Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature: The Politics of Time 9781498580663, 9781498580670, 1498580661

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Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature

Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature The Politics of Time

Aleksandar Mijatović

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Names: Mijatović, Aleksandar, 1977– author. Title: Temporalities of post-Yugoslav literature : the politics of time / Aleksandar Mijatović. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book engages with the conceptual intersections of postYugoslav literature, focusing on analyses of postism and temporality”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020041832 (print) | LCCN 2020041833 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498580663 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498580670 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Slavic literature, Southern—Former Yugoslav Republics—History and criticism. | National characteristics, Yugoslav, in literature. | Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. | Politics and literature. Classification: LCC PG569.2 .M55 2020 (print) | LCC PG569.2 (ebook) | DDC 891.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041832 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041833 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction—A Temporality of the Concept of (Post)-Yugoslav Literature: A Critical Approach toward (Post)-Yugoslav Studies?

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1 The “Post-” of (Post)-Yugoslav Literatures: An Outline of the Literary Study of the Temporalities of Parentheses and Hyphens

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2 The Time of Dispossession: The Conflict, Composition, and Geophilosophy of Revolution in East Central Europe

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3 The Time of Disappearing—From Memory to Becoming-(Post)-Yugoslav in Daša Drndić’s novel Leica Format: Reading the Dissolution of (Post)-Yugoslav Time through Bergson’s, Benjamin’s, and Deleuze’s Concepts of Temporality

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4 The Mono-chronological “Post”: The Synchronization of the Meanwhiles of Nations in Antun Barac’s and Pavle Popović’s Histories of Yugoslav Literature and Relation to the Concept of (Post)-Yugoslav Literature

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5 Remembering the Future: Narration and Fabulation in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novels The Ministry of Pain and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg 131 6 The Floating Middle: (Post)modern Time, Transition, and (Post)-Yugoslav Literature v

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7 The Voice of the Mother’s Secret—The Secret of the Mother’s Voice: The Acoustics of Memory in David Albahari’s Novel Bait 199 Bibliography 227 Index 239 About the Author

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Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book were supported by two research projects, Politics of Time in the post-Yugoslav Prose: Imagining Temporalities of Literary Cultures of Transnationality (IP-2016-06-9548) and Literary Revolutions (IP-2018-01-7020) funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. I owe a personal and intellectual debt to many colleagues and friends. I cannot imagine what this book would be without Professor Brian Willems. Thank you to Brian for his generosity, professionalism, and acuteness. This book project would not be possible without Eric Kuntzman and Brian Hill. They accompanied the germination of this book from its earliest forms. Eric and Brian, I offer you my great thanks for an initial trust and continuing support. In the later stages, the manuscript was carefully followed by Kasey Beduhn and Alexandra Rallo. Melissa McNitt and Arun Rajakumar oversaw the production process. Thank you to all the Lexington Books staff. Chapter 3 was previously published in the edited collection Claiming the Dispossession. Thanks to Brill for permitting me to reproduce the chapter in this book. I am grateful to MacLehose Press for granting me a license to use quotations from their edition of Daša Drndić’s novel Leica Format. I am thankful to Northwestern University Press (Iván, you were very kind) for allowing fair use in quoting from their edition of David Albahari’s novel Bait. Formalities aside for a moment, I would like to express my unconventional gratitude to the Anglophone publishers on both sides of the Atlantic for doing great work in translating, publishing, and promoting the so-called peripheral literature(s). Since its inception, I have been writing this book surrounded by two engaging and antic readers. Ivan is making his early steps in reading, yet

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he has abetted me in rekindling a rollicking, diverting, and erratic side to approaching texts. Aneli is an experienced and attentive reader, bucking me up to search for switch points. I am pretty sure that I tried to write this work because of Ivan and Aneli’s love of books. I dedicate this one to them and hope they will like it.

Introduction A Temporality of the Concept of (Post)-Yugoslav Literature: A Critical Approach toward (Post)-Yugoslav Studies?

This book presents a theoretical account of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature. The starting point of the theoretical elaboration is that all concepts have a temporal structure. The goal of explicating the temporal structure of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature is twofold. First, it is an attempt to disentangle (post)-Yugoslav literature from the concepts associated with both governmental notions of nation and state and nongovernmental notions invoking transnational forms of community, since governmental notions are replicated into their nongovernmental antipodes. Second, in foregrounding the temporal structure of these concepts, I attempt to reconsider the actual approaches to (post)-Yugoslav literature. Therein, (post)-Yugoslav literature is accessed in terms such as exile, nostalgia, trauma, memory, melancholy, war, and community. These accounts successfully explain how a panoply of cultural forms of writing is constructed as literature to reflect the collapse of the second Yugoslavia (1946–1992) and its aftermath. The construction of literature and the reflection on social, economic, and political realities are coeval processes. Yet, these processes also have different timelines that may converge and diverge without intermingling into a uniform and invariable chronological flow. In pinpointing and expounding the temporal structure of these concepts, the theoretical focus shifts from “(post)-Yugoslav” to “literature.” The literature does not construct itself to reflect the temporal manifold of social, economic, and political processes. Instead, the literature deflects them as it displays how timelines resist being subordinated to a uniform temporal flow. With this temporal reframing, the literature is promoted into the principal object of (post)-Yugoslav studies. Throughout the chapters, I defend the thesis that both the concepts of Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures have played an intermediary role in (re)building both (multi)national and transnational communities. Much weight 1

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Introduction

is put on the component of “Yugoslav(ia)” in these concepts. Both notions of time and literature are subordinated to the establishment of multinational unity in the case of Yugoslav literature as well as to recovering communal life after the demise of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars in the first half of the 1990s. In the vocabulary that I develop in the book, multilayered temporality is demoted to the synchronization of its heterogeneous timelines, time-shifts, which, nevertheless, resist being fully accommodated and captured within encapsulated and entrenched identities. Therefore, I outline and underscore how the timescape of the former Yugoslavia is configured by the two-tiered process of synchronization and de-synchronization. The proposed temporal structure of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature is explained as an asynchronous simultaneity. Aleš Debeljak, Slovenian theoretician and poet, depicts the second Yugoslavia as a multipronged kaleidoscope of different cultures. He says that the members of the different nations and ethnic groups living together in the former state shared a “one common trait (jednu zajedničku crtu)” in being “unknown acquaintances (neznani znanci)”1 to each other. Drawing on Freud’s notion of das Unheimliche, Debeljak argues that the Yugoslav mosaic, blended from different pieces, could not withstand the irresolvable tension between both foreign and familiar components present in the community. However, according to Debeljak, that tension encourages and entices the members of different nations or ethnic groups to declare and lay bare the foundations of their identities openly. Later, Debeljak describes this tension in terms of cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitan identity is unstable, but it is stirred by epistemological curiosity and a capability for simultaneous compassion and empathy. To understand someone genuinely means to “step into someone else’s shoes.” The cosmopolitan attitude involves both “home” and “world,” two halves of a whole that never join. The cosmopolite is a smuggler who ceaselessly passes from the foreign to the domestic. He expands the first while reconsidering the other.2

Non-coalescing mutuality declined from the “ideal of the people” to the nationalist “idea of the Nation.”3 Debeljak’s concept of Yugoslav anational cosmopolitanism evokes Benedict Anderson’s definition of a nation as the simultaneity of anonymous individuals: The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analog of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.4

Introduction

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The nation is no longer conceived as stemming from a single and monolithic origin but as the intertwined arrangement of multiple tribal, ethnic, race, cultural, class, linguistic, and social fragments. Still, it is not apparent how this simultaneous multiplicity of distinct fragments is endowed with the linear form of calendar time. This consecutive chronology synchronizes the multilayered arrangement of ever-shifting timelines of heterogeneous people. The multipronged anonymity of people is leveled down to the project and the destiny of the nation. Debeljak discovers a tension inside the variety of the former nations of Yugoslavia. He pins that tension down by introducing cosmopolitan inclusiveness into Yugoslav identification. In that halcyon image, Yugoslav identity is not settled; instead, it is engendered through ephemeral encounters among the different nations and cultures. Along with the inexpugnable nationalist myth of a perennial Yugoslav identity, the transnational and transcultural myth of inchoate and deciduous identifications is promoted. Even though identity and identification are advocated as conceptual adversaries, they are entangled and support each other. Yugoslav identity, whether national or anational, is associated with the dis-identification and transgressing the boundaries of one’s own identity. However, it reclaims a once-repudiated identity and reinforces Yugoslav identity as a national category. One does not become a Yugoslav in undergoing dis-identification; on the contrary, being a Yugoslav is a condition of dis-identification. Hence, only in passing through identification (being a Yugoslav), it is possible to disconnect and exempt oneself from a previous ethnic, national, class, or cultural attachments and belonging. The synchronized co-existence of different identifying operations inevitably leads to the constitution of an ethnonationalist fiction. This ethnonationalist synchronization assumes various forms in both notions of Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures. For the temporal reassessment of both notions, it is necessary to expound alternative narratives of de-synchronization. The reconsideration of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature within temporal framework perpends the possibility of establishing an abstract dis-identification. It would be related to history, albeit irreducible to it. For Anderson, this simultaneity is synchronized into the linearity of calendar time. For Debeljak, nonetheless, the irresolvable tension between the foreign and the domestic is dispelled by endorsing a cosmopolitan attitude. This attitude, as Debeljak portrays it, involves the simultaneous process of a mutual redescription of foreign and domestic perspectives. The bilateral reconsidering of two views is fused into a single hybrid term that Debeljak dubs an unknown acquaintance, relegating it to the status of a common trait. He subdues the uncommon under the common. The two perspectives act as entwined switch-points.5

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Introduction

Nataša Kovačević proposes a model of non-coalescing mutuality to overcome the current European vacillation between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. She describes new forms of European belonging “as being-in-common despite the absence of a common identity,”6 and being together “without a filiative resemblance.”7 Kovačević underlines the simultaneous multiplicity of transitory belongings as “/t/he traumatic nodes of (un)belonging—hospitality across borders.”8 Her quest for new forms of European (non)belonging takes Yugoslavia as a foundation for rethinking and revisiting the European Union. Overhauling of the European Union according to the model of Yugoslavia paves the way for a bidirectional idealization of both Yugoslavia and the EU: Rather, Yugoslavia today denotes heterogeneity, protest, and broad social justice, less reified statist destiny than inheritance, hope, choice, and chance. It contains the kernel of an alternative sociality-in-common.9

Anderson’s notion of the simultaneity of anonymous individuals and Debeljak’s notion of the unknown acquaintance resurface in Kovačević’s model of uncommon alliances. This latter notion synchronizes the multilayered simultaneity of different timelines. Reflecting on the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its political, economic, and cultural aftermaths, Gordy calls for an approach that overcomes statecentered analyses and interpretations.10 The ongoing changes starting in the late 1980s involve a heterogeneous variety of national, ethnic, class, and social (f)actors. Deploying an explanatory framework dominated by the state, this multiplicity is splintered into disconnected zones. The state-centered approach reduces the comprehension of the multitude and its timescape to the cultural, sociological, and political accounts of institutions: There is insufficient knowledge and understanding of social change and the ways in which it affected political and social division. Contrary to the tendency in much of formal political analysis to treat political actors and events in isolation, we know that they are both the product of changes at the societal level and in many instances contribute to changes at the societal level.11

This state-centered approach has been rejected in recent accounts of both Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literature(s). Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić remarks that the double mechanisms of separation and joining can be limited neither to establishing the state nor its destruction.12 The two-tiered process of convergence and divergence, joining and disjoining is independent of the state: If we resist being dazzled by a turning point between the “former” and “the present” state (SFRY/RC, socialism/capitalism, prewar period/postwar), we

Introduction

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will be surprised with the “discovery.” Lines of separation between the former Yugoslav literatures are not the exclusive product of any particular historical turning point. Connections and interferences are abolished either by a decree or destroyed with grenades. Frontiers are not the exclusive agenda of ethnonationalists from the 1990s, just as connections and interferences are not the exclusive agenda of Yugoslav advocates of integralism and nostalgia.13

Predrag Brebanović rejects the claim that Yugoslav literature vanishes with the expiry of the state of Yugoslavia: The problem with the concept of “post-Yugoslav literature” is straightforward and consists of simultaneously endorsing a viewpoint of the state and avoiding it. Advocates of “post-Yugoslavity” therefore evade the field of any kind of conflict, irrespective of whether it is taking place in the zone of theory or war operations.14

Brebanović combines Walter Benjamin’s account of tradition as actualization and Svetozar Petrović’s distinction between the standpoint of the past and the standpoint of the present. Brebanović argues that works of art are charged with the indices of the historical instant from which they emerge. These indices interpose interpretations with a delay, and thus their readability is deferred to “some other time.”15 This time is different from the historical moment from which a work of art appears. The difference between time and historical accidents is history. This othering, differential temporality is produced when time is subtracted from the historical moment. The remainder of this subtraction is history as a differential temporality. The differential time of dispossession refers to an alien, exogenous temporality, belonging to no one.16 The linguistic form of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature has a complex grammar consisting of a prefix, punctuation(s), and word.17 This typographical and grammatical complexity engrafts the irresolvable ambiguity into the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature. Yet, this ambiguity is not an obstacle to thinking about the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature. Instead, it can be reassessed if time is taken to be the primary form of concepts, thereby endorsing variability as their constitutive layout. This means that the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature is a compound indicating a heterogeneous variation of timelines and time-shifts. Various accounts of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature are statecentered. They study how literature is tied to the state and its demise. Therefore, time is attached to a fixed point, which contains its transformative effects. The concept of (post)-Yugoslav time cannot be adequately explained as the mutuality of the past and the future, as temporal bidirectionality and

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Introduction

a lingering influence between timelines. These concepts are neither invalid nor illegitimate, but they require the concept of disappearing untied from a fixed point. As I show in length, Homi Bhabha, following Lévinas’s concept of the meanwhile, constructed a post-colonial de-synchronization of metropolitan dominance over time. Even this de-synchronized lagging behind can assume the shape of synchronization or exert synchronizing effects. Contrary to a synchronizing approach to a multilayered timescape, I develop an interstitial temporality that ceaselessly brings timelines into an asynchronous simultaneity. Versions of the concept of an asynchronous simultaneity are developed in the works of Louis Althusser, Ernst Bloch, and Reinhart Koselleck.18 I construct the concept of asynchronous simultaneity by drawing on various theoretical sources, including the notions of time put forth by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Brian Massumi, and Paul Ricoeur. These thinkers endorse time as a form of thought, and they rethink history by explicating its temporal structure. Due to this asynchronous simultaneity, mutuality is detached from coalescence: Time becomes a shifting continuity of events at a distance. The dialectic of simultaneity and delay organizes time into elastic rhythms. With this model, we can analyze the time-structures of such diverse phenomena as atonal music, political decision-making, leaps of memory and the boredom of waiting, and simultaneities and delays in everyday experience and behaviour. (. . .) Time is a multileveled system that pulls towards both convergence and divergence.19

I examine various forms of this interstitial temporality, such as delay, dilatation, deferring, time-lag, and meanwhile. The temporality of the in-between de-synchronizes simultaneity. In the following chapters, I analyze works by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, Danilo Kiš, Daša Drndić, Dubravka Ugrešić, and David Albahari to explore forms of de-synchronization which oppose the temporalities that replicate patterns of subjectivation. I juxtapose a variety of theoretical models of temporality and the interpretations of some of the works of these authors. I propound the concept of asynchronous simultaneity to hinder stabilizing inchoate and multipronged collectives into homogeneous and monotonous communities. However, this transmogrification of the manifold and interstitial encounters into an immutable communal entity is present in the recent (post)-Yugoslav studies. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the distinction of a state as a form of interiority and a war machine as a form of exteriority. While the state tends to reproduce itself, the war machine is bound to a variation that cannot be divided into discrete segments:

Introduction

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Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. If there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible intuition of variation.20

However, Deleuze and Guattari underline how the state and the war machine interact: It is in terms not of independence, but of co-existence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and state apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in states, but describes its exteriority in what escapes states or stands against states.21

The concept of asynchronous simultaneity describes the perpetual field of interaction between the state and the war machine.22 However, as Deleuze and Guattari show, variation is not inherently antagonistic to the state. Instead, it may also be harnessed to support and maintain the state. Variation is not necessarily liberating. The state no longer struggles to suppress variation but utilizes it as a powerful governing technique. In hindsight, the controversial postmodern classic of Deleuze and Guattari is not only read as a eulogy to variation, which they triumphantly manumit from the fetters of constants. On the contrary, the real political and aesthetical task would be to disengage variation from steering and reinforcing constants instead of merely disrupting them. Hence, in studying (post)-Yugoslav time and (post)-Yugoslav literature, it is not sufficient to promote anational and transnational displacements and mutations that transpire simultaneously across and in-between individual and collective identities, subject-positions, and narratives. The goal of critical (post)-Yugoslav studies is to explicate neither a common, despite national, state, cultural, and linguistic borders nor the creation of the new and hybrid from such intersections of simultaneous trajectories.23 The field of (post)-Yugoslav studies is invested with both historical and theoretical complexities which are explicated as a question of how this coevality is de-synchronized. I develop concepts of zones of anonymous traversals that enhance a non-coalescing mutuality, a crosscutting of switching-points, and adjacency without adherence. A perpetual field is a continuum populated with the multipronged multitude. Erik O. Eriksen considers anonymous members of this collective as holders of rights that lack an already established identity. He developed the notion of the scale of state (“stateness”) as an adversary to the national(istic) and hierarchically ordered state: On a continuum with the autarchic state and the world society as end points. Means of coercion for protecting rights and realising collective goals would be

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Introduction

shared between levels. Within such a framework, the EU could claim legitimacy for its decisions by reference to the legal form they are dressed in, rather than with reference to some form of collective identity and superiority.24

Indicatively, Eriksen confronts the notion of scalar state and related concepts such as a state-less government to Habermas’s proposal of ordering the EU into a federation of nation-states. Eriksen’s concept of the scalar state requires multilevel intermediation between the state, the government, and ever-shifting ways for individuals to be held accountable. Yet, adjacency without adherence to these intermediate levels is enabled by asynchronous simultaneity. Returning to Yugoslavia, its degree of stateness was limited. Selfmanagement and the non-alignment movement were not state-free interzones. They were forms of governmentality designed to strengthen the state and thwart its mutation into a state-less proliferation of intermediate levels. Nevertheless, these features of Yugoslav governmentality are espoused as a model for the transformation and restoration of civic communions both in the EU and in the former Yugoslav republics. It is neglected that these governmental techniques were devised to empower Yugoslavia as a multinational state. Yugoslav governmentality integrates co-existing temporal flows and forges the monolithic time of the nation-state. (Post)-Yugoslav literature attempts to exceed and transgress the framework of the state and to envisage alternative forms of community and belonging. However, at the same time, it takes the extinguished state as a blueprint for conceptualizing non-state forms of belonging and allying. It takes the myth of an immanent community as a pattern for either anational or transnational communities. The task of critical (post)-Yugoslav studies is not solely to envisage an uncertain future starting from an incontestable and immutable idea(l) of the past. On the contrary, we comprehend our time against the backdrop of a time that is not our own. This exogenous temporality unhinges simultaneous trajectories of a variety of identities from social, economic, political, and cultural processes. This fissure is transformed into a historical interval. The interval of a non-coinciding co-existence generates a non-coalescing mutuality.25 The unheard-of future is an exotic determinism that is carried out by reconsidering the past. Critical (post)-Yugoslav studies trace transformative forces of the undercurrent both in Yugoslavia and in the republics constituted after its collapse. To perform this task, one enlists a few key concepts such as Yugoslavia’s modernization in architecture, design, and the arts, the nonalignment movement, self-management, socialism, and burgeoning popular and mass culture. The next step consigns to these concepts an incontestable legacy that outlines alternative paths not taken and aborted opportunities. These contingencies do not enfranchise anyone since they are subdued to

Introduction

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historical necessity. Differential history, nevertheless, depends on an archaeology of inchoate communities, missing collectives, and deciduous encounters. The critical underpinnings of this archaeology are associated with the ephemeral and transient region of toggling. The critical question is whether these concepts are installed and exerted as techniques for maintaining the multinational state or whether they provide resources for overcoming it. It is not enough to indicate points of intersections and non-state alliances or to retrieve the broken bonds across, and independently from, the new frontiers. It is also required to delineate their respective temporalities and spell out whether these new forms of ephemeral collectivity are related through nonrelations, thereby ensuring a non-coalescent mutuality. Otherwise, they will persist in reinstating the ensnaring myth of immanent community. With the shift from a thematic focus to a temporal, theoretical, and historical one, critical (post)-Yugoslav studies switch from the “Yugoslav” to the literature itself.

NOTES 1. Aleš Debeljak, Sumrak idola (Zagreb: Menadar, 1995), p. 29. 2. “Kozmopolitski je identitet nestabilan, ali ga pokreću spoznajna radoznalost i sposobnost istovremenog suosjećanje i empatije. Nekoga doista razumjeti znači ‘stupiti u njegove cipele.’ Kozmopolitiski stav uključuje dom i svijet, dvije polovice cjeline koje se nikad ne sastavljaju. Kozmopolit je krijumčar koji neprestano prelazi iz stranog u domaće te širi jedno dok preispituje drugo.” Aleš Debeljak, Balkansko brvno: Eseji o književnosti ‘jugoslavenske Atlantide’ (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2014), p. 21. 3. Debeljak, Balkansko brvno, p. 20. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Rev. ed.) (London: Verso, 1983), p. 26. 5. The de-synchronizing of narration is defined in categories of interstitial temporality such as delay, dilatation, and the meanwhile. De-synchronizing temporality is a ground for a theory of the narrative middle which is unhinged from the beginning and the ending. 6. See Nataša Kovačević, Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 27. 7. Kovačević, Uncommon Alliances, p. 145. 8. Kovačević, op. cit., p. 34. 9. Ibid., p. 214. 10. See Eric Gordy, “On the Current and Future Research Agenda for Southeast Europe,” pp. 11–23, in Debating the End of Yugoslavia, eds. Florian Bieber, Armina Galijaš and Rory Archer (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014). 11. See Gordy, “On the Current,” p. 17. 12. Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, “Književno polje SFRJ-a: podsjetnik na tranziciju dugog trajanja,” pp. 27–45, in Tranzicija i kulturno pamćenje, eds. Virna Karlić, Sanja Šakić and Dušan Marinković (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2017).

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13. Lacko Vidulić, “Književno polje,” p. 40. 14. Predrag Brebanović, “Jugoslavenska književnost: stanovište sadašnjosti,” pp. 57–65, in Tranzicija i kulturno pamćenje, eds. Virna Karlić, Sanja Šakić and Dušan Marinković (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2017), p. 60. 15. Brebanović, “Jugoslavenska književnost,” p. 62. For critical remarks on Petrović’s account of Yugoslav literature, see Davor Beganović, “Filologija i politika iznova: aktualnost ideja Svetozara Petrovića u promijenjenom kontekstu,” Croatica: časopis za hrvatski jezik, književnost i kulturu 40, no. 60 (2016): 1–14. 16. History demonstrates how its actors regain the capacity to disappear. To survive it is to reclaim the capability to die. 17. For a discussion regarding the temporality of the “post-” in the post-colonial, see Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 160–174. He proposes the concept of plural temporalities. 18. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); and Louis Althusser et al., Lire le Capital (Paris: PUF, 1965). 19. Jay Lampert, Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 1. 20. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 369. 21. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 360–361. 22. Davor Beganović (See “Od periferije ka centru i natrag. Nomadizam u prozi Aleksandra Hemona i Saše Stanišića,” Sarajevske sveske, no. 23–24 (2009): 127–156 and Diana Hitzke (See Nomadisches Schreiben Nach Dem Zerfall Jugoslawiens: David Albahari, Bora Ćosić und Dubravka Ugrešić (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014)) introduce Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts in the research field of (post)-Yugoslav studies. I owe much to their remarkable work. 23. See important remarks by Dean Duda (“Prema genezi i strukturi postjugoslavenskog književnog polja (bilješke uz Bourdieua),” pp. 45–57, In Tranzicija i kulturno pamćenje, eds. Virna Karlić, Sanja Šakić and Dušan Marinković (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2017), pp. 54–55.). 24. Erik O. Eriksen, The Normativity of the European Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 110. 25. Therefore, I agree with Hägglund’s claim that “time is nothing in itself (…)” (See Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 15). Nevertheless, this claim does not commit one to endorse succession over co-existence. Succession and co-existence are concomitant operations; otherwise, it would be impossible for a “moment [to] come into being at the same time as it ceases to be” (Ibid.). It is contradictory to state that time is nothing in itself and then to emphasize “a spatialization that constrains the power of the virtual in making it dependent on material conditions” (Ibid.). These material conditions are already temporal and it is precisely this temporal status of materiality that enables the noncoalescing mutuality of preservation and effacement, the possibility of the survival of life, and the impossibility of life to close in upon itself. Hägglund’s central thesis of the negativity of time is easily reversed into the time of negativity.

Chapter 1

The “Post-” of (Post)-Yugoslav Literatures An Outline of the Literary Study of the Temporalities of Parentheses and Hyphens

It might seem obvious that the notion of Yugoslav literature is related to the establishment of the nation-state of Yugoslavia. This presumption is natural within the framework of national philology in its supposed role of supporting the processes of nation-building and the founding of the nation-state. Within such a framework, we can mention at least two histories of Yugoslav literature.1 However, Yugoslavia was a multinational and multiethnic state, and two historians of its literature were forced to follow diverging paths of the literatures of its single nations. During the 1960s, two prominent literary critics, Vlatko Pavletić and Sveta Lukić engaged in a polemics regarding the notion of Yugoslav literature. In endorsing the term, Lukić saw a readiness to step out from local, regional, and national boundaries.2 Pavletić, on the contrary, debunked the hidden hegemony behind such a cosmopolitan veil behind which the notion of Yugoslav literature appeared.3 Pavletić argued that the term is too narrow to include all of the differences between the nations of Yugoslavia and proposed the term literatures of the nations of Yugoslavia instead of using the term Yugoslav literature. Eekman knew about the polemics between Lukić and Pavletić and was explicit about the perplexities of writing the history of Yugoslav literature.4 Although he used the expression “conglomerate” in order to describe the Yugoslav nation, Eekman nevertheless retained Popović and Barac’s methodology in presenting the history of Yugoslav literature.5 The notion of (post)-Yugoslav literature is apparently related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The existence of Yugoslav literature is not necessary to account for the notion of (post)-Yugoslav literature. However, these two literatures share a relationship with the project of Yugoslavia. The notion of Yugoslav literature could be retroactively derived from (post)-Yugoslav 11

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literature, which is on first sight its chronological sequel. In relation to Yugoslavia, (post)-Yugoslav literature struggles to speak in the name of the co-belonging, which supersedes both the former state and its ideology. The (post)-Yugoslav writer attempts to show that co-belonging survived even after the violent demise of the second Yugoslavia. (Post)-Yugoslav literature seemingly presents itself as a mediator between nationalisms of the former Yugoslav republics. It also stages itself as a guardian of values, beliefs, and standards that are on the verge of vanishing in the social, economic, and political transformation from socialism to the neoliberal market economy. From this point of view, the (post)-Yugoslav writer rejects identifying with any institutionalized or state form of Yugoslavia and affirms ways of building communities that would be irreducible to recognizable forms of identities. However, as Gajević6 underlines, the idea of Yugoslavia as a literary community was envisaged before it gained the form of a political community. He laments that writers shifted from advocates of Yugoslav literature to its detractors.7 Later in his book, Gajević uses the notion of literary unity that is supposed to replace the notion of Yugoslav literature. In discussing Danilo Kiš’s influence on (post)-Yugoslav writers, Wachtel spells out four principal attributes that made Kiš a Yugoslav writer.8 According to the second attribute,9 Kiš had an affirmative attitude toward Yugoslavia, but he nevertheless “was not identified with the Yugoslav state or with the communist project.”10 Wachtel explains Kiš’s position as approaching dissidence. However, this is not only an attribute of Yugoslav writer(s), but it can also be adopted as a definition of (post)-Yugoslav writer(s). Accordingly, Kiš would already be a (post)-Yugoslav writer, and contemporary (post)Yugoslav writers would turn out as Yugoslav writers. Both terms, Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures, compound components which can be defined separately and independently from each other. Two components—literature and “post-”—are almost entirely left undefined. I will approach the theses presented at the beginning of this by focusing on the role of punctuating the prefix “post-” in relation to the word “Yugoslav.” The prefix “post-” can be added to the word “Yugoslav” in at least three ways. First, the prefix “post-” can be added directly to the word “Yugoslav.” Second, the prefix and the word can be separated with a hyphen. Third, the prefix can be attached to the word by enclosing it in parentheses. I will consider various ways of using and/or omitting punctuations. THE POST-YUGOSLAV AS POSTMEMORY In elaborating on the notion of post-Yugoslav constellations, Beronja and Vervaet11 adopted and applied Marianne Hirsch’s12 concept of postmemory.

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Hirsch elaborates on the role of the prefix “post-” in the notion of postmemory. While Beronja and Vervaet write “post-Yugoslav” with a hyphen, Hirsch attaches the prefix “post-” directly to “memory.” According to Hirsch, postmemory refers to how the succeeding generation is related to the past of the preceding generation. These generations cannot establish links through remembering. The prior generation does not transmit its memory to its successors. The succeeding generation does not inherit memory directly but attempts to imagine it, endorsing the imaginative projection of the past as own memory. However, the attempt to imagine the past of one’s predecessors is a reaction to the inability to establish an immediate link between the past of predecessors and the present of successors. Events from the past tend to be prolonged and effectuated in the present, which is disconnected from them. The aftermath of the past is to be narratively reconstructed and seized, although it escapes such reconstruction. In postmemory Hirsch sees “an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture,”13 a return of traumatic experience but from an inter- and a transgenerational distance. The “post-” emerges from that alien and yet immanent zone of passage, a distant contact between (“inter”) and across (“trans”) generations. The evasive past is transformed into the proximate memory. Otherwise, a succeeding generation appropriates a foreign past to naturalize its present. Hirsch underlines two traits of the postmemory. First, the past with which one generation was not directly involved displaces its retroactive narrative reconstruction. Second, the events of the past have a strong impact on the present. But this coming after is not what makes the “post-” of the narrative reconstruction. The object of a narrative reconstruction is how the past simultaneously demands to be narratively reframed and still defies attempts of being recaptured through narration. However, one cannot convert belatedness into the superordinate position of a distanced witnessing. What is reframed and recaptured is the immediate presence of the past, which, on the other hand, defies mediation. The real question of the “post-” would be how one mediates the unmediated or even unmediatable immediacy of the past. The “post-” question cannot be restricted to positing a thesis on the mutual influence and intersection of the “post-” and the present. There is a “metapost” question hidden in this thesis that asks which kind of temporality one is to be committed to developing the notion of mutual influence. Generations are affiliated with/to the past, to which they no longer bear any filiation. The filiation with the past may be severed even between the most proximate generations. By “post-Yugoslav,” Beronja and Vervaet14 attempt to capture both the breakup of second Yugoslavia and its aftermath. They draw on Hirsch’s parallelism between the “post-” in postmodernism15 and postmemory, based on the “ongoing influence of the former on the latter.” The ongoing influence

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entails continuity persisting despite the rise of new political configurations that denounce previous filiation with the second Yugoslavia. Beronja and Vervaet’s notion of the post-Yugoslav constellation can be synthesized as the four features of reclaiming filiation: 1. Redirecting nostalgia toward the future of former Yugoslav republics, 2. Reestablishing cultural and linguistic space independently from the new politics of identity which relives the pre-communist nation-building processes, 3. Reinventing the hidden and suppressed potentials of the revolutionary project of the second Yugoslavia, and 4. Reconstituting and reimagining the transnational community outside the political frontiers. In constructing post-Yugoslav constellations, it must be acknowledged that the (post)-Yugoslav as postmemory is foremost an affiliative relation instead of being a familial one. The affiliative work of postmemory relates to the unknown and yet also to the innermost memory of Yugoslavia. What if the present situation of the former republics of Yugoslavia is inherited from the former Yugoslavia itself? The (post)-Yugoslav question must be re-enacted in the very notion of Yugoslavia. The “post-” does not relate only to the breakup, but to the multidimensional processes that led to it. THE GRAMMAR OF PARENTHESES: A SHIFT FROM “YUGOSLAV” TO “POST-“ Rakočević16 and Matijević17 explain the notion of (post)-Yugoslav literature by relying upon Bhabha’s definition of “post-” as it is used in his classic book The Location of Culture.18 However, as we shall see, Bhabha, just as Hirsch, does not hyphenate post and colonialism and yet the prefix and the word are spectrally punctuated without visible punctuation marks. When Rakočević defines the (post)-Yugoslav situation as a capability to imagine the future by taking the past as a starting point, he italicizes the “post-” in post-Yugoslav.19 The “post-” that is both italicized and hyphenated refers to the twofold process of looking back into the past and overcoming it, as Matijević20 sums up Rakočević’s reintroduction of the (post)-Yugoslav into the field of post-colonial studies.21 For Rakočević, the retroactive projection of the future within the past enables one to be conscious of the latter without passionately becoming attached to it. It is no longer a postmemorial situation because the crisis of memory is seen as a possibility for a new beginning. In the sentence in which Rakočević argues that a proper definition of the

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(post)-Yugoslav requires the notion of liminal temporality, the “post-” is de-italicized. Adorno22 speaks of a shift in the function of punctuation marks when they cease to be subordinated to conveying meaning. Through that liberation, punctuation constitutes the pole of language opposite to words as independent bearers of meaning. That graphic pole of punctuation, as opposed to the graphemic pole of words, outcrops from the language. According to Adorno, the physiognomic character and expressivity of punctuation are not exhausted by their role in the sentence. Proust, for example, extensively used parentheses, assigning them the function to interrupt both graphic and narrative continuity to capture a memory from its obscure, involuntary, side. Virginia Woolf developed the use of parentheses to concoct the effect of the simultaneity of heterogeneous perspectives. The hyphenated “post-” in the (post)-Yugoslav is to be enclosed within parentheses, or it must be thought as parenthesized. As Agamben argues,23 a hyphen signifies a dialectic of unity and separation; it unites by separating and separates by unifying. Parentheses interrupt that dialectical relation and replace it with simultaneity. As we shall see in the following discussion on Bhabha and Lévinas, parentheses and hyphens indicate an asynchronous simultaneity of components. Bhabha develops his parenthetical perspective in the introduction to The Location of Culture through a reading of Emmanuel Lévinas’s seminal essay on art, “Reality and its Shadow.”24 Bhabha quotes a sentence from Lévinas’s essay in which it is stated that the imaginary encloses reality inside parentheses. We will consider Lévinas’s argument and Bhabha’s reading of it in the context of postcolonial theory. In the paragraph of “Reality and its Shadow” titled “Image and Resemblance,” Lévinas argues that in the imagination, the real world appears to be inside parentheses or quotation marks. Lévinas argues that demarcation lines between art and reality are drawn by displacing notions of object, light, transparency, knowledge, understanding, and concept. Art does not assess reality by imitating an object, illuminating it, enhancing its diaphanousness, cognizing it, and defining it through a concept. On the contrary, art gains access to reality through images and resemblances, which open different temporal relationship with the world. Art comes from the region of darkness, obscureness, shadow, night, and opaqueness. The reality is not attained through the image. Instead, the image suspends the relationship to reality. One is reconnected to reality by being disengaged and disinterested from it. However, this reconnection with reality is not an active, living relation in which reality is seized through action or concept. They are substituted with the image. Through this disengagement, time is interrupted, and one finds oneself “on the hither side of time,” in the “interstices” of time.25 This interruption is of particular importance for Bhabha and his notions of the “post-” and postcolonial modernity.

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By arguing that the imaginary world is enclosed in parentheses, Lévinas contends Husserl’s notion of the image “as a neutralization of the thesis.”26 Lévinas rejects Plato’s theses on the duality of being and sensible appearances as its diminished shadow. Instead, being is essentially divided between itself and its image. The resemblance is not an indirectly external—Platonian—relation between image and being, but an internal and direct relationship of an object to its double. Plato’s succession of the idea and sensible appearances is replaced with their simultaneity. According to Lévinas, being and its reflection, truth and the image, and reality and its shadow are simultaneous to each other through which “Non-truth is not an obscure residue of being, but is its sensible character itself.”27 In this simultaneity, being is enclosed in parentheses—(being)—by internally splitting itself and its image. Being non-object becomes an essential part of the being of an object. As a succession to absence and presence, the image simulates the presence of a represented object, and one must enclose this evoked presence in parentheses. However, in the simultaneity of being and image, the object persists in its absence. Its parenthetical dimension becomes essential because it withdraws from presence in the delay of coming into being. The reality in parentheses refers to an imaginary world conceived as an unreal world. In Existence and Existents, Lévinas introduces the notion of exoticism as a way of relating to the world by extracting from it. Artworks liberate sensation from its being directed toward an object, thereby underlining the being of sensation itself. As seen from Lévinas’s discussion from “Reality and its Shadow,” and his critical remarks on Fink’s notion of the image,28 phenomenological parenthesis explains the difference between the imaginary and the real world. This unreal, parenthesized world does not capture the exoticism of the imaginary world evaded from the real world and enclosed into the limits of materials. The limited character of the art material in “Reality and its Shadow” is reconceptualized as a double of image, its idol or caricature, a splitting image without the model. The image is (dis)possessed by its caricatural aspect. This dispossession is the internal structure of the image: “The image qua idol leads us to the ontological significance of its unreality.”29 It introduces a temporal structure that Lévinas determines as the meanwhile30 and which Bhabha redefines. He shows that the “post-” is parenthesized to release the postcolonial from belatedness and to reinscribe it into the notion of modernity. The meanwhile assumes “an instant that endures without a future,”31 “a quasi-eternal duration,”32 an infinitely enduring instant. It is an “eternally suspended future” or “a future forever to come”33 that impedes an image from descending into a presence. This suspension and neutralization of the imaginary, or its parenthesis, is essentially temporal. The real delays itself;

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it is continuously its belated version. The work of art assumes the character of the statue. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the work of art is merely the immobilization of life. Instead, it is a life enclosed within parentheses or inside the instant. In this sense, every artwork is an “aspiration for life” or “the statue a lifeless life.”34 It is like death imitating life, or life simulated from the standpoint of death. Lévinas dubs as the meanwhile this immobilization of life, its petrification in a statue. The meanwhile is the instant animated by duration. The duration is petrified, mortified, and divested from passing on. By this absorption of the duration, the instant is endlessly expanded. The instant is turned into the interval, which is detached from anything that would have preceded and succeeded it. It is the interval that cannot pass and endlessly endures. Lévinas compares this enduring interval with the incessant dying. The world of the artwork is suspended in this interval; it never changes. The task of criticism is to “put in movement (. . .) the immobile statue” that art creates and to make it speak.35 If one insists upon writing “post-Yugoslav” only with the hyphenated prefix, the borderline temporality which Rakočević calls for is limited to this narrow notion of the meanwhile. It is not the task of criticism to mobilize the immobile statue. The criticism recovers in the meanwhile forces that both foster and suppress change. There is a tendency in (post)-Yugoslav studies to freeze the temporality of the “post-” into the immovable present. The hyphen designates the meanwhile described by Lévinas. It is the meanwhile of the immutable present circumscribed with the “break up and its aftermaths.” (Post)-Yugoslav studies should be critical of this circumscription. Otherwise, they would be, akin to the post-colonial studies, limited to “(. . .) commemorating a lost object.”36 Creating a notion of the future-oriented nostalgia loads the future with the virtually unknown past. However, the past ceases to be foreign, and its transformative charge is lost. Both the past and the future are the effect of an analogical retroactive projection. The nostalgia for the future immobilizes the meanwhile of the “post-,” and the present is arrested between the past and the future. The present should be allowed to pass for something new to arrive. If “post-” and “Yugoslav” are hyphenated, the meanwhile is the temporality of this transformation. TOWARD A PARENTHESIZED AND HYPHENATED “POST-”—A TYPOGRAMMAR Lévinas withholds from further conclusions arising from his thesis, as elaborated in Existence and Existents. In the realm of aesthetics, the sensible is

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freed from its being the quality of an object. The obscure world of shadows into which one drifts by entering the realm of images is not deprived of being. Through this detachment, the sensible foregrounds its own being. Following Deleuze, as the object loses its sensible being, it becomes a being of the sensible. Lévinas is still captured by images of being, although he, with the notion of the simultaneity of being and image, formulates an implicit theory of the being of images. The images are not a negation of being. Following Deleuze’s remarks on the “non” as a being of differences instead of simple negation, the “non” of non-being is put into parentheses: (non)-being.37 The parenthesized and hyphenated (non)- is not a negation of being, but the very essence of being of problematic and questioning. Problem and question, according to Deleuze, are not outside being, but they are an essential part of its structure.38 Following Deleuze, the meanwhile or the time in parentheses does not refer to an immobilized or petrified being. Deleuze introduces the notion of the present as an effect of division between the past and the future.39 Parenthetic and hyphenated in-between, or interstitial, temporality indicates the constitutive incompleteness of being. Incompleteness stems from continuous becoming. The meanwhile is in the middle of its formation, and its plasticity belongs to the order of life. It can be reduced neither to the matter of the living nor of the livable. It is a quasi-cause, meanwhile of dividing into the past and future, and the simultaneity of these split temporalities. For Lévinas, completion, distancing, and disengagement create a meanwhile, which maintains the art world in perpetual arrest. For Bhabha, however, this aesthetic immobilization “discloses an ethical time of narration.”40 Bhabha refers to Lévinas’s contrasting the beyond and “the hither side of time.”41 Lévinas argues that artistic disengagement has to be distinguished from Plato’s definition of withdrawal through which a philosopher interrupts his bonds with this world to go beyond it, into the realm of ideas. According to Lévinas, artistic disengagement happens on the hither side, through the interruption of time, its freezing and stopping. Later in the text, Lévinas uses the hither in a spatial sense since the artwork hinges to the hither world. The spatiality of the hither is crucial for his definition of the meanwhile. The art fixes to the spatialized meanwhile, and criticism must unlock it and put it into motion. However, Lévinas imbues the instantaneity of the art image with the eternal. Bhabha, nonetheless, reinscribes both the hither and the beyond in the “post-” added to the postcolonial. Just as the artwork is an extraction from the stream of life, so the meanwhile, in Bhabha’s reading of Lévinas, extricates the present from the flow of time. The prefix “post-” designates neither succession nor opposition between disciplines, periods, positions, and identities. Bhabha defines “post-” according to the main features of Lévinas’s

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meanwhile. “Post-” means the induction of a delay, the belatedness between the past and the future. Bhabha reconceptualizes this belatedness as the time-lag that decelerates Europocentric and ethnocentric modernity. The incommensurable temporalities of post-colonial (pre-)modernity and (post-)colonial modernity become simultaneous although de-synchronized. In the time-lag, the past has lost its determinacy, while the future ceases to be indeterminate. For Lévinas, the world has to be protected from the leap of the meanwhile of the art world into the real world, from inserting its totality into parentheses. The critic is that intermediary that covers the real world from being parenthesized into an interstitial meanwhile. For Bhabha, on the contrary, if modernity is to be both turned and returned to its postcolonial counterpoint, theory interrupts time, infuse it with layers of temporal ramifications which will become externally simultaneous to each other, and internally asynchronous within themselves. However, there are constraints to Bhabha’s rethinking of modernity from the post-colonial parenthetical perspective. By disrupting modernity, its colonial past, from the enunciative present of its post-colonial counterpoint, Bhabha exerts a double exclusion of the excluded colonial subject. In the first instance, the colonial subject is the background of modernizing identity. In the second, the process of modernization is completed by rediscovering difference by and through the colonial subject. In the first exclusion, the difference is subordinated to the background of European modernity and identity. In the other, the difference founds both the delayed modernity and the identity of the post-colonial subject. Bhabha de-synchronizes European modernity and identity to synchronize the post-colonial subject with(in) itself. He reinscribes the time-lag, the meanwhile, into the European project of modernization and misses that its “post-” is simultaneous with the “post-” of the post-colonial subject. The challenge of critical (post)-Yugoslav studies is to disclose and unveil such processes of internal synchronization. As Bhabha interprets Benjamin and Brecht, the present revives the past by inhabiting the hither side of the future. Lévinas presents the artwork’s immobilization of the time without asking a question of whether the realworld time is already immobilized. The meanwhile is the immobilization that mobilizes time anew or, following Bhabha, it rediscovers what is in “modernity more than modernity.”42 In Benedict Anderson’s notion of homogeneous empty time, as we shall discuss later, the anonymous members of the nation are synchronized with the ticking beats of the same time, without knowing what is happening meanwhile. Bhabha reinscribes the meanwhile into the linear order of clock and calendar time. Time is deranged, various lines are de-synchronized, and its beats are syncopated. Bhabha’s parenthetical perspective is applied to that of Lévinas’s. The artwork does not make a statue of life and leave its world in a state of insurmountable arrest.

