works of both authors, Christa Wolf and Dubravka Ugrešić, with the main aim of these correlations and evocation of life and theory to see how are accomplished in different directions, in order to come together and be compared in several mutual points in different historical, political, cultural contexts. Also, see Philippe Lejeune, Philippe, Avtobiografski ugovor. Autor, pri­ povjedač, lik 8 See English translation of Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. published 1992. All further quotes in my book are from this edition, some with my interventions. 9 See Anne Herrmann essay: “I/​She: The Female Dialogic in The Quest for Christa T”. in Responses to Christa Wolf (Critical Essays). 10 “Durch eine Freundin lernt man sich kennen” –​see Anne Herman in “Female Dialogic, in The Quest for Christa T”., (1989), 264. 11 Sophie von La Roche –​ the first recognized woman in German education, author of the epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) (The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim: derived from original notes and other trusted sources by a friend of hers (Geschichte des Fräulein von Sternheim: von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-​Papieren und anderen zuverlässigen Quellen gezogen), written in 1771. In this novel the main character carries the name of the author Sophie. It is believed that Sophie La Roche is the literary model for Christa T., and Christa Wolf herself

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  167 says that Christa T. is a literary figure who, similar to Sophie La Roche and Sophie Sternheim, “shares” her name with the author. Apart from Sophie La Roche, women prototypes for the literary characters in Wolf’s novels are Ingeborg Bachmann, Bettina von Arnim, Caroline von Gunderrode, Cassandra ... . 12 The structure of the novel Nachdenken über Christa T. /​Thinking about Christa T. is not an evocation of society, but it creates open questions, while the hermeneutist in its defragmented structure re-​questions “the truth” and the doubt in “the case” of Christa Wolf. On this level apply Dominick LaCapra’s theses about the correlation of the text and context, explained in the first theoretical part. 13 See Susan Lanser, 1992. Fiction of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. (1992). 14 In Christa Wolf’s novel In the Flesh (2003) Christa Wolf continues to write about redundancy, the repetitiveness of the imaginary protocols which in her works appear as “perforation” of the language, as a possibility for a way out “to the other side” of the Berlin wall. In this novel as well, the main character –​ a woman –​ suffers from an illness. While she’s in the hospital (on the border between sleep and waking) she gives in to memories. She remembers Berlin, both the fear and the love. While the doctors take care of her body, she heals herself with a story, intimately, inside herself, as looking at a mirror reflection in the public, in the political present. She breaks the “real” language with the imaginary protocols from the myth. This novel is a continuation of what Wolf began in Nachdenken über Christa T. /​The Quest for Christa T./​Thinking about Christa T. in which the “conceived” language/​speech “solves” everything, “releases” just through the archetypological dimension of the topos: “the home”, “the house”. 15 See Nora Rätzel, ‘ “Harmonious Heimat” and “Disturbing Auslander” ’. Feminism and Psychology, special issue Shifting Identities, Shifting Racism, 4(1): 81–​98. 16 See Andreas Huyssen, Reflections of Crista T. Responses to Christa Wolf (Critical Essays), 15. 17 See Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension (Selected Essays), 22. 18 Kindheitmuster, 1976 –​ a title with rich meaning that has several solutions. Some of them are: Patterns of Childhood –​ signals a childhood lived according to a certain pattern, mold, scheme, guide. It is a childhood which is completely “molded” in the political circumstances of fascist Germany. Models of a Childhood –​ it refers to childhood taken as an example, but at the same time to a schematized childhood that cannot be escaped. The ethical question is asked –​ How can such childhood be taken as an example? Matrix of a Childhood is my intervention, the matrix is ambivalent as a term. In contemporary technology and mathematical operations, this term suggests a previous logical scheme after which something must be created according to given parameters in a strictly determined and fixed (patterned) scheme. On the other hand, the matrix points to the process of creating something and “checking” the operation. At one point in the novel Christa Wolf points out that the word sample is connected to the word monster which originally meant “examination” (which enables another re-​reading of childhood); only afterwards did the word monster gain its current meaning. The matrix as a symbol points out that Christa Wolf undertakes the “examination” of her own childhood ... I was reading the Serbo-​Croatian Translation I djetinjsvo, zar ne? (1979), so the translation in English is related to that translation and intervention in it. All future quotes in this part use this translation: Krista Volf, I djetinjsvo, Zar Ne? (1979).

168  Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices 19 The ‘investment’ of literature as a factor in innovation and the awakening of history draws the borders which separate history from fiction or philosophy and determine the dominant influences in historiography and the crucial role of language in the description of historical reality. Every attempt to describe these historical events is based on narratives which lay out the coherency, integrity, fulfilment and closing of the image of life which is and which has to be imagined. 20 Historiographic narration, according to Hayden White (1973), is accomplished on a conceptualistic level of chronicle, story, modus of plot, modus of argumentation and modus of ideological implications. The chronicle is an open reading of the record of historical events, a testimony which is shaped as a disclosure of the beginning and the end. It is a starting point for the historian, which makes him different from the writer of fiction who invents the story. 21 See Wilhelm Dilthey, The Delimitation of the Human Sciences, 262. 22 As many as 80 million representatives of German society were “protected” from reality and truth through self-​delusion, lies and stupidity which became an inerasable part of their mindset (Eichmann’s, author’s note). Thus, layered during the years, they fell into their own contradiction, while “lies weren’t necessarily equal for the different representatives of party hierarchy or the people in general. The “practice” of self-​ delusion became “a moral prerequisite for survival”. In the basis of those regimes and the totalitarian project of mass organization of the “atomized, isolated individuals” which extort “total, unlimited, unconditional and unwavering dedication of every individual member”. See Arendt’s books The Origins of Totalitarianism; Between the Past and Future; On Revolution; Eichmann in Jerusalem. 23 See Senka Anastasova, “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, in Historical Expertise 2021 (186–​87). 24 Senka Anastasova, Diaries from Yugoslavia 1984–1997. 25 Important books which Dubravka Ugrešić has written about exile are: Kultura lazi, antipoloticni eseju, 1991–​1998) (Culture of Lying, Anti-​Political Essays), Zabranjeno citanje, 2001 (Thank You For Not Reading), Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, 1991–​1996 (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender), novel, Ministarstvo boli, 2004 (Ministry of Pain), novel. I was using integral written books, translating them here. 26 See Dubravka Ugrešić. “Drago mi ja da sam na margini, tamo gdje je gotovina zvjezda”. Zarez 2002. (91–​95) (Available at: www.z­arez­.hr/​). 27 See Senka Anastasova, “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia” ’, The Historical Expertise (191–​91). 28 See Paul de Man, Autobiografija kao razoblicenje. Knjizevna kritika (2), 120. 29 See David Lodge, Nacini modernog pisanja. 30 Paul Ricoeur offers a possible solution for surpassing this abyss through the theory of reading in the refigurative Mimesis III. The “gathering” of life in the form of a story is grounds for seeing life “as”. Ricoeur’s theory for the reception of the text (refiguration) is important for stimulating the real reader or for the fusion of the text with the consciousness of the reader. Refiguration is important for the intersection of the virtual world with the world of reality to which the reader and cognition belong, as well as interpretation and selfawareness which come out of that fusion. During the fusion of consciousness of the reader with fiction the world or the secondary reference is projected (1999, 71). 31 Senka Anastasova, Diaries from Post-Yugoslaiva, December 2022.

Politics of Aesthetics to the Social of Artistic Practices  169 3 2 Read Rada Ivekovic, “Estetika i zrtva. Politika estetike”. Gledista (1–​2). 33 All further quotes in this chapter would be from The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. 34 Both in history and in fiction function the techniques of narrativization/​textualization as practices of narration (not a fundus) of the discourse, as a model for representation of a specific reality whose construction is produced, and then deconstructed. 35 See Senka Anastasova, “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, The Historical Expertise, 190. 36 See Senka Anastasova, “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, The Historical Expertise, 191. 37 Dubravka, Ugrešić/Kultura laži, antipoliticki eseji, 52. 38 Clive Thomson, “Culture, Identity, and the Dialogic”. Dialogism and Cultural Criticism. 39 See Stuart Hall, “Who needs Identity?” in Questions of Cultural Identity. 40 Senka Anastasova, Diaries from Post-Yugoslavia, June, 2021, Skopje 41 Senka Anastasova, Diaries from Post-Yugoslavia, December 2022, Zagreb 42 See Senka Anastasova, “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, The Historical Expertise’ (186–​210). 43 See Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice, Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. 44 Rada Ivekovic, “Estetika i zrtva. Politika estetike”, Gledista (1–​2), 102. 45 Senka Anastasova, Diaries of Post-Yugoslavia, November 2022. 46 See Senka Anastasova. “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, The Historical Expertise (198–​99). 47 See Senka Anastasova. “Memory Landscapes, in (Post) Yugoslavia’’, The Historical Expertise (194–95). 48 See Aleida Assmann, Rad na nacionalnom pamcenju. 49 Senka Anastasova, Diaries from Yugoslavia 1984–1997.

Conclusion Political and the ‘Political’ Beyond the Narratosophy

Inspired by Paul Ricoeur, Nancy Fraser, and Jacques Rancière’s work on the ­politics of emancipation and the poetics of imagination, I developed my approach of giving premises related to the ‘political’ and called it political narratosophy. What I called ‘political’ exists in-​between the space of two embodiments, in-​between the identity thinking of the distributions of functions in society, somewhere there is a space for new identity thinking in which the political subjectification is related to the possibility of the ‘political’ set in the radical equality and materialization of the thought about the processes of narrative –​in –​ progress, narrative –​in –​ transit, narrative –​ in –​motion. On the other hand, the ‘political’ is essential in the empirical referential context, ontologically excluded from the dynamics of the social relations, that can never be fulfilled in a substantial meaning, but always needing reiteration during the political processes and exists by itself. The third dimension is the ‘politics’ that exists when the figure of a specific subject of narration is constituted in relation to institutions, elections, bodies (associated with the term ‘the police’), which is why politics can never be a pure category and the emergence of democratic politics cannot occur in its own sphere but only within the very regimes of policing that covered the world. I have elaborated on why the politics of narratosophy observes the politics of narrativity beyond text and structuralism. I have emphasized that such an epistemology must ground its norms immanently, in relations between ‘life as narrative’ –​ narration –​ identity –​ social identity –​ history –​ historiography –​ ideology –​ politics –​ fiction –​ poetics of knowledge –​ memory –​ women’s understanding of the politics of the process of narrative, covered in the understanding of narratofemosophy; I have elaborated Ricoeur’s mimesis without mimesis, through Fraser’s social justice and Rancièrian mimesis (as refusal of figurative representation), or his political redistribution of aesthetic politics understood as resistance where politics plays itself out in the paradigm as the relationship between the stage and the audience, as actualization of a radical new humanity. I emphasized how real events come from the desire to represent the coherency of the images of life which are imagined and can’t be real, but with the help of real events. Therefore, political narratosophy opens the terrain for the DOI: 10.4324/9781003374794-5

Beyond the Narratosophy  171 need to actualize the questioning of the relation between fiction and reality, where historical reality is solely made up of ‘fictions’, and where the question of the distinction between fiction and falsity appears, the question between the modes of intelligibility used for the construction of stories and modes of intelligibility used for understanding historical phenomena. At the same time, I have insisted that the norms in putting questions must point beyond the present context across the process of narration rotting in society. But I have suggested that the political narratosophy insists on the politics of narrativity and social imaginary and that is not just limited to fiction, but it also becomes a significant mark upon history today that is constantly in flux. Precisely because of that, one could read history as a story that one tells to oneself about that which took place in the past. Political narratosophy has its material roots, and integrates the disorders and discontinuity, impure politics and art, like forms of knowledge, constructs and ‘fictions’ that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. I followed the trajectory of Fraser’s critical theoretical and practical concerns of rethinking the public sphere, her understanding of redistribution and recognition, and her articulation on the concepts of justice and emancipatory practices. Based on that I developed the concept of the philosophy of narrativity as a process, that I used as the background for going beyond narratology and giving the main philosophical thoughts for the political narratosophy in this book, explaining through analytical examples why one needs another approach beyond structuralism in late capitalism today. The concept ‘narrative – in – progress’ is highly anti-​capitalist, based on the idea for emancipation of narrativity (Fraser, Rancière, Ricoeur). Through theorizing judgment and narration, I focused on how the life of narrative, narrative identity, and social identity was built, then deconstructed it (and built it again) related to the power of imagination as the source of continuity related to theories of political judgment and Radical Left thinkers committed to the application of a concept for assessment, where theory and critique are focused on the construction of the sensible world to which the artwork belongs or which a political act makes possible (Rancière). In that sense, this book shows how the political narratosophy transforms itself from structural to social questions into a reactive context. When talking about the political narratosophy in this book, I insist on talking about feminist political narratosophy, or narratofemosophy, since the great emancipatory practices of the text and narration happen during the transformation in the direction of justice and feminist politics of narration –​not only through raising questions of gender and discourse theory. Thus, based on Fraser’s work, I developed a direction of the political narratosophy toward feminist politics of reading the narrative of pragmatic over structuralist approaches related to language. This is important since narrative identities are rooted not in the texts, but in the material social context and social practices of communication and depend on a plurality of historically changing discursive practices. This led to comparing the structuralist