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On the contrary, the artwork, through the creation of interstitial temporality, demonstrates that life is mummified in a state of suspended movement. Time is immobilized to be mobilized again. This asynchronous simultaneity of intersecting and not yet overlapping temporalities is inscribed in the “post-” of (post)-Yugoslav literature. THE CONCEPT OF THE (POST)-/(POST)-AS A CONCEPT Hirsch (2012) mentions Rosalind Morris’s thesis, according to which the “post-” functions as a post-it that is added to concepts and yet transforms them in the manner of Derrida’s supplement.43 The “post-” engenders aspects of the concept that were not its initial components. In the case that the “post-” is removed, the concept retains its qualities gained from the previous joint between concepts. Therefore, to add the “post-” to the concept makes both a junction and a dis-junction. A familiar concept is estranged. The prefix “post-” indicates the possibility of a new junction of an already established concept to a new set of problems. This new set of problems is both unknown and yet related to the already established concept. From this point of view, the concept is internally split because it is reconceptualized by accepting that the being of the already established concept depends on the yet-to-be-constituted field of its own problems. Usually, the concept is identified with the already established compound of its definitions. However, the concept acquires its identity; it becomes itself only by identifying with the yet-to-be-constituted set of its problems. The timelines of the already-has-been and the yet-to-be are not set into the temporal and spatial order of precedence and succession. Instead, the time-shits are inscribed in the concept. For one strand of thinking, the “post-” reduces this veering temporality to the linear model of sequences. The other strand attempts to identify the concept with its problematic field. The second definition of the “post-” could be approached through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the concept and its relation to its components.44 The concept creates the whole from its components in a non-totalizing way or as fragmentary wholes. Concepts are retrospectively related to other concepts, not only to their history but to their becoming and the present situation. The first feature of the concept is relationality. Components of the concept are autonomously relative regarding the concepts that unify them. Components could be considered both through the concept and independent from it, as a concept alone. (Post)-Yugoslav literature is to be regarded as a single and complex concept, consisting of the three components of “post,” Yugoslav, and literature. Each of these three components can be singled out as independent concepts.

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The second feature of the concept is the endoconsistency of its components. On the one hand, these components remain distinct, heterogeneous, while, on the other hand, they also become inseparable from each other. Deleuze and Guattari give special attention to the constitution of the threshold of indiscernibility as a partial overlapping of components. In this zone of partial overlapping, components enter a free indirect relation; they are relinked because of interrupting their links, related by being withdrawn from relations. Deleuze and Guattari substantialize the passing among concepts. This passage establishes a zone of indistinctness among components. Whereas every component becomes indistinguishable, this zone of dis-identification is common to them. That zone of indiscernibility belongs to none of the components that participate in its formation. Components are superimposed to each other, and they become indistinguishable as they establish the space of non-belonging. They create a zone of intersection irreducible to their interaction. Subsequent concepts of the adjacency without adherence and the zone of traversals readdress the zone of indistinction. However, nothing can prevent the indistinct from detaching itself and being elevated into a form of distinction. Due to the capability of the zone of the intersection to separate itself from intersecting components, the “post-Yugoslav” should be, or at least might be thought, if not written, with parentheses and a hyphen: (post)-Yugoslav.

NOTES 1. See Pavle Popović, Jugoslovenska književnost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918) and Antun Barac, Jugoslavenska književnost (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1954). 2. See Sveta Lukić, Savremena jugoslovenska literatura: (1945-1965): rasprava o književnom životu i književnim merilima kod nas (Beograd: Prosveta, 1968), pp. 34–37, 41. 3. See Vlatko Pavletić, Protivljenja (Zagreb: Znanje, 1970), pp. 59–61, 68–69, 77–79. 4. See Thomas Eekman, Thirty Years of Yugoslav Literature: (1945-1975) (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), pp. 3–4. 5. Eekman gives an account of Yugoslav literature from 1945-1975. His book was published two years after Kiš’s Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (1976) and in the midst of a quarrel between Kiš, his advocates and opponents which culminated with the publishing of Kiš’s polemical book Čas anatomije (1978). 6. Dragomir Gajević, Jugoslovenstvo između stvarnosti i iluzija: ideja jugoslovenstva u književnosti početkom XX. Veka (Beograd: Prosveta, 1985), pp. 35, 63. 7. Gajević, Jugoslavenstvo, p. 33. 8. See Andrew Wachtel, “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš in Post-Yugoslav Literature,” The Slavic and East European Journal 50, no. 1 (2006): 135–149.

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9. I discuss the three other criteria at length in chapter 7 of the book. 10. Wachtel, “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš,” p. 148. 11. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet (Eds.), Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 5–7. 12. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Memory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 13. Hirsch, The Generation of Memory, p. 6. 14. Beronja and Vervaet, Post-Yugoslav Constellations, pp. 5–7. 15. I attempt to give a more elaborated account on the relationship between the (post)-Yugosalv and the postmodern in chapter 7 of the book. 16. See Robert Rakočević, “Post-jugoslovenska književnost? Ogledala i fantomi,” Sarajevske sveske no. 35–36 (2011): 202–210. 17. Tijana Matijević, “National, Post-national, Transnational: Is Post-Yugoslav Literature an Arguable or Promising Field of Study?,” pp. 101–113, in Grenzräume – Grenzbewegungen, eds. Nina Frieß, Gunnar Lenz and Erik Martin (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2016). 18. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 19. Rakočević, “Post-jugoslovenska književnost?,” pp. 208–209. 20. Matijević, “National, Post-national, Transnational,” pp. 107–108. 21. More on that topic can be found in chapter 2 of the book. 22. Theodor W. Adorno, “Punctuation Marks,” trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen, The Antioch Review 48, no. 3 (1990): 300–305. 23. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 222. 24. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” pp. 101–115, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987). The essay was originaly published in 1948. 25. Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 3. 26. Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 7. 27. Ibid. 28. Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 54. 29. Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 8. 30. Lévinas, op. cit., p. 8. 31. Lévinas, op. cit., p. 9. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 1. 37. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 66.

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38. As we shall see throughout the book, Deleuze develops this parenthesized notion of (non) within the notion of the second death. Death is not only negative but a form of the problematic. 39. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 168. 40. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 22. 41. Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 3. 42. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 352, 360. That internal yet non-interiorized modernity is a “cut” or a “temporal break,” a “time lag” that resists to the contemporizing of the difference. It “is the disjunctive ‘postcolonial’ time and space that makes its presence felt at the level of enunciation. It figures, in an influential contemporary fictional instance, as the contingent margin between Toni Morrison’s indeterminate moment of the ‘not-there’—a ‘black’ space that she distinguishes from the Western sense of synchronous tradition” (Bhabha, op. cit., p. 360). 43. Hirsch, The Generation of Memory, p. 5. 44. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 1994).

Chapter 2

The Time of Dispossession1 The Conflict, Composition, and Geophilosophy of Revolution in East Central Europe

THE EVENT OF 1989—REVOLUTION OR REBIRTH? The fall of communism in the East Central European states in 1989 is usually considered a revolutionary and liberating event. In its aftermath, the region was expected to acquire the values of liberal democracy and market economy. Yet it entered into a process of state- and nation-building that was accompanied by growing racism, nationalism, and xenophobia. In this fashion, during the post-transitional period, the keenly desired liberal democracy and market economy metamorphosed into populist governments and oligarchic capitalism. In this chapter, two models for understanding the complexities, contradictions, and paradoxes of this East Central European “coming out of age” will be outlined and contrasted: the model of conflict and the model of composition. Before attention is turned to the model of composition, some features of the model of conflict will be discussed by focusing on its perspective on the developments of 1989 as an event and the relationship between the two (groups of) geopolitical and cultural entities as a difference. In the model of conflict, social and political transformation is conceived as a struggle for recognition through mutual determination. Hegel’s and Marx’s notions of social conflict and its political resolution could be singled out as the most notable representatives of this model. According to these philosophers, liberal subjectivity is established by self-possession. The liberal subject possesses herself on the epistemological and political levels. But, as Hegel and Marx demonstrated, it is dispossessed by conferring her individuality (her rights and work) to the other (the sovereign and the capital owner) that mediates between the individual and her (self-)possession. As 25

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proposed by Hegel and Marx and subsequently developed by various social, political, and postcolonial theories, in order for identity and community to come into being, this intermediation has to be reappropriated. However, this project of reappropriation failed because the model is rooted in the notion of negativity, which necessarily entails the permanent and interminable formation identity. The event of 1989 is not simply related to East Central Europe, but is also a kind of spectral revenant of 1789 that haunted Western Europe for two centuries. Wolff proposed understanding “the extraordinary revolution of 1989 as incitement and opportunity to reconsider our mental mapping of Europe.”2 In this decade, the welfare state was replaced by the neoliberal type of governance. The Western European left-wing parties entered a stage of denying their communist “prehistory,” creating a “third way” as a technique of disavowal. This denial of the past provoked historical revisionism on the part of the right-wing parties. However, some scholars reject the definition of the event of 1989 as a revolution. As was convincingly demonstrated by Soltan,3 the event of 1989 is a rebirth, which he conceives as radically different from the revolution. While revolutions are breaks between the past and the present, rebirths restore continuity with the past. Revolutions are charged with the Enlightenment idea of a rupture between the ancient and the modern. Rebirth, on the contrary, follows the Renaissance model of reclaiming the old rights. The process of rebirth is constrained by constitutional limits that prevent outbursts of rage against the dominant order. It is a peaceful “plural improvement”4 modeled on mass movements, such as those led by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Leaders, members, and followers of such movements allegedly (re) claim their own rights without jeopardizing the rights of others.5 Despite the constitutional limits imposed on the social action of rebirth, Soltan is unable to explain “the disappointment of 1989,” which comes from replacing the “sovereignty of the communist party” with the “sovereignty of money.”6 Isaac, on the contrary, underlines the traumatic background of 1989. His analysis of the dissolution of Yugoslavia is a historical example that would not fit Soltan’s model of rebirth.7 Moreover, Yugoslavia had the constitutional preconditions for the transition from a federation to a confederation.8 Those constitutional preconditions were based on the right to self-determination granted to the constitutional nations of Yugoslavia. Despite proclaimed republicanism, the breakup of Yugoslavia was neither a revolution nor a rebirth. Isaac supports his analysis with the example of Bosnia: “Democrats can no longer place any faith in either the utopia of communist classlessness or the utopia of beneficent, progressive liberalism.”9 East Central Europe was dispossessed through a two-step process of overthrowing the communist

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regime and socialism and adopting democracy and the neoliberal economy as the new forms of governmentality. In that two-step process, East Central Europe oscillates between the lawlessness and the law-governed state. In his thesis, Soltan draws a distinction between restoring the past and restoring continuity with it. As rebirth is opposed to revolutionary rupture, it could be understood as a return that redefines the inherited meaning of modernity.10 Despite its anti-communist flavor, Soltan’s anti-contractarian and anti-Cartesian affirmation of a “global civil society”11 outside of the coercive state has important consequences for recovering intermediation. At this point, Soltan’s and Isaac’s analyses of 1989 intersect. In Soltan’s and Isaac’s arguments, “a global sense of responsibility”12 is given as a new foundation for “democratic innovation.”13 Such intermediating responsiveness as opposed to the “legitimacy of liberal democracy”14 and the “grim legacy of the seventeenth century.”15 In fact, as forms of solving social conflict and political transformation, revolution and rebirth are not easily separable from one another. Revolution was never defined as a simple act of replacing an old order with a new one. Instead, following some thinkers, it emerges from the explosive constellation of the old and the new (W. Benjamin) or from the contingent discontinuity (Althusser of the 1960s) and encounter (Althusser of the 1980s) between the old and the new. The old is not dispossessed by the new; the constellation, discontinuity, and encounter of the two are not to be reduced to intermediation. It would be more appropriate to say that the old and the new are intra-mediated and extra-mediated. This means that they are undergoing an internal transformation as well as external genesis. Therefore, the revolution could never be simply defined as a “coming out of age,” but, rather, to remain within the metaphor, as “being born again.” FROM CONFLICT TO COMPOSITION Internal transformation and external genesis are necessary elements of social and political changes. The event of 1989 cannot be properly understood outside of the division between Western and East Central Europe and the distinction drawn between them.16 The conflict between the West and the East is internalized by the East Central European states. Through this internalization, every East Central European state presents and perceives itself as being more “Western” than its neighbor states. According to Melegh,17 the internalization of the “floating border system” destabilizes the self-consciousness of East Central European states regarding their “position on the civilizational scale.” For Antohi, the internalization of the conflict led to the failure of cooperative projects in these states: “The poor record of East European cooperation shows

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how mimetic competition is constantly disabling regional integration and also how conflictual mimesis can disintegrate all cultural and political systems.”18 East Central Europe is a liminal zone in between the West and the East, forming a scale on which Western civilization gradually diminishes and Eastern civilization begins. This liminal character of East Central Europe is not to be reduced to the discourse of Orientalism, as introduced in Edward Said’s classic analyses. Wolff correctly describes the in-between character of East Central Europe but compares the Western attitude to the region with Orientalist techniques.19 Todorova20 highlights the difference between Orientalism and Balkanism, adopting Wolff’s thesis on the Balkans as a bridge between civilizations and races. However, she also argues that the Balkans remain on the European side, since they occupy a place in the matrix of oppositions, such as the “white” versus the “colored” and the IndoEuropean versus the Asian. Todorova claims that the European features of the Balkans might explain the increased attention given to the war in Yugoslavia compared to other conflicts around the world; she qualifies other conflicts as “more serious and bloody.”21 She thus westernizes or “Occidentalizes” the Balkans: “It is my thesis that while orientalism is dealing with a difference between (imputed) types, Balkanism treats the differences within one type.”22 In elaborating the model of composition I will attempt to further develop Todorova’s thesis of the differences within one type. Kovačević23 accuses Todorova of obfuscating the long history of Europe’s civilizing its outer frontiers, which has enlarged the area of EU membership. As Kovačević puts it: “Eastern Europeans, while not ‘other’ as much as Asians or Africans, are also ‘not quite’ European; rather, they are semi-European, semi-developed, with semi-functioning states and semi-civilized manners.”24 Such notions of the difference within and between types led to the classical thesis on nesting Orientalism as a reproduction of the original opposition between the West and the East.25 Melegh argues for the notion of a slope rather than an absence when analyzing the diminishing Western European values. None of these discussions abandon the essentialist and foundationalist framework. One should recall Freud’s notion of “the narcissism of minor differences,” which does not drive hatred toward that which is different, but rather toward that which is the same. The difference is a retroactive effect of an attempt to justify the urge to destroy and dominate the sameness. The problem is not just how East Central Europe is defined from the perspective of Western Europe, but rather how it is presented as indefinable and ineffable for both Orientalist and Occidentalist methods of representation. Recently, the Croatian scholar Katarina Luketić argued that if Europe is a cape of Asia, the Balkans are a cape of Europe. It functions as a double margin, “a margin of the margin”26 which does not fold back on the center. It is

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a margin that lacks a decentering power. However, “nesting,” “margins,” and the “slope” are spatial metaphors used to describe the relationship between Western and East Central Europe. The kind of reasoning outlined above is typical of the model of conflict according to which the type precedes its differentiations; the nesting of oppositions reproduces the original opposition and the margin of the margin is derived from the already established margin. This explanation is insufficient and has to be altered. As already indicated above, this is the task of the model of composition. With the shift between the models, a redefinition of the established models of difference between Western and East Central Europe will be proposed. The notion of autonomous entities will be replaced with the notion of composites introduced in the early Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson. Following Deleuze, composites do not consist of differences of degree, but of differences in kind. Two things or two products differ only by degree, while differences in kind occur in one and the same thing as the tendencies of its internal differing.27 According to Deleuze, Bergson replaces external difference with internal difference. One should not search for differences in proportion between determined things that enter into generic and specific relations. Things, generic and specific relations, are replaced with the “tendency” of things to “develop.”28 One does not pass directly from the undeveloped to the developed thing; instead, the passage is covered with the heterogeneous and still co-existing developmental tendencies. To put it in Deleuze’s vocabulary of The Logic of Sense, the thing should be grasped in its becoming. From the perspective of differences of degree, East Central Europe is dispossessed from Western Europe’s values and properties. Measured that way, East Central Europe is too far removed from the generic features of Western Europe. However, within the notion of external difference, it is impossible to take into account the coexistence of tendencies such as racism and nationalism with their counterparts such as multiculturalism and individualism in both parts of Europe. To prove that recourse will be taken to Bergson’s broader discussion in Matter and Memory on contemplative and motor memory as well as conceptualism and nominalism. Contrary to nominalism and conceptualism, Bergson argues that one starts from neither individual nor general terms. Instead, the starting point is “an intermediate knowledge,” which develops “a confused sense of the striking quality or of resemblance.”29 The processes of generalization and individualization depend on the “confused sense.” Starting from the confused sense, the mind performs two distinct but connected operations: “The one by which it [the mind] discerns individuals, the other by which it constructs genera.”30 Individuation and generalization are contractions and relaxations of the confused sense or general idea.

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In the article on Ravaisson, Bergson describes the concept of color as an abstraction from “the variety of shades”31 and as “increasing generalization” that obliterates the individual traits of colors. It is the “gradual extinction of the light which brought out the differences between the colors, and ends by blending them together into a common obscurity.”32 According to Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, the concept and object become two separate things connected by subordination. To the unification through abstraction, Bergson opposes “the method of true unification.”33 Through this latter method, all color shades are pulled through a convergent lens and brought “to a single point.” In the dispersing shades, “the pure white light” will be revealed in which every nuance participates and from which color is derived.34 The concept and thing are no longer separated; the relationship of subordination is replaced with one of participation. Differences of degree are replaced by “degrees of difference itself.”35 The object is not subsumed under the general concept and individualized as its instantiation. Spatial and external difference is replaced with a temporal and internal difference, which turns the concept into “the possible coexistence of degrees or nuances.”36 The concept and the thing, interpretation and change, knowledge and transformation become an indivisible composite.37 The major part of postcolonial theory inherits the falsely stated epistemological problem of distinguishing between concepts and objects.38 Such epistemology engenders notions such as nesting, margins, slopes, scales, and a vagueness that does nothing but reproduce differences in degree. With the notion of the composite, it is possible to reject “differences of degree in nature” and affirm “only degrees of difference itself.”39 On the level of the difference of degree, there is the opposition between the “two” Europes engendered through the struggle for recognition. Following a temporalized notion of difference, Europe is internally differentiated into a multiplicity of compositions irreducible to the actual geopolitical and cultural entities. Bignall applied Deleuze’s ontology of internal and genetic difference to the postcolonial condition. Following Bignall’s employment, virtual Europe differs internally from itself, while actual forms of Europe “differ from each other.”40 Actual differences are the effect of internal and virtual differences in kind. The virtual engages in the critical practice of “counter-actualization,” which shows that the actual historical condition is a contingent effect of internal differentiation inhabiting the virtual. By counter-actualization, the postcolonial present is problematized by taking into account the presupposition of the virtual colonial past.41 Therefore, Bignall argues that the colonizing and the colonized develop a “new kind of sociability,” entering into a “compossibility” that underlines “the capacity of colonizing and colonized to co-exist in a complex national body that maintains the power of each participating body to preserve in being, and which enhances each

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body in virtue of its participation in the association.”42 Following Bignall’s model of the postcolonial agency as “becoming-compatible,”43 it is possible to consider a shift from the model of revolution as conflict to the model of revolution as composition without reducing revolutionary (re) composition(s) to a rebirth. East Central Europe is dispossessed of both European identity and Oriental otherness, unable to become either a part of Europe or its exotic other. It is neither endogenous nor exogenous to Western Europe. However, Western Europe and East Central Europe are not two separate entities. Instead, two Europes create a composite with parts that are individualized in the actual political, economic, and social conditions. There are not two (or more) Europes; instead, there are different ways of splitting the whole and of participating in it. Only on the actual level are there distinct geopolitical and cultural regions of Europe. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “something passes”44 between parts of a concept. These passages create “area ab” that “belongs to both a and b.”45 In that area of inseparability, a and b are indiscernible and still distinct.46 Area ab is not founded on the external difference of degree. Instead, it is the internal difference in nature, which is a condition for differentiating between actual regions of Europe and its geopolitical entities. COMPOSITIONAL REVOLUTION— AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF REBIRTH AND A “EUROPEAN TURKEY” The shift from conflict to composition is present in Kant’s text on the revolution in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798).47 Kant says that revolution is not in the great deeds but in the enthusiasm it arouses in spectators. In the analysis of the relationship between the faculties of law and philosophy, he argues that the human race is progressing toward the better. Such a prediction could not be made by relying on immediate experience (unmittelbare Erfahrung) but only by isolating an event (Begebenheit),48 which indicates humanity’s disposition and capacity for advancement. This event and its effectiveness are undetermined in relation to time, and it was not possible to predict whether the revolution would happen at all. Instead, the event is a historical sign that points to such disposition. Following Kant’s discussion of teleological judgment in Critique of Judgement, such prediction does not belong to intellectus archetypus but to intellectus ectypus. In the latter type it is possible to presume teleology, or the directionality of one being, without positing preexisting and determined telos.49 This elliptical teleology, or goalless directionality, might not have been “conjured [by politische Wahrsager] out of the course of things hitherto

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existing,”50 because it could not be measured by the successes and failures of its actual occurrence. Such an event maintains its ideality by being turned into a sign that indicates human advancement. Advancement is the “inevitable consequence”51 of the cause whose effects are “indefinite” and “a contingent event.”52 The effectiveness of the sign-event could not be simply measured by its success; the sign retains its sense even if it fails to denote. Kant’s notion of revolution spawned important readings by Foucault, Habermas, and Lyotard. These thinkers clearly distinguished the enthusiasm for revolution from direct engagement. They pointed out the capacity of the sign-event to be separated from its empirical conditions. However, Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture and its concluding essay, “‘Race,’ time and the revision of modernity” objects to Kant’s and his poststructuralist followers’ developing the notion of revolution within the framework of the nation’s pedagogical temporality. They do not take into account the performative temporality of the colonized, which disrupts pedagogical symbols of modernity, such as progress, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism. According to Bhabha, the enunciative space opened up between the colonizer and colonized dispossesses postcolonial belatedness53 of its pedagogical effects. Time, which is not synchronous with the modernizing “continuist, progressivist myth of Man,”54 introduces a lag as a “temporal caesura.”55 The lag refers to the “excessive marginality of modernity.”56 Bhabha describes the time-lag as a non-place in which imperial modernity is haunted by the post-imperial uncanny double. But a time-lag should not be mistaken for a “postmodern celebration of pluralistic identities.”57 Bhabha sees in Foucault’s, Habermas’s, and Lyotard’s approaches to modernity the privileging of spatiality over temporality. Through that spatialization, the lag is defined as a distance between an event and its spectators. Bhabha argues that the new and the contemporary emerge by splitting modernity into the event and the enunciation, the epochal, and the everyday.58 Through that lag, modernity becomes contemporaneous with itself. The timelag iterates modernity: What if in the geopolitical space of the colony genealogically (in Foucault’s sense) related to the Western metropolis, the symbol of the Revolution is partially visible as an unforgettable, tantalizing promise—a pedagogy of the values of modernity—while the “present efficacy” of the sign of everyday life—its political performativity—repeats the archaic aristocratic racism of the ancien régime?59

The time-lag between the event and enunciation, the epochal and the everyday, the pedagogy and the performative is redefined from the position of a subaltern agency. Subaltern doubling replaces the pluralist many with the

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not-one or “the minus in the origin.”60 In modernity, the minus in the origin is more than modernity itself, appearing as a “signifying cut” or “temporal break.”61 But, following Bhabha, the emancipation of the subaltern agency cannot be accomplished through the ethical care of the self (Foucault), sublime phrases of enthusiasm (Lyotard), or by finishing the project of modernity (Habermas). The time-lag does not only secure an enunciative position of disjunctive modernity, which would show the complicity of the latter with the colonial past. It also opens a moment for revision in which “the present of narrative enunciation” is turned “into the haunting memorial of what has been excluded, excised, evicted.”62 With the notion of time-lag, Bhabha demonstrates that the project of modernity is constrained to its disciplinary side. He shows that liberation cannot be separated from enslavement in colonies. Although the time lag is an innovative concept, the consequences it entails are conservative. Moreover, Bhabha neglects that enslavement already starts in metropolitan centers as an essential part of the emancipatory project of modernity. In that way, he retains the time-lag of modernity within the framework of the monolithic and homogeneous division between the West and the East. In the discussion between Kant’s interpreters and Bhabha, the reference to Kant’s distinction between advancing toward the better and revolution is missing. This distinction indicates that Kant refuses to think of revolution as a mere conflict. Instead, the revolution is an event composed of heterogeneous and co-existing actions of actors and spectators but irreducible to them.63 As will be shown soon, this shift in the conceptualization of revolution from conflict to composition allows us to rethink enthusiasm for revolution from the perspective of the aesthetic idea instead of that of the sublime. According to Kant, there is nothing in revolutionary events themselves that would reveal the progress of humankind.64 The spectators feel enthusiasm not about the event, but about something irreducible to the event and to the attitudes and interests of those participating in it. This irreducible part of the event is the “moral disposition” of humanity, which is endowed with the disposition in its entirety. The irreducibility of the event appears as a “historical sign,”65 which points to a still immature moral disposition. Yet the signifying ideality of the event seems to be an effect of enthusiasm aroused in the spectators. Notwithstanding the (un)successfulness of the revolutionary events, the spectators are possessed by an enthusiasm by which they aspire to something ideal and moral. The players, being directly engaged in the event and enmeshed in its outcomes, are dispossessed of its ideality. The irreducibility of the event is an effect of “the mode of thinking of the spectators,” to which no objective content pertaining to the event can be correlated. How can a spectator know what it is that s/he is enthusiastic about? And it seems that Kant was cautious in dealing with this matter because he underlines that the

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sympathy of spectators “borders closely on enthusiasm,”66 which “deserves censure”67 in spite of the fact that enthusiasm “always moves toward what is ideal.”68 The historical event does not affect the spectator’s faculties of intuition and will, as in the case of the mathematical and dynamical sublime. As will be argued soon, enthusiasm for revolution does not belong to the order of the sublime, but to the order of the aesthetic idea.69 In the sublime, intuition and the will are overwhelmed by the size and force of things, which results in the failed attempt of the imagination to find the proper intuition for the rational idea. In enthusiasm, on the contrary, intuition and the will exceed immediate experience. Participants in the event are dispossessed of this excess that makes the spectator think of the moral disposition of humanity. However, Kant attempts to control excess by censuring enthusiasm. The spectators do not sympathize with the event of overturning the political order, but with the actors’ attempt to replace it with the republican constitution. That which those involved experience as revolution is determined by the exalted as the evolution of the constitution: “the uninvolved public looking on sympathized then without the least intention of assisting.”70 The ideality of moral disposition is reduced to the evolution of the constitution. However, this ideality is inaccessible from the perspective of revolutionaries. While they act in the name of actual reasons of a particular nation, the spectators recognize in their action something unforgettable,71 which points to the moral disposition of humankind. This moral disposition is reduced to “the spirit of republicanism.”72 Although it is jeopardized by both civil and foreign wars, the constitution is constantly evolving toward republican perfection. And perfection is again narrowed down to a principle that demands that men “rule autocratically and yet [. . .] govern in a republican way.”73 This autocratic republicanism is a path from the internal advancement of society to the external advancement of humankind that culminates in a cosmopolitan society.74 The hypothesis of moral immaturity introduced in the seventh proposition of Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose is reiterated in The Conflict of the Faculties. However, The Conflict argues that humankind advances toward the better without increasing its moral disposition.75 Moral immaturity is supplemented with the evolution of legality, which sets an ideal constitution (respublica noumenon) as its eternal norm. The composition of a legal framework and a moral disposition is achieved by the autocratic government in accordance with the laws of freedom. Kant distinguishes between the republican and democratic governments.76 The republican government takes freedom into account, although it is not obliged to appeal for the (democratic) “consent” of people.77 One should distinguish between the historical accident and the sign that refers to a disposition for “revolution or reform of a national constitution.”78

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The objective of autocratic republicanism is to govern people because they are incapable of governing themselves: “Gradually violence on the part of the powers will diminish and obedience to the laws will increase.”79 Advancement toward the better is a kind of harmonizing of legality and morality, laws and freedom. That advancement demands the composition of government and people. Kant rejects the advancement of humankind’s morality; it would require a kind of new supernatural creation. He dispossesses humankind of internal transformation and external genesis because it can progress only by perfecting the constitutional foundations of political order.80 In such a way, he replaces revolution with evolution: Rather, the whole mechanism of this education has no coherence if it is not designed in agreement with a well-weighed plan of the sovereign power, put into play according to the purpose of this plan, and steadily maintained therein; to this end it might well behove the state likewise to reform itself from time to time and, attempting evolution instead of revolution, progress perpetually toward the better.81

Instead of being reformed or even overthrown by the revolution, the republican government reforms people by subjecting them to the evolution of a republican constitution. Such a purloined revolution, sterilized into a mere evolution of constitution (or rebirth), destabilizes the division of higher and lower faculties. By dispossessing the people of revolution, the lower faculty is subjected to the higher and limited to the education of educators or to the upbringing of autocrats to rule in a republican way. Revolution is reduced to an uprising of those who cannot govern themselves by simultaneously discovering freedom and duty. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), the phylogenetic dispossession of humankind of becoming is transferred onto the ontogenetic dispossession of nations. Kant sketches the characters of five European nations: French, English, Spanish, Italians, and Germans. Slav people are represented by Russians, who are “not yet developed” and by Polish people, who are losing their character of a nation capable to rule. Kant gives a description of Europe as he believed it is conceived by the Turks. He believes they considered Europe to be divided into France, England, Spain, Italy and Germany, Sweden and Denmark. That part of Europe ends with Poland as “the land of lords.”82 Outside Frankestan or Christian Europe are Russia and “European Turkey”83 or the “nations of European Turkey.”84 Russia and the nations of European Turkey are sandwiched between empires, in the middle of Christian and Islamic civilizations. Kant concludes that the nations of European Turkey “have never attained and never will attain what is necessary for the acquisition of a definite national character.”85 The people of European

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Turkey are unable to bind authority with law and freedom. The territory between the two empires is a hybrid between Europe and Turkey; it is dispossessed of its own identity, or from its character in relation to Europe and Turkey. The territory of European Turkey could be conceived as a junction or contact zone between two empires.86 Its territory is defined as terra nullius, belonging to “the condition of a constitution of law without freedom”87 and thereby without citizens. Terra nullius could be used to extend the scope of civilization. During the period of EU enlargement, the idea of European Turkey resurfaces in the extension of EU borders. To use Kant’s terms, the people of European Turkey are unable to socialize their unsociability or to transform “the pathologically enforced social” union into a “moral whole.”88 Kant’s exposition of national characteristics forms a scale on which the nations are ordered according to the degree of their success in solving the tension between the two incompatible human inclinations:89 to “live in society” and “to live like an individual.”90 The first three combinations of authority, law, and freedom are unsuccessful models91 for solving the tension between the conflicting inclinations. Only the fourth, the republican model, is able to incorporate “healthy hostility”92 within and between the states and thus eventually reach “moral maturity.”93 Such a perspective is now applied to the East Central European states, which are considered unable to foster individual inclinations and socialize them through a republican constitution. They are considered lawless and unable to accommodate to European laws. After 1989 communism and socialism were deterritorialized by liberal democracy and capitalism, only to be reterritorialized through a community acquis. This amounted to dispossession through simultaneous possession. IMMANENT REVOLUTION—FROM MISSING AUDIENCE TO MISSING PEOPLE Despite their problematic aspect, Bhabha’s objections to Kant and his interpreters might be basically correct. The peoples of European Turkey are unable to hold the position of both the actors and the spectators of revolution. According to Lyotard, contrary to aesthetic judgment that mediate between the “islands” of faculties, bridging the gap between them, historico-political judgment leaves the gap between the faculties open. Aesthetic judgment, for its part, bridges the gap with schemata and examples. In historico-political judgment: This gap is significant, and its meaning lies in its emptiness. The contours of the gap define the space of the historical even though what they contain is not revealed in itself, even though the historical as defined by this gap has no positive content or concept.94

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Following Lyotard, actors are, first, directly involved in the revolutionary event. They are unable to purify the sound and fury of the happenings into enthusiasm; as they are possessed by a “revolutionary pathos,” they are dispossessed of revolution. Second, the actors affected by the events risk mistaking signs for examples and schemata. Taking historical signs for examples and schemata leads to an illusion.95 Third, while actors eventually ascend from empirical facts to ideal entities, spectators are in contact with these entities from the very beginning. Therefore, the gap is established and maintained in the transcendental domain of faculties into which historico-political judgment is displaced. The gap is also produced in the phenomenal domain shared by the actors and spectators. The relationship between the actors and their audiences is reminiscent of the relationship between intuitions and concepts; while the first are blind, the second are empty. According to Lyotard, enthusiasm as an extreme version of the sublime does not rely on the aesthetic community, but rather on its ethical counterpart. The ethical community is not related to the taste but to the idea of freedom; this is where Lyotard sees signs of history referring to progress toward the better.96 However, in The Conflict of the Faculties Kant displaces the advancement of the moral domain of freedom into the legal domain of law. Following Lyotard’s reading, the idea of freedom is inaccessible from the standpoint of actors, and Bhabha’s argument against Lyotard’s reading seems justified.97 How do the actors access the moral idea of freedom that is expected to guide their maxims and how can the spectators become the actors? Lyotard brings historico-political judgment close to the practical judgment. A similar interpretive move is made in a more recent reading by Clewis, who rejected the aesthetic notion of enthusiasm because of its inability to establish an archetype for action. Clewis98 argues that Kant rejects the revolutionary violent means of attaining the republic, but he nevertheless supports the republic as the end of the revolution. Despite the unacceptable means of the revolutionaries, spectators become enthusiastic via the revolutionaries’ (actors’) establishment of a republican constitution. Yet, Clewis’s onlooker must retain aesthetic distance to avoid sliding from ends into violent means. Although spectatorship must be confined to aesthetic communication,99 enthusiasm is related to the practical domain. The spectators withdraw from engaging in revolutionary activities, and it seems that this disengagement enables them to access the “kingdom of ends” from which the actors are banned.100 However, the notions of enthusiasm, revolution, and the republic cannot be properly grasped from the standpoint of the division between the spectators and actors. Deleuze argues that Kant’s aesthetics is developed from the points of view of the spectator and the creator. While the Analytic of the Beautiful and the Analytic of the Sublime come into being from the point of view of the spectator, the theory of genius is articulated from the point

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of view of the creator. In Kant’s Critical Philosophy Deleuze remarks that Kant adds material meta-aesthetics to formal aesthetics. The beautiful and the genius are principal constituents of formal aesthetics, which is established from the point of view of the spectator, whereas material meta-aesthetics emerges from the point of view of the creator. It is a limit aesthetics placed at the borderline between “mature classicism” and “nascent romanticism.”101 Taste is a pregiven formal accord between the free imagination and enlarged understanding. Genius, on the contrary, presents an accord between the faculties as a “living unity”:102 Genius is a summons sent out to another genius; but taste becomes a sort of medium between the two, allowing a waiting period of the other genius is not yet born.103

Deleuze reminds us that in Critique of Judgement, Kant introduces various modes of presenting ideas by intuition: the sublime, symbolism, Genius, and teleological judgment. In his reconstruction of the notion of enthusiasm, Lyotard is focused on the sublime and symbolism. Deleuze follows Kant one step further by redirecting interpretation to the notion of the creator. Such a move raises difficulties regarding the universal subjectivity necessary for judging taste because the artistic creator is defined through the inimitability of genius. Following Clewis, if the creation of genius cannot be universalized, practical judgment cannot be directed by it. Contrary to the sublime, genius is not focused on the split between imagination on the one hand and rational ideas and their indirect presentation through symbola (hypotyposis) on the other. Instead, genius, through aesthetic ideas, intuits the other nature by expressing the inexpressible.104 By extending the concepts of understanding, aesthetic ideas free the imagination by making one think.105 However, genius does not simply create inimitable object art; s/he also creates an object of taste, engendering intersubjectivity: Genius is always a calling out for other geniuses to be born [. . .] the work of genius provides an example for everyone: it inspires imitators, gives rise to spectators, and engenders everywhere the free agreement of the imagination and the understanding, which agreement constitutes taste.106

The creator is outside the opposition between the spectator and actor.107 The genius is not the only one with the capability to create, but s/he also “engenders the agreement of faculties in the spectator.”108 According to Lyotard, enthusiasm is outside the tension between pleasure and pain. It leaves a gap between imagination and understanding because one finds pleasure in the failure to think about it. More radically, enthusiasm is