172  Beyond the Narratosophy model (and concept of gender identity), on the one hand, and simple negations and fluctuation of identity, on the other, dissolved into the pragmatic theory of discourse and critique of essentialism through historical feminist materialism. In the middle of the interest of the political narratosophy I developed the concept of life as narrative, that is identity thinking, or narrative identity, which I interpreted in this book through the social identity and interweaving of history and fiction in the theory of the symbolical representation of reality in the writings of Ricoeur, on the one hand, as opposed to the deconstructivist critiques, the theory of new historicism and contemporary political theories in the work of Fraser, Rancière, Derrida, Foucault, on the other. Ricoeur’s paradigms of the narrative seen through fiction and history are close to the philosophical paradigms of White and Foucault’s analytical line. Derrida forces the aspect of the conflicts in the text and the transition of the politics of identity of the narrating subject from social to intellectual history (the one which is actualized through the tropics of irony). Rancière is not attempting to dissolve the boundaries between fact and fiction (that is blurred), the boundaries between science and fiction, and assign the status of fiction and history. Hence, I have distinguished myself from formalist readings of poetic regimes, and poetics of knowledge by going beyond structural boundaries, by crossing the boundaries between disciplines in in-​disciplinary thought and the democratic potential of the opening structures of narrativity in transit. Where does that contradiction in identity thinking of ‘life as narrative’ come from? The attribute ‘narrative’ I have pointed to the need for completeness, unity, definition, entirety, coherency, fixing of identity through the need for narration and writing. But complications arise when one faces its politics in the dividedness, partition, castration, dissemination, and iterability. That notion of the politics of subjectification given reflections on the structure of society leads to the crisis of ‘identity’ and responds to the crisis of fiction and the contemporary politics of autobiographic and autotheory statements. In this view of the emanation of the political philosophy and political theory thoughts (inspired by Fraser’s and Rancière’s work), the political narratosophy is challenging the subjective politics of the subject of narration that moves with certainty through the different positions of the narrative practices. Such elaboration happened through the theory and politics of deconstruction when I pointed to the unsteadiness of the single identity and the politics of discontinuity of the democratic processes of opening the narrative structures. During that process, one loses the sense of an ending. Fiction goes through distortion and total eclipse, and the paradigm of the plot goes through total erosion. Therefore, it is confirmed that the crisis of identity is a contemporary concept, developed in democracy. The social discontinuity of identity is not an eternal problem (present since ancient times); instead, it is connected to the contemporary politics on the subject of narration, which protection from a certain authority of values are seen as damaged today. Of special pertinence to this discussion is the need to write about the narrative identity as opposed to the structure of the novel, the narrative levels of the plot,

Beyond the Narratosophy  173 the empirical reality and society, and the antagonistic discourses which mutually intersect. The identity of this narrating subject isn’t singular, it signifies radical historicization and politics and, from the position of political theory, it is in the process of constant transformation. In the first theoretical block of the analysis, I discussed the modus of an interweaving of the plot in history and the plot in fiction. One could see the politics of the subject of narration in fiction connected to the politics of the personal and social identity of the subject set in history. Therefore, the intention is to show that the politics of the subject of narration (Rancière) and the concept of ‘life – as – narrative’ absolves the aporias of the ethical determinations of human action and the dialectic of selfhood and otherness in history transformed into fiction (metafiction). Depending on the relation of the politics of the subject of narration towards culture, one sees that this otherness, expressed as an alter/​other being, and the narrative identity is not only a structuralist segment of ‘narrative’ but also a socio-​cultural and political phenomenon. The key difference between Ricoeur’s and Fraser’s/​Derrida’s methodology is in the understanding of the concept of ‘meaning’ of the social. Ricoeur believes that the meaning of the identity of the narrating subject can’t be grasped, but can be intermediated through signs, symbols, and narrations. Therefore, one can think of life as an untold, virtual story, articulated through narration. The approach to its meaning is only through metaphors and cultural symbols. For Derrida, the meaning of the politics of identity of the narrating subject is situated in the dispersion of the discourse. It is an unlimited, dispersed, unreachable, delayed, expected meaning which (always) is about to happen. I show how political narratosophy integrates Rancière’s work on the social and political change of the transformative power of aesthetic and aesthetic-​political impact on the process of narration and political emancipation of the hermeneutic possibilities (that started as Athusserian impact, but it is not that in the conclusions). If Ricoeur speaks about mimesis, then Rancière speaks about the possibilities for the redistribution of discourses and social hierarchies or, better still, about the ‘mimetic order’ and ‘representational regime of the sensible’ and possibilities of a politics without mimesis. Political narratosophy is about mimesis without mimesis. Political narratosophy powerfully shows that this mimic with no mimic is possible through subjective politics and the distribution of the sensible; the difference between Ricoeur’s and Rancière’s aesthetic of politics is that in Rancière’s work no relation is fixed, so actions, sensibility, and perceptibility happen as a variety of forms beyond the passive status of mimesis and through the dominant form of something that Rancière calls ‘poetics of knowledge’ where poetics of knowledge concerns not only writing but also implications of the thinkable. Rancière gives a human dimension to the political narratosophy premises by destabilizing borders and hierarchies, so his work is important for the whole epistemology of the political narratosophy, because it is about the birth of a new subject in history –​the people, and how they appeared in history before disappearing again in history as a science. Rancière’s poetics of knowledge refers

174  Beyond the Narratosophy to history, not as a ‘past’ but representing the past in different historical ways through historicizing the transcendental. The political narratosophy arises that articulation of the thinkable that is potentially demarcated by historically variable poetic regimes where truth can be produced. Politically, on a broader epistemological, political and cultural level, in a time of big times of crisis, post pandemic crisis, migrational changes, the position and deliberation of the ‘life as narrative’/​identity thinking, social identities, and politics of the narrating subject’s entire spectrum of possibilities that are radicalized, through a connection between the political narratosophy and decolonialism and future transformations of the narrativity as a never-​ending process, reflected in political narratosophy studies. Methodologically, the background is broader and leads toward feminist social philosophy, feminist political philosophy, political sociology, and political theory. Political narratosophy refers to the uncertainty of identity thinking of the political being that does not mean the homogenization of the world but goes beyond identity constitutions. Political narratosophy refers to the uncertainty of identity thinking of the political being that does not mean the homogenization of the world but goes beyond identity thinking constitutions. Conceptually, the question that remains unanswered is whether the new contextualization (of post-​pandemic times, migrations, fight against capitalism) can join the areas/​topoi/​meta-​topoi in the works of women’s authors in a communist and post-​communist context, and isn’t that another glove for contemporary reinterpretation and deconstruction of the social –​ now through the political narratosophy and narratofemosophy, and the critique of the new technologies of identification and narration in the contemporary communication media in capitalism today? Could one talk about transnational political narratosophy today with an alert on narratofemosophy related to social reproduction theory, aesthetics of resistance, radical cultural studies, labor studies, socialist democracy, as the new way for survival through narration and political dynamics of the narrativity? At university, I teach women’s studies and post-​socialist feminist theory with a shifted focus from the institutional/​political sphere to the inner dynamics of self-​management and organization, based on the model of Yugoslav society in the 1980s. Since World War II, women’s political, economic, and social rights had been inscribed in the Federal Constitution, as had been women’s access to education and labor processes in the labor market. This was an inclusive process of the integration of women (and their painful memories of being women) from the less wealthy parts of the former Yugoslavia into the industrialization process. Balkan Studies or Post-​Yugoslav Studies is a broader field; encompassing literature, music, memory, collective memory, pop culture, folk culture, alternative culture, art, media, political activism, dissent culture, economy, organizational society, studies beyond the paradigm of ethnonationalism in the former Yugoslav republics.