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not the pleasure-in-pain aroused by the sublime, because one could be enthusiastic about a revolution despite its failure.109 However, with the proposed shift from the sublime to the aesthetic idea, the thinking of revolution is displaced from pleasure and pain to life. The idea of revolution is not the unpresentable attained by the imagination only when it fails to present the idea of freedom as intuition. Nor is it a rational idea defined in Critique of Pure Reason. It could not be defined as a failed or indirect presentation. Instead, it is the aesthetic idea introduced in Critique of Judgement. Deleuze rejects the opposition between rational and aesthetic ideas: “The intuition without concept is precisely that which the concept without intuition was lacking.”110 Aesthetic ideas express something that rational ideas cannot. They do not express the inexpressible indirectly in symbolism, but by extending understanding and freeing the imagination. Yet, Deleuze compares aesthetic ideas with symbolism. Reading Kant’s notion of revolution strictly within the lines of the sublime does not accommodate the notion of a historical sign, and the shift from an aesthetic to the ethical community cannot be consistently explained. With the notion of the historical sign modeled on the aesthetic idea, the disposition of humanity is not confined to the legal domain on which the characterization of nations from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is based. The historical sign refers to the other nature of humanity, which is nothing but a plurality of its compositions.111 Aesthetic ideas express themselves by creating “the intuition of a nature other than that which is given to us [. . .].”112 Aesthetic ideas create a nature that is missing. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari argue that in art, the thing is separated both from its model and its audience. Moreover, art is also independent of the creator: “It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself.”113 The self-positing of art is paralleled to the self-positing of the revolution. The missing audience engendered by aesthetic ideas in the field of art is equated with the people to come as bearers of immanent revolution.114 LOST IMMANENCE—AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF REBIRTH REVISITED In the fourth chapter of What Is Philosophy?, “Geophilosophy,” Deleuze and Guattari contrast Greek and European philosophies from the standpoint of the relationship between the concept and the plane of immanence. While Greek philosophy invented the plane of immanence, European philosophy operated with concepts. As they argue, this is because European philosophy was misled by Christian transcendence: “But possession of the concept does not appear to coincide with revolution, the democratic state, and human

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rights.”115 Philosophy after Christianity lacks a plane of immanence for its concepts. The Greeks, on the contrary, deterritorialized the transcendence of the state in the immanence of the city as a milieu of philosophy. However, it is hard to agree with Deleuze and Guattari that the ancient Greek relative deterritorialization of the state by the city is repeated in the European capitalist deterritorialization of the despotic state. Deleuze and Guattari start out from the old philosophical assumption (Hegel and Heidegger) that the history of philosophy has its roots in ancient Greece. On the one hand, they argue that breaking with historical and geographical determinations is a necessary precondition of philosophy. On the other hand, for such a break to happen, a “milieu of immanence”116 is required. Therefore, the roots of philosophy lie in its ungrounding or deterritorializing operations. In order for philosophy to arise, the necessity of historical and geographical determinations needs to be transformed into a contingent milieu. The examples of such transformations are the ancient Greek relative deterritorialization of the state into the city and the European capitalist decoding of states. However, a further example is the relative deterritorialization by which this capitalist decoding is recoded. Relative deterritorializations consist of the two contradictory movements; in the first, immanence is prevented from returning to transcendence, and in the second, immanence passes into transcendence. Therefore, to transform geographical and historical determinations into the contingent milieu of immanence, an absolute deterritorialization is required beforehand. But absolute deterritorialization belongs to thinking, or to the order of philosophy. There must already exist a kind of philosophy independent from the contingent milieu of its occurrence. Deleuze and Guattari solve that circularity through the notion of the encounter as a universal history of contingency.117 In the encounter or conjunction between thought and the social milieu, the absolute deterritorialization is linked to the relative deterritorialization. It is impossible to think of absolute deterritorialization without such a connection of thinking and social reality.118 In relative deterritorialization, territories move into the earth, while in absolute deterritorialization, the earth is absorbed by the plane of immanence. But it is impossible for a territory to become earth, as a contingent milieu free from determinations, without previously being absorbed by the plane of immanence of thought.119 Immanence is, therefore, accessible only to those with the disposition for philosophy. Following Gasché’s recent reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?, the Greeks’ originality is in the doubling of the immanence of thought in societal immanence.120 Such a doubling precludes verticality and transcendence by which philosophy would be turned into a property: “Philosophy is Greek only if it does not belong to anyone, the Greeks

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included. [. . .] Based on radical immanence, philosophy must be something that cannot be possessed, but that can happen or take place in different contexts and worlds.”121 By inventing philosophy, the Greeks cease to be Greeks. The plane of immanence was reterritorialized in history through the transformation of the state into the city and the establishment of democracy. It would imply that only those capable of philosophy are also capable of such dispossession. Kant’s notion of autocratic republicanism is an example of a concept without the plane of immanence. The Kantian slope starting with England, France, and Germany and ending with Spain and Italy appears as a background to Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy. As they explain, Spain and Italy “were not able to produce philosophy in the capitalist world”122 and reterritorialize the Greeks for themselves. Spain and Italy had philosophercomets, but geophilosophy needs a milieu. Moreover, Spain and Italy could not be liberated from Catholicism, and their philosophical concepts are masked with rhetoric.123 While England, France, and Germany attempted to find an intersection between the concept and history, other European nations could not even develop the concepts. Instead of having a milieu, it turns out that revolution possesses an origin from which a large part of Europe is dispossessed: “Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples.”124 They also present capitalism as an “immanent axiomatic of decoded flows”125 of money, labor, and products. This immanent axiomatic of capitalism does not “refer back to transcendence.”126 In capitalism, the state is deterritorialized and reterritorialized by capital. Reterritorialization assumes democratic, dictatorial, and totalitarian forms leading to the conformity between the democratic and dictatorial state, human rights, and the market.127 The geophilosophy of revolution must reconquer immanence from capitalism and reterritorialize the new people and earth: “Greeks and democrats are strangely deformed in this mirror of the future.”128 Kant’s idea of enthusiasm reemerges in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of revolution.129 Spectators of revolution are “sensible men” who would hardly “resolve to make the experiment at such cost.”130 Nevertheless, despite “the misery and atrocities” of revolutionary events, sensible men are enthusiastic about them. Their sympathy is independent of the success and the bloodshed of revolutionary events. Instead, the ideality of the event, as independent of the state of affairs, becomes the object of enthusiasm. Similarly, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, the “/s/uccess of revolution resides only in itself” and “/t/he victory of revolution is immanent.”131 Becoming-revolutionary, as a transformation of the present into the becoming, or as “resistance to the present,”132 consists of wresting percepts and affects from perceptual states and

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affection. Those revolutionary affects and percepts—“vibrations, clinches, openings” “new bonds”—comprise monuments in the process of becoming. Monuments commemorate a people that is missing. Revolution belongs to becoming, which is opposed to history. Since it belongs to the order of becoming, revolution is an event. In Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, the “event in its essence” is characterized by the impassibility and neutrality of its actualization. The event is indifferent to its determinations, extracting itself from the sensory-motor chain, separating percepts and affects from perceptual and affective states. The event is never something that is happening; it possesses a counter-actualizing force that might be recognized as misfortune, suffering, or failure. Revolution as accident may succeed or fail, but if it is considered as an event, it is beyond the empirical category of success. One is enthusiastic about “vibrations, clinches, openings” and “new bonds” extracted from the revolutionary accident. Such affects and percepts are defined as monuments which commemorate a people or earth that is missing: A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, and their constantly resumed struggle.133

If the event cannot be reduced to an actual state of affairs, what is its condition of possibility, how is its effectivity secured in the actual course of things? According to Deleuze and Guattari, a plane of immanence is the horizon of any event, while the plane of immanence is the non-thought within the thought. The communication between the virtual and the actual, the event and the state of affairs, the concept, and the history is secured by the absolute and relative deterritorializations: “Thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth.”134 In the absolute deterritorialization, the plane of immanence absorbs the earth. Through that absorption, “a new earth” is created.135 Geophilosophy provides a milieu for absolute deterritorialization in which a new earth can be created.136 But then, the only earth that can be shown is the one that is there, as an unthought in every relative deterritorialization. As Deleuze and Guattari often emphasize, concepts “connect with” history, falling back into history but are not of history.137 However, the apparent antinomy of concept and history belongs to philosophy, which constructs concepts and is no longer able to create the plane of immanence. In that way, one is returned to the antinomy of moral history present in Kant’s notion of revolution. The event that demonstrates man progressing toward the better could not be resolved directly through experience, and yet it has to be connected to some experience. The event does not refer to things and states of affairs, but to the tendency.

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If contemporaneity lacks a plane of immanence, as argued by Deleuze and Guattari, then pursuing the path of its construction might be a way of reintroducing transcendence. Concepts would not succeed in their task of freeing immanence “from the limits imposed on it by capital,”138 whereby the immanence would be (re)turned into an attribute of concepts. By defining the plane of immanence as something that must be thought but cannot be thought, “nonthought within thought” or as the “base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane that does not succeed in thinking it,”139 “unthought in every plane of immanence,”140 Deleuze and Guattari risk turning the immanence into the condition that is larger than the conditioned. It would be the immanence that ceases to be genetic; instead, it regulates thinking. The function of such non-thought ought not to be assigned to the plane of immanence, but only to the multiplicity of the planes of immanence;141 only such multiplicity that resists totalization could gain the status of the plane of immanence. Every possession of Europe will be dispossessed by a nonEurope that is immanent to it: “This people and earth will not be found in our democracies. Democracies are majorities, but a becoming by its nature is that which always eludes the majority.”142 To avoid slopes, margins, and differences of degree, it is no longer possible to suppose the immanence of Europe on which all of its planes would be (de)graded. If the model of conflict refers to the struggle for possession, the model of composition foregrounds the struggle for dispossession. The capacity for philosophy is the precondition for the immanent revolution.143 And only those with the disposition for philosophy would be able to be dispossessed of themselves, by which the primacy of absolute deterritorialization over the relative one is proved. New people, a new earth are only possible where philosophy is nourished. And it is not by coincidence that Deleuze and Guattari refer to the non-philosophy as immanence resilient to possession by concepts. Yet, again, one could be dispossessed of philosophy, entering the non-philosophy only by already wearing the national persona of a philosopher. In the anthropology of revolution revisited, the new character of the nation is reserved for those capable of removing the mask.

NOTES 1. This chapter was originally published in Mijatović, Aleksandar. “The Time of Dispossession: The Conflict, Composition and Geophilosophy of Revolution in East Central Europe,” pp. 50–73, in Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/ storytelling in Post-imperial Europe, ed. Vladimir Biti (New York: Brill, 2017). 2. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 14.

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3. Karol Soltan, “1989 as Rebirth,” pp. 25–39, in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, eds. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000). 4. Soltan, “1989 as Rebirth,” p. 32. 5. Yet, it could be argued that Portuguese Revolução dos Cravos on April 25, 1974, overthrowing the Estado Novo, is closer to Soltan’s definition of rebirth than the fall of communism in East Central Europe. 6. Soltan, “1989 as Rebirth,” p. 34. 7. Consider the example of violence in Romania during the overthrowing of Nicolai Ceauşescu’s regime. 8. See Milica Bakić-Hayden, Varijacije na temu ‘Balkan’ (Belgrade: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju, 2006), pp. 37–40; Igor Štiks, Državljanin, građanin, stranac, neprijatelj: jedna povijest Jugoslavije i postjugoslavenskih država (Fraktura: Zagreb, 2016), pp. 138–152. 9. Jeffrey C. Isaac, “1989 and the Future of Democracy,” pp. 39–61, in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 57. 10. Soltan, “1989 as Rebirth,” pp. 35–36. 11. Soltan, op. cit., p. 35. 12. Isaac, “1989 and the Future of Democracy,” p. 57. 13. Isaac, op. cit., p. 57. 14. Ibid. 15. Soltan, “1989 as Rebirth,” p. 35. 16. Attila Melegh, On the East–West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), p. 1. 17. Attila Melegh, “Floating East: Eastern Europe on the Map of Global Institutional Actors,” pp. 63–95, in After Communism Critical Perspectives on Society and Sociology, eds. Carol Harrington, Ayman Salem and Tamara Zurabishvili (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 85. 18. Sorin Antohi, “Habits of the Mind: Europe's Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies,” pp. 61–81, in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, eds. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 68. 19. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, pp. 12–13. 20. Maria N.Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 18–19. 21. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 19. 22. Ibid. 23. Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 2. 24. Kovačević, Narrating Post/communism, p. 3. 25. See Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–931.

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26. Katarina Luketić, Balkan: od geografije do fantazije (Zagreb: Algoritam, 2013), p. 14. 27. See Gilles Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” pp. 32–52, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 29–30. 28. Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception,” p. 34. 29. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 158. 30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 161. 31. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Dover Publications, 2007), p. 191. 32. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 191. 33. Bergson, op. cit., p. 192. 34. Ibid. 35. Deleuze, Bergson’s Conception, p. 43. 36. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 44. 37. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 129. 38. As Bignall (see Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 30) puts it: “Most postcolonial theory remains complicit with an imperial philosophy when it tacitly accepts that negation is the motive force of construction and change, and that recognition of identity is the basis of equality. This continues to position difference ambiguously: as the critical force of social transformation, but simultaneously as that which must be negated, expelled or assimilated as society progresses towards equality and harmony.” 39. Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception,” p. 49. 40. Bignall, Postcolonial Agency, p. 110. 41. Bignall, op. cit., pp. 112–114. 42. Bignall, op. cit., p. 211. 43. Ibid., p. 212. 44. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 19. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 20. 47. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Book, 1979). 48. Although it would be more accurate to translate ‘Begebenheit’ as ‘occurrence,’ the current English translation will be retained throughout the text. 49. David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 135. 50. Kant, The Conflict, p. 159. 51. Kant, op cit., p. 151. 52. Kant, op. cit., p. 159. 53. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 341. 54. Bhabha, op. cit., p. 340. 55. Ibid.

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56. Bhabha, op. cit., p. 341. 57. Ibid. 58. Bhabha, op. cit., p. 348. 59. Bhabha, op. cit., p. 350. 60. Bhabha, op. cit., p. 352. 61. Ibid. 62. Bhabha, op. cit., p. 284. 63. This is one of the main reasons why ‘Begebenheit’ should be translated as ‘occurrence.’ Revolution does not just happen; rather, it occurs by stripping off the determinate character of historical and social conditions. To put it in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, a revolution needs contingent milieu in which it shifts from the state of affairs to the event. As a state of affairs, a revolution is produced or conditioned by them. As the event, a revolution is productive, conditioning and genetic, belonging to the order of becoming. In the revolution-event conditions and the conditioned overlap; they are not in conflict; rather, they form a composition. To use Kant’s distinction, revolution considered from the standpoint of states of affairs is reproductive; while being the event it gets to be productive. The revolution-event is not determined in advance by historical and social conditions; instead, it occurs as a free accord, or a composition, of conditions. 64. “This event consists neither in momentous deeds nor crimes committed by men [. . .] No, nothing of the sort,” Kant, The Conflict, p. 153. 65. Kant, op. cit., p. 151. 66. Kant, op. cit., p. 153. 67. Kant, op. cit., p. 155. 68. Ibid. 69. However, it is not clear why the notion of the moral sublime introduced by Clewis (See Robert R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 89) is needed. 70. Kant, The Conflict, p. 157. 71. Kant, op. cit., p. 159. 72. Ibid., p. 157. 73. Ibid. 74. For a different conclusion see Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), p. 16. 75. For such an increase “a kind of new creation (supernatural influence) [. . .],” Kant, The Conflict, p. 167, would be needed. 76. See Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” pp. 93–131, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 99–102; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 236.; The Conflict, p. 165. 77. Kant, The Conflict, p. 165. 78. Kant, op. cit., p. 159. 79. Kant, op. cit., p. 165. 80. For such an interpretation see Clewis (The Kantian Sublime, p. 207): “The republic, then, helps the ends of morality to be achieved since it clears the ground for

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the individual to act in morally worthy ways, even if a republican form of government cannot guarantee that individuals will so act.” 81. Kant, The Conflict, p. 169. 82. Kant, Anthropology, 215. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., p. 222. 85. Ibid., pp. 221–222. 86. For important readings of that passage see Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 87; Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 79–80; and more recently by Vladimir Biti, Tracing Global Democracy. Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), p. 116. 87. Kant, Anthropology, p. 215. 88. See Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” pp. 41–54, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 45. 89. Such reterritorialization of philosophy on the basis of national characters given in Kant’s argument was defined by Deleuze and Guattari (What Is Philosophy?, p. 104) as nationalitarianism. 90. Kant, “Idea,” p. 44. 91. As it is known, those three combinations are: 1) law and freedom, without authority (anarchy); 2) law and authority, without freedom (despotism); and 3) authority, without freedom and law (barbarism). There may be a fourth, which combines authority with freedom and law. The fourth combination generates ´the republic, which Kant sharply distinguishes from democracy. Early versions of this typology can be found in the seventh proposition of Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. 92. Kant, “Idea,” p. 49. 93. Ibid. 94. See Suzanne Gearhart, “Irreconcilable Differences: Kant, Hegel and the ‘Idea’ of Critical History,” pp. 56–82, in Critical Conditions: Regarding the Historical Moment in Critical Practice, ed. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 68. 95. See Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” pp. 393–412, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 408; JeanFrançois Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 41. 96. Lyotard, Enthusiasm, pp. 37–39. 97. It is hard to agree with Gearhart’s claim that “The privilege Lyotard gives Kant is so enormous, precisely because for Lyotard he is the philosophical representative of all that history has excluded—because his philosophy is virtually unique in providing a framework for redressing the grievances of those who have been robbed of or removed from history,” Gearhart, “Irreconcilable Differences,” p. 60. 98. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime, p. 203.

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99. Clewis op. cit., p. 211. 100. A more coherent practical notion of revolutionary enthusiasm is given by Gailus (See Andreas Gailus, Passions of the Sign: Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe, and Kleist (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), who argues that enthusiasm involves “noncategorical faculty of will,” p. 61) and does not act on objects in terms of understanding and imagination, but in terms of will. 101. Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 57. 102. Deleuze, Kant’s, p. 57. 103. Ibid. 104. See Gilles Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics,” pp. 56–72, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 67. 105. Deleuze, “The Idea,” p. 67. 106. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 68. 107. Deleuze and Guattari (What Is Philosophy?, pp. 100–101) distinguish between the notion of enthusiasm understood as a separation between spectator and actor and “immanent enthusiasm” (p. 101) defined by a distinction between the state of affairs and events, historical conditions and Nietzschean unhistorical vapour. 108. Deleuze, “The Idea,” p. 68. 109. For a lucid reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of revolution from the standpoint of Lyotard’s reading of Kant see Rex Butler, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘What Is Philosophy?’: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 168ff. As Patton (See Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 88–93) demonstrated, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of revolution combines Nietzsche’s Untimely, Foucault’s Actual and Péguy’s Internel. However, Patton (p. 90) explains the event as the hermeneutical sublime, which raises the question “What happened?” Such a hermeneutical phrasing of the sense-event as the sublime is questionable. 110. Deleuze, “The Idea,” p. 67. 111. In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze rejected Hegel’s description of a plurality of senses as “a child’s stuttering out its most humble needs,” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 4. According to Deleuze, such a plurality is the maturity of philosophy. 112. Deleuze, Kant’s, p. 56. 113. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 164. 114. In his version of the counterfactual argument, Patton appeals to the transformation of the postcolonial present into an actuality or the “history of present” by actualizing the other layers of the colonial virtual past. He argues for a coexistence or composition of different peoples: “It might have been an encounter that was also an event of reconciliation between peoples and cultures largely unknown to one another. To reconceptualize the event in this manner is to counter-effectuate the historical process of colonization in a manner that calls for new peoples and new relations between them on the land they share,” Patton, Deleuzian Concepts, p. 117. 115. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 103.

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116. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., pp. 87–88. 117. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 93. 118. Op. cit., p. 88. 119. For a recent critical commentary on the privileging of absolute over relative deterritorialization, see Biti, Tracing Global Democracy, pp. 319–329 and especially pp. 324–326 and 329. 120. Rodolphe Gasché, Geophilosophy: On Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), p. 95. 121. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 106. 122. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 102. 123. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 103. 124. Ibid., p. 108. 125. Ibid., p. 106. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., pp. 106–107. 128. Ibid., p. 110. 129. Ibid., p. 100. 130. Kant, The Conflict, p. 153. 131. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 177. 132. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 108. 133. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., pp. 176–177. 134. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 85. 135. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 88. 136. As Gasché (Geophilosophy, p. 92) put it: “In absolute deterritorialisation the earth as a whole is deterritorialised to become Earth-Thought, and as such it is one of the plane of immanence [. . .].” 137. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 95–96. 138. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 100. 139. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 59. 140. Ibid. 141. This is one of the most important consequences of Badiou’s (10–11) critique of Deleuze (see Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 10–11). 142. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 108. 143. That precondition expressed as a “universal minor” is discussed by SibertinBlanc (see Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari. Essai sur le matérialisme historico-machinique (Paris: PUF, 2013), pp. 223–227).

Chapter 3

The Time of Disappearing—From Memory to Becoming-(Post)-Yugoslav in Daša Drndić’s novel Leica Format Reading the Dissolution of (Post)-Yugoslav Time through Bergson’s, Benjamin’s, and Deleuze’s Concepts of Temporality

MEMORY ON/OF DISAPPEARING: THE DUALITY BETWEEN FUGUES AND LEICA FORMAT1 Daša Drndić’s novel Leica Format2 has been interpreted as an account of remembrance within the conditions of eradication and exile in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the war between its former republics. According to various interpreters, Leica Format is focused on a state of irreconcilable homelessness. Homelessness is conceived as the displaced site of a decentered and unstable point of view, which shifts seemingly necessary facts into contingent and contested values. A lack of belonging is endowed with a contradictory position of dislocation. It enables one to inhabit various identities and perspectives without attaching to any of them. Being exile(d) is not merely about losing or leaving a homeland. Deprivation, experienced as the loss and departure, is separated from belonging through a doubling and borderline perspective on native and foreign languages and cultures. However, one should be able to uproot oneself without leaving one’s home or country and to discern a foreignness in the familiarity of a native place. Interpreters of Leica Format emphasize the constitutive relationship between exile and narration. They derive the particularity of Leica Format from the ambiguous position of the narrator, who is both exile and recounts her homelessness. According to Strahimir Primorac, in Lecia Format, the “topic of human eradication prevails.”3 Yet, Primorac explains that by 51

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appealing to her own biography, Drndić was absorbed by the theme of eradication: “after having a traumatic experience with the milieu she was forced to leave, but also because of her subsequent experience in the milieu in which she tried to live and work.”4 According to Primorac, being deprived of roots, one lapses into a condition of numbness. Primorac compares this condition with being dead or with the vegetal life of a plant. The narrator demonstrates “huge, almost unsurmountable differences which she faces in her new milieu and attempts to disclose eradication—abandonment from a community to which one has substantially participated—as an incurable disease.”5 Thus, following Primorac, the ambiguity of the narrator of Leica Format does not stem from the “unhealable rift”6 between homeland and the foreign land. The narrator describes the alternation between a familiar and foreign space. She changes a city in one republic of the former Yugoslavia with a town in another former Yugoslav republic. In her detailed analysis of Leica Format, Andrea Zlatar7 points out the problem of eradication as a part of the shift from modernism to postmodernism. As Zlatar puts it: While modernism, less than a hundred years after the Romantic withdrawal of the artist into nature, announced a return of artists to cities, postmodernism recognizes the mechanism of seclusion and the loss of communication in a society which identifies itself as the culmination of the information age and declares itself the “network society.”8

In their interpretations, Primorac and Zlatar stress that Leica Format is determined by a persistent evasion of any kind of belonging and an obstinate retreat from the possibility of rootedness. Primorac argues that in Leica Format, “nothing is taken for granted, everything is exposed to doubt, polemics are mixed with everything and everyone, without expecting any applause in return.”9 Zlatar argues that Leica Format presents: Life from which it is not possible to escape except in fuga. Fuga is the Latin word for impairment or loss of memory, but also for the escape from the homeland, banishment, and expulsion, as Daša Drndić writes in the explanatory note before the beginning of the novel Leica Format. The fugue reminds one of a polyphonic composition as well as a fugue as a span of wall, stones, or tiles. Leica Format is all of it: real and mental escape, polyphonic composition, intended spacing.10

In an anthropological reading of Leica Format, Jasmina Lukić11 argues: “forgetting and remembering are important topics of the novel.”12 She remarks

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that exile arranges “a framework for problematizing identity.”13 More importantly, Lukić underscores the “critical distance”14 that the narrator establishes not only in relation to others but also to herself. The narrator’s relationship toward the external other and its presentation is mediated through the narrator’s internal other. From that “critical distance,” the relationship between “the Sameness of the city” and “the Otherness of the stranger” is reversed. It is no longer possible to maintain the assumption that “we (city, community) are values for ourselves.”15 The stranger enables the “critical reconsidering” of Sameness from the viewpoint of Otherness: “Daša Drndić forms her story of Rijeka as a tale of disobedience. It requires maintaining a critical distance as a precondition of resisting the totalizing impact of Sameness.”16 However, that critical distance toward others relies upon the narrator’s distance from herself. The narrator dispossesses her own Sameness through memory: The novel speaks about interminable departure and that there are no real arrivals that would terminate the voyage because the traveler carries with himself memories of other places and knowledge about other worlds. In that sense, the journey can be ended only by complete oblivion that would erase either the past or the departing point. That forgetting entails a complete change of the traveler’s identity.17

To contribute to these insights and interpretations of the novel, I will propose the thesis that Leica Format is a story about disappearing. It does not tell a story about something that is irretrievably lost. Instead, Leica Format is a story about things and people that are in the state of disappearing. Disappearing includes both remembering and forgetting. What disappears is still present in its vanishing, and that vanishing is nothing but a transformation of disappearing into a form of something that is yet to appear.18 The story of Leica Format is situated amid things corroded by time: Only the clock at the entrance to that building with its mosaic marble floors from a once truly mosaic past, only the clock ticks regularly and dully, as though denouncing the dankness of its own present.19

Disappearing things are still ticking, and every stroke could be the last. What disappears is subordinated to the power of duration, but, on the other hand, it craves for its own end. What disappears is simultaneously present as it recedes into the past. Leica Format recounts a disappearing which leaves traces of its own lapse. This productive character of disappearing is alluded to in the paratextualperitextual frame of the novel used in its Croatian edition. On the inside flap of the book jacket, the word fugue is repeated in the direction of the bottom

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margin, and it decreases in size. The reiteration of the word fugue creates an illusion of descending into a vanishing point, dissimulating fading. At least three registers are brought into contact: the literary, which comprises the title and genre; the visual, in which the leica format refers to photography while fugue refers to the moving image; and the mnemotechnic, which links the leica format with remembering and fuga with forgetting. By combining these registers, the graphic solution of the inside flap creates the illusion of movement that is opposed to its arrest in photography—Leica Format.20 The leica format is a photographic snapshot which extracts a moment from the continuous flow of time.21 It is a fugue transformed into a picture.22 DISAPPEARING AS MOBILITY AND CHANGE: THE FUGUE IS A MOBILE SECTION Departing from the contrast between duration and moment, mobility and immobility, I will consider Henri Bergson’s account of duration given in Creative Evolution (1907).23 According to Bergson, human consciousness divides the continuous flow of reality into discontinuous segments. He defines the cinematographic mechanism of thought as segmentation and a drawing together of the pieces of reality into the appearance of continuous movement. The movement is recovered from immobile sequences. This resumed movement creates the mechanist illusion of reality as a compound of separated moments and independent states. Cinematographic consciousness excludes the existence of duration and change; it replaces becoming with a state. In Leica Format, the cinematographic mechanism of thought is manifested as the elusiveness of fugues. It provides an experience of duration. For Bergson, the cinematographic mechanism of thought and intuition are opposed as two methods for ascertaining reality. In Leica Format, on the other hand, the cinematographic vision comes to be associated with intuition. Those two views may appear incompatible. However, following Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s cinematographic mechanism or mechanist illusion, the relationship between photography and the fugue could be conceptualized within the framework of mobile sections. Deleuze underpins the productive aspect of Bergson’s account of the cinematographic mechanism of thought. The movement could not be restored from immobile sections. Thus, it seems that Bergson’s thesis is irreconcilable with the properties of the film image. However, Deleuze offers a different treatment of both movement and the moving image. According to Deleuze, movement cannot be made if it is presupposed that everything is given in advance. Movement is the creation of the new.

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Deleuze interprets Bergson’s thesis that movement is a mobile section of duration. Duration is redefined as the whole, which is continuously changed by the movement. The essential element of the whole is its incessant variation. If movement is understood as a mobile section, it enacts a qualitative change of the whole. When one puts sugar in a glass of water, both parts and whole are transformed into the state of sugared water. Both parts and the whole are immersed into the transmutation, which creates a new whole (the sugared water) irreducible to its components (sugar and water). The whole, being defined by the notions of change and transformation, is not given. The whole as Open continually changes. Because of its constitutive openness, the whole could not be reduced to a closed set. The whole makes the set open since it is not a circle that englobes and totalizes its parts. Instead, the whole is to be conceived as a line that connects parts without unifying them.24 The whole is duration because it does not cease to change. The part is no longer an immobile section; instead, the whole is constituted from mobile sections subsisting to duration. The whole could be considered in a twofold way: as a closed set made of parts defined as immobile sections and as an open whole consisting of mobile sections and the changing relations between them. With the shift from one to the other model, the whole is reconceptualized as a becoming that cuts through its parts and their states. It is possible to cut out a closed set or to immobilize an instant of duration. However, it is impossible to cut away from the whole as a becoming that incessantly changes. In the shift from one concept of the whole to the other, one passes from objects and discrete parts to the movements between objects and parts and finally to the whole as a continuous variation.25 The movement is two-tiered, it is an immobile section of objects and parts, and it is the expression of the duration. Through the movement, the whole is distributed or divided among objects and parts, which are simultaneously unified in the whole. Nevertheless, the real notion of the whole is in the passage from the movement as a mobile section to duration. In this passage, objects lose their discreteness and enter a continuity with other objects. Starting from the redefinition of movement as incessant variation, one can reconsider both the shot and photography. From this point of view, we will interpret the role of photography in Leica Format. In the novel, photography is related to an unframed field enclosing the image. The narrator always discovers a point inside photography that refers to its outside. Bergson’s critique of cinema refers to the image in movement, the moving image, which expresses only one side of the movement. However, both photography and cinema are derived from image-movement. The notion of photography as an arrested motion is correlated to the idea of cinema as the moving image. With the dichotomy of the captured image and the moving

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image, we remain on the first level of resumed movement that is related to the closed set containing isolated fragments. The shot reformulated as the mobile section is as equally related to photography as to cinema. If the definition of cinema would be confined to the moving image, it would also reduce photography to the arrested movement. The notion of photography should be assigned to movement as a constant variation. Photography mediates between disintegrated image and its exteriority, transforming them into a varying whole. Photography redefined as a mobile section contains the possibility of activating a fugue. This complicity of photography and fugue could be conceptualized through Walter Benjamin’s elaboration of photography and cinema given in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936).26 I will highlight at least two aspects developed in Benjamin’s seminal essay important for understanding the dual temporality of the leica format and the fugue. While the first is the asymmetry between the demands that art creates and the means for their realization,27 the second is the shift from manual to technological reproduction. The latter undermined the authority of the original over its copies.28 Moreover, technological reproducibility undermines the dominance of both originality and authenticity. Consequently, the image could be reproduced in a variety of heterogeneous contexts. The image lost its auratic “here and now” to which the recipient’s “now and here” would be subordinated. Instead, there are numerous and irreconcilable chronological layers of the actuality that coexist but never synchronize with each other. They are related through such an asynchronous simultaneity of different actualities. Cinema liberates the potential of photography to register not only movement but also to grasp constantly changing rhythms of fleeting reality, its ceaseless relapse into absence. The invention of photography is related to a notion of reality that is in constant change and perpetual movement.29 However, its task is not to fix these feeble perceptions, but to get hold of their wandering, erratic, and transitory character. Both photography and cinema are two forms of relating to movement as an ever-shifting whole. They cannot be reduced to the two historical ways of getting hold of movement, either through capturing it in the snapshot or resuming it through the moving image. Cinema sharpens the physiognomic attitude of photography toward repudiated and hidden aspects of reality. Photography excavates an indestructible surplus of experience that cannot be assimilated into representation. In this way, it exposes a past that is to be reassessed from the perspective of a future. Disappearing is connected to duration, because something that fades still endures: “For, as soon as we are confronted with true duration, we see that it means creation, and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only be because it is inseparably bound to what is making itself.”30 Bergson insists

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upon interrupted variation,31 and he rejects the difference between “passing from one state to another” and “persisting in the same state.” He concludes that even a seemingly same state is the product of variation. However, that also leads to the conclusion that the most varied states retain their sameness. Passage and transition are to be detached from the notion of state. In the context of this discussion, it is a crucial demarcation because, in Leica Format, the decline is distinguished from disappearing. Disappearing is invested with the variation. UNBINDING CONNECTIONS: FUGUES AS (UN)WITNESSING MEMORANDA The narrator arrives at the city of Rijeka and attempts to maintain the observing position of the stranger who gives an account of the habits, customs, values, and prejudices of the citizens. On the other hand, the narrator is enthralled with the lives of two characters, the old woman Clara and Doctor Ludwig Jakob Fritz. Clara is an old woman who died in the late 1990s. She lived in the narrator’s neighborhood. At a young age, she was a flower-girl and prostitute. As an old woman, she made a living by selling flowers. A long time ago, before World War I, Doctor Ludwig Jakob Fritz visited Rijeka and had an affair with the young prostitute who could have been the old woman Clara. The narrator tries to meld vague indices, intermingling the separate lives and times of Clara and Doctor Fritz. This intersecting of divergent lives brings the narrator to the idea that every event could be considered as separated from other events and that their fragile totality creates a deceitful mosaic, an ever-shifting whole of loose interconnections. It is possible that the narrator’s uncle Luigi and Doctor Ludwig Jakob Fritz could be the same person. Uncle Luigi died from syphilis when the narrator was a child living in the second Yugoslavia, which was established after World War II. In this way, the narrator establishes the simultaneity of heterogeneous temporalities extending from pre-Yugoslav time over Yugoslav time to postYugoslav time. Yet, the narrator attempts to withdraw this simultaneity from synchronization. The times of the narrator as a child and as an adult are connected while retaining their separateness through the times of Clara, Doctor Ludwig Jakob Fritz, and Uncle Luigi. Three temporalities, pre-Yugoslav, Yugoslav, and post-Yugoslav, are thereby transferred from succession to superimposition in which timelines simultaneously lag behind and forge ahead of each other. In this multifold temporality, events simultaneously could have happened, they happen, and they are about to happen. In discovering this chain of loose connections, the narrator’s observing position is transformed into the participating, and separation is converted

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into unity. This transformation does not depend on the veracity of these free-floating associations. The narrator is engulfed by the story she is trying to recount: We search for our pulse, I search for the town, the town searches for me, half blind, we stumble, grope through the sticky worm-eaten mass of our pasts, sick and inseparable enemies until death do us part.32

The memory of the city, the narrator, Clara, and Luigi enter a whole. Although they do not establish causal links, these recollections cannot be apprehended separately. No recollection could verify that the lives of Clara, Fritz, and the narrator really crossed paths, and yet they subsist to the whole they make together without being unified into a single identity. The lives of Clara, Fritz, and the narrator are entangled, but nothing yields decisive evidence of that complicity. However, fugues which cannot be assessed by way of personal recollection are constitutive to their individuality. On the other hand, individual recollections, the personal process of remembering, lose their objectivity because they are integrated into a memory-whole that can be neither confirmed nor denied. Accepting one story as true does not exclude another story as false, but, on the contrary, truthfulness is derived from the asynchronous simultaneity of a variety of stories. The story that is beyond the opposition between truth and lie does indicate not only something that is possible but also an event that cannot be witnessed by way of direct evidence. According to Agamben, the testimony contains a part that cannot be witnessed, and that unwitnessable part excludes the witness from the capacity to testify.33 Nevertheless, one is a witness precisely in the name of that unwitnessable part of the testimony. This means that witnessing does not depend on any kind of evidence by which something could be approved or disapproved. On the contrary, the testimony is related to the very impossibility of witnessing. It means that witnessing is outside the legal framework of correspondence between facts and statements, between remembering and actuality: “Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive.”34 The narrator of Leica Format witnesses disappearing but she recounts that testimony from a place where no language speaks: And yet, around her nothing moves, parts of her being live separately, each for itself. Parts of her being do not speak, they no longer have anything to say, or anyone to say it to. She understands those parts of her being, but she does not feel them. Around her a pantomime is a being performed in which she does not participate. She is outside.35

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Narration inhabits the fault line of fugues which “no longer speak” and cannot be “felt.” Fugues occupy a stratum that is experienced as its own impossibility of being spoken about or being felt. We will recourse to that stratum of experience with Deleuze’s notion of the imperceptible. The object of encounter is imperceptible from the point of view of recognition and the regular exercise of faculties since they are associated with a sensible being. In their discordant exercise, faculties attain the very being of the sensible or the sentiendum. The sentiendum pushes memory to its extreme limits making one remember through forgetting. That part of memory that is both impossible to evoke through reminiscence and to forget is the memorandum. The memorandum (in the mode parallel to sentiendum) replaces the past being with the very being of the past36 in which something is “never-seen” and “already recognized.” We can imagine how fugues in Leica Format and memoranda are mutually reconsidered. That position of storytelling is aimed to testify the very impossibility of speaking and sensing the impossibility of feeling. On that strata, recollections are replaced with memoranda. Through them, parts of the narrator’s being are detached from each other, but they constitute a whole through that detachment. The narrator’s inability to arrange a whole is extended into the whole of her life without being the subject of that composition. She is estranged from the totality into which she is plunged. THE WHOLE OF TRANSITIVITY: FUGUES AND CHANGE If for Bergson what endures disappears, in Leica Format, to the contrary, that what disappears endures. In Leica Format, disappearing is not the part of the present that slowly replaces what fades out. Instead, the present shows itself as the last instant of the vanishing. The present appears as a time that remains before everything evaporates.37 The relationship between Leica Format and the fugue reverses the relationship between the kaleidoscope and the cinematographic apparatus, as Bergson describes it. For him, it is an illusion that leads to a moving puzzle composed of the immobile sections of the movement. However, these mobile sections are the constitutive elements of both photography and cinema. In Leica Format, it is impossible to divide the instant and duration. The cinematographic apparatus does not simply imitate duration, but it provides a new experience of time. In Cinema 1, Deleuze shows how to understand Bergson’s critique of cinematographic illusion. In the third commentary on Bergson given in the third chapter of Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses the double function of recollection-images. On the one hand, they still serve the

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sensory-motor arc, and they are not able to give a virtual image. However, they are more important for attentive recognition than for automatic recognition. On the other hand, they enable a new kind of subjectivity. This new subjectivity is different from that emerging from affect, as described in Cinema 1. Affect intervenes between action and perception, and it arises from the interval between them. The recollection-image introduces an insurmountable interval between action and perception. In recollection-images, subjectivity inhabits the interval itself. It is not that duration, or the whole, is divided into discrete and immobile sections.38 Instead, it is the instant of being liberated from duration. Everything endures without entering the totalizing duration. Nevertheless, it does not imply that the spectator encounters a ruin of the whole. Instead, the spectator discerns the cracks in the apparent whole. The ruin, or disappearing, is not a starting point for the spectator, but the goal to be attained. To change is to disappear.39 It is at that point that one must look for the “post-” of the (post)-Yugoslav. The inability of characters to extend their images of Yugoslavia, described in many works of (post)-Yugoslav literature, into movement does not relate to the time after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. That delay of prolongation, the meanwhile as the gap, occurs during its existence. The after becomes part of the temporal rhythm of the during. To catch a glimpse of ruin is to constitute the whole as a convergence along diverging lines, to detect blanks and gaps which resist being integrated into the whole. (Post)-Yugoslav studies, nevertheless, in their post-traumatic quest for convergence, enact the very event of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The narrator comes from cities that remain foreign to her, even when they can be taken as “hometowns.” She remains a stranger both in the “little town in which [she is] currently living”40 and in “the town in which [she] lived for forty years.”41 She arrives at a “little dead town.”42 Leica Format apprehends the history of Fiume—Rijeka from the first decades of the twentieth century to the beginning of the new millennium. However, she uses that time span to show that the town on the eve of the millennium is dilapidation of its previously prominent past. Within Rijeka as “the small town” at the beginning of the twenty-first-century survives the town from the beginning of the twentieth century. In the present town, whose “slow, ugly expiring [she is] observing on the eve of the new millennium,”43 there are inscribed traces on the threshold of visibility of the town, which is “crumbling, but in fact not crumbling.”44 That remark about a paradoxical non-declining decay does not refer only to the town, but to the concept of decaying. A thing or a person that decays do not necessarily disappear. The city described in Leica Format is not a dead town: instead, it is in a demonic and liminal state between life and death. It is mythical imprisonment in a state of inexorable repetition, which is not liberating, but “create[s] an immense shudder that incites nausea.”45 Only catching