Beyond the Narratosophy  175 From a contemporary point of view, focusing on the paradigm of political and cultural memory politics allows us to research the context of dogmatic socialism and social citizenship in socialist and post-​socialist, post-​Yugoslav states. Socialist feminist political theory opens up the memory of female labor, organization of the society, gender regimes, and how female industrial transformations happened, moving jobs into the private domain and households. The case of Macedonia shows that after forced privatizations during the long transition period, gender relations and gender regimes were transformed, hand in hand with privatization, pushed into the sphere of private and unpaid feminine domestic labor, as Silvia Federici says (2012). This is important for understanding the stages of the memory of female labor practices that has never been static. Women’s labor and female workers across the former Yugoslavia were part of the social-​political organization of society based on an equal basis, with social rights and a welfare system, a system well organized against gender inequalities. During World War II, women took part in the war (keeping the leading feminized positions of essential workers, teachers, nurses), and after that, after Freedom, there was a whole model of women’s historical pattern of participation in the labor force; throughout the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, and not only in Macedonia. As Chiara Bonfiglioli (2013) states, in October 1978, the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade hosted the international conference entitled “Comrade Woman: The Woman’s Question: A New Approach?” (“Drug-​ari-​ca žena, Žensko pitanje: novi pristup?”) which explored the issue of inequality and challenged gender equality in socialist self-​management, which was a unique initiative of second-​wave feminism in Eastern Europe. Balkan feminist studies should explore these questions and topics. In the post-​socialist gender regime, struggles for memories turned into a re-​reading of the legacy and the memory practices related to the concept of “work” in the socialist period, and the present Macedonia. Therefore, I would propose to focus on investigating what aspects of social reproduction theory from the socialist Yugoslav days could serve as a potential concept for understanding today’s democracy. This entails pointing out the social benefits of low-​waged jobs, “female” jobs, secure/​insecure jobs, flexible jobs, the labor of care, the feminization of labor that includes the political, social and economic involvement of women in labor. Hence, anticipative memory practices, or the “memory of awakening”, would have the potential to emerge as a potent tool in the fight against capitalism today.1 (Senka Anastasova, “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, The Historical Expertise) Note 1 See Senka Anastasova. “Memory Landscapes in (Post) Yugoslavia”, The Historical Expertise (198–​99).

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Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 92n23 refers to note 23 on page 92. 1929, 98 1945, 125 1949, 132, 153 1968, 53 1980s, 127, 175 1984, 125 1991, 153, 124 1992, 127 1994 150 2019, October, 154 2020, November, 150, 154 aesthesis 55 aesthetic 12, 21, 31, 42, 46, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 81, 85, 87, 128, 130, 142, 147, 159, 160, 173 aesthetic act 108–​109 aesthetic activity 21 aesthetic and ideological productive contradictions 93 aesthetic cognitive effect 32 aesthetic criticism 11 aesthetic distribution 10, 15, 49 aesthetic equality 43, 45, 46 aesthetic experience 11, 51, 54, 55, 57, 90 aesthetic expression 12 aesthetic extension 10, 17 aesthetic ideology 86 aesthetic illusion 67 aesthetic judgment 4 aesthetic modalities 87 aesthetic of politics 173 aesthetic practices 55, 56 aesthetic production 105

aesthetic regime (of art) (Le Regime esthétique de l’art) 42, 47, 48, 55, 57, 61, 62, 67 aesthetic regime of distribution of sensible (Le Sensible) 42 aesthetic response 21 aesthetic sensations 13, 20 aesthetic sense 2, 41 aesthetic sensibilities 15, 18, 50 aesthetic standard 11 aesthetic structures 2 aesthetic theory 41 aesthetical 5, 52, 54 aesthetical subject 54 aeestheticization 67 aesthetics 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 18, 21, 23, 41, 42, 54, 61, 62, 67, 71, 89, 93, 95, 104, 120, 160, 162, 165 aesthetics and politics 3, 4, 42, 93, 95, 97–​165; concepts of aesthetics and politics 173 aesthetics in narration 42 aesthetics of artistic text 23 aesthetics of resistance 11, 16, 174 agreement acts 28 Althusser, Louis 12, 41, 43, 49, 52, 53, 58, 83, 85, 86, 92n23 always–​already 2, 12, 13, 22, 23, 35, 43, 75, 91, 135 America 1, 21, 37, 75, 81, 125, 135, 141, 145, 150 American culture 125 alcera 139 analogousness 75 Ancient Macedonia 151

Index  187 Anderson, Benedict 124 Antagonistic 46, 47, 86, 141, 162, 173 antagonistic episteme 3 Anastasova, Senka 1, 140, 168, 169, 175 anticipative memory 128, 175 anti-​capitalist 35, 58, 171 anti-​imperialist 35, 152 apolitical 62 apolitical philosophical exchange 59n9 art (arts, philosophy of arts) 6, 10, 21, 46, 55, 56, 57, 66–​69, 83, 85, 120 art criticism 97 art in the aesthetic regime 55 art of saying 24 art of memory (ars memoriae) 89 art of narration 36 art form 66 art of writing 21, 43, 46, 47, 62, 67, 129 artefact 69, 123 artist 93, 125 artistic (text, narrative, work, fictions, plot, prose) 2–​12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 25, 32, 33, 34, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 61, 72, 77, 87, 90, 94, 101–​105, 120 artistic action 58 artistic practices 51, 52, 56, 59, 93–​165 artwork (artistic work) 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 23, 24, 34, 41, 48, 65, 85, 171, 174 arts and humanities studies 71 as-​ if 54, 62, 70, 82, 86, 104, 116, 129, 130, 131, 138, 148, 156 Arendt, Hannah 6, 17, 59, 88, 92n26, 110, 115, 121, 122, 136–​138, 149, 160, 168–​169 Aristotle 31–​34, 51, 55–​56, 59, 63, 64, 70, 165 Aristotle’s plot 32 Aristotle’s theory of the emplotment 55 Aristotle’s time in the emplotment 31 art becoming life 43 Assman, Aleida 156, 169n53 Austin, John 74, 87, 119 autobiography 5, 6, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 103, 104, 114, 120–​122, 128, 129, 133, 139, 157, 158, 160, 166n7 autofiction 5, 14 auto-​bio-​narrative 128 auto-​immunity of democracy 72 authoritarianism 16, 37–​38 authority 4, 47, 70, 72, 74, 128, 137, 153, 166, 172 autotheory 5, 13, 14, 34, 166n7, 172

bad narrative 16–​20 Baudrillard, Jean 150 Baker, Catherine 127 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10, 86, 91n20, 92n21 Bal, Mieke 9 Baltic Sea 119 Balibar, Étienne 12, 91n23, 92n23, 92n24 Balkan Studies 175 Balkans 37, 145, 154, 162, 174 Balkan feminist studies 176 Barthes, Roland 68, 69, 130 Bazar magazine 144 being-​as 31, 46 being a political narrative 10 belonging (non) 42, 76, 111, 133, 136, 139, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 163, 165 Berlin Wall 93, 130, 142, 167n14 betrayed-​plot 118 Benjamin, Walter 88, 99, 124, 131, 157, 159, 161, 177 beyond historicism 83 Bhabha, Homi 147 bilateral 124, 153 biography 5, 96 bizarre language 133, 142 Black Wave movies 144 blurred (borders and between fiction and history) 5, 98, 112 131, 172 bodies (new bodily capacities) 21, 42 Bonfiglioli, Chiara 176 borderline 7, 24, 25, 63, 96, 100, 107, 112, 130, 135, 146 borders 6, 80, 87, 98, 114, 127, 128, 131, 136, 138, 143, 147, 149, 168n19, 173 Bourdieu, Pierre 22n12, 36, 54 Bosnians 146 brotherhood and unity (bratstvo I jedinstvo) 143 Brown, Wendy 96, 166n6 brutal aesthetics 142, 150 Burke, Peter 89–​90 Capital 47, 51–​58, 84, 92n23, 96, 105, 150, 156 capitalism (anti-​capiatalism) 1–​4, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 22, 35–​37, 41, 44, 51–​58, 80–​83, 96, 97, 128, 140, 142–​144, 149–​150, 152, 153, 156, 171, 174, 175, 176 care 19, 50, 128, 132, 143, 167n14, 175 castration 74, 172 China 141, 152

188  Index chronotope 60, 68, 79, 99, 111, 139, 148 Central Committee 93, 95 Central Post Office in Macedonia 150 cinematic way of thinking 53 citizenship 142, 149 Coca-​Cola 125 Colebrook, Claire 5, 59n4, 82, 83, 137 Collecting Heritage of South-​Eastern European Women Philosophers meeting 142 communal 55, 109 communal apartment (komunalnaja kvaritra) 142 communicative (acts, actions) 5, 15, 65 communism (post-​communism) 5, 6, 17, 37, 48, 81, 96, 120, 126, 142–​144, 152, 158 communist life as narrative 93 comradeship 124, 144 configuration 31, 118, 130, 134, 159, 165 contemporary communication media 175 context (political context, context of interpretation, context that no longer exists) 1–​20, 21n7, 22n10, 23, 27, 30, 34–​41, 46, 48, 49–​54, 57, 58, 59, 65, 74–​78, 80–​85, 90, 91n29 context of reception 105 contextual hierarchy 45 contextualization 4, 7, 10, 39, 89, 94, 162, 174 convergence 14, 19, 21n7, 49, 71, 128 Covid-​19, 43 critique (of the politics of imagination) 172–​174 crossed reference 71 crossing 173 Crvena Zvezda 145 cultural chronotope 139 cultural hegemony 19, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 162 cultural history 104 cultural identity 111, 126, 139, 140, 157, 164, 169n45 cultural memory politics 176 cultural politics 4, 44, 53, 82, 100, 123 cultural studies 3, 8, 10, 174 cultural theory 13, 43 culturological processes and social changes 5, 104, 148, 155, 160, 162 Cyrillic 145

Davis, Yuval Nira 107 de Certeau 5, 24, 54, 57, 59n3, 91n6, 155, 163 de Foucault, Michel 66, 79, 84, 85, 133–​ 136, 147 de-​historization 66 de Man, Paul 128, 168 de Saussure 26, 34, 38 Dean, Jodi 5, 12, 14, 21, 78, 91n18, 144, 149, 159 Deleuze Gilles, Guattari Félix 78, 85, 150 deconstruction 5, 35, 41, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 81, 138, 172, 174 deflection 5 defocalization, defocalized 79 deixis 7, 15, 19 democracy 7, 9, 12–​18, 20, 21n9, 40–​59, 62, 72, 73, 127, 141, 147, 152, 159, 172–​175 democracy to come 73 democratic accountability to the artistic text 8 democratic practices 54, 57 democratizing narratives 4 denationalization 148 deregulation 45 Derrida, Jacques 25, 36, 59n4, 71–​91, 123, 139, 155, 156, 165, 172, 173 Derrida and Foucault 79 Derrida and Rancière, 72, 155–​172 Derrida’s Deconstruction of the political 25, 71, 72 Derrida’s difference (différance) 73, 123 desire 118 destabilization of the narrative –​in –​ progress 45 deterritorialization 78 diachronic 38 dialectic 3, 12, 19, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 51, 65, 68, 81, 84, 95, 106, 123, 155, 157, 163, 166n3, 173 dialectical 5, 12, 19, 20, 27, 28, 30, 33, 74, 95 dialectical subjectivity 33 dialogue 98, 104, 113, 115, 127, 142, 148 diaries 97, 98, 100, 168n24, 168n31, 169n43, 169n44, 169n47, 169n51 dictatorship 137 diegesis 9 différance (Derrida’s concept) 73, 123

Index  189 Dilthey, Wilhelm 121, 168n21 discipline 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 37, 38, 43, 47, 48, 49, 56, 58, 66, 90 disciplined memory 100 discontinuity 84, 134 discourse theory 3, 7, 9, 11, 16–​19, 24, 36, 51, 52, 75, 80–​83 disidentification 6, 125 dislocation 2, 17, 50, 133 displacement 3, 12, 18, 22n10, 25, 37, 40, 86, 119, 147, 165 displaced narrative 2 dispositif 8 disruption 3, 12, 36, 42, 43, 73 dissent 3, 18, 96, 142 dissemination 72, 74, 145, 147, 172 dissensus12, 14, 42, 43, 46, 47, 54, 55, 58, 67, 72 dissensual act of subjectification 42 dissensual politics 4, 14 dissensual ruptures 14 distribution of the sensible (Le Partage du sensible) 13, 14, 21, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50–​53, 56, 57, 61, 91, 173 disidentification 125 divided reference 71 Division Joy 162 documentation 113 documentary autobiography 6 documentary work 6 dogmatic socialism 175 domestic labor 175 dominant narrative 153 dominant polities 43 domino effect 129 doxa 19, 115 Durkheim 89 Dysneyland 150 Eagleton, Terry 102, 109 East Berlin 163 Eastern Berlin 116 Eastern Europe 176 East Germany 93 economic dimensions of justice 37 economic globalization 36 economic inequality 36, 37 economy 3, 9, 12–​16, 20, 22, 35, 44, 48, 54, 57, 71, 76, 152, 174 economy of imagination 3, 20 edge (fiction, reality) 12

Eichmann, Adolf 119 Eisenstein 48 en passant 140 emancipation (Fraser’s emancipation) 12, 15, 19, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 72, 80, 171, 173 embodied subject 57 emigration 139 empirical time 101 emplotment 29, 30–​34, 55, 60–​65 end of ideology 14 end of metaphysics 76 end of politics 9 epistemic discussion 1–​43 epistemic power of narrativization as an act of disruption in society 36 epistemology 1–​67, 123, 145, 173 epistemological incision 63 erosion 173 erosive fiction 125, 148 ethnonationalism 174 ethical 30, 55, 67, 70, 72, 86, 88, 107, 130, 163, 167, 173 ethics 130 EU 154 European citizens 155 European Council 133 European trauma 143 Europeanization 154 Ex Yugoslavia 6, 126, 129, 137, 144, 148, 164 exile 6, 18, 19, 35, 93, 126, 129, 133, 137, 139, 141, 145–​148, 162, 168n24 expressing (pesprechen) 62 expatriates 147 equality 4, 8, 11, 14, 15, 20, 22, 28, 35–​37, 40, 42, 43, 45–​50, 54, 58, 74, 76, 163, 174, 175 equal basis 175 everyday life 21n3, 53, 54, 133, 142, 144, 165 existence 8, 9, 12, 23, 128, 30–​33, 42, 50, 56, 67, 77, 78, 79, 83–​86, 103, 121, 138, 136, 137, 141, 157, 161 fable 130 fabula 59n8 falsification 115 fascism 16, 17, 105, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 159 Federal Constitution 175