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a view of a disappearing city—which means to grasp invisible traces and impalpable remains—provides the decisive insight into its history. While discussing photography and cinema, Benjamin46 introduces the concept of the optical unconscious (Optisch-Unbewussten). As psychoanalysis enlarges the perception of speech activity by recovering the background planes that determine speech, cinema expands the perceptual world. Cinema dilates the borderlines of the perceptual world and makes visible that which would go unnoticed in one’s immediate perceptions. However, Benjamin assigns the notion of the optical unconscious a polemical note in comparison to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious. The latter, according to Freud, escapes immediate perception and representation. Freud distinguishes between word-representation and thingrepresentation.47 The unconscious reveals itself through thing-representation, the trace of memory as a leftover of perception overwhelms the psyche. The preconscious uses the double structure of signification consisting of both thing-representation and word-representation. It is not possible to recall the traces of memory directly through consciousness, but only as they are intermediated through word-representation. The application of the laws of verbal representation to thing-representation strips the remnants of memory off from their affective and emotional layers. Memories, tied to word representations, are free from the affective charge and enter consciousness where they become part of cognitive processes. According to Freud, these processes are different from perception. However, the fugues in Leica Format are not purified perceptions that are recast into word-representations. Instead, they are revealed in the optical-unconscious, which couples transitivity and change. A fugue is a form of memory that is connected to forgetting and unconsciously possessed. The fugue is a gap, an interstice in which memory and forgetting are inseparable and indistinct. Its definition contains both joining and spacing. It is a double movement of joining and spacing, building and dilatation. From that point of view, the fugue is a forgetting that enables memory. Just as in architecture, the fugue builds by leaving empty space(s). The cinematic destruction of the world, the constriction of its duration in an instant, is an optical explosion. In its flash, one glimpses the disappearing world. In Leica Format, the new is the last glow of the old before its evanescence into the gloom of the past. The new is not something that arrives; rather, it fleetingly appears as it inevitably fades away. Just as after every explosion, only scattered debris remains, so a cinematic explosion leaves repeatable images. After the flash of the image, only its dismembered leftovers remain. Benjamin’s notion of destroying the world in “the split second”48 indicates an interval in cinema images that is constitutive of the process of their receiving. Spectators are unaware of the duration of images and the seemingly indiscernible intervals between them. We can interpret

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Benjamin, nevertheless, as he speaks of the liberating duration of images and the intervals between them in independent objects of perception. Only in catching a glimpse of those intervals and volatile objects, one may hope to be rescued from the world in which one is “imprisoned.” In “Central Park,” Benjamin speaks of the “rescue (Rettung)”49 which shows itself as the dialectical image—an image of the past that flashes in the actuality in which it is recognized. For Benjamin, it means that redemption is connected to “the perception of what is being irredeemably lost.”50 In Leica Format we read: The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns. Departures of non-departure. Through cracks in the past overgrown with brittle plants, blue and yellow. Travelling through the trembling light that is fading. Floating through deserted landscapes, through soundlessness.51

The past dwells in segments of experience that are on leave, that will fade away. Technological reproducibility brings objects closer through the image. Since objects cannot be spatially and temporally bound to a determinate position, they are displaced continuously, and they remain at a distance through their displacement. However, what is coming in proximity is not the object, but the image. Therefore, it is an aporia, since “ what is brought closer is itself already reproduction—and as such, separated from itself—the closer it comes, the more distant it is.”52 These pictures “you do not get—you are gotten by them.”53 Benjamin distinguishes the image and reproduction. Fugues are transient, like reproductions, and they are recurring, like images. The fugue does not represent the object; instead, it is rather its vanishing. The object appears as its own disappearing. Moreover, the object is nothing but its disappearing. In fugues, the past appears in its own fading. They are bound to “lost memory,” they are debris, or “rejects,” from which it is impossible to reconstruct a determinate whole. The whole reverberates in the fugue, but only as of the impossibility of its own resurgence. DISAPPEARING AS THE DETACHED LINE OF RUPTURE As Bergson contends, the instant conceived as an immobile capture of duration cannot lead to movement. Bergson aims this discussion of the cinematographic illusion primarily against the notion of the moment and its dominance over the idea of duration. The instant separates from duration. Life is caught within the continuous flow of duration in which creation and decay belong to the same act. In its progression, duration leaves only ruins behind. Following

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this thesis, it is not possible to distinguish decay and disappearing. This distinction is of great importance for understanding Leica Format. Everything withers away—cities, populations, individuals submitted to brutal medical experiments—but no one disappears to be saved from the process of deterioration. Decay is a torment that pushes its victims to the limits of life and death. In Leica Format, characters do not simply undergo torture; instead, their lives are described as anguish. They do not deteriorate; instead, they are deterioration itself. The characters of Leica Format are in a deep old age, and their life extends over different periods of the city, or their age cannot be readily determined. They are presented as having always been there, like living fossils.54 The old woman Clara is a central character: “died in her hundred and first year.”55 She weaves and unweaves the threads of forgetting from the texture of memory, bringing into a non-coinciding juxtaposition the photographic layer of leica format and the cinematographic layer of fugues. In Rijeka at the beginning of the twentieth century, Clara once was “a beauty and nocturnal entertainer she sold flowers and love through the numerous taverns, cafes, terraces and hotels of Fiume.”56 The story of Ludwig Jakob Fritz is introduced as a fugue, which is parallel to that of the old woman Clara. He stayed in Antonija Resch’s pension (an “intimate family guest house at number 28”57) on October 25, 1911. Fritz’s line of the story is developed by forming a juncture between his (pre-Yugoslav) past and the (post)-Yugoslav present time of the city. The narrator juxtaposes these time-shifts. Fritz and Clara met in Hotel Hungaria. Fritz has been warned about the spreading of syphilis by local prostitutes in Fiume. Fritz and Clara meet again in the coffee house Grotta. Fritz writes a postcard to Doctor Segal, and when he leaves the city Doctor Fritz forgets to take three books from the nightstand in his room. Clara’s and Fritz’s fugues intertwine, they have a love affair, she infects him with syphilis, from which he dies years after. The spores that Clara was carrying in herself, nevertheless, remain inactive during her long life. The bordello romance between Clara and Doctor Fritz enmeshes the narrator in a story that she attempts to recount as a bystander. Hotel Hungaria is a few decades later, during the Yugoslav time, renovated and turned into an apartment building. Clara, in the (post)-Yugoslav time, happens to be the narrator’s neighbor. On the other hand, Doctor Fritz, coming from both pre-Yugoslav time (as Fritz) and Yugoslav time (as Luigi), could be the uncle of the narrator. In the weaving of the storylines and their timelines, it is impossible to disentangle older from younger layers, beginnings from endings. Some links are established, but only for others to be severed, some aspects are disclosed while others concealed. Life is evoked through the fugues. They render various sheets of life in a juxtaposition of counterpoints. Through such counter-composition, the layers of life are brought closer

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while simultaneously maintaining a distance from themselves. However, this double movement of fugues refrains from assuming any shape whatsoever. Links between generations and individuals are juxtapositions of coincidences. In Leica Format, these erratic junctions are described by turning the contagious disease of syphilis into a cultural trope. Syphilis is transmitted through the generations with the possibly long periods of latency. It is almost impossible to determine the original moment of infection. The syphilisdiagram is not reproductive; instead, it is a propagation that dispenses with any ancestor. The narrator of Leica Format presents these clinical features of syphilis as a model for the interpenetration of historical events: (...) while Ludwig Jakob Fritz, blessed in his insignificance, in his enclosed life limited by emptiness, Ludwig Jakob Fritz does not think of the funeral in store for him, he has no idea he that has become a link in the chain of that hideous disease that is still (at that time) circling the globe. He could have pulled through; in 1911 Ludwig Jakob Fritz could have been treated, but since he was not, it’s hard today to establish on which continents his spirochetes roam, in whose lives they have settled, what monstrosities they have caused, and it is not known whether now, when there are treatments, that invisible chain of destinies has finally been broken. Ludwig Jakob Fritz had only to remember that not all diseases are manifested at once, that some diseases may present their invoice sometimes fifty or sixty years later, that there are malevolent diseases that recur, skip a generation or two, and then return, refreshed, strengthened, that sins of the fathers are very tough sins, that Madame Alving’s phantoms are not phantoms at all, but tangible horrors that transform a person into a worm-eaten mass of poisonous, noxious cells. Where the sources of these dense, filthy waters lie, it is hard to say.58

The narrator opposes this model of history as an aleatory line, cutting across layers, or fugues, to a model of history that reduces persons and happenings to their ideal and antiquarian versions: This is a town that its faithful inhabitants, unlike its unfaithful ones, adore leafing through. These devotees of the town say, We leaf through our town with pride and read it, that is what they say. They arrange shreds of their town and call them shreds of history. These are shreds of the history of our town, they exclaim, when in fact they are foraging through the names of their dead, excavating the numbers of dead years, doggedly and self-importantly.59

The narrator distinguishes between remnants, shards, and remains or patches. The patch (krpica in the Croatian language) is a concept from the nineteenth-century history of Rijeka, which refers to the Croatian-Hungarian Deal of 1868 when Rijeka was subsumed under Hungarian rule. Historians

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of Rijeka use the notion of the patch figuratively in their presentations of the history of the city. For the narrator, through such presentations, the city is conceived as the living dead. The town is locked up in a present that never ends. Disappearance is opposed to the city which is circumscribed within the present of its own decay: Since the avenue beside the sea stretches richly and flexibly, it could be imagined as a two-way street, free-flowing, leading outwards and inwards, without end or beginning, a street where time loses its outlines and quietly vanishes, a street where the traveler discovers some past of his which he longer knows that he possesses. But the Riva gives an impression of being a closed road. At its beginning and at its end, invisible ramparts have been erected, which squeeze the flow into its old body, and it stands imprisoned in its carapace like stagnant water. Recollections of that road disperse into little drops formed of easy, halfexpressed words, of odourlessnes that closes the lungs.60

Behind the remains, there is an invisible city. Otherwise, the fugues could be mistaken for patches. The pairing of photography and cinema is correlated to the two-tiered pattern of leica format and fugues. To the immobility and the frozen time of shreds, the narrator opposes mobile and varying complexes of fugues. Ruptures and fissures are freed from their subordination to the totalized whole. These liberated fault lines metamorphose into fugues, or lines of the constant interpenetration of shards to the point of the indiscernibility. Shreds transformed into fugues create a composition of parts that sustain their heterogeneity. To distinguish painting from cinema, Benjamin compares a magician and surgeon. The distinction is connected to the opposition of aura and its destruction. In contrast to the surgeon, the magician maintains the distance between himself and its patient. Just as the destruction of the aura is connected to getting hold of objects in their proximity, so the surgeon cancels the distance that separates magician and patient. The surgeon penetrates the body of the patient. Whereas as the painter’s image is total, the cameraman’s image is fragmented and assembled from various pieces. The cinematographer decomposes and recomposes the image by finding new ways of rearranging its parts. Fragments, unlike patches, are blended, following the lines of their ruptures. These lines indicate that the memory of one fragment is not isolated from the memory of another fragment, which might retain its remoteness. Uncharted fragments are linked through their detachment. The memories of fragments reverberate, recalling each other, making a composition that escapes from forming a totality. A unified point of view around which fragments are assembled is replaced by a variety of perspectives and attitudes regarding their reconstitution and reconstruction. They relate to each other

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without getting included in a harmonious pattern. This relation, as it develops on the lines of rupture, does express not only a junction of fragments but also a spacing which divides them. Fugues are lines of crack that are wrestled from both shreds and fragments. The present is not something that irrevocably vanishes; rather, it is sensed as vanishing itself, a sentiendum of vanishing. The present as being immanent to its own disappearing is indicated in the duality between the leica format and the fugue. The leica format is not only a snapshot of fugues, but it emerges from their elusiveness. This duality is manifested as the “web of our life,” which is like “a false magic cloak, now visible, now invisible.”61 When the web is invisible, one reaches the layers of fugues. When it is visible, fugues congeal into a leica format. In the novel, everything lives its own decrepitude: “(. . .) everything stands still,”62 “(. . .) this was (and remained) a town in a corset, tragically constricted.”63 When an object or person enters a fugue, their disappearance is separated and freed from any decline. THE ARRHYTHMIA OF DISAPPEARING: ASYNCHRONIZED MOMENTS As Bergson argues, if reality would consist of discrete instants, there would be no duration. If a present instant were replaced by another, there would be only the present. However, what does not change does not endure.64 The reality is in continuous change, while the form is a snapshot of this change.65 This duality between the leica format and the fugue corresponds to this distinction between change and its snapshot.66 Fugues are in permanent movement, and they are apprehended in the leica format’s immobilization of the flow of time. The Leica Format could be defined by Bergson’s notion of the “mean image.”67 This intermediate image is featured as a compound of resemblances extracted from the succession of images. All successive images of movement are reducible to the intermediate image. Ideas of the essence of a thing or the thing itself derive from the notion of the mean image. As soon as attention is shifted from movement to its immobile contour, the reality is discerned in an indefinite image of continuous change. The idea of change is hidden, while its discontinuous representation is foregrounded. Therefore, perception reveals a state instead of the transition between the states. Leica Format attempts to replace the decay with duration. Whereas in decay, everything persists in its own deterioration, in duration everything disappears. However, the instant is the path to duration. In Leica Format, the hierarchy between the instant and duration is disrupted. In dissociating movement to the succession of immobile states, it is impossible to reconstitute movement itself in its continuous flow. It would be, as

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Bergson vividly describes, just as a child tries to seize smoke by clapping its hands. As the smoke slips way through the child’s hands, so movement is divided into instants. If we pause on Bergson’s example, we can contend that the child does not want only to capture the smoke, but also to have the sensation of how it evades being seized. It is the elusiveness of the smoke itself that the child wants to experience. The child apprehends the smoke not only as elusiveness but also as it is escaping from the clapping hands. Moreover, by experiencing the elusiveness of the smoke, the child can experience the disappearance of smoke. Similarly, it is not the past itself that escapes one through recollection. Rather, it is disappearing that one experiences in the failed attempt to reach the past through recollection. Fugues are such shortcomings of remembering: Fugues—little friends of our reality, indestructible. Sometimes, to a collection of innocent fugues, we add submissive little fuguettes which, like small faithful dog, scamper round our heels, elusive fugues tasting our dreams. We unearth fugues that we thought were long since dead out of who knows which storehouses. Our fugues are our beliefs, our common sense, our gods, they are the peace with which we decorate our lives as we decorate Christmas trees, at times excessively. How would we manage otherwise, how? It is warm beneath the fugues, they are a tent over our days. Beside them and with them we stroll into a time of paltry pain. (. . .) we wait for the germ of a new fugue to bud, to uncoil from our breath like the tone of a mysterious melody and grow and grow until it becomes a symphony in which we plunge.68

The child in the game of seizing smoke feels its own palms. The palms are sensed through the elusiveness of smoke. The sensation of the body is given as the experience of the evading smoke. It could be surmised that such games are a kind of phenomenological framework through which one acknowledges forgetting as the obverse side of remembering. The latter does not enable one to (re)capture the past; instead, the past is sensed as its irrevocable vanishing. Memory is not an experience of reclaiming the past, but of its disappearing. Through evanescing moments and their transient character, one grasps duration. The counterpoint of the leica format and the fugue can be explained with the dual system of perception compared with the cinematograph and the kaleidoscope. The continuity of movement is reconstituted through the unrolling of the cinematographic tape. It consists of snapshots of real movement, and yet, its unfolding stages the illusion of movement. One does not discern existence itself, but its imitation. This false image of movement changes as the interrupted moments replace each other. These recurrent rearrangements are like a kaleidoscope in which the image changes by reordering

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immobile pieces. Therefore, we never reach becoming because we see snapshots of transition, instead of the transition itself. Nothing is known about passages. We are preoccupied with what is happening between the snapshots of the passage, disregarding the new snapshot which inserts itself between the first two. While this could be taken as an argument against the reconstitution of movement from moments, it is still not ground for rejecting the notion of the moment. Inasmuch movement is cut into an infinite number of photographs and artificially animated by the cinematographic mechanism, in Leica Format there is an attempt to extract photography from the movement itself. Remembering composes a varying whole, which changes by liberating the interval between movements. Some authors do not denounce discontinuity as an illusion. Cinema does not imitate real movement, but it shows the continuity of movement as an illusion. Whereas Bergson criticizes the famous experiment undertaken by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, other interpreters convincingly argue that the deficiency of the experiment is not in the rejection of the premise of the continuity of movement. On the contrary, Muybridge and Marey proved the impossibility of the continuity of movement: “They captured the nature of the movement as a series of moments and fragments, as an illusory discontinuity.”69 While Bergson demonstrated that there is continuity behind the appearance of discontinuity, duration behind the succession of moments, Dagognet70 claims that Marey exposed the veiled background of the illusion of continuity.71 However, the inability to capture movement in its continuity does not necessarily entail that movement itself is discontinuous.72 Bergson does not discard moment, but he rejects the reconstruction of the continuity of movement through a reassembling of its instantaneous segments. Instead, the moment is the most contracted point of duration. The moment cannot be purified from duration just as duration tends to be contracted into a moment. There is an image in Leica Format that might complicate the matter further: What there is here, now, is full of illusions, empty squares, which give the impression of little cubes, but they are not cubes because they are made of air. These rickety windows, full of holes through which we put our fingers as we play, puncturing the invisible, are perhaps dreams, old dreams made entirely of breath and sighs, elusive, decayed dreams, because as we poke around them nothing hurts, anywhere, only the net twitches and the eye watches. At every touch, intended or not, that net of our days loses its shape, slides, slips away, moves in our hand to and fro, backwards and forwards and in a circle, without rhythm, without harmony, intractable, resembling the gigantic face of a surprised rubber man. If that web of our life does not fall apart, it is because of the little knots, hundreds, thousands of tiny taut knots that hold it together, just

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because of them. In that way it becomes a false magic cloak, now visible, now invisible, with which we cover ourselves, with which we warm our reality. If it is turned upside down, that cloak is transformed into a basket, a little pannier in which we tidy away time, neatly, like freshly washed laundry.73

It seems that the fleetness and elusiveness of the moment are opposed to duration; “the eye watches” only the twitches of the net and a “cube” is disclosed as an “empty square,” whereby the here and now are unveiled as being “full of illusion.” However, “that web of our life does not fall apart” because these empty squares of experience are rediscovered as “knots” that “hold together” the web. “Tearing apart” and “holding together” are opposed movements of the web, and yet they are simultaneously mechanisms from which surges the fragmentary wholeness of the web. “Empty squares” and “knots” at their junctures produce cubes, a fullness made of emptiness, or “a false magic cloak.” The web is turned into a cloak when one endorses the asynchronous simultaneity—“without rhythm”—of unification and separation. It might seem that the image of the basket in which time is layered “like freshly washed laundry” could be accommodated to Bergson’s cone of memory. Nevertheless, this comparison of time with something washed or with laundry with its stains removed could imply ideological bleaching of the past. On the other hand, a comparison of the past with the freshly washed laundry echoes the idea of the past carried away in its wholeness and actualized due to the unforeseeable demands of an ever-changing present. One can go a step further and argue that this could indicate the virtuality of the past, its untimeliness, or its counter-actualizing force that continuously insists on its own actualization, or that the past and present are constituted simultaneously. This simultaneity, though, does not imply only the continuity of a whole. The constellation of separation and unification is underpinned in the “twitch” of the double movement of expansion and contraction. On the one hand, the net “loses the shape, slides, slips away” and, on the other hand, it is “a little pannier in which we tidy away time.” The time of disappearance is ordered, and yet it is freed from a distinctive shape. Fugues are like the intuition of an instant, and through their fleeting and elusive character, it is possible to enter duration. The asynchronization of moments into meanwhiles hampers the subsequent decomposition and recomposition of movement. A “DIS-ASSOCIATION”: THE FUGUE AS LINE According to Bergson, duration is a continuation of the past into the future. The past is simultaneously overwhelming and elusive. It cannot be represented, but it is present as an undetermined tendency that has an unavoidable

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impact on actions. Although it cannot be grasped through representation (or intelligence), the totality of the past is sensed as a tendency to which actions incline. Consequently, the past that can be immediately recalled is not decisive for life. It is the past that is directly tied to actuality and which prolongs the immediate response to the exigencies of life. As we saw in Leica Format, the remembering that eludes being fixed into the actualized images of immediate recollection is convulsive. This convulsive remembering is “like the gigantic face of a surprised rubber man.” In going beyond immediate remembering, one encounters recollections that exceed one’s own personal memory. The encounter surfaces as an involuntary expression (“surprise”) that changes face outside its intimate accountability (“rubber man”). The rubber face expresses surprise because it is forced to accept alien memories as its own. On the level of immediate remembering, the tie between the past and the present is deterministically described in causal terms. However, one recalls the past in a totality that cannot be brought into presence. This totality is forgotten and yet present as the virtual past. The present is the most contracted point of the past. The virtual past is actualized by choosing among its layers and levels. One is not determined by the actual situation because of the freedom to choose a level of the past that will be actualized.74 As Bergson demonstrates, such actualizations may fail because one may not be able to actualize the past. In that case, one dwells in the virtual past and severs its links with actuality. The actualization may be delayed, and the delay may gain its own temporality. The temporality of delay, a detached lag or time-lapse, releases the virtual past from the practical demands of everyday life. In this way, Bergson’s idea of recasting Kant’s notion of freedom into temporal terms is ambiguous; one chooses, but choices are still associated with the present situation. This juncture can be unhitched by infusing the instant with time, that is, by its turning into a meanwhile. This is a task of the nexus of fugue and leica format. Fugues are not actualized into leica format and petrified into immutable chunks of the past. Instead, fugues impregnate photography with time. On the other hand, Bergson defines humans as being capable of performing two opposite functions of piling up recollections and getting rid of them. Humans can reject the remnants of their development.75 The figure of syphilis contests this orientation toward the past. The past is transmitted like a contagious disease through the fortuitous encounters and random impingement between individuals and collectives: Ghosts! . . . But I almost think we are all of us ghosts. . . . It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that “walks” in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts

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all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.76

One enters a fugue through these encounters and encroachments and reaches a past beyond the filiations of both personal and collective memory. By falling into a fugue, the past and present are experienced in their disappearing. In disappearing, the time of things and persons is completed. Everything that lingers in the unfinished or destroyed state is fulfilled in disappearing. In “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” Benjamin argues that historical knowledge is about recognizing the instant in which that knowledge is possible.77 It is the instant in which one simultaneously stands in history (joint) and outside of it (spacing). In the fugue, one is exempted from history to return to it as a coetaneous rupture and junction. This coevality of detachment and attachment can be expressed as hyphenated affixation: dis-joint. Hyphenated affixation forms the joining of heterogeneous temporalities and their de-synchronization. Fugues are defined as having three different and yet interrelated aspects. First, they evoke a memory impairment that does not affect other mental faculties. It is felt like a compulsion to leave “familiar surroundings” and to “create a new life.” Second, there is a difference between the fugue as a musical and artistic form. In the Leica Format the fugues are described as “sketches” and “junk.” Fugues alternate without succumbing to a unifying rule. Third, there is a “joint,” but also “a crack” as a “deliberate gape” as applied to the “building process to obviate the possibility of the construction developing fissures.” The fugue is etymologically connected with the French word fuite, appearing in the famous concept lignes de fuite introduced by Deleuze and Guattari.78 The concept of lines of flight is connected with the central distinction between becoming and memory. To memory as a system of points, they oppose a becoming conceived of as a line of flight, which is detached from the subordination of points. The line of flight does not operate only by establishing “contiguous points” and “distant points.”79 It passes between points and through the middle, evading being fixed into a relation between points. It lacks both beginning and ending, departure and arrival, and it is a meanwhile, a middle, an in-between, constituting therewith “a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation.” They are “the border-proximity,” which does not abide by either connection or composition. In becoming the line is liberated from the point. Although they promote becoming as antimemory, Deleuze and Guattari concede the existence of molecular memory. They, nonetheless, argue that the molecular features of memory are subjugated to the role of reterritorialization. Contrary to this, deterritorialization is not indeterminate because it assembles the molecular levels. They are linked as they go through

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deterritorialization. Fugues link through cracks and gaps, they abut edges and borders, and yet their adjacency forms no filiation. It is an adjacency resisting adherence. The fugue is the dis-joint, as a coetaneous dissociation and association from which sprouts a multipronged compound. The fugue is a seam, an adjacency without adherence, which can be isolated into a detached zone of abutment with an incessant swaying between association and dissociation, joining and disjoining. DISAPPEARING AS A FORM OF THE TEMPORALITY OF THE DIS-JOINTED LINE Benjamin rejects the Enlightenment idea of history as continuous progress in which the present vanquishes the prejudices of the past. To overcome progress is inseparable from surmounting decay.80 Being embedded within a tradition does not safeguard an authentic relationship toward it.81 No generation could bear witness to tradition and provide its authentic testimony. Tradition cannot be conceived as a transmission since it changes values and objects in the process of delivering them to subsequent generations. However, the presence of delivered values and objects is indiscernible from the act of their conveyance. Deliverance, by which one is dis-jointed from tradition, is an adjacency without adherence between preceding and succeeding generations. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin distinguishes between the origin (Ursprung) and the process of arising from it, or genesis (Entstehung).82 He dispenses with the notion of origin defined either in terms of existence or by the process of its coming into being. Instead, becoming (Werden) is opposed to genesis (Entstehung), and origin is related to what is unfolded from the becoming and disappearance. The retroactive teleology of origin is described as an eddy (Strudel). Origins are swirling in the surge of becoming, and the swirling creates a vortex in the flow swelling from it. In origin conceived as the dialectics of eddy and becoming, something swells from the absorbed, swallowed material or from its disappearance. Such an origin is a “confrontation” of idea with history. An origin restores, but what becomes from it is incomplete and fragmentary. History is retrieved through the idea caught in the eddy of becoming. The narration in Leica Format is a retroactive positing of origins as a forgotten story. However, this forgetting is not opposed to remembering. The narrator in Leica Format does not unveil what she forgot, but that she does not remember; she does not reveal content, but being deprived of faculty is endorsed as a new faculty.83 This new faculty could be compared to the dissociative fugue as a state of impaired memory, which deepens memory, pushing it to the limits where it concocts something new.

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The moving forward of narration is coeval to the moving backward of the story. Through the fugue, the narrator interrupts the link between the narration and the story, but that interruption enables her to abut them again. The fugue is a cleave at which before and after incongruously coincide, forming a seam in which they are resolved from each other. Retrospective and prospective movement hinge on this seam. The fugue is a void created by the swirling of both retrospective and prospective movements wavering between the narration and the story. In this void, the narrator and characters are dis-jointed from themselves. The void simultaneously shifts between joint and gap, and this swaying is the origin of their own transformation. Both narrator and characters are engrossed in the ongoing process of becoming others. Therefore, the remembering is not a return to the origin, but its contriving: Lifts are otherwise a rarity in this town in which there are unimaginable quantities of steps and stairways, the town seems to have been dug into a hill. So a person who lives here has the sense that he’s forever climbing somewhere, either onto a higher floor or onto some elevation, which always makes him tired, but he doesn’t get anywhere in particular.84

It is like climbing up to the upper floors of a building or up to some hills, but without arriving at any place. Moreover, one goes up to some higher point to grasp a wider view of some places. In Leica Format, however, it is pointed out that this ascending does not ensure the apprehension of a determined object. In Bergson’s cone of memory, one ascends and descends through the layers and sheets of memory, either accessing the virtual past or associating it to the practical demands of the present situation. However, the fugue in Leica Format severs the past from its actualization so to saturate the present situation with duration. Even though perception is conceived as the most contracted point of memory, it is imbued with duration. The point is dilated into a meanwhile with its own temporality. One does not only need to dodge the exigencies of the present situation by immersing into memory, one freely wanders across layers and sheets of the past, and yet this immersion disconnects memory from action and creation. This freedom depends on suspending action and creation, ceasing thereby to be freedom. In the temporality of meanwhile, as a dilatation which can be steered both backward and forward, freedom is an inalienable part of action and creation. When the narrator talks about climbing in which nothing is revealed, it does not mean that she cannot recall anything. Instead, it refers to interrupting the link between the past and its actualization. Unlike the narration, the story is aimed at forgetting as a heightened, convulsive memory which resolves the already seen from the never before.

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The attempt to capture the past through forgetting gets hold of deformed creatures or of deceptive and transitory reflections that change their outlines as they vanish: Here, there’s a little cult of preparing and consuming pasta, which is, I believe, a reflection of the past. It is a cheerful cult, perhaps one of the few authentic ones, full of aroma and colour. Sickness deprives this town of precisely that, it corrodes its aromas and colours, which is why it now lies grey and motionless, miserably cramped under a cap that exudes the stench of stagnation.85

Recollection only reaches the city in a state of decay, as gray and motionless. The city cannot overcome its disintegration because it straitens access to the past. It is an inert and squeezed past (“constricted,” “miserably cramped”) to which the narrator opposes its more pliable and plastic counterpart. Its plasticity is represented in the figure of pasta (or, in a rubber man): Over the centuries, pasta goes in and out of fashion. Despite various campaigns seeking to erase urban memoires, memory stubbornly resists, sometimes it shoots up like a geyser, sometimes drips in a trickle, slowly, but it always returns, in one form or another, including through a love of pasta.86

The origin returns only by changing its form, as a “geyser (. . .) in one form or another.” Succeeding generations inherit the past from their ancestors as a recondite secret. Tradition is the process of the transmission of unreadability between generations. An actual generation receives tradition in the form of a task that its ancestors were not able to solve. However, the task gains readability only if the succeeding generation gives a form to the problem conveyed from the tradition. It is a form of simultaneous unity and separation of in-between generations. Similarly, the problem is inserted as a fugue that exhibits a space in which the past and the present are relinked. Tradition as a fugue is the disjoint between generations and their temporalities. Generations bear witness to the disappearing that is established by such dis-joining. In this disappearing, tradition is not transmitted as a solution; instead, it is a problem that becomes the form of the temporality of that actual generation. To receive this tradition is to pose a problem to both the past and the present, by making them twitch backward and forward. The central fugue in Leica Format is that of Doctor Ludwig Jakob Fritz: It is very likely that the case referred to by Professor Kogoj, the case of a physically fairly decrepit old doctor of more than seventy years of age, with latent syphilis, which manifested itself fifty years later, referred to Ludwig Jakob

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Fritz. In 1911 Ludwig Jakob Fritz was thirty-five, which means he was born in 1876. In 1949, when Academician Kogoj publishes the pamphlet in which he describes the disease of the unnamed doctor, Ludwig Jakob Fritz is seventythree, so older than seventy. If his syphilis had crouched in him for fifty whole years, he would have contracted it in 1899, at the age of twenty-three, which he means that he didn’t get it then, during his visit to this town, which means that it wasn’t Clara the flower-seller who infected him, which need not meant that spirochaetes were not circulating in her bloodstream as well, only that spirochaetes hadn’t gone beserk, while those of Ludwig Jakob Fritz had. Then I think, maybe Clara the flower-seller, the one who roamed drunk in 1992 through the abandoned rooms of the former Hotel Hungaria, on the floor below mine, maybe she is that centenarian with the positive B.W.R referred to by Dr Kogoj, but then I realise that is impossible, the dates don’t fit.87

The narrator is aware that the years do not match. However, history cannot be measured by dates: Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Yet, once again it has turned out that the threads of which human life consist are never completely broken, those threads intertwine, are entangled, and finally merge into some kind of protoplasmic matter invisible to the naked eye, into a matter which moves, which sways, into an amoebic protozoa that slithers around us wriggles, changes shape, overflows, until it surrounds us and sucks us in.88

While for Bergson, the past is a tendency, in Leica Format that tendency is experienced as ongoing variation, as moving and swaying matter. Such variation is formless, appearing as a protoplasmic substance. The fugue is a switch-point between the memory and the becoming. A CRITICAL GAP: A REVOLUTION IN THE SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOP For Bergson, the instant is a deceptive means of knowledge which provides the immobile outline of movement and arrests the spirit. Benjamin, on the contrary, defines the instant as an explosive constellation of what-has-been and Now of its recognizability. Knowledge about the past becomes possible in an instant that is yet to be grasped. It is an instant in which it is shown that one image belongs to a certain period of time in which it gets its readability.89 Benjamin does not distinguish between the two intervals; rather, the belonging of an image to a certain interval and its readability are two aspects of the same time. The instant cannot be separated from continuity; it is not

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a segment of time in which one image obtains its readability; it is rather that the instant and readability are indiscernible. That simultaneity of the situatedness of the image and the indiscernibility of intervals is the dialectical image. However, Benjamin looks for a way to avoid synchronization of the indistinguishable intervals. In that regard, he introduces the notion of dialectics at a standstill as a discontinuity between what-has-been and the Now. This discontinuity becomes intelligible in the flash of the constellation between what-has-been and the Now.90 The dialectical image “emerges suddenly (. . .) flashing up in the now of its recognizability.”91 The flash juxtaposes the constellation of the whathas-been and the Now, whereby the “truth is charged to the bursting point with time.”92 According to Benjamin, the past and the present do not illuminate each other. Such an illuminating relationship arises from the continuity of the past and the present. On the contrary, the dialectical image brings into a constellation what-has-been and the Now. However, it is hard to reconcile the flash, explosion, and burst with readability, recognizability, figurality, and the graphicness of the image. The image arises from the dissolution of forms, and then it gives form to the dissolution; the image is imposed as a form of dissolution of every other form. The dialectical image is expelled from continuity, and yet itself becomes continuous as being readable, figural, and graphic.93 It emerges suddenly as a flash in which what-has-been and the Now are indiscernible and create an image as the compound of heterogeneous and yet inseparable parts. In the flash of the dialectical image, what-has-been appears as double-sided since it is, on the one hand, what has to be retained and, on the other hand, what can be irrevocably lost in the Now of its recognizability.94 However, the irrevocably lost becomes a form of readability, a figure of the past. Therefore, the loss itself is stripped of its irrevocability, its very property of being lost—that is, disappeared—is appropriated and brought into presence. Explosion and flash expunge the continuity but only to retrieve it in the transformation of a lack. Through this transformation, the lack takes the form of getting hold of an object. Such objects are captured when they are recognized as lost. We have previously analyzed the transformation of the web into the cloak and the double mechanism of tearing apart and holding together. Hence, the critical study of (post)-Yugoslav time withdraws from a turning caesura, as a standstill in thinking, as formlessness that is elevated to another form of thinking, as a discontinuity that reestablishes continuity. However, defined in this way, the caesura is not the dis-joint, adjacency without adherence, dilatation expanding toward the past and the future. Giorgio Agamben95 explains Benjamin’s notion of time as the two-tiered structure consisting of kairos and chronos. Time as chronos is related to the

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linear succession of instants. While in time conceived as chronos instants are linked as passages to each other, time conceived as kairos is related to the very transitory and fugitive character of instants. Transitoriness and fugitivity are the meanwhile that stops chronological time, recharges it with possibilities, and fulfills it. Kairological time is detached from its chronological counterpart. According to Agamben, kairological time is contracted in order to complete itself. It is the time that remains between time and its coming to an end.96 It is the time that the time needs to complete itself. In kairological time, its chronological opposite is contracted and begins to flow to its end, instead of to eternity. In that sense, kairological time is the time that remains to finish chronological time. However, this time of fulfilling is not yet the time of disappearing. We need no centripetal time that draws together; instead, we need the centrifugal time of the line in which everything disappears. Leica Format ends time; it deanimates the undeadness of fossils-characters in the antique shop. There is a hope for the objects discarded by preceding generations. By collecting these repudiated objects, succeeding generations divide the past and the present into the what-has-been and the Now by bringing them into a constellation. In that cut, the past and the present are evacuated from the linearity of chronological time and drawn into simultaneity. However, this simultaneity is synchronized through readability and recognizability, which is enacted through a constellation. In the second-hand book shop, the secret exposes itself, without having anything to conceal: So, that damp and windy night, we entered into a secret that may have been spent but maybe not. It was as though that secret if it was a secret, had grown tired of hiding, so after a hundred years of waiting between the covers of discarded books, among old bills and out-of-date documents, where it was never able to rest, never able to settle, never able to die, as though that secret had all of a sudden decided to emerge and finally say—it’s time I left.97

As a part of kairological temporality, the time of departure promises redemption. A secret no longer hides and does not have any hidden content. It is a dilatation posed in and between timelines, preventing their synchronization. These times are dis-jointed, that is, relinked because of their separation. It is not enough for a caesura only to divide in-between. Instead, that division must be reinscribed, reinserted in(to) the caesura itself. The caesura is internally divided by its external cut, and the latter is enabled by the caesura’s cutting out its interiority.98 In Leica Format, the focus is shifted from a memory that is converted into representation to a memory that remains uncertain and yet has a determinate tendency: “These are meteors of memory, they are seeking stars, they are stories heavier than every measurable burden.”99 Memory, as a tendency, is

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part of the interiority of characters, and it is the most foreign region of their subjectivity. For them, what is the most alien pertains to their deepest intimacy. It is not simply that memories do not belong to the characters; instead, they do not belong to their own memories. They are dispossessed by their own memories or memoranda. Fugues appear to be out of the conscious control of individuality. Characters are confronted with a past that is beyond their personal memories. In other words, the fugue is a remembering which does not remember or a forgotten memory. Remembering is not a form of identification; instead, it disrupts identity. Later, my mother said: Since I could not be a singer, I became a psychiatrist, which I know has nothing to do with her stay in the Ustasha prison, but it just came to my mind. After my conversation with Dr Kogoj, I dreamed that people in white coats separated the top part of my skull with a saw and that I lifted that part of my skull as though it were a cap and watched my brain throb. Then I asked those people to give me a mirror, and when I placed the mirror in front of me, I saw. . . there was nothing there, no reflection whatever, just a silvery sheen casting back my non-existence. Then I thought, all toys should be moved far away, over the ocean. Perhaps that is how little fugues are born, who knows.100

That forgotten and yet to be remembered “who knows” is constitutive for any fugue, as a kairological meanwhile that completes time. The subject is trying to recapture its reflection in the past, to regain a continuity between the past and the present moment. However, the past is outside memory, reflecting nothing—“just a silvery sheen casting back my non-existence.” Inasmuch it opens itself to the past, the memory emerges from coincidences and chance encounters, which cannot be reduced to causal events. The perception of similarity is connected to a shift from recollection to the past. However, the object of that similarity is the fugue as dis-joint, a meanwhile of a dilated present from which fortuitous new arises. The form of perception linked to aura is in crisis, and a new form of perception is developed from the optical unconscious. Within it survives the archaic mimetic faculty (mimetisches Vermögen) for which Benjamin argues that it vanished from various parts of human life, only to pass into others. It could not be unambiguously stated whether the mimetic faculty and the perception of similarity vanish or undergo a transformation. In Leica Format this is questioned through a possible connection between fairy tales and memory. Inasmuch as disappearing is a line that unravels itself between transitivity and development, fugues are outside the opposition between truth and fiction. Fugues and disappearing share some structural similarities with fairy tales:

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In fairy tales, murdered beings come to life, one way or another, while some forever disappear, they leave, but the story still goes on. The fairy tale gets by without those eliminated (dead, murdered) heroes, because that is how it was conceived, to contain disturbances, here and there. This is like a fairy tale, all this, our lives today.101

The characters in Leica Format dream “of [their] forebears, immersed in a fugue from which [they] will never surface.”102 The characters in Leica Format are not the remains of completed time, like traces from the past found in the present. They resurface as the unlade instead of animated “fossils.”103 On the contrary, uncomplete time assumes the form of fossils, of “an immense shudder that incites nausea.”104 Fugues lead to the time of disappearing in which the time of living fossils would be completed. Characters wait for their time to be completed. The incompleteness of time emerges from the unfulfilled possibilities of the past resurging as haphazard junctures. Fugues open the kairological time when fossils will be finally deanimated from their undeadness, when they will be relegated to disappearing.105 The characters are similar to the narrator’s father, who “like a galley slave, like a giant chained to his life, waits for death,”106 waiting for their time to be completed. The characters are unfinished because of the unfulfilled possibilities of the past glimpsing in sudden flashes of correspondences and similarities: Sometimes curious coincidences occur, those coincidences have nothing to do with this town, they are general coincidences, existential coincidences, overlappings, crisscrossings, chance happenings never fully resolved, little cosmic earthquakes, that is, neglected time, melted time, resembling literary fabrications, elusive.107

The narrator describes this uncompleted time as unfulfilled and melted, and she compares it with the literary imagination. She distinguishes the particular correspondences belonging to the historical object or the individual from general correspondences as chance encounters. General correspondences are like “cosmic earthquakes,” pertaining to a different temporality. This temporality refers to kairological time that is simultaneously stretched and contracted. It is stretched along a line that draws together the multiplicity of the heterogeneous layers of the past, and it is contracted in a contingent juxtaposition in which layers lose their discernibility as they create something new. One such living fossil is the old woman Clara. She enables the forgotten leftovers of the history of the city to be assembled without converging to any kind of unity. Their dis-joint surges through the past for which the narrator can neither approve as part of her own past nor rejected it as something alien to it. It is a heterogeneous juxtaposition—memoranda—which is neither fully

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resolved, nor does it solve anything. This dis-joint is a withdrawal from making formlessness into another form. The fugue is the appearance of what is forgotten and shows itself as the deformed old woman Clara. She brings into communication pre-Yugoslav, Yugoslav, and post-Yugoslav temporalities and extracts a time, a meanwhile, as an in-between time that disrupts succession. However, this extracted time passes through these temporalities, thereby creating what they lack. The meanwhile is a non-time expelled from the sequential temporalities, which endows them with a form lacking any recognizable shape or contour. The narrator redeems the past in the antique shop: “There are nice places here, only they’re hidden. Like that second-hand shop in a building known as the ‘little skyscraper.’”108 In the Arcades Project, Benjamin does not only study Paris as a modern metropolis of the nineteenth century, assigning it to the status of the paradigm of capitalistic cities. Instead, the capitalist history of Paris is considered from the angle of ruins of forgotten memory in whose discontinuity the past and the present are brought into contact.109 Benjamin distinguishes two directions of this historical work in the Arcades Project. The first starts from the past, and it develops into the present to show arcades and capitalist culture. The second, on the contrary, is moving from the present into the past to charge the present with the revolutionary energy of the past.110 In Leica Format, both directions are operative. The city is moving from the past to the present when it is viewed from the perspective of reading shreds of the city. In the second-hand book shop, nevertheless, the focus is turned from the present to the past. What is forgotten is revealed, and it can be grasped as passing between the past and the present: In this second-hand bookshop, two young men, nested in the past, wait for someone to drop in. When one looks out from inside this second-hand bookshop crammed with all kinds of colourfulness and made up of passages, secret spaces and wooden staircases, so that it is possible to roam through it as through a labyrinth, when one looks out at the street, the street gives the impression of being empty, as though darkness were gathering outside, ever denser and blacker. (. . .) The shop seems to have detached itself from the town, and now it circles above it, not knowing whether it should land or forever move away.111

A few relations in the quoted section can be pinpointed. These relations can be arranged as a set of oppositions, and the fugue is what passes between their terms without attaching to any of them. The first relationship is between two young men and someone who could come across them. The second relationship is the borderline between the second-hand bookshop and the street. The third relationship is between the second-hand bookshop and the town. While two young men are “nested into the past,” a passerby or customers “drop in.”