190  Index Federici, Silvia 175 female authors 6 female dialogues 143 female labor 176 female subjectivity 19 feminine domestic labor 176 feminist dialectics 49 feminist epistemology 3, 17–​19, 20, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 50, 51, 54, 81, 170, 171, 174 female industrial transformations 176 feminist historical materialism 2, 4, 18, 19, 27, 83 feminist interpretations 3, 5, 6, 11, 36, 49, 51, 57, 81 feminist politics 3, 5, 15, 20, 35, 36, 39, 171 feminist political economy 135, 145, 150 feminist political narratology 19 feminist political thought 6 feminist politics of interpretation 3 feminist political narratosophy 11, 17, 18, 27, 50, 171 feminist political philosophy 2, 174 feminist social theory 36 feminized labor, see also feminization of labor 176 Feral 129 Fiat 143 Fićo 145 fiction 8, 11, 12, 14, 21, 22n112, 23–​25, 27, 31–​34, 46, 49, 55, 57, 60–​92, 96–​99, 101–​109, 115–​169, 170–​173 fictional pole 67 fictional trope 103 fictionalization of history 61 -​70 figuration 31 fine arts 55 fitness club 149 flexible jobs 176 floating 139 focalization 114 Fojnica 125 forced privatization 176 former Yugoslav republics 175 Foucault, Michel 79 Foucault’s archeology 66 Foley, Barbara 106 foreign language 147 Formal Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 124 forms of equality for the appearance and distinguishing the invisible from the visible 42

fragmentary historiography 88 fragmentation 74 Fraser, Nancy 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18–​21, 21n1, 21n9, 30, 33–​179 Fraser’s critique of theories of distributive justice 20, 76, 80 Fraser’s feminist social philosophy 18, 34, 174 Fraser’s recognition 18–​22, 27, 30, 32, 36–​40, 57, 58, 76, 80, 91n15, 95, 107, 109, 121, 137, 152, 171 Fraser’s theory of justice 26, 30, 41, 57, 58 free education 143 Freedom 15, 20, 21, 41, 43, 48, 52, 58, 72, 120, 142, 45, 149, 152, 158, 175 Freud, Sigmund 150, 151 FYROM 124 Gadamer’s fusion of horizonts 33, 64 GDR 165 gender equality 175 gender inequalities 175 gender regime 176 generation of transitions 154 Genettian paradigm of structural narratology 9 geocolonial 44 German Democratic Republic 6, 110 Germany 122 Gestapo 122 Gornick, Vivian 144 government 137 Gramsci’s hegemony 19, 36, 48, 151 Greece 150 Greek Parliament 124 grey zone 150, 153 Habermas 15, 36 Hall, Stuart 140 Hardt and Negri 15, 150 health care system 143 health dichotomy 43 Hegel 20, 27, 28, 40, 41, 65, Hegel’s dialectical understanding of social dynamics and philosophy of history 28, 123 91n4 hegemony 15–​19, 35–​41, 44, 124, 150–​152, 162, 169n38 Heidegger 30, 88, 107, 166n3 Heimat 111, 167n15 Hengehold, Laura 91n19

Index  191 hermeneutical 5, 6, 25, 30, 32, 33, 59, 81, 97, 99, 105, 115, 121, 126 Hermeneutics 21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 41, 55, 57, 66, 75, 77–​79, 84, 112, 119, 134, 164, 179, 184 Herrmann, Anne 98 heterology 47, 147, 155 heteron 45, 58 heteronormativity 59 hierarchical police order 48 hierarchies between discourses and genres 42 higher education 143 historiography 49, 57, 61–​167, 167n19, 170 historization of fiction 61 history (narrated history) 60–​93 history that has not happened yet 46 historical constellation 81 historical materialism 2, 4, 8, 18, 19, 27, 35, 50, 81, 83 historical reconstruction 59 historical time 63 historicism 5, 6 59n4, 82, 83, 84, 127, 131, 133, 137, 155, 162, 172 historiography (récit historique) 5, 6, 21, 25, 33, 49, 57, 60–​97 historiographic metafiction 65 hyper-​politicized 152 hyperreality 142, 150 hypothetical reader 105 home(land) 106, 110–​147, 167n14 Honneth Axel 37, 59n9 hooks, bell 181 Horn, Rebecca 133 house 133, 137 households 144, 175 human action 3, 30, 32, 173 humanities 1, 10, 13, 38, 43, 71 Hume, David 75 Hutcheson, Linda 65, 91n3 Huyssen, Andreas 167n16 Identity (identities) 24–​91, 97–​170 identity crisis 151 identity politics 3, 9, 11, 17, 37, 38, 54, 57, 76, 81 identityless 162 identification 9, 29, 34, 43–​49, 61, 67, 73, 76, 78, 79, 89, 94, 96, 98, 125, 134, 136, 139, 141, 145–​153, 160, 162, 164, 174 ideologeme 86

ideological mimicry 105 ideology 84, 153 illegal 139 in-​between method 54, 172 immigration 139 international 124 internationalism 153 international relations 153 intertextual 143 intimate stories 133 image-​trace 87 imagination 75 imaginary practices 68 imagology 154 imitation of an action 32, 34 imperfect histories 133 incision in the poetic composition 32 inequality 176 intellectual history 82 intelligibility 42 intelligible organization of the story 33 international relations 153 interpretation 147 intersectional identities 7 instersection of aesthetics and politics in narration 42 interruption 11, 60, 56, 75, 90, 121, 139 intimate stories 133 invisible 42 Irigaray, Luce 10 iterability 165 iterable (iterability) 73 -​75, 165, 172 Ivekovic, Rada 169 Jameson, Frederick 85 Kabakov, Ilja 143 Kandinsky, Wassily 133 Kant 78 kitchen 149 kitsch 144 Konstantinov, Janko 150 Kristiva, Julia 10, 39 Kundera, Milan 149 Kunst 135 Kunstprosa 113 labor force 176 LaCapra, Dominik 5, 59n4, 82, 92n21, 163, 166n12 Lada 143 La Riva, Gloria 145

192  Index Lacan 3, 10, 34, 36, 39, 78, 85, 86, 115, 135, 151, 152, 159 Lachmann, Renate 145 Laclau, Ernesto 12, 91n10, 151 Lachmann, Renate 92n28 langue 38 Lanser, Susan 167 larvae of language 101 late-​calitalism 91n16 Latin 139 leftwing radicalism 105 Legion of writers 93 Leipzig Book Fair 93 Lejeune, Philippe 128 lie 17, 55, 134–​138, 148, 169n37, 169n39 limit 119 literary studies 3, 10 lived narrative 2 Lodge, David 130, 169 logos 49 long transition 176 Los Angeles 151 lost 131 low-​waged job 176 Lynch, David 162 Lyotard’s grand narratives 17 Ljubljana 122 Macedonia 176 Mamula Island 145 margins 133 Martel, James 12, 131 Marx’s cultural theory 43 Marxism 12, 19, 27, 28, 34, 36, 38, 43, 48, 49, 52, 54, 57, 58, 62, 81, 82–​85, 93, 106, 108, 141, 151, 152 Marxism and the critique of structural Marxism of Louis Althusser 12 Marxist feminism 19 Marxist materialistic philosophy 27 Marxist philosophy 4, 54, 57 material (approach) 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 28, 45–​62, 65, 68, 74, 81, 87, 88, 94, 98, 117, 118, 121, 123, 144, 157–​159, 172 material rearrangements 173 materialistic approach 15, 18, 81 materialism 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 18, 19, 35, 45, 50, 53, 80, 81, 83, 172 materialist philosophy 27 materialist structures 2, 18 materiality of narrativity 19