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Dropping in is contact between the past and the present. By dropping in, it is possible to detach something young from the past. In the second relationship, the second-hand bookshop stands for the past, while the street stands for the present. While the gaze hinges on the threshold between the past and the present, the bookshop and the street, the labyrinth and emptiness slide into each other. From the position of the labyrinth of the past, it is possible to clear up, to tidy up the mess and disorder of the present. On the other hand, that reordering of the present obtains the guiding thread through the labyrinth of the past. There is nothing illuminating and enlightening in the relationship between the bookshop and the street. The present adopts the character of the labyrinth, thereby casting a shadow on the past and obscuring its light spots. The third relationship features two approaches to history. Moreover, it also depicts how the past encircles the present, how they are simultaneously brought closer and moved away from each other. Through this detachment, the past and the present are both united and separated in the creation of the meanwhile from which upsurges the temporality of non-belonging. In the second-hand bookshop, the narrator found three books, R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Inserted between pages 76 and 77 of Poe’s book, the narrator finds an advertisement with the picture of young Clara. It is Clara from Hotel Hungaria who passed away in the year 1992. These books were Fritz’s possession. Years later, an “old lady”112 brought his books in the antique shop. That old woman has the surname Kogoj, and she is the sister of Doctor Verena Kogoj. Verena Kogoj studied with the narrator’s mother. Doctor Kogoj lived a kind of reclusive life; she “had taken herself off to the margins.”113 Verena Kogoj’s father was Doctor Franjo Kogoj, who worked at the Clinic for Skin and Veneral Disease in Zagreb starting in 1923. He was a specialist for keratodermas, and he highlighted “critical moments in the treatment of syphilis.”114 These keratodermas are skin diseases for which “all kinds of horrors break out on the palms and soles of feet,”115 and when the skin becomes covered with “little callouses and nodules, hollows and ruts, as though tiny and invisible animals of some kind are burrowing there and leaving their excrement in the grooves.”116 In the Leica Format, keratodermas and syphilis are developed as models for conceiving of history as the infection by a contagious disease. Linking a fugue with the non-filiate heredity of syphilis bears some striking similarities to the notion of the line of flight developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The line of flight as becoming passes between points and makes them indiscernible. Keratodermas are hereditary; they “spread through families.” However, they are spread through propagation and infection, outside filiation and lineage.117

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The infected person could have a father without keratodermas and yet be affected by inheriting the illness from sick grandparents. It affects the patient in their early years. After that, the disease is transmitted and propagated to the patient’s descendants. However, it is a hereditary trait for which it is impossible to establish an ancestor. The narrator differentiates between keratoderma and syphilis, the latter being much worse, since it is born from small pale treponemas, from minute spiral-shaped bacteria, from spirochaetes that penetrate secretly at first and later loudly announce their final invasion here, there, all over the body (. . .) A little spiral animal, dumb, unarticulated, with no brain, with no consciousness, but endowed with the strength to produce horrors, to create suppurating wounds (. . .) when it is seized with irrepressible madness, it runs wild, goes crazy (. . .) Syphilis is a terrible disease, a hidden disease, a real internal enemy that just lurks and prowls, then springs at a person, out of the blue.118

In Leica Format, syphilis is not only considered a sexual disease; rather, it is the abstract diagram of a becoming which is opposed to memory. The past, conceived as syphilis, is presented as an immense pile-up of layers of forgotten recollection, buried in the past. Whatever is slipped or distorted by remembrance will resurface through forgetting. Memory springs out from a body that is not fully controlled by consciousness. Like syphilis, memory appears suddenly and inadvertently. The patient infected with syphilis cannot determine the origin of its propagation. It is not only the patients’ medical anamnesis; rather, they are included in the history of the diseased population as an immense whole. Instead of being restricted to the filiative (re) productions of the same, fugues are “transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.”119 Just like a syphilitic patient, one who evokes the past is a part of a history that is not one’s own. Both the syphilitic patient and the fugant are forced to remember outside the boundaries of the affiliative memories. They enter the region of becoming. They no longer connect and compose but draw a line between heterogenous points. Syphilis understood as a diagram of becoming, is only the “great imitator”120 because “the later symptoms may be similar to those of many other diseases.” However, syphilis does not create by imitation since it undermines sexual reproduction as a mechanism for the regulation of society. Syphilis is “a terrible disease,” but only to the extent that it has a healing effect of liberating people from the ancestry and chains of descendants. Leica Format is in a restless search for correspondences and similarities to which it denies authenticity by calling them “half-literary fictions” or “half-fictions which became reality.” The actuality is overshadowed by its contingency; no event is cut off from its possibility of being otherwise. In that sense, the past is woven from the coincidences from which it emerges.

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The past is appropriated by recovering those possibilities and coincidences. In Leica Format, the antiquary shop is a site of this appropriation. The objects in the antiquary shop are neither rejected by being hollowed out from any use-value, nor do they contain exchange value. The antique object embodies irradiating affects and sensations outside of the object’s primary purpose. It becomes a contagious thing that can infect different individuals and groups, thereby creating alliances outside predictable filiations. Syphilis as a diagram has a twofold structure. It is a repetition in which the event or the object preserves the potentiality of junctures, unrealized possibilities, and unpredictable coincidences. The past is haunted by its possibility to be different and to unwind as a heterogeneous variety of paths that inflect upon each other. Therefore, the figure of syphilis in Leica Format should not be limited to a regressive and conservative compulsion to return to the previous stage. What “lurks and prowls, then springs at a person, out of the blue” in both syphilis as past and past as syphilis is unforeseeable, a germ of the meanwhile: For forty years, the name of Ludwig and the connection of that name with syphilis were outside my reality. I believed that the name was buried along with the destiny of the man to whom it belonged. That all traces of this uninteresting destiny had been swept away by time, that the ghosts of the dead visit the living in literature, in literary fabrications, and that reality is made up of paths which branch off indefinitely, without the slightest prospect of their even connecting and intertwining anywhere, at any time. The time devours itself until it disperses into microscopic particles out of which a new time, no less sick, but more bearable—our time, the present—is born. That is possible to grasp the course of that time, place it in its channel and tell it how and where it should flow so as not to disintegrate again. And now, the name of Ludwig Jakob Fritz, imprinted nearly a hundred years ago in the musty book lying in my lap, has risen like some kind of ghost out of its grave where no gravestone was placed, a grave that has been waiting, open, for who knows how long, and of which it is not known when (or whether) someone will deign to close up some its dark innards, lower the cover and turn their back on the pit of the past, leaving it up to the modest and monstrous dead in that tomb to devour one another or to dance their own life, as they please, and leave the rest of us in the peace.121

In the antiquarian shop, there is a photo of Antonia Segala, who is Aura Segala’s great-granddaughter. Notes on the services offered in the bordello are written on the back of the photograph: Take condoms! Madame wants to open franchises on the coast! Used “thumb”— need not sprain it. Spacious premises, the waiting rooms have entertainments, music. Simple dress. Polite porter. Fine salon. Significant place. The Saxonia sails on 28th. L.J.F.122

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The photo is signed with the initials of L. J. F., indicating Ludwig Jakob Fritz as a possible author of the note. The sentence “The significant place” does not fully render the sentence in the Croatian edition of the novel: Jedna slika ima kritičnu škulju, mjesto značajno.123 The sentence could be translated: “One picture has a critical hole, a significant spot.” It refers to the peephole from where it is possible to gaze at the lovers in the boudoir. The sentence also functions as a metafictional instruction on reading the whole novel. One establishes a “hole” as a “significant spot” through which it is possible to enter the fugue out of which the leica format is wrestled. The hole, though, shows nothing, like “a silvery sheen” that “casts back [one’s] non-existence.” Moreover, it makes gapes in the line of inheritance like proliferation without ancestry. In Doctor Kogoj’s book Therapy of Syphilis, there is a description of a patient with manifest syphilis. The narrator recounts her summers at nona Ana’s house, the sister of her grandmother Claudia. They had a half-brother who was dying from syphilis, hidden in the house. He was slowly dying in a locked room and waiting for a “bundle of memories”124 to unroll. There is a possible coincidence that a patient from Doctor Kogoj’s book, the halfbrother and Doctor Ludiwg Jakob Fritz, is the same person: “We knew that Luigi, Claudia and Ana’s half-brother, lived in that room, that’s what they told us. Uncle Luigi is ill, we mustn’t disturb him, that’s what they said.”125 When the narrator arrived at nona Ana’s, her mother told her that Ludwig had died. When she asked who Ludwig was, her mother replied that it was barba Luigi, nona Ana’s, and nona Claudia’s half-brother. Luigi-Ludwig, the half-grandfather from her childhood, and Ludwig Jakob Fritz could be the same person. However, the narrator says that these coincidences remain irresolvable. They stand halfway between truth and fiction. In this insolvable connection, there lies a contemporaneity that both draws together and holds apart. It is a syphilitic becoming in which everything is inextricably linked without, though, assuming an assignable identity. It is how the spatiality of the middle is coordinated with the temporality of the meanwhile. It is possible to find coincidences, but they cannot be synchronized to congealed facts. It is only from this asynchrony and arrhythmia that the “post-” could arise. NOTES 1. On the homonymic and eponymous interplay of the title of novel and the medium of photography, see footnote below. 2. See the English translation, Daša Drndić, Leica Format, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (London: MacLehose Press, 2015) and the Croatian edition, Daša Drndić, Leica Format: Fuge (Zagreb: Meandar, 2003).

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3. Strahimir Primorac. “Eradication – The Cancer of Our Times (Daša Drndić, The Leica Format),” Most: časopis za međunarodne književne veze/The Bridge: Croatian Journal of International Literary Relations 1, no. 2 (2004): 12–13, p. 12. 4. Primorac, “Eradication – The Cancer of Our Times,” p. 12. 5. Primorac, op. cit., p. 13. 6. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 173. 7. See Andrea Zlatar, Tekst, tijelo, trauma: Ogledi o suvremenoj ženskoj književnosti (Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2004). 8. Zlatar, Tekst, tijelo, trauma, p. 154. 9. Primorac, Eradication – The Cancer of Our Times, p. 13. 10. Zlatar, Tekst, tijelo, trauma, p. 160. 11. Jasmina Lukić, “Imaginarne geografije egzila: Berlin i Rijeka kao fikcionalni toponimi u prozi Dubravke Ugrešić i Daše Drndić,” in Čovjek, prostor, vrijeme: Književnoantropološke studije iz hrvatske književnosti, eds. Živa Benčić and Dunja Fališevac (Zagreb: Disput, 2006), pp. 461–477. 12. Lukić, “Imaginarne geografije egzila,” p. 469. 13. Lukić, op. cit., p. 471. 14. Lukić, op. cit., p. 471. 15. Lukić, op. cit., pp. 471–472. 16. Lukić, op. cit., p. 473. 17. Lukić, op. cit., pp. 469–470. 18. Michael Rothberg introduces the second version of disappearance: “(. . .) the disappearance of the possibility of total disappearance” (see Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 69, see also pp. 85–87. 19. Drndić, Leica Format, pp. 50–51. 20. In the Croatian edition, the title of the novel is printed in bold letters on the inside flap, while the subtitle “fugue” is printed in a normal font but with its size progressively minimizing. The word fugue is repeated nine times and the decreasing tokens of the word are diagonally ordered as they descend in a cascade to the vanishing point (punto di fuga) of the page, dissimilating therewith an appearance of vanishing. For the graphic aspect of the novel, see Željka Vukajlović, “Delikatesa (Daša Drndić, Leica Format: fuge),” pp. 273–275, Književna republika: časopis za književnost 3/4, 2 (2004): 274. However, it must be noted that the English translation of Leica Format simplifies the graphic solution of the Croatian edition. On the inside flap of the English edition of Leica Format, the word “fugues” (the English plural form for the Croatian word “fuge”) appears eight times without the title of the novel. In this way, there is an unavoidably lost dichotomy of leica format and the fuges. In the Croatian edition, the word “fuge” (eng. fugues) is repeated nine times, although Vukajlović (“Delikatesa,” p. 274) mentions ten times. 21. Leica format refers to the first standardized format of photography. It is considered as a format with a fixed focal length of 35 mm, which is the diagonal length of the objective. Leica format was taken as corresponding to the image of reality viewed by the naked human eye.

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22. See Vukajlović, “Delikatesa,” p. 275. 23. In Creative Evolution, Bergson explicitly speaks about the cinematographic mechanism of thought. However, he uses visual metaphors in his earlier works to explain how the definition of philosophical concepts depends on the opposition between the instant and duration. Classical theoreticians of cinema, such as Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, and others in the first decades of the twentieth-century averts from Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic mechanism of thought. For a historical account of film theory, see Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For the interpretation of the dichotomy of photographic layer of leica format and cinematographic layer of fugues, which is given eponymously in the title of novel Leica Format: fugues, we will follow Deleuze’s reading of Bergson given in G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-lmage, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 24. The thread can be termed a transversal line after the concept introduced by Ian Buchanan in the recent reading of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of the body without organs (see Ian Buchanan, “The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body without Organs,” pp. 25–43, in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature, eds. Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 41). The transversal line “brings together disparate elements without actually joining them” (Buchanan, p. 41). Buchanan uses the example of a love that joins various accidents, happenings, properties, persons, gestures, sensations, and so on, while “leaving them separate too” (Ibid.). That unifying event of love does not retrieve either a lost or prospective unity. It “pulls together disparate elements,” “giving them consistency” (Ibid.) but it also maintains their disparateness. 25. The whole is neither divisible nor indivisible; rather, it is dividual (See Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 14). 26. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” pp. 101–134, trans. E. Jephcott, H. Eiland and others, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 27. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” pp. 118–119. 28. Benjamin, pp. 103–104. 29. According to Cadava: “It is not so much that we are unable to grasp the truth of the past, but rather that the true picture of the past is the one that is always in a state of passing away” (See Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 84). 30. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 373. 31. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 4–5. 32. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 68. 33. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 34. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 158. 35. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 297. 36. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 139–140.

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37. During the elaboration of the shift from the recollection-image to the pure past, Deleuze (Cinema 2: The Time-lmage, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 52) counterpoints memory as the function of the future. That latter form of memory shifts from reporting the story as what happened to evoking the story as what will happen. It is memory that constitutes itself simultaneously with the moment when the past was still present. One forms a memory from the perspective of the future in which the present will become the past. However, as we see in Leica Format, one cannot attain the past by keeping with the level of recollection-images. Instead, one needs to slide from recollection to fugues, to an amnesia that paves the way to remembering. The character-fugant dissolves itself in order to reach the world. When one cannot remember, one does not seek how to restore the lost extension between images and movement. Instead, one appeals to memory impairments or failed recognition enabling the escape from the actualization of recollection and from the swift passage from optical and sound images to recollection-images. By shunning actualization, one becomes capable of changing the level of memory. One’s inability to prolong optical and sound images into their own movements is compensated by their extension into the “movement of the world” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 59). 38. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 47. 39. “The debris of industrial culture teaches us not the necessity of submitting to historical catastrophe, but the fragility of the social order that tells us this catastrophe is necessary. The crumbling of the monuments that were built to signify the immortality of civilization becomes proof, rather, of its transiency. And the fleetingness of temporal power does not cause sadness; it informs political practice” (Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 170). 40. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 42. 41. Drndić, op. cit., p. 42. 42. Drndić, p. 58. 43. Drndić, p. 49. 44. Drndić, p. 89. 45. Drndić, p. 19. 46. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” p. 117. 47. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” 161–215, trans. James Strachey, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vols. XIV (London: Hogarth Press, 1953). 48. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” p. 117. 49. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” pp. 161–200, trans. E. Jephcott and H. Eiland, in Walter Benjamin, Selected writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940 I, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 50. Benjamin, “Central Park,” pp. 183–184. 51. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 219. 52. Samuel Weber, “Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” pp. 27–49, in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David Ferris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 36. 53. Weber, “Mass Mediauras,” p. 45.

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54. Eric Santner defines creaturely life as that which is neither animal nor human (See Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)). Santner develops his notion following thinkers such as G. Agamben, W. Benjamin, S. Freud, M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig. The creature transfers an ambivalent mechanism that simultaneously excludes and includes the animal and human in the limit between life and death, since the creature possesses “a peculiar sort of vitality and yet belongs to no form of life” (Santner, On the Psychotheology, p. 36). Santner terms that freeing of the creature from undeadness the “deanimation of the undeadness” and opposes it to the theological notion of resurrection and rising from the dead (Santner, On Creaturely Life, pp. 125–129). For further elaboration and critique, see Dominick LaCapra, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 55. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 136. 56. Drndić, op. cit., pp. 134–135. 57. Drndić, op. cit., p. 118. 58. Drndić, op. cit., pp. 212–213. 59. Drndić, op. cit., p. 32. 60. Drndić, p. 219. 61. Drndić, op. cit., pp. 29–30. 62. Drndić, op. cit., p. 142. 63. Drndić, op. cit., p. 190. 64. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 6. 65. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 328. 66. Cadava (Words of Light, pp. 90–92) considers Bergson’s use of the analogies of photography and film in his main works Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. One tries to grasp a reality that vanishes, disappears, and transforms itself. Bergson compares this capturing of evanescent reality with the camera’s fixing of images. Cadava remarks that Bergson, at the same time, uses and criticizes photography and film as visual analogies for explaining memory and perception. One does not attain the past in and through photography, but with it, one can switch from the notion of presence to absence in the definition of perception. Perception is not oriented to the moment’s being there, but to its transitory character. 67. Bergson, op. cit., p. 328. 68. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 13, emphasis in the italics added. 69. Leo Charney, “In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity,” pp. 279–297, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 289. 70. François Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey: La passion de la trace (Paris: Hazan, 1987). 71. As Dagognet puts it: “The universe knows only surges and drops, fragments that we reassemble and that we thereby diminish. We ourselves fabricate a smoothedout, rounded spectacle. Mareyism must shatter this lie, which philosophy (Bergson) reinforced,” (Dagognet, La passion de la trace, p. 13).

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72. It is a remark, I do not commit myself to either of the theoretical positions. 73. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 27. 74. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 83, where freedom is defined as choosing among the levels of the past that resist coming into presence. 75. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 290. 76. Drndić, Leica Format, pp. 179–180. 77. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” pp. 401–412, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 403. 78. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 79. On the distinction between the line and the point, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 293–297. 80. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 460. 81. As Howard Caygill elaborates, for Benjamin, tradition is not an uninterrupted passing over of the past to the present (See “Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition,” pp. 1–31, in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000)). Caygill emphasizes that the notion of tradition has its roots in Roman law, where it not only means deliverance, conveyance, and surrendering but also betrayal. This aspect of tradition as betrayal is foregrounded when Tertullian in the Second Century CE transfers the notion of tradition from the sphere of law to the sphere of Christian religion. After that, theologians called the betrayal of Jesus traditio. It also denoted relinquishing the sacred texts to unbelievers who persecuted early Christians. As Caygill argues, Benjamin and Heidegger emphasized and generalized that betraying aspect of tradition; it is not an uninterrupted bestowal of past generations to their descendants: “As Heidegger and Benjamin pointed out in 1916, tradition is paradoxical, even destructive phenomenon, characterized by a delivery which both exceeds and is contained by what is delivered” (Caygill, The Destruction of Tradition, p. 13). 82. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 45–46. 83. We will examine a similar pushing the faculty of writing to its extreme in the discussion on Albahari’s novel Mamac (Bait). 84. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 137. 85. Drndić, p. 219. 86. Drndić, op. cit., pp. 220–221. 87. Drndić, op. cit., pp. 210–211. 88. Drndić, op. cit., pp. 210–211. 89. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 463. 90. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 470. 91. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 473. 92. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 463.

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93. Consider, for example, how Benjamin (The Arcades Project, pp. 463–463) correlates readability to the movements in the interiority of images and way he defines the relation between the present and images as synchronic determinations. 94. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 473. 95. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 96. Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 67. 97. Drndić, Leica Format, pp. 197–198. 98. That cut in-between of caesura appears in a few places of the convolute N of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. In N2, 6, he argues for assembling “large-scale on constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 461) and to reveal “the crystal of the total event” in “the small individual moment” (op. cit., Ibid.). He goes much further when he leaves the language of montage in N 7a, 1. There is dis-joining power of a “present instant” that is able to divide into fore- and after-history, because it is divided in itself “like a line which, divided according to the Apollonian section, experiences its partition from outside itself” (op. cit., p. 470). 99. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 179. 100. Drndić, Leica Format, pp. 191–192. 101. Drndić, op. cit., p. 14. 102. Drndić, op. cit., p. 49. 103. Drndić, op. cit., p. 19. 104. Drndić, op. cit., p. 19. 105. Rothberg develops the notion of a “lifeless survival” (see Traumatic Realism, p. 86). 106. Drndić, op. cit., p. 42. 107. Drndić, op. cit., p. 35. 108. Drndić, op. cit., p. 181. 109. Benajmin (The Arcades Project, p. 470) rejects reconstruction as a historical method and replace it with destruction. 110. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 862. 111. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 181. 112. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 182. 113. Drndić, op. cit., p. 183. 114. Drndić, op. cit., p. 194. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 117. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 241–242. 118. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 195. 119. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 239. 120. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 200. 121. Drndić, op. cit., p. 182. 122. Drndić, op. cit., p. 197. 123. Daša Drndić, Leica format: fuge (Zagreb: Menadar, 2003), p. 229. 124. Daša Drndić, Leica Format, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (London: MacLehose Press, 2015), p. 208. 125. Drndić, Leica Format, p. 206.

Chapter 4

The Mono-chronological “Post” The Synchronization of the Meanwhiles of Nations in Antun Barac’s and Pavle Popović’s Histories of Yugoslav Literature and Relation to the Concept of (Post)-Yugoslav Literature

(POST)-YUGOSLAV AS A CONCEPT In this chapter, we will approach the (post)-Yugoslav temporality via discussion of two histories of Yugoslav literatures written by Pavle Popović and Antun Barac, two prominent historians of the literatures of the South Slavs.1 As I will demonstrate, Danilo Kiš develops a notion of Yugoslav literature that is antithetical to Popović’s and Barac’s. I propose and try to defend the thesis that both accounts of the history of Yugoslav literatures synchronize the temporalities of different national literatures, reducing thereby not only the differences between them but differences within particular literatures as well. Both histories substantialize Yugoslav literature as a remnant of a lost community. They argue that the immediacy of this community has dissolved into a variety of nations that led separate lives under the rule of various empires. In the name of this mythical past, heterogeneous temporalities are synchronized and succumbed to a single temporal flow. However, a similar substantializing operation, along with synchronization, is present in the more recent concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature. We will review how Kiš attempted to avoid such a synchronization. As we have seen thus far, the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature consists of three components: the prefix “post,” the adjective “Yugoslav,” and the noun “literature.” Each of the components can be defined independently and enter the concept as separate entities with their own definitions. It is not simply that one appeals to an already given notion that remains untouched 91

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by the operation of thinking. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, the components of concepts are neither constants nor variables; rather, they are variations that create adjacent zones of indistinction between components.2 This zone is itself separable while it hinders distinguishing between its components. This means that concepts are syneidetic and heterogenetic. According to the first feature, concepts form zones of traversals across components in which they become indistinguishable. Following the second feature, concepts array these zones of indiscernibility. Components do not relate to each other either by contact or by connection. Therefore, one needs to understand the relationship between the hyphen and prefix of “post” and the word “Yugoslav.” The hyphen designates zones of traversals that are unleashed from both beginning and ending. There is no time before and after Yugoslavia. Instead, it is the pure in-between of engaging in an alliance without any filiation whatsoever. Therefore, for the purposes of my theoretical elaboration, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the zone of indistinction, and its concomitant notions, are not sufficient to explain adjacency without adherence. To these three components, we add punctuation marks—the hyphen and parentheses. The prefix “post” is a kind of umbrella term or a trademark of contemporary theory. It appears in important concepts such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminist, posthumanism, postcontinental, and postmemory. It is usually used without a hyphen by being added directly to the word. The components retain their sameness only by becoming different in the process of making the concept of post-Yugoslav literature. Their past is reconfigured as they create something new that releases the possible as the delimiting domain of the concept. The adjective Yugoslav is, expectedly, far from simple. Its history is politically charged; its traumatic past raises various and conflicting attitudes and emotions. The noun Yugoslavia and the adjective Yugoslav are derived from the cluster of concepts related to the idea of assembling the South Slav nations.3 According to various authors considered so far,4 the prefix “post” indicates that a time after Yugoslavia has not yet been attained and that the past still affects the future of the former Yugoslav republics. Although the breakup happened almost thirty years ago, it is abiding and lades the relationships between former Yugoslav republics on a variety of political and cultural levels. The aftermath of the breakup, its outcomes, and shortcomings, are labeled, borrowing sociological conceptual framework and vocabulary, as the transition. However, the concept of transition does not capture the temporality of the time in-between the breakup and its sequels. There is nothing transitory, no interim, in the transition, since it looks onto the passage from one completed state to another, from one political and economic order to another. In the present (post)-Yugoslav studies, the prefix “post” is added to the word “Yugoslav” in order to designate a time between the joining

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and the disjoining. The problem with such accounts is that they conceive (post)-Yugoslav temporality as the breakup and its aftereffects. It is the time in which a lot of things happen and endure, but nothing passes. The ideological construction of a nation-state is remapped onto its dissolution. The time between the breakup and its aftermath must be devoid of any belonging. Yet, synchronizing processes are prolonged and extended to the present. As it is known, the “post” in “postmodern” does not refer to the end of modernity. The “post” in “postcolonial” does not refer to the freedom (re) gained by colonized nations. The “post” in (post)-Yugoslav does not solely signify the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Similarly, even Yugoslavia does not designate integration. An attempt to define Yugoslavia only in terms of the integration of people proved as a dangerous operation. The “Post” in the “postmodern” indicates the inseparability of the beginning and ending of modernity and the “post” in “postcolonial” defines the complicity of enslavement and liberation. To this extent, we may note that the “post” in “ (post)-Yugoslav” denotes, at least, an intermingling of integration and disintegration, joining and disjoining, establishing and dissolution. Those intertwinements, interpenetrations, and indistinctions cannot be conceived as a linear homogeneity of time or as flowing through the past into the present and gushing the future out of the vortex made by the confluence of the past and the present. Instead, these dynamics of interweaving are detached in the dual time-between and the time of the in-between. THE MEANWHILE ACCORDING TO DELEUZE, GUATTARI, AND BENEDICT ANDERSON In the zones of traversals, components of concepts lose their discernibility. We will try to redefine these zones in terms of the notion of the meanwhile as introduced in the course of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion on the difference between science and philosophy.5 Nevertheless, their notion of meanwhile needs to be adjusted to the adjacency without adherence. Both science and philosophy relate to the virtual in different ways. Science actualizes the virtual in the state of affairs. Despite this actualization, the event retains a part outside of it. Philosophy, on the contrary, introduces the event as distinct from the state of affairs. Deleuze and Guattari rely upon Maurice Blanchot’s and Charles Péguy’s notions of the event. For both thinkers, the event is an interminability without an outlying beginning and ending. The event is interminable regarding the states of affairs, eluding a spatio-temporal anchoring and hedging of temporal flow. Although it expands internally, the event is a delay lacking any kind of outskirts. Instead of being a succession of instants and the time

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between them, the event wrestles between in a meanwhile and “a dead time.” It is dead because it ceases to flow and empty since nothing happens in the event, while everything is simultaneously yet to come and “having already happened.”6 The interruption of the succession and suspension of linear time fosters the event to incite a two-tiered mutuality. Externally, the event coexists with the states of affairs, while it is also an internal simultaneity of components. All components are meanwhiles that traverse across each other within the meanwhile. Earlier in the book, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the present and the actual. The present is oriented toward what one is, while the actual turns to what one becomes. The passage from the present to the actual is detached into a meanwhile, which transforms the transitory instant of the present into an interstitial “the now of our becoming”7 or of one’s becoming-other. One current in the (post)-Yugoslav studies attempts to switch nostalgia from the past to the future. This turn is impossible without the recourse of interstitial temporality and the temporality of the interstice. That dual temporality separates from a sequentiality that encumbers history with preceding trajectories and entities. The project of Yugoslavia cannot be resumed in any form whatsoever, be it economic, political, or cultural. A diversity of disciplines overlooks the contingent and speculative character of history. Its counterfactuality does not only reside in how it could have happened otherwise but in the possibility that it could not have happened at all. It is not an ahistorical thesis, but the contestation of historicism.8 Historical events are simultaneously contingent and necessary. Their necessity is contingent just as their contingency is necessary. The historicist register containing the dichotomy of universalism and exemplarity is erected on the pedestal of the topic of historia magistra vitae. This register is replaced with the historical twofold structure of the universality and singularity of the event. That means that the historical object is constructed as departing from its complex modality, that it is happening, that it could have happened otherwise, and that it could not have happened at all. A historical object, contrary to its diminished historicist version, is constructed by linking components of temporality and modality. In the classic study on the emergence of the nation, Benedict Anderson shows how is the dual temporality of the in-between—meanwhile, as he calls it, appropriated by the mechanism of the synchronization of a nation. Considered from the viewpoint notions of meanwhile, event and actual, both Yugoslavia and (post)-Yugoslav transnationality and literatures, have something in common. They lay their stakes on the utopian premonition of an ideal togetherness; they consider Yugoslavia and its dissolution as states of affairs, with its historical past and present influencing each other. And yet, it is a persisting synchronization of becoming that is not national, ethnic, multicultural, or transnational. There is a (post)-Yugoslav distortion in every envisaging

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of Yugoslavia, by which it will be suspended into the persisting delay of the meanwhile. This meanwhile counter-effectuates the actualization, which enables the event to start anew. This withdrawal from being-actualized, and yet being actual, consigns important consequences to the mutuality of the event. Because of the internal simultaneity of components, the event is withheld from effectuation, which means that it does not happen, but, because of the incessant variation of components, everything engulfed by an event constantly changes. Since the event externally co-exists with the states of affairs, it is possible to isolate a variable component out of anything that happens. In this regard, the (post)-Yugoslav temporality is hardly to be accepted as part of the succession of before and after Yugoslavia. Thought about Yugoslavia must be in some way always already be (post)Yugoslav, thus finding forms of counter-effectuating of and to history.9 Moreover, it prevents the transference of the synchronization between the former republics within the republics themselves. (Post)-Yugoslav thought is not occupied with saving an external difference, especially not with fostering similarities within differences, which is an apparently Yugoslav infatuation. Both maneuvers are typical for the transnational idea of the (post)-Yugoslav community, which is nothing but the continuation of a failed Yugoslav community. Instead, (post)-Yugoslav10 thought seeks how to protect internal differences from being superseded through installing various forms of national, ethnic, multicultural, and transnational communities. The zones of traversals, understood as adjacency without adherence, do not only abut components to the verge of their indiscernibility. Moreover, in this abode without fringes, and yet without a localizable place, identities are interspersed instead of being arrested and congealed in their movement of traversal. DIVERGENT INTERSECTION: ANTUN BARAC AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONCEPT OF LITERATURE We will consider this temporal synchronization in the reading of the histories of Yugoslav literatures written by prominent Croat and Serbian scholars Antun Barac and Pavle Popović.11 In the first sentence of the opening paragraph of Jugoslavenska književnost (Yugoslav Literature) (1954), Barac assigns the essential role of establishing the ethnic substratum of the nation to literature: The expression “Yugoslav literature” is a common term for the literature of Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, and Macedonians gathered into the Federative National Republic of Yugoslavia.12 Notions tied up with association and integration appear twice: when the expression “Yugoslav literature (jugoslavenska književnost)” is determined

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as a common name for the literatures of particular nations and when these nations are depicted as living together in one country. Barac tries to establish a correlation between the “common term” for particular literatures of particular nations as they are assembled into a single state. He does not define Yugoslav literature as a unity of Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian literatures. It is, instead, a unity of literatures of these particular nations as they happen to be united in a common state. It is obvious that the notion of literature can easily be omitted from the definition, which could be rephrased: “Yugoslav literature is the unity of the literatures of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Macedonians just as Yugoslavia is the unity of these nations.” The definition shifts from literature to the state in which the nations are assembled. Seemingly, for Barac, “Yugoslav literature” is a descriptive term for the “literatures” of different nations. Since the nations are “gathered” in a common state, their unity is projected onto the idea of integral literature. However, the descriptive use of the term Yugoslav literature slides into a normative imposition of the unity of the multinational and multiethnic state. In the structure of Barac’s definition of Yugoslav literature reflects the first article of the Constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY), which defines the state as a “community of equal people (zajednica ravnopravnih naroda).” According to the Constitution, this community depends on the will of these people to “live together.” At the same time, this constitutional regulation gives every nation the inalienable right to exhibit a self-determining will for association and secession and situates these wills and rights within the community. The community, nevertheless, does not depend on the will of its members, but on the close rapport between them. Moreover, the community neglects equality and fosters bonding among member nations. Contrary to this conception of community, the modern nation, as we shall see in the following argument, builds the process of its association only upon the presupposition of its dissociability. Similarly, the Constitution of the FPRY amalgamates the will of the people to assemble themselves in communion with their right for self-determination and secession. Their integration and joining is grounded on the possibility of their disintegration and disjoining. The blood ties of ethnicity are replaced with a contractual relationship that is based on equality and free will. This dissociative and disintegrative duality of the people, which is still present in the Constitution, is nonetheless suppressed from Barac’s definition of Yugoslav literature, but it recurs in his presentation of this literature. Despite his intention to show both the unity of nations and literature, Barac is forced to describe the constant division of nations and literatures between and within themselves. Barac first speaks about literature in the plural, mentioning four nations gathered in the common state. Then he introduces the notion of “Yugoslav

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nations,” which he estimates as being close from the point of view of language and “genesis (postanje).”13 However, in the next sentence, Barac underlines the political, economic, and cultural factors that dissociated “Yugoslavs (Jugoslavene).”14 Melded together according to the mythic image of the lost community, Yugoslavs led separated lives and evolved into individual nations. A similar process of dissociation and individualization applies to the literatures of these individual nations. Barac says that their literatures are different while they still retain many common features. However, Barac cannot avoid presenting the literatures of particular South Slav nations as they “follow their own path” even in the common state. The structure of the chapters of Barac’s book evokes the constitutional structure of Yugoslavia, which in its first Constitution of 1946 grants to every nation of Yugoslavia the rights of self-determination and secession. One cannot learn from reading Barac’s overview of what is exactly common to the literatures of the nations of Yugoslavia. Instead, one knows how these literatures gradually diverged from each other and became different. However, differences and diverging processes are not obstacles for literatures in their cooperation and exchanging topics, themes, and styles. Such processes also, do not prevent various literatures from forming common literature. However, following Barac’s exposition, the only thing that was common to the literatures of South Slav nations was that they were different. Nevertheless, Barac asserts that they possessed many common traits, although they “followed different paths in a lot of things.”15 He is at pains to displace the dis(a)sociability of nations with the immanentist myth of a lost community.16 The only thing that could be common to the literatures of South Slavs is their diverging and differentiation from each other. Barac organizes the chapters of his book in a way that forges the forking paths of these literatures. Although in the opening definition Barac mentions four literatures—Serbian, Croatia, Slovenian, and Macedonian, he only traces the paths of the first three national literatures. Montenegrin writers are displayed within Serbian literature, while Macedonian literature is almost left out.17 There is also an important shift in the disposition of chapters. Barac first gives a description of Croatian literature from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century and then continues with Serbian and Slovenian literature. With the first half of the nineteenth century, the order is reversed; Serbian literature is described first and then followed by Slovenian and Croatian literatures. From Romanticism to the period which is designated as “Between the Two World Wars (Između dva rata),”18 the order of presentation is rearranged into Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian literatures. In forming national literature(s), the principle of their similarity needs to be replaced by the principle of their difference. On the one hand, the similarity of literatures does not necessarily entail that they are or have to be united

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into one literature, just as, on the other hand, their diversity would not prevent them from being assembled as a whole. Yet, this whole should not only be built along converging lines but also by tracing the fault line of their, even deepest, divergence. If there ever would have been a unity of literatures of the nations of Yugoslavia, the principles of its unification would have been their diversity and divergence. Barac tried to put aside divergences in his conception of the history of Yugoslav literature since they request singular and irreducible temporalities of interstices. SYNCHRONIZATION OF THE INSIDE AND THE OUTSIDE: PAVLE POPOVIĆ AND YUGOSLAV LITERATURE AS THE HIDDEN BACKGROUND OF (POST)-YUGOSLAV LITERATURE In the book Yugoslav Literature (Jugoslovenska književnost) (1918), Pavle Popović argues that the formation of Yugoslav literature as a whole begins in the middle of the eighteenth century. Before that, the literatures of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were separate, devoid of “mutual contact (uzajamni dodir).”19 Popović uses the terms “our modern literature (naša moderna književnost)” and “new Yugoslav literature (nova jugoslavenska književnost),”20 which refer to the literature of three nations united in an “undivided whole (nerazdvojnu celinu).”21 In the Foreword, Popović describes his book as an attempt to give an outline of the literatures of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as “the one whole (jedna celina).”22 Contrary to this late beginning, Popović introduces the notion of Yugoslav literature in the first sentence of the opening chapter titled “Genesis (Postanje),” in which he finds the origins of Yugoslav literature in the Middle Age period between the ninth and twelfth centuries. It seems that Yugoslav literature has a twofold genesis: the first occurred in the period between the ninth and twelfth centuries and the second, which Popović calls the modern or new, began to take shape at the end of the eighteenth century. The first notion of Yugoslav literature refers to the literatures of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in a divided state, while the second notion of Yugoslav literature indicates the particular literature in the unified state. The temporal structure underlying Popović’s argument assumes that Yugoslav literature(s) synchronize(s) its/their already there and still to come. There were two Yugoslav literatures and the time between them spanning from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries. However, the two Yugoslav literatures do not shift from one to the other; rather, they are brought into historical and teleological perspectives. Popović’s book outlines the evolution of Yugoslav literature from its disintegrated to its integrated state, with the

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Renaissance (Preporogjaj) and the Reformation (Reformacija) as transitional periods.23 When Popović describes the slow development of disintegrated Yugoslav literature to its transitional period, he mentions how the literatures of particular South Slav nations exchange characters, themes, styles, and languages. Nevertheless, it was still a borrowing between separated literatures, standing outside a unified whole. Therefore, he introduces the notion of Yugoslav thought (Jugoslovenska misao), which has a temporal dimension. The Renaissance and Reformation prepared the soil for a cohesive tissue, which will transfer Yugoslav literature from disintegration to integration. This transformation would be impossible without the birth of Yugoslav thought which ascertains the thought of the unity of the South Slav nations. Yugoslav thought was unfolding during the previous periods of the South Slav nations. He defines Yugoslav thought as a thought of the unity of the South Slav nations, but he readily emphasizes that this thought is an invention of the modern age. Yugoslav thought, as a creation of modernity, stems from “a wide spiritual horizon, an awakened and enlightened mind (jasne svesti, širokog duhovnog vidika i prosvetljenog razuma).”24 Popović denies the Middle Ages such a spiritual attitude and disposition of mind. If Yugoslav thought is a necessary presupposition for Yugoslav literature, it is not clear how to speak of it before the thought of the unity of South Slav nations emerged in the early modernity of the Renaissance and Reformation. While the Renaissance set the conditions for national thought, Popović gave special importance to the Reformation. As he argues, the first germs of Yugoslav thought sprouted in Primož Tubar’s Slovenian protestant reformation movement to which there contributed many Croats and Serbs. If one rigorously keeps with Popović’s definition of Yugoslav thought as a conception of the unity of a few nations, a paradox indispensably arises. It is impossible to conceive something as united if it previously was not viewed as disunited. If there was ever something such as Yugoslav thought, its content would rather have been the fragmentation of Yugoslav nations, something akin to Barac’s forking paths. Popović retroactively derives the concept of Yugoslav thought from the thought of Yugoslavia; a country that is yet to be established legitimizes a nation that is about to be forged. Popović argues that Yugoslav thought unravels through time and when it comes to its manifestation, literature acquires “the character of literary unity (karakter književnog jedinstva).”25 However, Popović identifies both literary and national unity. Similarly, Barac conceives Yugoslav literature as a supranational unity which overlaps with the idea of assembling the South Slav nations into a single (multi)nation(al)-state. It seems that at the bottom of Yugoslav thought, there must be an idea of an insurmountable disjoint between South Slav nations. A kind of Yugoslav

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thought precedes a thought of Yugoslavia, and if there had existed, it would have been considered as being independent of its expression in the form of a state or any other kind of formal organization. Such precedence and independence of a Yugoslav thought from the thought of Yugoslavia is the (post)-Yugoslav sentiment, which is present before and after any Yugoslavia is either founded or demised. This sentiment is entangled with the mythic conception of a lost community. Yugoslav thought obtains a recognizable form in the thought of Yugoslavia. Popović is explicit on this matter because he says that Yugoslav thought was sprouting through earlier ages, and as it thrives, the literature acquires “the character of the national unity.”26 However, if the literary transactions among nations increased over the centuries, the gradual unification was expressed as a literary unity. This is a false recognition by which literary relations are mistaken for the national. The empty space of bifurcations and ramifications, as well as their internal divisions, is displaced by a complex of national philology consisting of the categories of nation, language, and literature. This complex is transposed to the contemporary understanding of (post)-Yugoslav literature as the construction of transnational space irreducible to any nation. Bonding through similarity or resemblance is present in both Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures. However, the only thing that the literatures of South Slav nations have in common is their non-belonging; their only property is being expropriated from anything that would be common to them. This non-appropriable property dispossesses national philology from any recognizable identity and founding substance. This non-appropriable non-belonging, inconvertible into a trait, resides in parts of Popović’s argument, but he does everything to obliterate it. When he underlines the influence of the Renaissance and Reformation on the transition from the first to the second notion of Yugoslav literature, he stresses the Italian and German origins of the Renaissance and Reformation. He pays special attention to Trubar’s Reformation and its spread in Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia.27 Popović argues that Trubar’s Reformation was not national in character because it was also propagated to the Croats and Serbs. Aiming to diffuse and spread the ideas of the Reformation, Trubar and his followers established the first connections between Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. Popović is aware that Trubar’s movement was not originally intended as a “national Yugoslav movement (narodnosni Jugoslovenski pokret),”28 but he argues that the “the Yugoslav ideal” springs from Trubar’s Reformation. Something comes to itself under an alien influence, and the Renaissance and Reformation generate Yugoslav thought. South Slav nations reveal their becoming-Yugoslav through the intermediation of something alien and foreign. This becoming-Yugoslav is derived from something essentially

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non-Yugoslav; it must pass through something that is not of South Slav origin. This hindering of Yugoslav thought from synchronizing itself is denoted by the hyphenated “post-” that ceaselessly disturbs the threshold between the outside and the inside. It convenes by traversing inside limits and outside borders. However, this alliance without filiation, adjacency without adherence, in which becoming-together and becoming-other are simultaneous and yet asynchronous, is abandoned and foreclosed in both Yugoslav thought and (post)-Yugoslav sentiment. Popović himself, in his argument, abandons this non-affiliative and de-synchronizing part of Yugoslav thought, its essential “post-.” “The first Yugoslav community” was established as the outcome of the circulation of the Protestant doctrine. Popović develops the principal criterion for Yugoslav literature: Trubar’s books did not address only Slovenian readers, but the whole South Slav readership in the countries and regions of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, other writers crossed the borders of their regions and homelands and made similar attempts to reach a broader readership and create a larger community. However, such border crossings and bindings with ethnically and nationally different readerships are not used only as a determination of Yugoslav literature, but of (post)-Yugoslav literature as well. Yugoslav thought has its origins in the “general (opšta)” and “worldly (svetska)”29 nature of the Reformation and Renaissance. Its national character, as we have already remarked, is cosmopolitan for Popović; Yugoslav thought is established by something that is foreign to it; its becoming-Yugoslav passes through the non-Yugoslav elements of the Italian Renaissance or the German Reformation. Popović insists upon this opening of a cosmopolitan perspective onto the dual structure of the nation-building of the South Slavs: they build their particular national character by forging a more general or broader national character. However, it is not that one nation ceases to be itself and turns into another nation or is absorbed into a larger whole. In that case, becoming and nation are incompatible. A nation that initiates becoming is downplayed into a people or a multitude. In them, the meanwhile between anonymous individuals is not congealed into an invisible and still-strong network that binds and holds together. Instead, the anonymity of the meanwhile draws together as it induces an insurmountable gap between individuals. Anonymity appears on the axes of the relations both within and between the individuals themselves. They communicate their anonymity between themselves in revealing that they are anonymous to themselves. In this regard, every nation maintains contact with the becoming of its people as a multitude of anonymous. But it is highly questionable should that undercurrent of becoming appeal to any contact with a nation which synchronizes the axes of anonymous becoming. That synchronization dominates the constitution

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of Yugoslavia, even in its multinational variant in the period from 1945 to 1990. This synchronization is repeated within the contemporary engendering of the (post)-Yugoslav area of contact between cultures and literatures. We have dubbed this reiteration as the (post)-Yugoslav sentiment. This sentiment erases the hyphenation and parentheses from the prefix “post-”; it fuses the prefix with the word, agglutinating them, downplaying thereby any discontinuity between them. The temporality of “the post-” recurs in the concept of Yugoslavia, by constantly dividing it from itself. If any becoming-Yugoslav would safeguard its (post)-Yugoslav character, that is, the hyphenated and parenthesized (post)-, then every people reveal to itself own becoming, that is, its anonymity to itself and its communication with other anonymities. However, on the level of anonymous becoming, the coining of names is a supplementary activity. Just as Barac, almost by accident, discovers the forking paths of the people, so Popović drops out this anonymizing and pseudonymizing aspect of becoming in the very moment he fortuitously traces it. Popović argues that South Slavs transgress the boundaries of their ethnic and national identities while simultaneously recognizing themselves as part of a wider European community. These coeval processes are not to be synchronized in the making of national identity. This asynchronous simultaneity is both a particularizing and generalizing operation, and it is for Popović, the mark of new age, looming over the second half of the eighteenth century. In this Enlightenment redescription of forming Yugoslavity, Popović suggests that an internal unification coincides with external associations. South Slav nations bond with each other, in a circuitous way, through a link with the Western European nations; they pass through the other in order to come to themselves. “Whole of the people (Celina naroda)”30 can be attained by involving in the wider European whole. Scattered nations make the whole, as they include themselves into a larger whole. Yugoslav thought dangles inbetween something that is alien to it. It is a non-Yugoslav unthought in the heart of Yugoslav thought. It is with(in) itself only through this alienation. The axes of anonymity refrain from converging into a tribe, race, or a nation. However, Yugoslav thought is synchronized with the temporal rhythms of other nations. This inter-national synchronization enables the intra-national synchronization of the de-synchronized South Slav nations. Popović, nevertheless, maintains becoming-Yugoslav on the level of the shaping of a Yugoslavity by adopting ius cosmopoliticum. Yugoslav thought traces and contrives links with intellectual, artistic, cultural, and political transformations seeded and bolstered by the Italian Renaissance and German Reformation. Surprisingly or not, Popović then resorts to Dositej Obradović’s tailoring of idea of the Enlightenment to nation-building, and the adjustment of cosmopolitanism to nationalism. This recourse to Obradović causes the

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cosmopolitan deflection of Yugoslav thought to in on itself. Non-Yugoslav unthought in Yugoslav thought is foreclosed and extinguished. The comparative method that Popović probably adopts from Goethe annihilates differences in order to find similarities, thereby synchronizing the multiplying rhythms of the people.31 In adjusting Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, Popović’s version of the comparative method does not only reinforce similarities with the aim to suppress external differences. It propels the conversion of the anonymity of people into a nation. Moreover, he, following Obradović, reinscribes ethnicity into the nation and suppresses the internal difference within the nations. A similar synchronization takes place in the (post)-Yugoslav studies in their quest for the forms of communities that would elude resurrecting a state and supersede the nationalism. However, both concepts of literature, Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav, enact a lost community that synchronizes coeval and yet non-coinciding timelines.32 As shown by Lukács, the form of the novel (Roman) does not consist in revealing a form which totalizes the forking trajectories of parts and their contingencies. Instead, this irrevocable discord—/d/ie Dissonanz der Romanform—is metamorphosed in the form, thereby linking fragments in the asynchronous mode.33 KNOTTING THE ZONES OF ANONYMOUS TRAVERSALS: AGAINST AN ETHNO-GENETIC SYNCHRONIZATION BY MAKING ETHNIC FICTION AND FICTIVE ETHNICITY According to the well-known and seminal argument of Benedict Anderson, both the Renaissance and the Reformation are founding events for the rise of national consciousness. The spreading of the Reformation flourished on the exploitation of early print culture. Relying upon print-capitalism, Luther reached a mass audience and created a new and large readership that was suddenly able to enter in immediate relation with the texts of the Holy Scripture. The Renaissance promoted the shift from Latin to the vernacular languages that the monarchs of European states used in the consolidation of their administrative apparatus. Both processes uprooted the religious and political cornerstones of feudalism, which controlled the community by the centralized rule of the church and its dynasties. The dissemination of the printed word and the vernacular enabled the creation of a form of community that was beyond the reach of church and court. If Popović’s thesis about the rise of Yugoslav thought in the Renaissance and Reformation is correct, then Yugoslav thought is co-extensive with something alien to it and which prevents it from being synchronous with itself. It

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builds a relation toward itself through continuity with something external and foreign to it. This external continuity is also an internal discontinuity; Yugoslav thought is split within itself. In Yugoslav thought lies an unthought, a non-Yugoslav remainder originating in the Renaissance and Reformation. However, for Popović, that foreign core of Yugoslav thought—its general and worldly element—turns into a means for the domestication of the internal foreignness of a nation to itself. South Slav nations could form a thought about their proximity through the intermediation of an alien component (the Italian Renaissance and German Reformation). Through this intermediation, the zones of separation are turned into contacts of co-extensive and simultaneous asynchronicities. They were toggling between what is foreign in and to them, between internal and external foreignness. Due to this toggling, enabling adjacency without adherence, asynchronous simultaneity confounds internal and external elements. By adopting what is alien to them, South Slav cultures did not only constitute points of diverging intersections. They also constituted external and internal foreignness as a zone of traversals between themselves and within themselves. In these zones, becoming-together is inseparable from becomingother.34 Yet, the zones do not “belong to both a and b”;35 instead, it is a pure, toggling middle in which every element ceases to be recognizable. However, this knotting in the toggling middle is detachable. The toggling middle is a zone of traversal that aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis on becoming as the interruption of filiation and heredity.36 As Virno puts it: “The ‘many’ persevere as ‘many’ without aspiring to the unity of the state”;37 to this, we would add, without any kind of unity, immersed in the zone of anonymous traversals. The zone of traversal is anonymity of the many that detach itself from any denomination. However, nations, in the process of their constitution, attempt to overcome what is foreign to them and to reconstitute filiation and heredity. The nation endeavors to establish the process of retroactive ethnification and ethnofiction. Since the nation lacks an ethnic basis, it is to be devised. Despite his critical stance toward the nation as an imagined community, Balibar introduces the notion of fictive/fictional ethnicity as a community engendered by a nation. The nation, as a form of society, ethnicizes its populace by turning it into a fictive ethnicity. By mirroring itself in a fictional ethnos, the nation simultaneously narrates about itself and to itself a yarn of having arisen from the immediate community of close and interrupted relationships.38 This twofold process of ethnification and ethnofiction is a retroactive enrooting comprising the components of language and race.39 Popović invests Yugoslav thought with ethnic fiction and fictive ethnos by binding it with folk poetry. While Yugoslav thought is “universal” and “worldly,” folk poetry goes to the layers of society that cannot be reached

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by written literature. Popović’s concept of Yugoslav literature is composed of two components: the first is Yugoslav thought, which expresses national unity, and the second is folk poetry as the vehicle of national character. Popović ethnicizes the national through folk poetry that retroactively transforms the nation into an expression of a lost ethnic community. This ethnic fiction penetrates into the universal component of Yugoslav thought with Dositej Obradović, who dismantles differences by pinning them to one homogeneous ground of the same “kin and language (rod i jezik).”40 It is exactly in this homogenizing ethnic fiction that Popović sees a culmination of “the thought (. . .) of national unity” because in Obradović’s work and activity, this thought “attain its own complete formula.”41 The creation of ethnicity through nation-building assumes a simultaneous process of the nationalization of the individuum and the individualizing of the nation. According to Balibar, however, both nation and individuum should look for modes of the transformation of that imaginary, an ethnofictional and fictive ethnic belonging, in order to abandon it, “in order to communicate with the individuals of other peoples with which he or she shares the same interest and, to some extent, the same future.”42 The concept of (post)Yugoslav is usually displayed as a step away from ethnic fiction and the fictive ethnos produced after the collapse of Yugoslavia. However, this step away is impossible without disrupting the ethnic fiction and fictive ethnos of Yugoslavia and breaking with the processes of ethnifying and ethnofictionalizing its nation. Balibar discerns similar processes of fictionalizing ethnicity in the building of Europe as an attempt to overcome national differences. Nevertheless, as Balibar argues, it is rather a demografization of European identity as an opposition to the Asian–African demographic bloc. Despite its endeavors to surmount nationalisms and their fictive ethnicities, the concept of (post)-Yugoslav transnationality must interrupt its links with the formation of an ethnic substratum of the Yugoslav nation. (Post)-Yugoslav surpassing of nationalism and refraining from the state is still besotted with the lost immanent community. Popović holds two assumptions. According to the first, the existence of Yugoslav literature is an evident matter. He presupposes that South Slav nations originate from a common ethnogenetic core from which they are exempted and separated as an outcome of external circumstances. After that, they evolved along forking paths. During the eighteenth century, this mislaid community of close bonds will be recovered through the contractual association and formation of national identity that we have analyzed in Barac’s literary constitutionalism. This recovered unity was developed slowly until the sudden appearance of Yugoslav thought in the middle of the eighteenth century. Popović cannot explain how Yugoslav thought cultivated itself from the ages of detachment to the ages of unity, except by a sudden leap which

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enables the conversion of scattered fragments into the parts of a whole. After Popović restored the broken contacts among nations, he painstakingly tried to hide the traces of gaps and discontinuities. By taking into account Homi Bhabha’s critique of the process of nationbuilding, we may say that Popović introduced a pedagogical forgetting to remember in order to conceal the performative character of a nation.43 Bhabha has in mind Ernest Renan’s thesis44 stating that the members of a nation remember what they have in common while forgetting how they achieved that communion; they remember what they share while forgetting their divisions. Renan argued that this oblivion is the ground for building a nation.45 He also shows that a bundle of common values is not pregiven and predetermined, but arrived at after numerous assents agreed by individual and group members of a nation. Although this bundle is not of organic origin but forged as an outcome of the willful agreement, Bhabha nevertheless contests the basic assumption of the concept of the nation as an invention founded upon a seemingly shared bundle of values, beliefs, emotions, and attitudes. According to Renan, the formation of a nation would be impossible if a group of people would not be able to forget their heterogeneity and irresolvable conflicts and contradictions from the past. Therefore, even a common ground trodden by agreement and unity elicited by consensus ousts the heterogeneity of people. BENEDICT ANDERSON’S SYNCHRONIZATION OF MEANWHILES AS ZONES OF ANONYMOUS TRAVERSALS The nation turns out to be an effect of the encounter of fragments with the external mediator of their integration. Yugoslav thought will no longer underpin a shared identity; instead, it will demonstrate how people are linked through mutual difference, how they establish an accord through irreconcilable discord, or how they toggle between divergent identities. By finding something alien in its interiority, such thought46 will descend from the nation to a people, from the one to the many. The zone of anonymous traversals or asynchronicity hinders the multitude from closing upon itself into a nation. It is a preemption of the process of making up ethnic fiction and fictive ethnicities. In these zones of anomalous traversals, the many is linked though not united. For Popović, in the Middle Age, it was impossible for Yugoslav thought to flourish. For this thought, the forking paths of various nations started to merge, and divergent paths began to converge and entwine into synchronous temporalities, which Benedict Anderson terms homogeneous empty time. Popović propounds that Yugoslav thought, as “every genuine thought of

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nationality (suštinski svaka prava misao o narodnosti),” is “a creation of the new age (tvorevina novog doba).”47 Let us summarize the three elements that form the framework for Popović’s argument: (1) the processes of nationbuilding and the rise of the nation-state appear in the transition from the Middle Ages to early Modernity; (2) they both develop throughout the Age of Enlightenment; and (3) literature had a decisive role in their formation. This line of reasoning, which retroactively authorizes its object by assigning to it the status of a founding anteriority, brings Popović’s argument close to Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis on nations as imagined communities. Popović saw South Slavs—or imagined them—as part of a larger, though limited, soon-to-be sovereign community assembled in a state that was about to be established. The ground for this upheaval in perception was ascertaining and discerning common traits that existed alongside many differences. The precondition for this homogenizing operation is the synchronization of co-existing and simultaneous temporalities. Perhaps it would be more apt to say that the Yugoslav nation is invented in Ernest Gellner’s sense of the term: nations appear where they previously did not exist. However, the agent of such an invention is nationalism, which entails that nationalism precedes the birth of the nation. For the present discussion, it is more important to note that Gellner’s notion of the invention of the nation implies that, in contrast to invented communities, there are real or true communities. I would like to follow Anderson’s remark that every community, with removing Anderson’s caution from his parentheses, even one in immediate contact, is imagined. It is not simply the nation that is imagined; instead, the common, functioning as a place for the nation as a new kind of community, is itself the object of imagination. For the classic theorists of political theory, such as Hobbes and Locke, there is nothing common around which individuals and groups would agglomerate themselves. The common is not given in advance. And yet, as remarked by Fichte in his Romantic and post-Kantian imaginary, the nation is founded on the projection of external and internal borders—an individual recognizes oneself in others, and they are apprehended in it.48 This synchronizing projection—the simultaneous interiorization of the externalization and exteriorization of internal borders—poses an objective basis for the nation as its ethnicization. As shown by Balibar, the nation is not the sole subject and object of its imagining, but it performs its own fictive ethnicity by engendering the process of narration to and about itself. As Anderson argues, such imagining was enabled with a shift in temporality. The medieval simultaneity of fulfillment or the co-existence of the past and future in the present was replaced with the modern simultaneity of coinciding timelines. This timescape could be measured with a clock and calendar, and yet their concordances retain the contingency of this new temporality. It enables connections of individuals who would never meet each

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other. They remain foreigners to each other, and yet, they create a community. Anderson forecloses the contingent nature of the overlapping of these lines and the indispensable foreignness of individuals. The nation is based on the loose connections between foreigners. The stability of these connections through time emerges as the temporality of contingent events, their diverging paths, and their possible convergence. Continuity over time is the main challenge for both personal and national biographies. Even though one can determine the date of birth and death of an individual, it is impossible to directly access what happened “meanwhile,” in-between the moments of life that one remembers and those that are left to oblivion. The meanwhile is a region of oblivion out of which, according to Anderson, narratives arise. They construct a continuity across a life that was lived through, but it eludes immediate experience. In this regard, he compares narratives to cenotaphs consecrated to those forgotten moments, commemorating those unnamed heroes of one’s life. When nations are taken into consideration, things become more complicated because nations lack both beginnings and ends, and they still demand to be presented as if they did. Although they are not born and do not grow through time as real-life persons, nations are in their mythological imaginaries personalized, or personified, as persons to naturalize the ethnic fiction of stemming from an origin. Anderson emphasizes that every change in consciousness is followed by amnesia. As he argues, this split of consciousness is overcome by narration. Similarly, the gap between the solidity of nations and their being grounded in temporal relations between anonymous individuals must also be suppressed. The anonymous relations between people undercut the unity of a nation. The continuity of the time of nations stems from the discontinuity of this emergence. Anderson argues that individuals constitute a nation as they connect with each other within the meanwhile. Since Anderson conflates simultaneity and synchronicity, he synchronizes the multiplicity of meanwhiles in a homogeneous denouement of the plot of making a nation. However, if the asynchronous character of the simultaneity of meanwhiles is considered, individuals are linked within the meanwhile precisely because they are unbound by it. The meanwhile does not take place between individuals, but within themselves, they are anonymous to each other because they are foremost unfathomably unknown to themselves. DANILO KIŠ AND YUGOSLAV LITERATURE: BECOMING-ORPHAN AND DELEUZE AND ANDERSON ON THE MEANWHILE We will now return to the possible impact of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur on the formation of the notion of Yugoslav literature. Although Biti provides

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a critical account of the revival of Goethe’s project of forming a Weltliteratur, highlighted in David Damrosch’s book How to Read World Literature (2009), he also offers a comprehensive reading of Goethe’s inaugural notion. As Biti contends in his elaboration, both Goethe’s and Damrosch’s models of cosmopolitanizing literature are structured around the notion of family kinship. Particular literatures exempt themselves from their local, provincial, familial, and familiar contexts in order to include themselves in a new world and family. They detach themselves from the paternal context of national literature in order to become part of a group revolving around “the absent, i.e., obliterated father.”49 As Biti concludes,50 the reversal and inversion of the diversity of participants into a mere contribution to the unity of world literature is the constitutive principle of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, but with a crucial distinction. Whereas Goethe creates his notion of Weltliteratur in order to underpin the “irreducibly individual,” the new notion of world literature, nonetheless, prioritizes the “indifferently valuable”51 in the globalized world. It is important to notice that Danilo Kiš declares himself a Yugoslav writer and molds Yugoslav literature according to the model of Goethe’s Weltliteratur. In The Anatomy Lesson (Čas anatomije), Kiš propounds to go beyond Goethe’s Weltliteratur. Kiš saw Goethe’s notion, and he was not alone in this perception, as limited to the canon of Western European literatures. The omission of other European and non-European literatures was taken as the confirmation of the cosmopolitan character of Weltliteratur. Kiš looked for other ways of diversifying Weltliteratur, and Yugoslav literature itself, which would not exhibit the operation of homogenization through admitting heterogeneity. In this pursuit, undertaken on the pages of The Anatomy Lesson, Kiš reconceptualized Weltliteratur following Borges’s idea of forking paths that do not conform to the arborescent model of world literature envisaged by Goethe. Kiš links Yugoslav literature to something foreign to it and pertaining to its outside. Yet, through this link, a complex of nonYugoslav elements is accepted in the heart of Yugoslav literature. Kiš goes much further than Popović, and he welcomes Barac’s forking paths. Kiš’s attempt is not to (re)build a family, but to disrupt any filiation, to sever every link with the lineal and patrimonial. The dismemberment of filiation and the withdrawal from family are new forms of releasing anonymity and the realm of meanwhiles from synchronization. The arborescent model of Weltliteratur paralleled Goethe’s morphology of the Urformen.52 Through the morphology of the Urformen, Goethe attempted to recover an underlying and imperceptive unity that holds together the variety and diversity of the phenomenal world. The task of this morphology is to identify the rules of transformations and modifications through which variety rises from archetypes. Kiš was heavily influenced by Borges’s lecture given in 1951, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,”53 especially by Borges’s critique

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of abiding by local color when writing about national literature. Borges, however, unveiled local color as the foremost literary creation derived from already existing themes and motives in other literatures.54 The national is not pregiven, an already established limited area from which one must step out in order to become a writer of world literature. National literatures are retroactively derived from their being already immersed in world literature. As Borges contravenes to his denunciators and proponents of local themes, there is no national literature that did not use foreign themes, expelling itself outside the hedges of national tradition. Borges shifts the boundaries of the notion of Weltliteratur toward minor literatures, such as Jewish and Irish ones, which put the Latin American writer in the analogous position of making innovations to world literature. World literature is not a goal to be attained by leaving one’s familiar surroundings of national literature. By entering literature, a writer immediately severs the links with native soil. According to Borges, writers relinquish their national and cultural bonds, surrendering themselves to the world. However, there is a considerable similarity between Borges’s understanding of the world and his writing. He draws a striking parallel between the problem of Argentine national literature and a determinist order of the universe. According to the determinist picture of the world, what an individual does is already preordained by the impersonal and anonymous laws of the universe. Borges’s point is simply that the world is preestablished (although we could stretch this discussion in the other direction), but that acts and deeds of persons and groups are settled outside their individual wills. The world does not revolve around nation, race, cultural identities, or any other all-toohuman values. Instead, the world is clutched within the iron fist of nonhuman laws that resist being ruled by humans. Yet, Borges’s image fits Leibniz’s compatibilist theory of determinism and human freedom. This blind necessity of the universe liberates humans in the domain of values: We must believe that the universe is our birthright and try out every subject; we cannot confine ourselves to what is Argentine in order to be Argentine because either it is our inevitable destiny to be Argentine, in which case we will be Argentine whatever we do, or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask.55

Borges couples the inevitability of destiny (to be Argentine) with freedom (whatever we do). One does not do something adhering to one’s identity (being Argentine). Instead, one acquires an identity, whether Argentine or something else, by situating oneself within the unsettling adjacency of contingency and necessity. Borges, moreover, claims that quarrels regarding belonging to national literature appertain to a misconception of the nature of “literary creation” or “artistic creation” itself. Creation is a domain where

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individual intentions and will lose their sovereignty. In inciting creation, one abandons oneself to “the voluntary dream.” Every writer undergoes the alienating experience of creation, and Borges mentions writers who wrote, to acquire Kiš’s distinction, from the position of homo politicus and inadvertently slid into the position of homo poeticus: Kipling dedicated his life to writing in accordance with a given set of political ideals, he wanted to make his work a tool for propaganda, and nevertheless, at the end of his life he had to confess that the true essence of a writer’s work is usually unknown by that writer; and he remembered the case of Swift, who while writing Gulliver’s Travels wanted to raise an indictment against mankind and instead left behind a children’s book. Plato said that poets are the amanuenses of a god who moves them against their will, against their intentions, as the magnet moves a series of iron rings.56

In discussing the relations between his Jewish ancestries in The Anatomy Lesson, Kiš argues that he does not write as a Jew; rather, he becomes a Jew through writing.57 This echoes the concluding sentence of Borges’s lecture: “We will be Argentine, and we will be, as well, good or adequate writers.”58 Kiš defines being a Yugoslav writer as being related to the notion of Weltliteratur, but not restricted to Goethe’s initial definition. Instead, Kiš adheres to an expansion of Goethe’s notion made by Borges, Arthur Koestler, and René Étiemble. Later, Kiš attacks the search for “literary fatherhood (književno roditeljstvo)”59 as a forensic undertaking to identify a writer’s “blood type and tribal affiliation (krvna grupa i plemenska pripadnost)”60 in order to reduce her or him to their literary father. The law of paternity in literature is compared to nationalism. Both the paternal notion of literature and that of nation are a kind of paternal suit in order to establish the solid origins of writers and their nation. Both nation and literature revolve around patrimony. Kiš opposes the disseminating and promiscuous image of world literature of forking paths with intractable curves to this initial insemination unfolded into a straight lineage whose descents branch into clear-cut directions. The parental notion of literature is “reductionism,” modeled according to descent, attempting to determine “a common element” and to curtail it to “two different subject matters.”61 The sweetness of sugar62 does not come from any of its parts, and it cannot be established by breaking it down into pieces, or by a kind of priming its elements. Similarly, the writer is not a sum of all possible influences exerted upon her or him. In the 1980s, Kiš asks what Yugoslav literature could be if it would have been shaped following to Hispano-American and Nordic literatures.63 Contrary to the concept of Yugoslav literature, Latin American and

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Nordic literature are not built around national models. In interviews given in 1989, when both his death and the dissolution of Yugoslavia were looming, he declares himself as the “only Yugoslav writer (jedini jugoslavenski pisac)”64 adding that the Yugoslav writer “does not exist (ne postoji).”65 In committing oneself to something that does not exist and in obstinately withdrawing from taking sides on behalf of something that irrevocably resists taking place, Kiš offers a model of a (post)-Yugoslav writer. As we have seen, Kiš rebukes his opponents for contriving a patrilineal model of literature to impose it as a form of national identification. According to the “genetic reductionism (genetički redukcionizam)”66 that Kiš contests, “every writer must have their own parents (pisac mora imati svoje roditelje).”67 Establishing the nation conforms to this patrilineal parenthood. At the same time Kiš refers to the opposed notions of promiscuity and prostitution—the “big world whore (velika svetska kurva)” and “parthenogenesis and Immaculate Conception (partenogeneza i bezgrešno začeće).”68 The patrimony of national literature attempts to remove a writer from the abeyance of plural anonymity, which is the effect of both a proliferation of influences69 (everyone could be a father) and the unreliability of this proliferation for establishing a writer’s identity ((s)he is on her/his own, fatherless). The errant writer has an equal capability for being everything/nobody and nothing/no one, anonymous and pseudonymous, nobody, and a person of twists and turns. Kiš defines the errant writer, removed and exempted from the patrimony, as an “unknown foundling left at the door of the world lazaretto (nepoznato nahoče pred vratima svetskog lazareta).”70 This orphan model of the literary community is twofold, consisting of the bastard and the foundling.71 The orphan model resurfaces in the last of Kiš’s interviews where he declares himself as the only Yugoslav writer: That is what I assert—that I am neither Serbian, nor Croatian writer, but a Yugoslav one. Therefore, you can imagine that I am the only Yugoslav writer in the world.72

In the novel Garden, Ashes Kiš already introduced an (ab)errant father who is both the traitor and the betrayed. The father deposes himself and attempts to dispose of other members of his family from himself, including his son; he is a confident man who disguises himself so to expose being a father as the ultimate pretense. By freeing his son from himself, the father frees himself from fatherhood and steps into an anonymous universe without any filiation: How do you conceive his (Eduard Sam’s, the narrator’s father) revolutionary, historically far-reaching decision to cut ties with his parents, with his numerous sisters, with his brother and his family name? How do you conceive the history

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of his sickness, the birth of the wrath of god which will compel him to abdicate his own part in his father’s bequest? (Kako zamišljate njegovu revolucionarnu, istorijski dalekosežnu odluku da prekine sa svojim roditeljima, sa svojim mnogobrojnim sestrama, sa svojim bratom i svojim prezimenom? Kako zamišljate istoriju njegove bolesti, rađanje tog bogovskog besa, čija će posledica biti odricanje od svog udela u očevom nasledstvu.)73

Entering into the alliance is possible only by being devoid of any paternal ancestry, by being expelled from any descendant, in becoming an orphan, a son without a father, a father who dismisses his offspring in order to free himself from fatherhood.74 When Kiš says that he is the only Yugoslav writer, this does not mean that there are no other Yugoslav writers. Maybe there are, but it is not a point of choice between many writers and one writer. Instead, they do not affiliate with each other, and the whole they fortuitously create is not derived from any family ties whatsoever. Let us recall that for Borges being Argentine means doing whatever, which entails doing mostly non-Argentine things. One becomes Argentine by passing through the non-Argentine and by making others become Argentine. Yugoslav writers, which make them (post)-Yugoslav in the first place, establish mutual links in the zone of traversals and through the renunciation of any kind of a tie. It is not simply replacing consanguinity with the blood pact, which, according to Deleuze,75 founds the “society of brothers,”76 the “society without fathers,”77 sons without fathers forming a society of fellow men. Every intimacy must be renounced, even that of fellow men. When Deleuze argues that the American nation is “a patchwork of small nations,”78 he considers the American as one who is “the son of a crumbled father, the son of all nations.”79 Another form of state is possible without the principles of father and heritage. There is a parallel between Anderson’s connected foreigners and Deleuze’s fellow men without properties. Anderson’s definition of a nation is strikingly similar to Deleuze’s definition of the American nation as a patchwork of small nations: An American will never meet or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.80

Both Anderson and Deleuze cancel the asynchronous character of the simultaneous meanwhiles of anonymous and improper individuals as to put them into the function of solidifying and stabilizing a nation. While Anderson imagines the nation as “a solid community moving steadily down

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(or up) history,”81 Deleuze imagines it as “the proliferation of patchwork.”82 However, anonymity and impropriety do not confound the one and the many. Returning to Kiš, the anonymous and pseudonymous are linked to each other. The point is to hinder the surpassing of the anonymity and impropriety involved in any kind of bonding. According to the orphan model, one could equally be an offspring of everybody and nobody, both bastard, and foundling, everyone’s, and no one’s. Insofar as one cuts off ties that would bind vertically to some lineage, one also thwarts the bonds that would horizontally form a fraternity. The orphan model excludes both paternity and fraternity. It is to be simultaneously surrounded by a multitude and self-contained within the utmost solitude. This might encapsulate anonymity and protect it from either solidifying or becoming enclosed upon itself. TIME (IN)BETWEEN THE NATION: FORGETTING AS GROUNDING OR FORGOTTEN GROUNDS? As we have seen, Popović starts his book as if there had always been Yugoslav literature and the unity of nations which were divided under the influence of external circumstances. He describes how is unity resumed, and finally, he introduces the notion of Yugoslav thought as it suddenly appears in the loom of the eighteenth century. He attempted to include South Slav nations in the Enlightenment pattern of coming-of-age. Nevertheless, he uses, following Obradović, the Enlightenment as the rational justification for the mythic rebirth of the Yugoslav nation. With Yugoslav thought, single nations forget about their being divided over the centuries and how they separately developed along different paths under the impact of different imperialisms. Through the notion of Yugoslav thought, Popović synchronizes different meanwhiles of the multiplicity of people. He first synchronizes them as the nations, and then he synchronizes the nations themselves. A similar synchronizing operation is in effect in the (post)-Yugoslav sentiment, a longing for a once-lost community that erases the punctuation enclosing the “post” and divests the (post)-Yugoslav from its relation to thought. The most cunning attire in which the (post)-Yugoslav sentiment appears is the nostalgia for the future. Forgetting operates on two levels. On the first, people are divided by external factors, such as historical circumstances, the geopolitical distribution of power, and economic circulation. On the second level, there is deeper forgetting, which is itself forgotten. In that repressed forgetting, a fundamental gap recedes, a hollowing although endlessly small meanwhile, which prevents people from gathering between themselves and refraining from synchronization.