materialization (of the emancipatory thought) 19, 48–​62, 170 memory 6, 30, 71, 87, 89–​175 memory practices 88, 123–​128, 150, 154, 175 metahistory 60 metamemory 87–​93 metanarratives 81 metanarratofemosophy 81 metanarratosophy 80–​82 metaphysical discourses 28 metaphysics 41, 80 metaphor 30, 129 metaphoric discourse 27 meta practices 146 methodology 5, 13, 30, 44, 60, 66, 123, 165, 173 migration 35 military 93 mimesis (I, II, III) 9, 23–​77, 128, 134, 168n30, 170, 173 mimesis praxeos 32 mimetic 24 Mohr, Heinrich 108 modalities (of aesthetic and ideological production) 81 modalities of intermediation 61 modernist buildings 150 moving jobs 176 Mouffe Chantal 12, 91n10 Munter, Gabriela 133 Museum of Communism in Prague 143 mutual space 142 NATO 124 Nazism 162 Nancy Fraser 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21n1, 21n10, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 45, 57, 75, 91n15, 91n16, 138, 141, 146, 147, 149, 169–​173 Nancy Luc-Jean 12 Narratofemosophy 17 narratology 2–​66 narrated history 61 narrated story 61 narration 2–​41 narrative 2–​60 narrative identity (narrative identities) 2–​60 narrative-​in-​motion 172 narrative –​in –​progress 23–​60 narrative structures 23–​93

Index  193 narrative turn 2 narrativity 4, 10, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 31, 33, 57, 58, 64, 106, 117, 118, 132, 171, 172, 174 narrativity in transit zone 15, 172 narrativization 118 narrativization as a political act 36, 97, 116, 117, 118, 168n34 narratofemosophy 17–​20, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 50, 51, 54, 170–​174 narratosophy 1–​93, 170–​176 nationalism 16, 126, 134, 143, 147, 149, 150 Negri, Antonio 12, 15, 149 necessity 62 neoliberalism 150 neo-​Marxist philosophy 54 new historicism 82, 132 new humanity 172 New Left 35 new literary histories 82 new social movements 58 new solidarities 126 Nobbe, Patrizia 145 nomads 147 non-​actions 42 non-​belonging 147 non-​fictional 6 non-​identities 5, 43, 49, 169n38 normative ambivalences 80 normative point 41 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Pact 153 North Macedonia 127 nostalgia 143, 162 now-​time (Jetztzeit) 88, 162 Obelisk 151 objet petit a 152 obscure theory 93 Olympic Games Sarajevo 125 Orthodox 151 Other 45, 154 oneiric 78 ontologically epistemological status of the discourse 31, 80, 170 ontological principles 46 opened narratie structures 8 Ossie 147 other woman 98 overlapping the refigurative methods 61

paid sick leave 143 paid summer vacations 143 pain 132 painful memories 175 Paris 133 parole 38 Partisan movies 145 perception of time 32 perceptibility 42 periphery 154 performative 165 personal identity 174 personal heritage 97 personal memory 89 pixelated identity 165 phantasma 99 phenomenology 41 Philip II of Macedon 152 philosophical (philosophical in the political) 2–​45, 75, 76, 123, 134, 136, 145, 157, 171 philosophy 2–​57 philosophy of democracy 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21n9, 40, 45–​49, 53, 58, 59, 62, 72, 73, 127, 141, 147, 152, 159, 172, 174, 175 philosophy of identity thinking 23–​60 philosophy of the narrative–​in–​ progress 23–​60 photography 158 Pierce 26 plausibility 34 Plato 47, 55, 62 plot 27–​99 plot and politics 96 poetic imagination 78 poetics of knowledge 66, 174 poiesis 42, 55 police (order of police) 14, 15, 42–​56, 130, 172, 173 policing 44, 159 policy 8, 45, 46 political 1–​77, 128–​133, 170–​176 political act 4, 24, 36, 97, 153, 171 political action 11, 15, 18, 41, 42, 48, 49, 58, 144, 146 political activism 175 political activity 42, 70, 72 political actors 40 political constellation 15, 150

194  Index political context 2, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19, 35, 38, 54, 65, 95, 141, 144, 159 political culture of the state-​organized society 35 political distribution of artistic text to the socio-​political context 15 political economy (of the imaginary, of the narrative, of the senses) 3, 9, 12, 20, 22, 34, 35, 54, 57, 71, 76 political emancipation 11, 12, 15, 19, 41–​54, 171, 173 political narratosophy 1–​57, 170–​175 political order 42 political representation 3, 7, 11, 16, 19, 20–​90 political subject of narration 8, 25, 41, 49, 53 political sociology 175 political theory 8, 10, 11, 13, 18, 37, 39, 42, 45, 46, 54, 56, 69, 70, 76, 80, 91n10, 143, 153, 172, 173, 174, 175 political transformation 15, 49 politics 1–​17, 23–​57, 71–​80, 81–​87, 94, 95, 96–​99 politics of aesthetics 12, 21n4, 21n7, 67, 91n5, 93–​165 politics of art 67 politics of equality 4, 45 politics of inequality 43, 58 politics of interpretation 3, 70, 173 political interventions 58 politics of imagination 1–​22, 77–​80 politics of memory 87–​93 politics of praxis 12, 27 politics without mimesis 174 popular 151 populism 16, 17, 152 possessive and disciplined memory 99 possibility (of politics and freedom) 43 post-​communist studies 20 post-​modern 90 Post-​Yugoslavia 6, 125, 169n43, 169n44, 159n57 Post-​Yugoslav feminists (feminist political economy) 140 Post-​Yugoslav Studies 174 postcolonial critique 3, 4, 20, 44, 81, 82, 144, 147 post-​colonialism 126, 154 post-​communist nostalgia 143 post-​communist theory of discourse 125

post-​socialist 127, 144–​145, 149, 174–​176 post-​socialist societies 143 post-​socialist gender regime 176 post-​structuralism 82 post war 35 political discontinuity 128 political voices 8 politics of difference 74 politics of imagination 75 politics of knowledge 136 politics of narrative paradigms 44 politics of reconfiguration 30 policy 8 politization of art 67 politicized cultural studies 8 populism 153 post-​Yugoslavia 176 potential history, 28 potential meaning of the narrative –​in progress 48 potentially present 142 potentially transformative structure (of narrative – in – progress, identities) 8, 9, 36, 74, 80, 82 power, organization of power 43 pragmatic model of Nancy Fraser 10 Prague 143 praxis 42 praxis-​bios 129 praxis of resistance 2 prefiguration 31, 130 prefigurative time 31 pre-​plot 118 private domain 176 probability 62 processes of elections 43 progressive historical narrative 19 Protocol on the Accession of North Macedonia 124 pseudo-​real imaginary 86 public sphere 12, 15, 16, 21n9, 40, 135, 171 quasi-​autobiography 114 quasi-​characters 64, 115 quasi-​event 63, 64, 115 quasi-​historicity of fiction 79 quasi-​history 63, 79, 114, 115 quasi-​past 62, 63 quasi-​plot 63, 115 quasi-​presence 62

Index  195 radical 24 radical democratic (approach, response) 8, 12, 15 radical transformation of the deep structures in the social totality 36 radical 7, 15, 17–​19, 24, 25, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37, 40–​58, 67–​69, 72–​76, 79, 91n10, 105, 110, 131, 135, 142, 145–​147, 159, 170, 171, 173, 174 Radical Left 171 radicalism 147 Rancière, Jacques, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 41–​78, 81, 91n5, 125, 140, 145, 146, 148, 159, 170–​173 Rancière’s political 13, 15, 41–​55 Rancière’s political philosophy 43–​48 Rancièrian politics of emancipation 43–​48 Rätze, Nora 167n15 Real 55, 58, 65, 67, 69–​80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 99, 100 real pole 67 reality 80–​123 recognition 18–​22, 36–​40, 121, 137, 152, 171 recollection 88 reconfiguration 17, 18, 20, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 49, 70 reconstruction 147 redistribution 19, 76 redistribution of the sensible 13, 46 referential reality 101 reification 38 reinscription 128 representation 20–​90 representation –​without -​representation 24 resistance (political narratosophy and resistance, resistance of art) 11, 15, 20, 37, 41, 44, 50, 51, 55, 58, 66, 78, 85, 139 return to politics 9 revolutionary act of resistance 41 revolutionary emancipatory politics 14 right wing 151 rhetoric 153 Ricoeur, Paul’s philosophy 21n1, 23–​33; Fraser and Ricoeur and Rancière 40–​59, 6–​70; Ricoeur, Fraser and Derrida 71–​77 Ricoeur’s politics of imagination 77–​80, 81–​91n2, 171–​174

Ricoeur’s emplotment 30–​65 Ricoeur’s “embedded in history’’ 28 Ricoeur’s hermeneutical methodology 30 Ricvoeur’s life as narrative 23–​60 Ricoeur’s mimesis 31–​33 Ricoeur’s political hermeneutics 25 rhetoric strategies 16–​70, 92, 145–​154 Russian invasion 92 Sarajevo 162 sayable 42 schism 125–​156 scene 25, 128, 133, 137, 139, 141, 142, 157, 160, 164, 165 Seattle 133 Second World War 97 second-​wave feminism 176 seeing-​as 31, 71 self-​government 143 self(hood) 5, 19, 27–​29, 72, 75, 79, 86, 96, 109, 116, 135, 162, 163–​165 self-​management 143, 153, 175 semantics 11, 15, 26, 31, 89, 154 semantic of action 11 semiotics 25, 39, 65, 84, 104 sense 42 sensible (Le Sensible) 14, 17, 21n3, 21n7, 41–​59 sensibility 15, 17, 18, 42–​59 sensory presentation 42 sensory regimes 42 sepia 145 Serbia 154 simulacrum 99 Skopje 123, 134, 150, 151, 169n43, 169n44 Skopje 2014, 150 Slavic languages 123 soc-​realism 86, 105, 105, 110, 159 social 70, 72, 78, 80, 82, 83, 85, 93, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 120 social act 89 social amnesia 90 social citizenship 176 social class 86 social organization 41 social philosophy 76 social policies 152 socialist feminist political theory 176 socialist political organization 176 socialist self-​management 176

196  Index society 2–​26 social history 82, 96 social identities 35, 36, 39, 45, 54, 174 social imaginary 58, 78 social inequalities 3, 12, 19, 43, 45 social justice 82 social memory 90 social of artistic practices 93 social reproduction theory 176 social rights 176 social sciences 82 socialism 95, 110–​113, 114, 124, 127, 135, 138, 140, 143, 145, 148, 152, 175 democratic socialism 18, 145 socialist 127, 153 socialist home 111 socialist democracy 175 Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia 123, 127, 176 socialist regime 113 social reproduction 127, 174 socialist republic 127 solidarity 143, 144, 152 Solidarnost posters 145 Sophie von La Roche 167n11 South-​Eastern Europe 35 Soviet museum 126 Soviet style communism 37 south 123 spectralization 155 speculative 2, 8, 18, 20, 37, 43, 55, 61, 85, 116 speech acts (performativities) 74 Spiegel 94 Stabilization and Social Agreement 124 Stadler, Gustavus 145 Stasi 94 state-​organized society 35, 36 structuralism 72 story 4–​22, 27, 59–​80 symbolic (identities) 150 storytelling (erzalen) 62 strict narrative 48 structuralism 29–​39, 80 structural features of the economic system 40 Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade 176 subject (of narration) 9, 18–​78, 172, 173 subjective politics 172, 173 subjective idealism 105

subjectivity 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 24, 33, 40, 50, 79, 99, 109, 120, 157 subjectification 173 syllogistic logic 147 symbolic 25, 32, 34, 38, 39, 53, 54, 61, 78, 85, 92n21 synchronic 38, 78, 87, 106, 123 syntagmatic 33 subordination 40–​41 superstructures 10, 78, 84 Tarr, Béla 48 teloi 124 temporal 139 Tenth plenary meeting of the Central Committee of East Germany 95 text (context, subtext) 20–​92 time 28–​58, 139 the nineties 149 theory of political discontinuity 128 Third World countries 153 time after narratives 4, 48 Todorov, Cvetan 142 Todorova, Maria 154 topos 142 totalitarianism 92n26 see also totalitarian regime 153 trace 87 transcendence 128 transcendental conditions 66 transformation of the discourse theories to the social​ 34 transformation of narrative 9, 28 transformation of reality 63 transformative political actions 58 transit process from the text toward context beyond discourse theory 16 transition 176 trauma 149 tropics of displacement 119 tropological (discourse) 71, 137, 160, 163 tropoi 119 truth 16, 31, 50, 55, 61, 66, 68, 75, 79, 85, 91n6, 97, 100–​162 The Great Alexander 152 theory of narration 1–​54 theory of political actions​41 theory of reception 6 thinkable 174 Twin Peaks 162

Index  197 Ugrešić Dubravka 126–​170 United Nations 124 un-​homely 146 un-​homing 146 un-​identification 146 unpaid feminine domestic labor 176 unsayable 42 Vertov, Dziga 17, 48 violence 16, 74, 101 visa 140, 143 visible 42 Vogel, Lise 81 war 35 Washington, D.C 153 welfare 144 Wessie 147 West Berlin 163 White, Hayden 59n1, 59n4, 60, 61, 63, 70, 71, 75, 79, 82, 90n1, 91n9, 100, 119, 160, 167n20, 172 White’s poetics of historiography 61

Williams, Raymond 44, 83 World War II 176 Wolf, Christa, 93–​125 women’s studies 3, 6, 174 women’s writings 93 work 176 writing (écriture/​art of writing) 42, 43, 46, 47, 52, 61, 65, 66, 67, 70, 73, 89, 91n4, 96, 97, 98, 108, 149, 150, 155, 156, 163, 173 writing history 68, 136 Yug 123 Yugonostalgia 144 Yugoslav collective memory 163 Yugoslav self-​management system 143 Yugoslaiva 1, 6, 37, 123–​160, 162, 164, 168n23, 168n35, 168n36, 169n38, 174, 175 Zagreb 123, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146 Žižek, Slavoj 20, 149 ZZ-​Top Café’ 144