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Similarly, in his concept of nation, Anderson synchronizes the diverging and heterogeneous temporalities of the “meanwhile” through the narrative structure without questioning how the elements of the narrative gain their synchronicity. As Bhabha strikingly pointed out, the meanwhile is not only the time of people’s anonymity but also of a nation’s anomie.83 Anderson, through emplotment in the realist novel, turns the time of the meanwhile, of the heterogeneous lives of people, into a time of cultural identification. Anderson, according to Bhabha, misses the point in his interpretation of Renan’s notion of forgetting. The second notion of forgetting of forgetting should be recovered. The anomie of Yugoslavia consists of heterogeneous temporalities of meanwhiles, which cannot be synchronized. A joining that would restrain this hetero-temporality, as the temporality of asynchrony or toggling, boosts the fictive ethnicity of the myth of the lost community. Even if that lost unity could ever be testified, it would not be the ground for joining into a community. It is precisely this fiction of the lost community that is to be left to oblivion. Yet, the only way to depart from the myth of the lost continuity is to retrieve the essential gap from which the multitude, connected only by resistance to any unity whatsoever, surges. It is to enter the region of the forgotten forgetting and to pass from (re)sentiment to thought. RENAN AND (UN)FOUNDING AMNESIA We will try to show that Renan has in mind both levels of forgetting, and by recovering and delineating them, we will attempt to free people from the nation, the many from the one. Although the nation presents itself as continuous and cohesive, this continuity and cohesiveness must be incessantly reaffirmed and reestablished. The pedagogical and the performative constantly toggle between each other. Renan also draws a parallel between personal and national biographies: “Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”84 He defines the nation as the bipartite structure consisting of soul and spiritual principles. While the soul is oriented toward the past, the spiritual principle is embedded within the present. These two principles appear between the ethnic and contractual models of the nation. Renan, in the spirit of the French Enlightenment, derives the notion of the nation from “the contract of free individuals.”85 According to Renan’s contractualism, it is not enough to have a common past; it is also necessary to constitute a general consent, a will, to establish the community around that common past. However, Renan’s individuals first forget that they have nothing in common, and then, second, they forget that forgetting itself. They are severed from any becoming because

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they, first, forget how they become, and, second, they forget precisely that becoming of forgetting. The problem is that Renan, as I will elaborate soon, on the one hand, sharply distinguishes the ethnographic and national principles86 while, on the other hand, he submits the nation to ethnic fiction by transferring the unity achieved on the level of a nation to the conflicting diversity of the ethnic level. In this way, national integration shapes ethnical convergence.87 The transference of convergence is induced and enabled by forgetting: Be on your guard, for this ethnographic politics is in no way a stable thing and, if today you use it against others, tomorrow you may see it turned against yourselves. Can you be sure that the Germans, who have raised the banner of ethnography so high, will not see the Slavs in their turn analyse the names of villages in Saxony and Lusatia, search for any traces of the Wiltzes or of the Obotrites, and demand recompense for the massacres and the wholesale enslavements that the Ottoss inflicted upon their ancestors? It is good for everyone to know how to forget.88

Forgetting represses heterogeneity as to synchronize nation and to replace one fiction with another. However, Renan restricts heterogeneity to the ethnic level. For him, there is only ethnic heterogeneity, which can be superseded by ascending to the national level.89 This protonational(ist) diversity of already constituted and conflicting identities is not heterogeneity at all. Besides this limited heterogeneity, there is the infinite heterogeneity itself, unknotted from any identity whatsoever. In Renan’s account, access to the infinite heterogeneity is double-barred: first, by national unity and second, by ethnic diversity. Therefore, Renan’s demand to forget is impossible to respond to because, according to his model of national identification, one is asked to remember ethnic varieties and then to forget them by leaping into a nation.90 What is really forgotten is the heterogeneity that simultaneously precedes identification and with which any identity is inextricably tied. The nation constitutes a continuity between the past and the present, between memory and the will to forge community around shared memories. That past is summarized in the present, but the continuity between them needs to be incessantly revived and reinforced; it depends on a “daily plebiscite.”91 Contrary to Anderson, Renan argues that nations have their beginning and their end, which is the effect of the willful agreement between free individuals. Individuals must forget many things in order to build unity. The unity which binds them is based on forgetting. Entering a nation and remaining a part of it connects will and forgetting. One is willing to be a part of the nation only in forgetting the fact that the will could prevent from giving consent. The daily plebiscite is based on such a forgetting. Forgetting is bidirectional

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in Renan’s argument; it models the memory of the past and the present’s relation toward the past: “National identity was thus maintained through a circuitous process in which the present was seen to be a continuation of a past, that was itself a construction of the present!”92 The circle of forgetting and memory ensnares the nation in a myth of a given and homogeneous unity. By connecting forgetting and a daily plebiscite, Renan put the latter in the function of preserving the continuity between the past and the present. Nevertheless, Renan gave the plebiscite the function of contesting and negotiating the will of the nation. It is true that, as Bhabha argues, Renan, through the link between forgetting and the daily plebiscite, synchronizes the past and the present. Following Bauman’s93 thesis on the ambivalence of modernity, the contingent character of the contract between individuals is naturalized into the ethnic community stemming from the necessary bonds between its members. The daily plebiscite has the dual function of opening and closing, de-synchronizing, and synchronizing the nation. THE CASE AGAINST ANDERSON’S AND DELEUZE’S CONCEPTS OF FORGETTING: DE-SYNCHRONIZING MEMORY AND FORGETTING Anderson renders Renan’s phrase in French doit avoir oublie as “already having forgotten” in English. Anderson mentions traumatic events from French history that French people both remember and forget. In order to link the past and the present, French people must both remember the past, which they take as common, and forget anything that would threaten to interrupt that link. Or, in other words, they must disable any element that would discourage or weaken the will for being a nation. French people forget anything that would prevent establishing such a link or that would jeopardize the already achieved unity. Anderson comments on events that Renan took as examples of the dichotomy of remembering and forgetting. According to Anderson, Renan uses these examples in a way that conceals a distinction between victim and perpetrator to show that their conflicts were “fratricidal wars between fellow Frenchmen.”94 In a recent comment on Anderson, Westover95 analyses the role of forgetting in the creation of the ethnic fiction of the nation as an extended family. Although the United States is founded upon a social contract, its individuals are, nevertheless, nationalized as affiliates. Their contractual relationships, established upon willful agreement, are transformed into kin bonds. To Anderson’s examples of the fraternization of contractual relationships and turning them into familiar relations, Westover opposes Frost’s poetry, which

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restores the traumatic background of that ethnicized national kinship. Instead of accepting an appearance of familiar harmony, as it is distorted by forgetting, Frost encouraged remembering unsettling historical events. According to Westover, Frost avoids remaking American Indians from the victims of massacres into fellow brothers.96 It is not simply that establishing democracy is coupled or even redoubled with the oppression of others and the forgetting of that oppression. The first level of forgetting is how diversity is extinguished in the name of one’s own unity, and then how is that extermination cast to oblivion. Nevertheless, it is not only that the other’s heterogeneity threatens one’s own homogeneity. A proper and yet unsettling heterogeneity needs to be repudiated. The inmost heterogeneity is mislaid and forgotten. Insofar as the first forgetting is an obstacle to remembering, the second forgetting is the limit of memory alone. In the forgetting of forgetting, memory is restored by and through forgetting. It no longer remembers, but it connects with the past itself, considered as the whole of co-existing levels instead of a succession of parts. According to Deleuze, this formulation suggests that the new is swept under the folds of memory.97 On the first level, the nation carries within itself parts jeopardizing its unity. These parts negate unity—they are the non-nation. On the second level, relations precede parts and reconstitute them. Unity is redoubled by the whole, consisting of the relations of heterogeneity which simultaneously order and disorder unity—the whole is a (non)-nation which brings the part into simultaneity. The parts cannot simply either oppose or negate each other since they are relations that repeat various levels of the whole. Relations are synchronized in that way. The future in Deleuze’s account (at least in Difference and Repetition) is too busy in freeing parts from being totalized by succession in order to be resuscitated98 as the co-existing of relations on the various levels of the whole. When Deleuze discovered the “paradox of the present,” he introduced memory as the second synthesis of time that enables the present to pass.99 Just as the first synthesis of time points to the second, so the latter is endowed with the ungrounding effects of the third synthesis of time. Insofar as the second synthesis solves the paradox of the present, the third synthesis of time liberates the second from its own illusion of the pure past.100 Instead of the pure past of the second synthesis, the third synthesis of time stages a time that is itself pure. It is time evacuated from both “empiric” and “mnemic”101 content. In the third synthesis, the unfolding of events within time is replaced with the unfolding of time alone. However, this emptying out of time, its relegation to the status of pure form, is still subsumed into the role of disillusionment from the pure past or from the past itself. It is true that forgetting should not be confined to a simple impediment or disturbance of memory. The principal object of forgetting is the pure past itself, which itself must be forgotten in order for something new to come about. Deleuze describes the third synthesis in terms

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of a rupture, and yet, it establishes “a secret coherence”102 between unequally divided halves. The self appears as the harbinger of the new, giving birth to multiplicities that devour and engulf it.103 We will reiterate the argument by appealing to Deleuze’s notion of transcendental memory.104 The exercise of transcendental memory consists in recalling what is empirically out of the grasp of reminiscence. Starting from the distinction between transcendental and empirical memory, Deleuze draws the distinction between essential and empirical forgetting. One cannot recall an object or event that is empirically forgotten. With essential forgetting, a past being switches to the very being of the past or memorandum. With this shift, forgetting turns out to be indispensable for the exercise of memory in its attaining of the pure past instead of recollections. Forgetting ceases to be an obstacle for the memory; rather, memory is pushed to its extreme. As Deleuze later remarked, the folded (forgetting) is not unfolded (remembering) directly, but only as of the impossibility of this direct unfolding. Every unfolding creates “new foldings.”105 In an excellent commentary, Jay Lampert concludes: A repetition that has nothing to repeat takes something other than itself as its predecessor. When one event takes another event not as a model, then it takes it as something to increase. Hence, Napoleon comes after Caesar just to the extent that Caesar never took place, or to the extent that Caesar takes place simultaneously with, and not before, the Napoleon that replaces it. Let us emphasize this point: Napoleon is after Caesar only if Caesar is not before Napoleon.106

In that case, repetition is limited to repeating something that has never been. The strange and the familiar are identified in the repetition belonging to the second synthesis of time. Instead, the asynchronous simultaneity of memory and forgetting is related to the third synthesis of time, which is concerned with the future. According to Deleuze, the future is that which is repeated. The future as the third repetition brings indeterminacy and necessity into the object’s coming about. It is not an object = x that is repeated; instead, it is its being an object = x, what makes it unknown, unprecedented, and yet not sudden and precipitate, that is repeated. As Lampert pointed out: If what one wants is to repeat a virtuality and not a model, it is easier to repeat a future event, which is by nature indeterminate, than to repeat a previous event whose facts are given. The earlier event has to be made earlier by the force of its successor’s attempts to resist identifying with it.107

In that case, we submit the future to the exemption of the earlier event from the irreversibility of succession in order to break with the chronological

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illusion, which conflates temporal succession and causal sequence. In that way, we get the future as an unpreceded and unpredicted event, impossible to be derived from previous events. However, this being the case, the future considered as new is reduced to something that cannot be anticipated and calculated. This is the tension present in Deleuze’s argument. He emphasizes that the third repetition makes laws of the first and second repetition ineffective.108 The present is a repeater, and the past as repetition itself is the condition, but the future as repeated is independent of any agent and unconditioned by the past since neither of these two returns. Instead, in the future, as the third repetition, the centrifugal “repetition by the excess” is “itself the new.”109 Yet, in the same paragraph, Deleuze argues that “the absolutely new itself, is, in turn, nothing but repetition.”110 Repetition defined as the new itself, and the new itself defined as repetition is not the same thing. Deleuze assigned the future to be the third, centrifugal, excessive repetition with the role of interrupting any link with preceding events; too much weight is put on the stripping of events from their sequential character. The new is subsumed into renewing or reviving what preceded it.111 This line of interpretation is obvious from two of Lampert’s conclusions, from which we extrapolate two corollaries: a) Napoleon is after Caesar only if Caesar is not before Napoleon. b) The earlier event has to be made earlier by the force of its successor’s attempts to resist identifying with it. Napoleon’s not coming after Caesar depends on Napoleon’s undoing of Caesar as his predecessor. In terms of b), Napoleon, as a successor, resists identification with the earlier events in order to make them earlier. He is a successor to the extent that he makes his predecessors, thereby remaining determined by them. The future’s being unconditioned by the past and independent from the present is subordinated to releasing both of them from conditioning and determining function. Lampert did not just interpret Deleuze; rather, he showed how Deleuze subordinated novelty to reliving the past and the present. Essential forgetting indicates an object which is yet to be constituted, instead of recalling the already constituted object which is surrendered to empirical oblivion. The yet-to-be-remembered becomes the sole object of memory. It means that memory and forgetting are simultaneous without being synchronized. In their asynchronous operation, they simultaneously produce both excess and lack. While memory produces a constantly ousted and evicted object, forgetting creates an empty place that withdraws from being held. This is the breaking of the circle of the never-seen and the already-recognized,

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in the sense that they cease to be the same, although they “signify the same thing.” While memory creates a new object that does not yet have a place, forgetting empties out a place for an object that is still to come. Although the creation of a placeless object and a vacant place is simultaneous, they never synchronize in the way that a new object would occupy a vacant place. Hence, there cannot be a merging between the unfolded in forgetting and its folding in memory. REMOVING PUNCTUATION: AGAINST (POST)-YUGOSLAV SYNCHRONIZATION Anything that could threaten a nation is not simply excluded from it, but it is simultaneously included through exclusion and transfigured into part of the collective memory. The past is reshaped, and what was previously seen as the conflict between different ethnic, race, class, and religious groups is now presented as an internecine slaughter. The nation is the relation among individuals who foreclose and repudiate anything that could threaten and undermine the sense of belonging. It may be the reason why Renan argues that the nation protects itself against conflicts that could be enticed by ethnic, racial, and religious differences. While Renan tries to debunk the essentialist notion of the nation established through prior identities, he still naturalizes the contractual concept of the nation through the process of remembering through forgetting. Although a member of a nation is endowed with the will to connect with others, that will is dominated by the individual’s duty to forget. Therefore, one does not deal with a Nietzschean active forgetting, in which one repudiates identity, affirming thereby its anonymity and opening oneself to de-synchronized meanwhiles. Renan, on the contrary, puts forgetting in the function of collective identification.112 Elicited by obligation, the will is no longer seen as arising from the freedom of individuals, but rather as an expression of the nation. In this way, the daily plebiscite scrutinizes national issues only to confirm them as exceptions that prove the rule. As Bhabha contests Renan, by introducing the obligation to forget, Renan concealed the violent roots of the nation. According to Bhabha, Renan, by subordinating the will to duty, changes the “pastness of the past,”113 just as Anderson synchronizes the “meanwhiles” of anonymous individuals by subordinating them to the clock and the calendar time. Clock and calendar display the same time for any member of the nation. Due to preventing access to the meanwhile and the pastness of the past, cultural difference is suppressed. I will attempt to restate my thesis on the asynchronous character of the nation through Bhabha’s notion of cultural difference. Bhabha defines

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cultural differences through Benjamin’s notion of the insurmountable foreignness of languages that hovers over every act of translation. Foreignness does not only arise in translating between languages; it is not only external as the unfathomable foreignness of the translated language. It is also internal because it seizes the translating language itself. However, the translation does not only occur between languages; rather, it also transpires within the language. In the act of translation, it is realized that translation begins at home because language uncovers its internal foreignness. It turns out that translating or source language needs a translation. I think that Bhabha did not push his important argument to that point.114 Translation starts with the questioning of givenness and the immediacy of the source language. Using the notion of cultural difference, he stresses how cultures are irreducibly different, or untranslatable, between themselves. He wanted to resist pluralism, multiculturalism, a tolerant and harmonizing acceptance of polarities that—at the end of Renan’s daily plebiscite—ends up with the universalist offset and alignment. For Bhabha, imperial nations exclude the postcolonial other, molding it into the repressed and hidden background of their constitution. Accordingly, the imperial dominator forecloses its internal otherness to maintain the unisonance of its own temporal rhythms. Yet, the temporal synchronicity is syncopated by the postcolonial past.115 What if, after reclaiming its own difference, the postcolonial other constitutes its own sameness based on this, once subversive, claim? What if an excluded minority, in the name of its own incommensurability between cultures, constitutes a commensurability with itself, mimicking its imperialist dominator? By affirming its own opaqueness and untranslatability, the postcolonial other becomes transparent and translatable to itself. However, the same operation of splitting that was undertaken between two entities needs to be introjected into entities. The incommensurability and untranslatability between cultures are to be reiterated within cultures. It comes as a truism that cultures are incommensurable between themselves. However, the less trivial fact is that the cultures curb their internal incommensurability.116 To recapitulate, we can now distinguish three types of relations between literary and political communities. In the first type, literature is taken as an expression of a political entity or an idea. In the second type, literature stands for what is excluded from an established and already formed political entity or identity. In the third type, literature represents the incommensurability of differences, its irreducibility to prior identities. All three types are effective in the works of (post)-Yugoslav literature(s). Just as the notion of Yugoslav literature was equated with the project of establishing the Yugoslav state, so the notion of (post)-Yugoslav literature capitalizes on its dissolution. However, the notion of (post)-Yugoslav literature poses a redemptive attitude toward both the former Yugoslavia(s) and

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conflicts over Yugoslav literature. It painstakingly attempts to resume and revise the failed projects of both the state and histories of literature. The two histories of Yugoslav literature that were discussed perform synchronization of precisely this internal incommensurability. Moreover, this synchronization constitutes what is “Yugoslav” in (post)-Yugoslav literature. Insofar as one studies the literatures, cultures, history, or politics of Southeastern Europe, it is necessary to find a way to resist such harmonization and alignment of temporal dissonances. This could be one of the conditions of attaining the “post” in and of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav. NOTES 1. In the parts of the argument when the respective notions of Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures are not discussed, we will use the term South Slav literatures in order to avoid any theoretical and ideological commitment. 2. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 20–21. 3. This conceptual cluster consists of the notions “Yugoslavism,” “Yugoslavity,” and “Yugoslavdom.” For a recent and lucid discussion of this cluster, see Drago Roksandić, “Yugoslavism before the Creation of Yugoslavia,” pp. 29–65, in Yugoslavia from a Historical Perspective (Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, 2017), pp. 29–38. 4. See Wachtel, “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš”; Rakočević, “Post-jugoslovenska književnost?”; Beronja and Vervaet, Post-Yugoslav Constellations and Matijević, “National, Post-national, Transnational.” 5. See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 117–162. I draw my argument from the distinction between functions and concepts and their respective relations to the virtual, see pp. 155–161. 6. Op. cit., p. 158. 7. Ibid., p. 112. 8. See a recent discussion on the difference between universalism and universality in Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 31–32. 9. As noted above, this does not make (post)-Yugoslav temporality ahistorical. The (re)injection of temporality into history makes the latter abstract but only to the extent that time is abstractly immanent to history itself. History without a temporal consciousness provides nothing but a historicist’s petrification of timelines, and time flows into the consecutive train of accidents. 10. Which means, as we have argued, thought as (post)-Yugoslav. In this regard, the (post)-Yugoslav is independent of both the establishment and breakdown of Yugoslavia. The conceptual cluster of “Yugoslavism,” “Yugoslavity,” and “Yugoslavdom” is a component of the concept of (post)-Yugoslav. 11. Both histories are written in two different political and economic orders of the first and the second Yugoslavia. Popović wrote his history of Yugoslav literature immediately before the establishment of the first Yugoslavia as a constitutional

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monarchy which defined itself as a capitalist society. Barac’s book was published soon after the establishment of second Yugoslavia as a socialist state. Barac’s argument could be compared with his earlier books such as Illyrian Book (Ilirska knjiga) (1931), Literature and Nation (Književnost i narod) (1941), and The Greatness of the Small (Veličina malenih) (1947). Popović’s book could be related to An Overview of Serbian Literature (Pregled srpske književnosti) (1909), his talk Yugoslav Literature as Totality (Jugoslovenska književnost kao Celina) (1922), and An Essay on Yugoslav Literature (Ogled o jugoslovenskoj književnosti) (1934). 12. Antun Barac, Jugoslavenska književnost (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1954), p. 5 (“Izraz ‘jugoslavenska književnost’ zajednički je naziv za literature Srba, Hrvata, Slovenaca i Makedonaca, okupljenih u Federativnoj Narodnoj Republici Jugoslaviji”). 13. Barac, Jugoslavenska književnost, p. 5. 14. Ibid. 15. “(. . .) u mnogo čemu išle različitim putovima” (Ibid., 5). 16. For a discussion of the relationship between the literature and the myth of a lost community see Zrinka Božić Blanuša, “Nacija bez subjek(a)ta. Kakva je poststrukturalistička koncepcija nacije?,” Filozofska istraživanja 30, no. 1–2 (2010): 311–321, pp. 319–320. 17. Historians of literature will surely find “philological evidence” to support this peculiar classification. 18. Barac, op. cit., pp. 99–296. 19. Pavle Popović, Jugoslovenska književnost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), p. 49. 20. Popović, op. cit., p. 49. 21. Popović, op. cit., p. 49. 22. Popović, op. cit., p. 49. 23. Popović, op. cit., pp. 27–30. 24. Popović, op. cit., p. 50. 25. Popović, op. cit., p. 50. 26. Popović, op. cit., p. 50. 27. For a recent account on Primož Trubar’s role see Marko Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2019), pp. 4, 94–95. 28. Popović, op. cit., p. 51. 29. Popović, op. cit., p. 51. Both expressions remind of Goethe’s concept of world literature that is established in the passage from national literatures. An interesting thesis about Yugoslav literature as patterned on world literature is developed by Pavletić, Protivljenja. He underwrites the homogenizing aspect of the concept of Yugoslav literature and he suggests replacing it with the “literature of nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia (književnost naroda i narodnosti Jugoslavije)” (Pavletić, Protivljenja, p. 59). Even in this proposal, the constitutional feature of Yugoslav literature, emphasized by Barac, is obvious. However, Pavletić attempts to foreground the dissociative aspect of the definition that Barac supersedes. Pavletić (op. cit., pp. 62–69), in his polemics with Sveta Lukić, introduces the notion of a “world perspective” that is to be assumed regarding literature. It seems that Popović tried to develop

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both the worldly and integralist aspect of the concept of Yugoslav literature. However, he engages a worldly perspective in order to empower the integralist tendency. 30. Popović, Jugoslovenska književnost, p. 69. 31. This parallel commits both notions of Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literature to “renew terrorism of one over the many” (Biti, Tracing Global Democracy, p. 166), which is present in both Goethe’s Weltliteratur and in world literature as its contemporary heir. We will consider this matter below. 32. Synchronization constitutes immanentism, as it was defined by Jean-Luc Nancy in the seminal book La communauté désoeuvrée (1983). In a recent study on Nancy’s concept of community, Ignaas Devisch (Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 39–40) apostrophizes the wars in former Yugoslavia as examples of immanentism. Zlatko Kramarić (Jugoslavenska ideja u kontekstu postkolonijalne kritike (Zagreb: Meandarmedia, 2014)) analyzes elements of immanentism in the idea of Yugoslavity. Darko Suvin (Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (New York: Brill, 2015)) tried to extract a politics of Yugoslavism that would be anti-immanentist. 33. Parts are linked while remaining independent; there is an inextricable connection between autonomous parts. In the novel, totality does not close on itself in an organic totality (Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984), pp. 66–67). Lukács considers the novel as a literary form of transcendental homelessness that is linked with time (op. cit., p. 107), through which foreignness pervades over its world and heroes. Therefore, the realist novel cannot be a ground for the synchronization of meanwhiles, as it was used in Anderson’s thesis regarding the imagining community (See Imagined Communities). By having in mind Adorno’s and Jameson’s reading, Lukács’s conceiving of the whole and its temporality reminds on two of Deleuze’s notions of the whole elaborated in his books on cinema and on the concept of the fragmentary whole introduced in the last book co-written with Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991). 34. The inside and outside are inconceivable outside their perpetual knotting. For the figure of knotting regarding power-knowledge in Foucault: “Difference without exteriority or precedence. Resisting identity as much as opposition, with their difference as their hinge, power and knowledge inhabit each other, parasitize each other, get inside each other-but into a double inside without outside. Neither one, without the other. Each is the other’s inside: such are the comings and goings of their coincidence, their ‘immanence’” (Tom Keenan, “The ‘Paradox’ of Knowledge and Power: Reading Foucault on a Bias,” pp. 5–37, Political Theory 15, no. 1 (February 1987): 15). 35. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 20. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 238–239. 37. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 80. 38. Bauman (1993) argues that the nation, after it takes the place of the organic community, uses a technique of enforcing friendship among alien members of a society and then it redefines friends as authentic members of the nation.

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39. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 96–97. 40. Popović, Jugoslovenska književnost, pp. 80–81. 41. Popović, op. cit., p. 81. 42. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, p. 105. 43. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 230. 44. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” pp. 42–57, trans. Martin Thom, in Becoming National: A Reader, eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 44–46 and 49. 45. This is a lecture delivered by Ernest Renan at the Sorbonne in 1882. The concept of forgetting in its relation to history is introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche in Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen) (1876). In his later writings, Nietzsche sharply criticized Renan (see On the Genealogy of Morals, 1886 and Anti-Christ, 1888). Nietzsche’s earliest critique of Renan can be found in the first meditation dedicated to D. Strauss. This is the line of reception of Renan that I will not follow in this study. I am after the thread of Bhabha’s critique of Anderson’s interpretation of Renan’s notion of forgetting. I will also try to keep up with the recent analyses of Anderson’s position regarding Renan (Jeff Westover, “National Forgetting and Remembering in the Poetry of Robert Frost,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 213–244; Martha Langford, Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 196–197; Vincent J. Cheng, Amnesia and the Nation History, Forgetting, and James Joyce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 43–50). 46. As a parenthesized and hyphenated thought of “post.” 47. Popović, op. cit., p. 50. 48. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 166–167. 49. Biti, Tracing Global Democracy, p. 166. 50. Biti, op. cit., pp. 174–175. 51. Ibid., p. 175. 52. See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, introduction by Gordon L. Miller (Cambridge: MIT, 2009). From the variety of accounts of Goethe’s possible parallels between biology and aesthetics, see Jean Petitot, Morphologie et esthétique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003). 53. See Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” pp. 420– 427, in Selected Non-Fictions, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, ed. Eliot Weinberger (London: Penguins Books, 1999). 54. For the most recent reading of the relationship between Goethe and Borges, see Dominique Jullien, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (New York: Palgrave, 2019). 55. Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” p. 427. 56. Borges, op. cit., pp. 426–427. 57. Danilo Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” in Sabrana djela Danila Kiša – Knjiga osma, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Podgorica: Narodna knjiga, 2010), pp. 50–51.

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58. Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” p. 427. 59. Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” p. 200. 60. Kiš, op. cit., p. 200. 61. Kiš, op. cit., p. 208. 62. This is Kiš’s example (op. cit., p. 208), Bergsonian in its consequences. 63. Danilo Kiš, “Gorki talog iskustva.” in Sabrana djela Danila Kiša – Knjiga petnaesta, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Podgorica: Narodna knjiga, 2010), p. 182. 64. Kiš, “Gorki talog iskustva,” p. 305, and the same phrase on p. 300. 65. Kiš, op. cit., p. 305. 66. Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” p. 200. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. If anxiety haunts anyone, it is not the writer, but the writer’s interpreters. 70. Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” p. 200. 71. Dychotomy was developed by Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 24–40. 72. Kiš, “Gorki talog iskustva,” p. 305. 73. Danilo Kiš, “Bašta, pepeo,” in Sabrana djela Danila Kiša – Knjiga četvrta, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Podgorica: Narodna knjiga, 2010), p. 133. 74. In this regard, there is a deep ambiguity in The Anatomy Lesson. Insofar as Kiš subverts any patrimony, both national and literary, he claims fatherhood over A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Only in upholding himself as the progenitor can he contest every other father(ship). 75. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998). 76. Deleuze, Essays, p. 84. 77. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 88. 78. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 89. 79. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 85. 80. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 26. 81. Anderson, op. cit., p. 26. 82. Deleuze, Essays, p. 77. 83. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 229. 84. Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” p. 45. See also: “The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion” (Renan, op. cit., p. 52). 85. Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 19. 86. See Renan, op. cit., pp. 47–48. 87. Renan (op. cit., p. 45) himself uses the term “convergent facts” from which the nation is produced. 88. Renan, op. cit., p. 49. 89. See to a certain extent the prophetic remark on the distinction between “/t/ he primordial right of races” and “the national principle” regarding the progress of European civilization (Renan, op. cit., p. 47).

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90. As we shall soon consider, Anderson refers to this paradox. See: “In effect, Renan’s readers were being told to ‘have already forgotten’ what Renan’s own words assumed that they naturally remembered!” (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 200). 91. Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” p. 53. Consider the full quotation: “A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life” (Ibid., p. 53). 92. David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 33. 93. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). 94. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 200. 95. Westover, “National Forgetting and Remembering,” pp. 213–244. 96. Cheng (Amnesia and the Nation History, pp. 46–47), as an example of failed collective amnesia, mentions the 1990s wars between the former Yugoslav republics. In his analyses of James Joyce’s short stories and novels, Cheng demonstrates forgetting as the privilege of dominant parts of society. The oppressed, on the contrary, try to survive the oblivion of their pre-colonial past. As Cheng (op. cit., p. 51) concludes, this memory lapses into the nostalgia for a primordial immediate community. In that way, actuality is blocked in its opening to heterogeneity and multiplicity. Renan puts forgetting in the function of safeguarding identity, instead of enacting its transformation. Nietzsche gave forgetting a transformative role in its relation to history. 97. See in Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988): “Only forgetting (the unfolding) recovers what is folded in memory (and in the fold itself)” (p. 107); “Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside and, as such, forces every present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory: forgetting is the impossibility of return, and memory is the necessity of renewal” (p. 108). 98. As Deleuze argues, the revolutionaries of 1789 must first resuscitate Romans in order for something new to come about. They repeat in order to install a novelty (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 90). 99. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 79–83. 100. See, Deleuze, op. cit., p. 85, and p. 88. 101. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 89; p. 111. 102. It is unrhymed, divided by caesura on unequal sides and still those unequal halves cohere. The self in the last instance becomes equal to unequally distributed halves (Deleuze, op. cit., p. 89). 103. Deleuze, op. cit., pp. 89–90. 104. Deleuze, op. cit., pp. 140–142. 105. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 105. 106. Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 93. 107. Lampert, op. cit., pp. 93–94. 108. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 90. In relation to the third, the first and second repetitions are introductory. 109. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 90.

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110. Ibid. 111. Recently, similar reading is offered by Lampert, “Problems with the Future.” 112. Langford (Scissors, Paper, Stone, p. 197) pays special attention to this distinction. She stresses that in Anderson’s interpretation forgetting changes the perspective on events. 113. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 230. 114. Beganović (“Jezik, povijest, geografija. Egzil i emigracija u postjugoslavenskim književnostima,” Sarajevske Sveske, no. 45–46 (2014): 41–65) contests this as a monolingual paradigm enticing the prejudice of translatability. Both the histories that I discuss here acquire this paradigm. 115. “He /Gibreel Farishta/ is the history that happened elsewhere, overseas; his postcolonial, migrant presence does not evoke a harmonious patchwork of cultures, but articulates the narrative of cultural difference which can never let the national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 241). 116. It is a typical postcolonial gesture mentioned already by Frantz Fanon. The poet Tin Ujević also admonishes against an interiorized postcolonialism in his prose writings during 1918. However, he underpinned this gesture in quite an unusual place – in a public letter addressed to Benito Mussolini, who was the editor of journal Il Popolo d’Italia those years. On the thesis about possible counterfeiting of Ujević’s letter, see Radoslav Dabo, “Pesnik Tin Ujević,” Sodobnost 23, no. 7 (1975): 605–611, p. 610.

Chapter 5

Remembering the Future Narration and Fabulation in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novels The Ministry of Pain and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

LIFE-STORY: FIGURATION VERSUS FABULATION Dubravka Ugrešić’s early work appears as a postmodern undermining of literary conventions.1 Ugrešić’s novels disrupt2 boundaries between high and low genres, fiction, and history, and displace hierarchies between levels of narration, simultaneously opening and complicating the structure of the text. However, her work resists such easy classification. Postmodernist fiction raises ontological questions regarding the modes of being of world and text.3 The primary focus of Ugrešić’s metafictional literary procedures toggles between the connected and yet discordant realms of life and story. Ugrešić replaces the ontological issues of postmodernist fiction with a vitalist question of life. For example, to create prose, it is necessary to strike a pose; only in the “jaws of life” can one create stories; life makes one imagine fantastic creatures and the plots of fairy tales. Life is not figured by growing into a story; it becomes the life through such conversion. Instead, a life itself is the force that spawns stories.4 Life is a fabulation5. Through the fabulative tendency of a life, the dividing line between truth and fiction, epistemology and ontology, narration and reality is detached into a seam where these zones trail into each other.6 In Ugrešić’s novels, narrator and narration are replaced by storyteller and storytelling, separating art from the archaeological functions of “personal process memory and collective ideal of commemoration.”7 Instead of performing a commemorative function, with its distinction between the imaginary and the real, the fabulation turns places and objects into parts of the whole that is yet to become. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Bergson contrasts closed and open societies. Various kinds of myths and fantasies are fabulated 131

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in closed societies to include one group of individuals and exclude another. In closed societies fabulation is “a central component of religion.”8 Fabulation fosters the socializing function of religion.9 Understood that way, fabulation is opposed to élan vital as the creative aspect of open societies. But fabulation does not only ensure the cohesion of society.10 Deleuze reconceptualizes Bergson’s notion of fabulation, emphasizing its superseding of truth and the real. Following Bogue’s interpretation, fabulation is a switch-point between artistic invention and the political creation of a missing people: The goal of fabulation is to break the continuities of received stories and deterministic histories, and at the same time to fashion images that are free of the entangling associations of conventional narratives and open to unspecified elaboration in the construction of a new mode of collective agency.11

Later, Bogue connects fabulation with Deleuze’s syntheses of time, assigning to fabulation the clinical function of overcoming traumatic disorder in culture.12 Burton links Bergson’s earlier argument from Creative Evolution (1907) with the version of fabulation developed in Two Sources of Morality and Religion. He argues that the notion of fabulation avoids a mechanistic and teleological reduction of life.13 These reductions follow from an attempt to reconcile the biological notion of instinct with the epistemological notion of intelligence. Therefore, Bergson insists upon the sharp distinction between the psychological faculties of perception, memory, imagination, and fabulation.14 While psychological faculties are derived from the intelligence, fabulation stems from intuition. Contrary to narration, fabulation belongs to the third synthesis of time. It reinvents and recreates narratives that have lost their authority over the present and the past to “transcend empirical circumstances.”15 Fabulation engages the “virtual components” of such narratives in “new actualizations.”16 Figuration individualizes; it creates the life of a particular person, while fabulation, by contrast, creates a life—the singular although undetermined passage between a biological human being and the political person. HOMO DUPLEX: FIGURATIVE AND FABULATED LIVES In Ugrešić’s novel The Ministry of Pain (Ministarstvo boli), the topics of exile, memory, and forgetting might be reconsidered in terms of fabulation. The main character of the novel is Tanja Lucić, who taught South Slavic literature at the University of Zagreb. She expelled herself from Zagreb and after breaking up with her boyfriend Igor, started working at Amsterdam University. Tanja Lucić

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evokes the literary convention of realism when she compares herself with the female teacher Branka, a character in August Šenoa’s eponymous realist novel. Ugrešić’s intertextual technique prompts the reading procedures intrinsic to realism, but only to interrupt the reader’s affiliation with their own reality. In literary realism, characters are defined and determined by social, economic, political, national, and gender parameters. In The Ministry of Pain these parameters lose their determining and delimiting capacities. This cracked backdrop of identity rather outlines a “people to come,” a not-yet existing community which oversteps recognizable political and cultural boundaries. In the realist novel, the determining structure is outside the characters, while in The Ministry of Pain, it is ingrained in them. Although the determining structure is placed in the interiority of characters, it is also their exogenous trait. Memory is usually considered as a foundation of personal identity, endowing it with inner continuity, but in The Ministry of Pain the link between memory and identity is interrupted. It is not simply that the characters can no longer approach their memories or connect them with a new actuality. Instead, it is as if someone else’s memories are implanted in them.17 The characters are dispossessed by their memory. Remembrance transmutes into an evasive site of dissolving identity. Characters are compelled to forge links between their memories and the new actuality. Due to the subterfuge of these deceitful connections, memory reinforces the transformation of identity. Ugrešić adopts Baudelaire’s notion of the homo duplex to refer to a new kind of human being: homo duplex is a being with one biography and two lives.18 One life is narrated and figured as biography—the life—while the other life is fabulated. Figured life and fabulated life are in unresolved conflict. The characters in the novel do not belong to the fabulation, which they compulsively concoct. Remembrance is no longer a way to recollect the fragments of their lives; rather, it seeks the faultlines between the fragments. Trauma is enacted on the level of a figured life, while fabulation separates memory and identity. Ricoeur defines the dissociation of memory and identity as the passage from prefigured idem-identity to (narratively) reconfigured ipse-identity.19 But, is it possible to pass from figuration to fabulation? Let us outline Ricoeur’s and Deleuze’s notions of narration and fabulation. According to Ricoeur, time and narrative are in the “inverted interplay of concordance and discordance.”20 Time cannot be intended directly through a constitution of an extension of past, present, and future moments. Time constituting intention is a distension of the soul in which the soul extends the present through memory and expectation. Present, past, and future do not exist as independent dimensions but only as mutual extensions that complement each other. The soul distends itself through memory, attention, and expectation. The present is threefold by extending itself into the past and the future. Discordance emerges “again and again out of the very

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concordance of the intentions of expectation, attention, and memory”21 and “the more the mind makes itself intentio, the more it suffers distentio.”22 However, Ricoeur does not aim to abolish discordance but rather to replace it with discordant concordance. According to Ricoeur, temporality cannot be “reduced to simple discordance,” and emplotment is never “the triumph of ‘order’”23 imposed on heterogeneous parts of a story. Discordance, concordance, disorder, and order are distributed along two slopes that simultaneously converge and diverge. Therefore, the space between discordance and concordance is dilated and expanded, thereby generating the meanwhile which de-synchronizes co-existing slopes.24 Deleuze introduces the transition from narration to story (récit) or fabulation. The story is the third element that intermediates between the crystalline description and the falsifying narration.25 In falsifying narration the form of the truth is replaced with the powers of life. The falsifying narration is not a semiological notion of dysnarrative.26 The system narration-dysnarration contains the creation of the new within the boundaries of exhausted life. Dysnarrative refers to the organic narration, which depends on the movement-image and sensory-motor signs. But, in crystalline narration, aberrant movement cannot be integrated into sensory-motor schema. Moreover, dysnarrative depends on the distinction between fiction and reality, which falsifying narration tends to blur. The story, on the contrary, is related to life that undergoes a metamorphosis. To forge by the falsifying narration is to affirm the power of life and to engender its transformation. The transformative power of life does not abandon the truth; instead, it is attached to creating the new. Such “metamorphoses of life”27 associate becoming and history. The system of fiction-metafiction belongs to the organic regime of the image, and it is superseded by the crystalline system of falsifying narration-fabulation. Therefore, Ugrešić’s prose is irreducible to the framework of epistemology and ontology, which enfeebles life, encloses it within alternating, but pre-given, frontiers between fiction and truth. In the vitalist conception of fabulation, however, one establishes zones of traversals and switch-points between fiction and truth, the subjective and the objective. PALINDROMES: REPEATING DIFFERENTLY The conflict between figurative memory and fabulation dominates the plot of The Ministry of Pain. In Igor’s interpretation of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s fairy tale “Kako je Potjeh tražio istinu (How Potjeh Sought the Truth),28” figurative memory is displaced by fabulation.29 Figurative memory is philological; it would be ineffective without the conception of original memory and its historical reproduction: it creates biography. But what is the originary meaning

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of the memory of Desanka Maksimović, her earlier writing of the Krvava bajka, or her later supporting of the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević? Does this later engagement discredit her earlier fight for freedom and equality for all the nations of the former Yugoslavia? How to differentiate between the one and the other Desanka, between her two lives? Did she ever fight for freedom and equality? What if Desanka Maksimović is a personification of the transmogrification of the second Yugoslavia? However, the more profound question is not the (im)possibility of the differentiation between memories. Rather, it is the question of how to remember without being the subject of recollections. In the frame of figuration, the separation between personal identity and memory is a traumatic event. By contrast, fabulation turns that separation into a new, asubjective form of life that links history and time. That life transpires in history, but which is not of history.30At that point, The Ministry of Pain shifts into the “low” genre of a love story between Tanja Lucić and her student Igor. Moreover, if Tanja represents the figurative conception of memory, Igor represents its fabulative counterpart. In “The Palindrome Story (Palindromska priča),” Ugrešić31 introduces the figure of the palindrome to the field of cultural critique. A palindrome is a word, sentence, or verse that remains the same if read backward. Ugrešić questions the sameness of the reading: “The palindromic language has been let out of the bottle like a genie. Like a mirage, truth becomes two, the same.”32 Contrary to a palindrome as the repetition of the same, Ugrešić argues for the palindrome as fabulation; to read in a “palindrome way” means to capture the same life as dissimilar, to fabulate or to repeat differently. Before the academic semester starts, the Head of the Department for Slavic languages and literatures, Cees Draaisma, warns Tanja Lucić that one of her students has lodged serious complaints about her lectures. The student condemns Lucić for deviating her teaching from the syllabus. At this point, it is obvious that Yugoslavian contemporary everyday mythology is a forbidden memory. Tanja decides to focus her teaching on the theme of the return in Yugoslavian literature. She changes her lectures, but she still retains the figurative conception of memory: So here I was, packing my students’ refugee suitcases again. It was the same thing I’d done during the first semester with one difference: this time the suitcase contained no contraband. I was familiarizing them with their own literary family, their forebears. The examples I selected amounted to a kind of biography of fictional heroes.33

However, Igor, in his essay, elaborates on the fairy tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth.” Igor’s paper claims that the fairy tale deviates from the law of genre since it ends with Potjeh’s death. On the other hand, the fairy tale, through that

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deviation, grounds the truth of exile: one should not leave the homeland. Just as Potjeh should have stayed with his old grandfather on his land, so an exile should never have left the homeland.34 According to Igor, being an exile too, the point of the fairy tale is that remaining in exile is a defeat: The message is clear: “exile” equals defeat—Potjeh wanders through the woods in a total fog; he has amnesia—and the return home equals the return of memory. But it equals death as well: no sooner does Potjeh’s memory return than he falls into a well. So, the only triumph of human freedom resides in the ironic split second of our departure in this, that, or some third direction. For the sake of that inner truth, Mažuranić strayed from the genre and wrote a “bad” fairy tale.35

Igor confronts his conception of memory with that of Tanja Lucić. After class, Igor and Tanja go to her small apartment to discuss his paper. Igor gets angry and says to Tanja: And that memory game you forced on us! In a few years, all that nostalgia crap is going to be a big moneymaker. The Slovenes were the first to cash in on it: they’ve got a CD with Tito’s speeches on the market. Mark my words. Yugonostalgia will be coming out of our ears. And if you want to know what I remember most about our former homeland, what I remember is that the local motherfuckers wanted to put me in uniform and pack me off to war! To safeguard the achievements of their fucking country. What fucking country? The whole kit and caboodle were mine. You know the song: “From Vardar in the South to the Triglav in the North. . . .”36

If the past is the origin of identity, then memory should reproduce and restore the past. But Igor proved with his paper that memory and the past are not related to each other as an original and its reproduction. In this part of the novel, the fabulative conception of memory takes on its figurative opposite. In the essay “Confiscation of Memory (Konfiskacija pamćenja),”37 Ugrešić borrows the concept of musealization from the cultural theoretician Andreas Huyssen.38 Huyssen claims that the museum is the main paradigm of the contemporary experience of time. However, Ugrešić claims that only Americans have the privilege of musealizing their culture and creating an appearance of the “eternal present.” Americans, Ugrešić argues, are unable to experience loss: The rich market of nostalgia seems to wipe out nostalgia; it appears that real nostalgia for something implies its real loss. But America does not know loss, or at least not in the sense that Europeans do. Thus, through the process of commercialization, but also through the elasticity of an attitude to recollection which is constantly changing (make—remake, shape—reshape), nostalgia is transformed into its painless surrogate as the same as its object.39

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Nations of the former Yugoslavia do not fabricate memories; rather they attempt to erase them. If Americans confiscate things from the flow of living experience only to turn them into objects of memory, nations of the former Yugoslav republics sequester their memories to revamp history. Ugrešić introduces the Proustian motif of the madeleine as she compares the situation in Yugoslavia to the purloined madeleine as the key to memory: On a different, and more elegant, level, this could also be the story of Proust who was forcibly deprived of the “key” to his remembrance, a madeleine. At first glance a trivial thing, an ordinary madeleine. However, in the Balkans that “key” is taken by force from its owners.40

However, characters in The Ministry of Pain hold the key (recollections of the former state), but since there are no doors to be opened (the state transmogrified into a war zone), the key turns out to be useless. Within the figurative framework, the memory is conceived as the key to Tanja Lucić’s life. But her life is disassembled and doubled into erratic pieces metamorphosed into scraps. For Tanja, memory is a figurative way to recover the loss of a homeland. However, the confiscated object of memory cannot be retrieved. As already seen in Igor’s “reading” of Brlić-Mažuranić’s fairy tale, remembering is not the moment of return, but the moment of death, since Potjeh dies at the very moment he summons the memories of the homeland he had left. The fairy tale about Potjeh enfolds the narrative structure of The Ministry of Pain. The fairy-tale-as-genre is replicated in Tanja and Igor’s quarrel as well as in Uroš reciting of Desanka Maksimović’s Krvava bajka and Uroš’s suicide. Igor accuses Tanja of musealizing memories. The truth—as Igor interprets it through the lens of his reading of Brlić-Mažuranić’s fairy tale—of the memory of the Yugoslav people is the oxymoronic Krvava bajka. Igor accuses Tanja of telling fairy tales about the cultural history of Yugoslavia instead of disclosing and disenchanting that history as it ends in bloodshed. Only Uroš, like Potjeh, understands the truth of memory: memory is deeply enmeshed with guilt—“the stigma of his father.”41 Memory is an attempt to repress guilt as the ground of culture and history. HISTORY AS FORGOTTEN CRIME: ASSISTANTS FROM FAIRY TALES In Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), Freud42 argues that culture is founded on primordial parricide—sons killing their violent primal fathers. To forget what they did, sons institute the memory of their dead father in taboos as a form of laws and rigorous prohibitions. That profane order—the incest taboo and

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taboo of killing a member of the same tribe—is secured in the sacred sphere by the totem animal, which stands for the dead father. Sons are trying to recall43 their crime by subjecting themselves to a totem: “Totemism helped to smooth things over and to make it possible to forget the event to which it owed its origin.”44 Freud claims that totem religions contained an attempt at self-justification: “If our father had treated us in the way the totem does, we should never have felt tempted to kill him.”45 However, the dead father is more powerful than when he was alive. Freud’s portrayal of sons’ fierce breaking with the state of “self-incurred immaturity” displays how their submission to the alive father of the horde is converted into obedience to its totem. Instead of liberating themselves, sons strive to take the place of their father. They simultaneously become masters and enslave themselves to their dead fathers, consecrating them in the totem. This point is underscored in Ricoeur’s contrapuntal reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism: Religion is not only repentance, but it is also the disguised remembrance of the triumph over the father, hence a covert filial revolt; this filial revolt is hidden in other features of religion, principally in the son’s efforts to put himself in the place of the father-god.46 It is because he is forever helpless like a child that man remains stricken with longing for the father. Faced with nature, the man-child conjures up gods in the image of the father.47

Igor accuses Tanja that she defines cultural memory as a totem to which her student has to be subjected instead of disclosing the crimes incorporated into the cornerstones of culture.48 Ugrešić’s notion of the key can be compared to Freud’s understanding of the totem: The “key” only comes to the surface many years later, when there is no longer anyone who would know how to open the door with it, and when the confiscators too are long gone, when it has become a meaningless thing.49

The key is an “irrelevant thing,” a distorted and clumsy form that things assume in oblivion. The key-totem disables deliverance. The interiorization of the violent father into the law co-exists with the inversion of external coercion into the internal mechanism of consent through the establishing of the Super-Ego. Therefore, fetters are the most vividly conjured up in the consciousness of the most fervent deliverer. Eradicators, through the totemkey, summon up the force they once deposed and the law from which they have withdrawn themselves. Yet, the overthrown father and the suspended law persist in the seemingly liberated community. Hatred convolves from the

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external relationship between the primal father and his son to the interiority of sons themselves. Ugrešišć’s key-totem, nevertheless, cannot break in the circle of love and hatred. This ineptness of the key-totem bothers the characters of The Ministry of Pain. The crux of Freud’s argument is not about human history, or even human prehistory, it is rather about prehuman history, about the primordial and immemorial event to which no human being could ever testify. Humanity is irrevocably determined by the immemorial event which oversteps the order of affirmation and negation: The sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that action. [. . .] an emotional process, such as might have developed in generations of sons who were ill-treated by their father, has extended to new generations which were exempt from such treatment for the very reason that their father had been eliminated.50

In reading Freud’s history it should be constantly kept in mind that an animal functions as a totem. The anthropology of religion usually explains the totem as a rudimentary stage of mythology. However, for Freud, totem religion contains both the taboo of killing an animal and the ritual of the totem meal, whose primary function is to remember the primal killing of the father: Thus, it became a duty to repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of the totem animal, whenever, as a result of the changing conditions of life, the cherished fruit of the crime—appropriation of the paternal attributes— threatened to disappear.51

The thing that is not be surrendered to oblivion is incarnated in the totem animal. In remembering, human beings are embedded within the safe and intimate limits of human history, but forgetting transgresses the limits of humanity. Freud’s political theory renounces the irreversible passage from the state of nature to the civil state, from the primal horde to society. Nature survives as the totemic animal, and the primal horde is converted into the clan of brothers. However, in The Ministry of Pain, brothers band together through hatred, which is more cohesive than the previous submission to the primal father. In the essay on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin argues that in Kafka’s stories animals incarnate the forgotten. Benjamin refers to totem cultures as: To Kafka, the world of his ancestors was as unfathomable as the world of realities was important for him, and, we may be sure that, like the totem poles of

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primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took him down to the animals. For Kafka, animals are the receptacles of the forgotten.52

In depicting the role of assistants in Kafka’s novels, Benjamin rejects the possible impact of human hierarchy in Kafka’s work because the world of myth is “incomparably younger than Kafka’s world.”53 Animals stand for the guilt that is transmitted to humans from an immemorial time that is simultaneously condensed into the immediate instant.54 Generations are seized within this eternal instant. One of the strangest distortions bound up with guilt is “Odradek,” that is, the form “which things assume in oblivion.”55 Odradek inhabits places entangled with predetermined guilt, such as attics, staircases, or halls. Ugrešić recalls the Kafkian image of “the attic which has been locked up for years.” She describes forgetting as a resurfacing of the once-confiscated key haunting generations whose links with their primal confiscation were severed a long time ago: It was like discovering something one had always been vaguely aware of but never considered important, like finding a mole at the same spot on one’s skin as on the skin of one’s parents or children or grandchildren.56

The recurrence of the key-totem as a blind spot will be described in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg as senility. Parricide affects generations that did not kill the father, and that know nothing about the primal crime. Because there is no one left who would be guilty of this immemorial confiscation, such generations do not inherit memory, but rather accountability for a crime that might have happened a long time before their appearance.57 Just as the dethroned father endures in the eternal instant, so the ruined community continues to wield power through the key-totem over its apparent eradicators. The confiscated object of memory cannot be retrieved. No reminiscence can suppress the hatred inherent to the community. Ugrešić represents, then, a key-totem as an “archaic inheritance”58 that haunts present generations, echoing Freud’s evocation of a parricide still operative in generations that cannot know about that crime. While for Freud, that remnant leads to neurosis in contemporary humanity, in Ugrešić’s work, the key-totem acts as a phantom limb: “Confiscated memory behaves as a disabled body that at intervals suffers the syndrome of the ‘phantom limb.’”59 The key haunts those who are not able to find the door it opens. Since there is no one responsible for the ancient confiscation, new generations do not inherit its memory, but rather the responsibility for the crime of a confiscation that was committed long before their appearance: What stimulates nostalgia, that prick of indistinct emotion, is just as compels as the topography of our memory. Just like the mechanism of the dream, where the

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oneiric encounter with an insignificant and harmless object can provoke a quite disproportionate emotion, so are the mechanisms of nostalgia unpredictable and hard to read. Nostalgia is not subject to control; it is a subversive activity of our brain. Nostalgia works with fragments, scents, touch, sounds, melody, colour, its territory is absence, it is the capricious corrective to adaptable memory. The strategies of its activity are deceit, capriciousness, subversion, suddenness, shock and surprise. (. . .) The field of its activity is the unconscious, the chemistry, the workings of the heart, its mechanisms are often close to the phenomenon which neurologists call the “phantom limb.”60

The “hetaeric,” prehuman world61 is evoked in The Ministry of Pain by blending of the genres of novel and fairy tale, which is expounded in readings of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” and Desanka Maksimović’s “Krvava bajka.” The fairy tale has the role of the first tutor of humans.62 Fairy tales depict a victory over the powers pertaining of myth. Ugrešić attempts to recover and foreground the archaic, premythological layer of human experience by introducing fairy tales into the genre structure of The Ministry of Pain. Prehumanity crops up in the form of interminable guilt that demands remembering, without leading to an object or event. Brlić-Mažuranić terms this archaic layer of human experience as the time long ago or immemorial time (davnina). Due to this time immemorial condensed into the instant, sons are condemned to the guilt of their fathers. They perpetuate the transitional state of the adult-child, where the father endures as a phantom limb. Adult and child abduct each other. Two becomings, man’s and a child’s, are coeval without being congruous. They are unhinged to extricate eternity and the instant.63 POTJEH’S LESSON ON DEMENTIA: MEMORY AS FABULATION We will turn now to the importance of Brlić-Mažuranić’s fairy tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” for The Ministry of Pain and how the two texts deflect each other. That “hetaeric” world, exonerated from the stigma of fathers, is developed in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” is the first story in Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s Priče iz davnina (Tales of Long Ago) (1916). After the release of Tales of Long Ago, critics and readers entered a debate about the source and the origin—or “genesis”64—of the fairy tales. Although Brlić-Mažuranić explicitly acknowledges the “external connections” with Slavic mythology and the “internal connections” with folk literature, she nonetheless challenges the notion of genesis: “I have been often asked about the practical genesis of the stories. However, the word ‘genesis’ seems to me too scholarly. It

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destroys the idea of ‘storytelling.’”65 Genesis can be defined as the relationship between external and internal connections. Nonetheless, storytelling is opposed to genesis. From the standpoint of “external connections,” the Tales of Long Ago is “rendered (sačinjene)”66 from “names and characters from Slavic mythology (imena i likova iz slavenske mitologije).” As Brlić-Mažuranić further contends, “no scene, no plot, no resolution and no tendency are espoused as complete in our mythology (/n/i jedan prizor, ni jedna fabula, ni jedan razvoj, ni jedna tendenca u ovim pričama nisu nađeni gotovi u našoj mitologiji).”67 Names and characters are appropriated from Slavic mythology, but other elements had to be reinvented.68 Scenes and plots cannot be simply adopted from the Slavic mythology since it is “an assembly of (. . .) confused hunches, a field of ruins from which only names protrude as perpendicular columns.”69 In that respect, Slavic mythology is determined within the framework of narrative reconstruction. On the other side, every narration based on names and characters inevitably forges a tale weaved from “confused hunches, a field of ruins.” Genuine Slavic mythology is drawn from this tale. Both Slavic mythology and Tales of Long Ago enter a simultaneous and yet asynchronous formation. Fabulation is the creation of tales that undercut both the generic and the genetic drive of mythology. Instead of being simple rearrangements and reorderings, the fabulation-tale recovers mythological scenes or plots as incomplete events.70 Brlić-Mažuranić recounts a mystical experience that she had on a lonely winter evening in her house. She heard sounds that she first mistook for knocking at the door. She uses the onomatopoetic expression “Kuc! Kuc! (Knock! Knock!).” Nobody answered when she asked, “Who’s there?,” so she repeated the question, which remained unanswered. Brlić-Mažuranić writes: With some secret fear, I stepped into the large dining room when suddenly: a joyful burst, a blow, and a small explosion! A pine log in the large fireplace had burst—from the small doors of the fireplace, they rushed out to meet me, like a swarm of tiny stars. And when I spread my arms to catch that living golden gift, they darted up to the high ceiling [. . .] and they were gone.71

The question, therefore, is how to grasp that strange experience that begins with an uncanny feeling and then turns into a kind of a revelatory joy—an ecstasy in catching the disappearing sparks which vanish at the very moment of their explosion. The indeterminable character of Slavic mythology cannot be complemented with the author’s creation. It amounts to the claim that Tales of

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Long Ago is doomed to “the destiny of Homer’s poems (sudbinu Homerovih pjesmotvora)”72 because Tales of Long Ago matches with Homer’s poems in the “accelerated tempo of 100:1 (ubrzanim tempom 100:1).”73 Barely ten years since the Tales of Long Ago was published, readers were already inquiring: “Who wrote those stories? Did people do it? Folk people? Or an individual (Tko je napisao te priče? Da li narod? Puk? Ili pojedinac?).”74 Brlić-Mažuranić compares the elusive authorship of Tales of Long Ago, stirred by its seemingly archaic themes and motives, to Homer’s question. At that moment, she “unpretentiously (skromno)” declines the “analogy” between Homer’s poems and Tales of Long Ago. Nonetheless, she “will receive” the analogy “after a few centuries, gratefully and joyfully as its greatest gift (nakon nekoliko stoljeća zahvalno i radosno primiti kao najveći njezin dar).”75 The time of long ago is not only quantitative; rather, it can be felt or sensed intensively at the pace of 100:1. This “death of the author” is the effect of the internal connection of Tales of Long Ago with “folk poetry (narodno pjesništvo)”: From this point of view my stories are not mine; they are, instead, stories and foretelling, hopes, believes, and reliance of the whole soul of the Slavic tribe. (. . .) On that behalf, and from this side, I gladly accept for the name of the author to pass unnoticed. (S toga gledišta moje su priče zaista ne moje, nego su one pričanja i predviđanja, nade, vjerovanja i uzdanja cijele duše slavenskog plemena. (. . .) U to ime i s te strane radosno prihvaćam da se ne zamijeti ime autora.)76

As the Mother, Brlić-Mažuranić is the protagonist from “Šuma Striborova (Stribor’s Forest)” who refuses to take the chance of rekindling her youth, renouncing authorship to become the medium for the indeterminable voice of the “soul of the Slavic tribe.” The narration dangles between the position of the poet, who obsessed and besotted with the muses, discovers a story, and the rhapsode that transmits the voice. The narration can be infinitely bloated by confounding different conditioned and conditioning levels. This compound is a tale that is vague and barely audible knocking on the present through which reverberates immemorial time. When Stirbor tells the Mother to “cross the fence” so that she will “at once regain her youth,”77 she asks what will happen to her son. Stribor replies: “He will remain in the present time, and you will go back to your youth! You will know nothing about any son!”78 Šuma Striborova is enchanted “until it should be entered by someone who preferred his sorrows to all the joys of this world.”79 Mother said to Stribor: ‟But I would rather abide in my misery and know that I have a son than that you should give me all the riches and happiness in

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the world and I forget my son.”80 Even though the son abandoned and betrayed his mother, she resists being separated from him, refusing even the possibility of the rejuvenation offered by Stribor. Yet, oblivion becomes an essential part of conveying tradition. It is no longer important to save tradition because it can be grasped from the youth which ceases to remember the legacy of their forebears. The continuity between predecessors and successors is relinked by the discontinuity within their memory. Successors cannot retrieve any ties with their ancestors. Tradition cannot be directly relived. Instead, ancestors can be summoned indirectly by their successors’ recollecting how their forebears gave up their tradition. Primeval times—prehistory, the long ago—are attained through “storytelling and foretelling, hopes, beliefs, and the trust of the whole soul of the Slavic tribe.” The before and after are incongruous coevals. As Svarožić reveals to Potjeh after failed attempts to recall Svarožić’s order: I thought you were wiser than your brothers, and there you are the most foolish of the three. Here you have been racking your brain and calling on your wits to help you for a year and a day so that you might remember the truth; and if you had listened to your heart when it told you on the threshold of our cabin to turn back and not leave you old grandfather—when they, you silly boy have had the truth, even without wits.81

Tradition—described as the “confused hunches, a field of ruins”—emerges from oblivion—from “storytelling and foretelling, hopes, beliefs and the trust”—gives birth to what is forgotten in the future. From one story, other stories ensue, “without any individual genesis (bez ikakve zasebne geneze).”82 This return of tradition from the future explains the asynchronicity which enables Brlić-Mažuranić to announce her authorial death from the time-shift when she will be dead for a long time. She imbues her present existence with the impending time of her enduring absence. This bloats her present within the temporal delay in which her death does not coincide with herself. It is no longer her death, but a death detached from any authorial personality. Therefore, Brlić-Mažuranić not only accepts the death of the author. Moreover, she disavows claiming authority over both her death and the oeuvre. Brlić-Mažuranić simultaneously addresses her son and renounces the authorship over the Tales of Long Ago, thereby replacing the paternal model of authorship with its maternal antagonist. While in paternal authorship, “trade reigns (zanat [je] zacario),”83 its maternal opposite instigates creation without the originator84: “I caress you and the beautiful autumn evening invites me outside into nature, into this inexpressibly beautiful story whose genesis, thank the Lord, we search for in vain (Grlim Te, a prekrasno jesensko veče zove me van u prirodu, u tu neizrecivo divnu priču, kojoj hvala Bogu zaludu tražimo pronaći genezu).”85 Debating the genesis and authorship

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of Tales of Long Ago puts critics and interpreters in the position of Potjeh, who sought for the truth in vain. Indicatively, Potjeh, who was engrossed by his thoughts, loses his life by plunging into the depths of a spring. Svarožić instructs both Potjeh and the reader that truth does not always reside within the depth of thinking and its reflections. Both son and reader must withdraw from Potjeh’s commitment to wisdom to access the truth.86 In this maternal model of authorship, the author refuses to impose herself as the authority, deflecting the reader’s search for the truth elsewhere.87 BrlićMažuranić pops up in front of inquisitive readers just as Svarožić suddenly appears before Potjeh. The maternal model of authorship affirms a maternal conception of tradition that refrains from being an authoritative relationship toward its descendants.88 Maternal tradition repudiates the infliction of patrilineage over one’s offspring.89 Brlić-Mažuranić says that she was reading Afanasjev’s Vozzrenija drevnih Slavjan na prirodu, in which she found the legend of the domaći (brownies)—little people jumping out like sparks from a hearth. Brlić-Mažuranić points out that the modern age is not divested from the experience of the extraordinary or the supernatural. When she explains “storytelling” as a kind of capturing of the pieces of surreal experience through Slavic mythology, Brlić-Mažuranić immediately remarks: “It is a pity to unravel something for which you cannot find a real and primal origin (Šteta što se ovako raščinja nešto, čemu ipak pravi i prvotni začetak naći ne možeš).”90 Brlić-Mažuranić reconsiders storytelling as fabulation, or as a creation of something missing and without origins. Just as Potjeh had to follow his heart, so the storyteller has to “write something straight from our heart.”91 The storyteller does not transmit heritage or tradition; rather, (s)he extricates it from conveying an already fixed identity. “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” is a story about giving up the search for “a real and primeval origin.” This origin is immemorial because it is surrendered to oblivion since it surges from the senility of youth (Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh). Assistants, as figures of the forgotten, are not here to “refresh” memory and resume remembering. On the contrary, they sustain the unforgettable character of the forgotten: But this formless chaos of the forgotten that accompanies us like a silent golem is neither inert nor inefficacious. On the contrary, it influences us just as much as our conscious memories, although in a different way. It is a force and almost an apostrophe of the forgotten that, although it can neither be measured in terms of consciousness nor accumulated as a patrimony, insistently governs the hierarchy of all knowledge and all consciousness. What is lost demands not to be remembered and fulfilled, but to remain forgotten or lost and therefore, for that reason alone, unforgettable. The assistant is at home in all this.92

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Three brothers, Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh, are grandsons of the old man Vjest and they went into a deep forest. While going further into the woods, they invoked Svarožić. Svarožić appears before the brothers and takes them on a flight around the world. After the journey, Svarožić forbids the brothers to leave their grandfather and commands them to take care of him until he dies. Bjesomar, the enemy of Svarožić, overhears the command. The old man Vjest establishes a Sacred Fire which repulsed the forces of darkness. Bjesomar sends bjesovi (goblins) to make the brothers forget what they were told by Svarožić: “They [bjesovi] squeaked and they squawked, they jumped and they romped; they were a pack of harum-scarum imps, no good to anybody and no harm either, so long as a man did not take them into his company.”93 When the brothers return home, they tell their grandfather that they met Svarožić and that he gave them an injunction. Ljutiša and Marun are inveigled by their Bjesovi to lie to their grandfather Vjest, instead of admitting that they forgot Svarožić’s order. Nevertheless, Potjeh attempts to resist his bijes and he says to Vjest that he forgot Svarožić’s order. He will leave home and stay in the hills until he remembers what Svarožić’s words were. Potjeh in a temporary abode starts to recount the day he met Svarožić. While Ljutiša and Marun take the bjesovi into their company, Potjeh disobeys his imp. But the bijes constantly disturbs and distracts Potjeh in his effort to recall Svarožić’s words. While Potjeh was away, Ljutiša and Marun decided to kill their grandfather by burning the house. Meanwhile, Svarožić resurfaces before Potjeh, who takes back the vow made to Svarožić, that he and his brothers will never leave their home. On his way back home, Potjeh leans into a spring to drink some water, but he falls into well and drowns. Potjeh’s bijes starts to cry and screams for help. Ljutiša and Marun hear the Potjeh’s bijes. They arrive at the well and see Potjeh’s coat and bijes in great sorrow and pain for the loss of the good and just Potjeh. Ljutiša and Marun return to their home(land) and save the Sacred Fire, keeping the demon powers away from humankind. However, humankind is saved from Bjesomar with the help of his demonic assistants, the bjesovi, and Potjeh’s aberrant brothers Ljutiša and Marun, who are bewitched and inveigled by bjesovi. Human beings are upheld by their nonhuman adversaries. Therefore, the fairy tale has its denouement neither in the demonic domain of Bjesomar and his bjesovi nor in the sacred domain of Svarožić and Vjest. Instead, the fairy tale is solved in the zone of toggling between Ljutiša and Marun on the one side and Potjeh on the other. Just as Potjeh plods into the demonic domain, so his brothers protuberate into the sacred antipode. The brothers find their redemption while leaving and killing their grandfather as they ally with the bjesovi and forget Svarožić’s injunction. However, in abiding within their youthful senility the brothers coevally join and disjoin Svarožić’s order. These trajectories interweave, albeit they do not confound each other. At the point of their intersection, they engender a seam which is the space of their abutment. The seam brings those trajectories

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into an incongruous contact. “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” is lavished with such seams, such as the coat, glade, rocky ledge, and spring. The Ministry of Pain is depleted of such hinges with swinging temporal directions and timeshifts. The teacher Tanja describes the toggling of her students between the parts of time with which they sustain links with their people and they reject any attachment to them. Simultaneously, the students shift between times when they “accepted their fuzzy collective identity” and when they “rejected it in disgust.”94 These timelines are coeval, albeit incessantly ramifying. Svarožić did not tell the brothers to remember his words but to act following them. To heed his order is to surrender oneself to forgetting. The deity requested adjacency to his words, not cleaving to them. The descendants inherit the dementia of and from their forebears. Youthful senility forgets its ancestors as well as their forgetting. Ljutiša and Marun, who kept Svarožić’s word forgotten, without trying to remember it like Potjeh, became the keepers of the Sacred Fire, establishing the dividing line between demons, humans, and gods. The assisting figures in that redemption were the bjesovi. What was the key that suddenly resurfaced before the professor Tanja Lucić and her students; who was that key assisting figure? Not Tanja, of course; and not even Igor, albeit his interpretation of “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” discloses Tanja’s hypocrisy and the reinvigorating kitsch of nostalgia. The presupposition of Igor’s interpretation of the fairy tale was another fairy tale—Maksimović’s Krvava bajka, which was recited by Uroš. Uroš, entangled in the contradictions of memory, is the demonic power that assists the characters in The Ministry of Pain in releasing themselves from their origins, enabling them to pass from a traumatic return of the repressed to an eternal return of what is yet to come. Similarly, the fabulation does not belong to the loyal descendant Potjeh; on the contrary, it belongs to the traitors Ljutiša and Marun, as the inadvertent keepers of the Sacred Fire. To remember is to fabulate a community as it never really was. The characters of The Ministry of Pain should strip off Potjeh’s costume and transform themselves into Ljutiša’s and Marun’s disguises of apostates and turncoats. The characters of The Ministry of Pain should get rid of the “common past”95 to redeem ancient times from the stigma of the fathers: It is not a child but a father that is being beaten.96 The redemption of ancient times is, in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, presented as freeing old age from the idea of longevity; that is, from a nostalgic and musealized relation toward the past. GIVING BIRTH TWICE: THE ALLIANCE OF PARTHENOGENETIC PROGENIES Deleuze and Guattari liberate the earth from the territory in order to disentangle the autochthonous from a particular territory.97 The autochthonous no

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longer thrives on native soil.98 Instead, it delivers soil from being indigenous and genetic, recasting it into the earth. Following this thread, we will consider how the characters in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg are depicted as foreigners who counterfeit the missing bonds between autochthones.99 Moreover, the becomingautochthonous depends on entering into relations that have never existed before. David discovered his forgotten roots and he “became a secret ally”100 with Pupa. David was described as “the child of a different culture and different age” and he “had succeeded in solving the puzzle”101 of the lost foundling. The direct connection between Pupa and Asja has been broken and David could have had never met Pupa. The descendants who almost forgot their roots retrieved the links between generations. Forgetting becomes a vehicle for the transmission of tradition. Is there any other way to reconnect old age and youth? The narrator describes Pupa’s drifting away on a lounger as sliding down to the bottom of her memory. Pupa’s descending into the depth of memory is described as a Moebius loop.102 Pupa straightened out the circle between herself and her daughter Asja: Aaron’s father died in 1952, the same year that Pupa came out of prison, and his mother died in 1960. A little later same year, Asja Pal, married Michael Thompson and four years later she gave birth to a little boy, David, and then to a little girl, Miriam. Asja had never been to Yugoslavia, nor had she ever wanted to go. For her Pupa was a monster, a woman who abandoned her child to join the communists. Pupa’s second husband, Kosta, died in 1981. Their daughter Zorana studied medicine and got a job in a Zagreb hospital.103

The second problem of inheriting was described in the relationship between Pupa and her daughter from another marriage, Zorana. The circle of anger and guilt between Pupa and Asja was prolonged into the relationship between Pupa and Zorana.104 Asja and Zorana are two of Pupa’s daughters who do not know each other. Yet, despite their mutual anonymity, two daughters share in hatred toward the mother. Beba and Pupa are inept mothers. Whereas Pupa abandons Asja, Beba is too possessive toward her son Filip. The foreign Chinese girl Wawa, who had also been abandoned, recovered the lost link between Beba (mother) and Filip (son). Pupa, Asja, and David on the one side, and Beba, Filip, and Wawa on the other, represent two complexes of relations toward tradition and the past. The first complex is expropriative and the second is appropriative. Inasmuch Pupa expropriates Asja, Beba appropriates Filip; motherhood is too weak in Pupa’s case and too strong in Beba’s.

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In the paternal model of tradition, the father is the transcendental principle remaining outside the succession of descendants. He is an originary and immutable identity which is reproduced by descendants as his copies. Deleuze calls this naked repetition, in which the repeated term is expelled from the succession. Deleuze opposes clothed repetition, in which repeated term is included in the series, to naked repetition. The originary term of naked repetition is replaced with the virtual object (object = x): “What is displaced and disguised in the series cannot and must not be identified, but exists and acts as the differenciator of difference.”105 What is repeated is not an object, but the difference which is differentiated in itself every time it is repeated. The character of Wawa can pronounce words by shuffling their sounds. Wawa creates anagrams. The past could be reversed by devising anagrams; it is not the return of the same, but of the different. When Kukla states the sentence expressing stereotyped gender roles “Mum makes lunch, dad reads the paper,”106 Wawa juxtaposes the opposed terms “mum” and “dad” in an adjacency without adherence: “mumdad.” In “mumdad,” the terms are inextricably linked without ceasing to separate from each other. Wawa says that “mumdad” was Filip. Like Baba Yaga, Filip possesses the traits of both sexes. Wawa’s reversing the order of words makes new meanings. However, the rearranged elements do not simply change their positions, but their identities are also transmuted as they engender a new whole. Pupa, Kukla, and Beba are both bad wives and mothers. Their failed relationships are important for defining the maternal relationship between the past and the present. Being a bad wife refers to detaching from the paternal model of tradition as the reproduction of the same. Both infant and adult events influence each other: “How can it provide a model for it, when all its effectiveness is retrospectively received from the later present?”107 Deleuze argues that two presents are not successive; rather, they form a series that are coeval to a virtual object (object = x). The repetition of one present in another (infancy in adulthood) occurs in the coexistence of two series related to a virtual object. An accident from infancy retroactively affects the adult. In material repetition, the succession of the adult scene is an imitation. Yet, in clothed repetition, the childhood accident is the event, a dark precursor, which both displaces and is displaced between the infant and adult series. It means that an adult event is not simply a disguise in which an infant event resurfaces. The childhood event is, instead, the paradoxical element whose effects are autonomous from the empirical succession of presents: “There is no question as to how the childhood event acts only with a delay. It is this delay, but this delay itself is the pure form of time in which before and after coexist.”108 Clothed repetition is no longer derived, no longer secondary in relation to the originary term; on the contrary,

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resemblance and similarity between scenes or between stories from infancy and adulthood is the function of an internal difference in the childhood event itself.109 However, originality is displaced from one term to the difference itself, since it ‟alone is originary within a system.”110 In the eternal return only difference could be designated as an origin, and due to the originary difference, difference in itself, childhood events return, but not as the same ones that were repressed. The adult story could be a disguise of the infant story, but only if the latter simultaneously appears as the disguise of the first. The two stories are outside the succession of time and the relation between model and copy. They are two divergent stories of “before” and “after,” which “unfold simultaneously,”111 without reproducing each other, or privileging one story over another. This is how stories become equal, but their equality is a function of difference itself, which is not the difference between terms with already established identities. Adult and childhood stories are constituted by repetition and disguise. Deleuze and Guattari introduce a “childhood block”112 in opposition to a childhood memory. The childhood block is an egg or body without organs which is not before or after the adult; instead, it is concurrent with the adult. As it exits the consecutive order of lineage, the child is redefined “as the germinal contemporary of its parents.”113 Pearson114 defined the coevality transpiring between child and adult as a germinal life that does not belong to an origin but to becoming. Germinal life is not evolution or progression from child to adult; rather, it is a becoming-child which is ‟adjacent to the organism and always under construction.”115 Both forms of expropriating and appropriating motherhood are considered to be aberrant—the “dark side of motherhood.” However, inept motherhood switches from the genetic to genital, from the native to the germinal. Genital or germinal motherhood is liberated from the paternal model of inheriting in which the mother receives the imprint of the father’s model and reproduces it in a string of offshoots. David is a grandson who lost the link with his ancestors and Wawa is an adopted girl without blood ties connecting her to Filip and Beba. Both David and Wawa are foreign elements which establish the link between the past and the present. The family could not be preserved by repeating the same; on the contrary, it is saved by repeating differently, through a genital propagation that obliterates clear lineages. It is not the preservation or revamping of an already existing family. Instead, it is to invent a family that does not yet exist. This missing family is a germinal community that propagates its multipronged multitude outside the lineage. The germinal replaces the native. Old age cannot attain rejuvenation or rekindling by being administrated, managed, and medicalized. Old age is, for political and economic governmentality, conceived as a debased form of life. Longevity is the naked

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repetition of the same. In the paternal pattern, old age is maintained through various forms of medical and cosmetic procedures. On the contrary, the maternal pattern of old age is genital, instead of being genetic. Being-old is different from becoming-old. Kozeny says that, contrary to the belief of our forebears, people never learn anything from history: “(. . .) otherwise there’d be no life.”116 When Pupa contends, Kozeny replies: “Many people don’t have the best of experiences with their parents, but they still have children.”117 Is it possible for something old to be creative when it sacrificed its youth for freedom, as it happened to Topolanek’s parents?118 Deleuze describes the extraction of the event from the accident, of becoming from history, as interference of “carnal birth.”119 It is ageing extracted from history and transferred into the order of becoming: “Sometimes one ages in accordance with History, and with it, sometimes one becomes old in a quite unobtrusive event.”120 Pupa abandons her child Asja, but she remains in the homeland, Aaron’s parents forsake their homeland but they take Asja with them. Asja is reluctant to restoring the relationship with her mother, but Asja’s son David resuscitates the family links that never existed. There is no first term in the series which is to be recovered; David repeats something he has never experienced before. The terms in a series, Pupa, Aaron’s parents, Asja, Aaron, David, are displaced in relation to themselves. Asja opens a space that no one holds, just as David and Wawa become placeless occupants. This repetition is clothed since its terms are masks, customs, and disguises lacking any originary predecessors. For instance, Kozeny claims that we are all killers who first kill their parents, and then their children.121 The paternal model of the relationship between the past and the present, and tradition and descendants, is disrupted. David and Wawa do not resemble any model, but from their dissimilarity, there springs a new kind of community based on adjacency without adherence. When Pupa and Beba recover and regain their lost children, only strangers return; the Englishman David returns instead of Asja, and the Chinese girl Wawa instead of Filip. The entrances of David and Wawa are irreducible to the states of affairs belonging to history. The worlds of old age and youth are impenetrable to each other, like Pupa and Asja, Pupa and Zorana, Beba and Filip.122 They form separated series which communicate through strangers such as David and Wawa. The intermediating strangers contrive anagrams that overturn the orders of life and stories. When Pupa’s and Beba’s secrets are discovered, Kukla flips the narrative setup. Life is not something which is to be either represented or recounted as a story: It was all too much, too much, too much even for a very bad novel. But, then again, things happened, and besides, life had never claimed to have refined

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taste. Each of them, Pupa, Beba, and Kukla, had her own life, each of them had accumulated baggage on her way and each of them dragged her own burden after her. And now, all that luggage, piled up in one great heap, had collapsed under its own weight—the suitcase had burst at the seams and all their old junk was out in the open.123

Kukla was the sister of Pupa’s second husband Kosta, but she barely knew anything from Pupa’s earlier life: “The invisibility in which we live next to one another is appalling (. . .).”124 The point is not to render something invisible visible, but to show the very invisibility of the visible. In the Croatian edition of Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, one sentence is omitted from the narrator’s presentation of Pupa’s thoughts regarding her relationship with Zorana. The presentation of Pupa’s thoughts ends with the sentence: “She herself had become invisible.” In the English edition of the novel, one sentence is added: “And only one sweet creature in this world was able to see her.”125 Pupa and Beba were bad mothers and Kukla was an unsuccessful mother. It is important to delimit the maternal model of tradition, elaborated in the previous interpretation of The Ministry of Pain, from the idea of the motherland. To see old age is the perception of imperceptible, seeing the invisibility of the visible in which childhood and old age transform the sequential order into a coevality of ramifying timelines. Such a perception of imperception, like Pupa’s and Filip’s, creates anagrams from one’s biographies, reversing the order of life and story. Old mothers meet bastards and foundlings. Such a reversal is fabulation whose task is not a rebirth but naked repetition or “baking the child properly,”126 which is described as putting the child back into the womb and reinvent its birth. Since childhood is not resuscitated, rebirth is neither carnal nor genetic. To attain longevity, old age should not be rejuvenated. Such a reinvigoration would be a naked repetition of the same. Similarly, the past should not be preserved and left to a nostalgic restoration. Rather, the palindrome is destroyed by being transformed into the anagram. It is a repetition that works by shuffling sounds and crosscutting images. NOTES 1. See Ugrešić’s novels A Pose for a Prose (Poza za prozu) (1978), In the Jaws of Life (Štefica Cvek u raljama života) (1981) and Life is a Fairy Tale (Život je bajka) (1983). 2. On employing the disruption as the literary term, see Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1975).

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3. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 10. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 3. 5. It is a notion introduced by Bergson in Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). Bergson uses the French terms “la fabulation” and “la fonction fabulatrice.” In the English translation of Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion “la fabulation” is translated as “mythmaking” and “mythmaking function” while in the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps it is translated as “storytelling” and “storytelling function.” Both translations do not fully capture Bergson’s expression. Deleuze (Cinema 2, p. 126) develops the distinction between narration and fabulation. Following an earlier argument from The Logic of Sense, fabulation like the event (l’événement) is both “nouvelle” and “conte”; first referring to something just happened and the other to what is going to happen (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 63). 6. See Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: une vie,” pp. 359–365, in Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975-1995 (Paris: Minuit, 2003), pp. 360–361. 7. Deleuze, Essays, p. 66. 8. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), p. 93. 9. Bogue, Deleuze’s, pp. 93–95. 10. Edward James Burton, The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p. 44. 11. Bogue, Deleuze’s, p. 106. 12. See Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 13. Burton, The Philosophy, p. 29. 14. Henri Bergson, “Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion,” pp. 980– 1251, in Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1970), p. 1066. 15. Bogue, Deleuzian, p. 46. 16. Ibid. 17. In commenting upon the nonvoluntary, ongoing, and retroactive impact of unconsciously remembered impressions, Beeckman concludes: “We are what we remember, but we are also the things we are unable to remember. We change as the meaning we attach to memories changes” (See Tinneke Beeckman, “Reinterpreting Freud’s Genealogy of Culture,” pp. 117–135, in Origins and Ends of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychoanalysis, eds. Christian Kerslake and Ray Brassier (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), p. 130. 18. For a recent reading of duplicity in Baudelaire see Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 19. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 20. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 4. 21. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 21. 22. Ibid.

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23. Ibid., 73. 24. This non-coinciding co-existence of melding parts into the whole and their disintegration is described by Lukács: “The irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world’s fragility: inadequate relations can transform themselves into a fanciful yet well-ordered round of misunderstandings and cross-purposes, within which everything is seen as manysided, within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself. Thus, a new perspective of life is reached on an entirely new basis-that of the indissoluble connection between the relative independence of the parts and their attachment to the whole. But the parts, despite this attachment, can never lose their inexorable, abstract self-dependence” (See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 75–76). 25. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 135. 26. Deleuze, op. cit., pp. 136–137. 27. Ibid., p. 142. 28. In F. S. Copeland’s translation from 1924, the name Potjeh is rendered as Quest. (See Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, Tales of Long Ago (Zagreb: Croatian Centre of UNIMA, 2004), pp. 133–167. Although I appreciate Copeland’s intentions in translating the names of Slavic mythological characters, I will avoid using anglicized versions of the names of characters coming from Slavic mythology. 29. Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Telegram, 2008), pp. 189–193. 30. As we shall see, the focus of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2010) is to wrest a life from history to transmute the latter into becoming. 31. Dubravka Ugrešić, “The Palindrome Story,” pp. 20–34, in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (London: Phoenix, 1999). 32. Ugrešić, “The Palindrome,” p. 28. 33. Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 177. 34. I will return to this fairy tale. 35. Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 192. 36. Ugrešić, op. cit., p. 219. 37. Dubravka Ugrešić, “The Confiscation of Memory,” pp. 217–236, in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (London: Phoenix, 1999). 38. Ugrešić refers to his book Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1996). 39. Ugrešić, “The Confiscation,” p. 223. 40. Ugrešić, “The Confiscation,” p. 227. 41. Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 157. 42. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo. Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge, 2004).

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43. I have in mind the equivocal character of the word “recall,” referring both to the act of remembering and the act of withdrawal, the cancellation and return of something. 44. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 168. 45. Freud, op. cit., p. 168. 46. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 242. 47. Ricoeur, Freud, p. 251. 48. Igor accuses Tanja: “You didn’t lecture on the statistics and topography of destruction. No, you stuck to your syllabus. You didn’t stand up for what you believed, not even here, where you are free to say what you please. You totally discredited yourself” (Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 220). 49. Ugrešić, “The Confiscation,” p. 227. 50. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 183. 51. Freud, op. cit., 169. 52. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” pp. 111–141, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 132. 53. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” p. 117. 54. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 130. 55. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 133. 56. Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 178. 57. On the indirect ways of being entangled into violence, see Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). 58. According to Beeckman (“Reinterpreting,” p. 131): “We do not have a hold on the inheritance we received from our ancestors, nor could we fully describe it objectively. But this does not mean that the effect of such originating events does not continue to exert their power. According to Freud, the reappearance of antisemitism is an example: it covers the violent origin of moral and religious law.” Recently, Dufresne claims that the notion of archaic inheritance obliges an understanding of the influence of Lamarck’s thesis on the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” on Freud (See Todd Dufresne, The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 150). Contrary to Beeckman, Dufresne considers Freud’s Lamarckianism to be unquestionable. 59. Ugrešić, “The Confiscation,” p. 231. 60. Ugrešić, op. cit., 230. 61. This “world” is not just before history; it cannot be conceived as a prehistoric world, as the world of the first human beings on earth is usually considered. Freud did not only try to depart from mythology; he even separated his conception of the parental crowd from the Darwinian concept of the primal horde. Since this “world” is somehow outside both our historical and prehistorical time, it cannot become the past, or be sublated (in a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung) into a more developed stage. This “world” is always here without being fully presented or incarnated in the living.

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Rather, it is an undifferentiated life that precedes all actual living and absolutely determines actual living from that insuppressible anteriority. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud describes that kind of life in terms “of a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation” (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), p. 20), or otherwise as “a little fragment of living substance” (Ibid., p. 21). The death instinct does not only refer to an organism’s restoration of its earlier stages. Instead, it points to the absolute anteriority of life over the living. One does not strive to return to any earlier stages but to foreground this absolute anteriority. The saliency of anteriority within actuality is immemorial time—the time that is forgotten and still to be remembered. The death instinct is not simply the urge of an organism to return to the state of being dead. Instead, the death instinct de-synchronizes living by enticing protrusions of life within it. 62. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” pp. 83–111, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 102. 63. The sadist function of the animal is altered in its masochist counterpart: “The animal stands for the primitive hetaeric mother, the pre-birth mother, it is hunted and despoiled for the benefit of the oral mother, with the aim of achieving a rebirth, a parthenogenetic second birth in which, as we shall see, the father has no part” (See Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 61). 64. Term used by Ivana Brlić Mažuranić in “Izjava autorice o postanku ‘Priča iz davnine’ (Author’s Statement on the Genesis of ‘Tales from Long Ago’),” published in 1930 (See Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, Sabrana djela Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić, sv. 4., ed. Marina Protrka Štimec (Slavonski Brod: Ogranak Matice hrvatske, 2011), pp. 165–169). 65. “O praktičnoj genezi Priča pitali su me već često, Meni se riječ ‘geneza’ čini odviše učena. Ona razara predodžbu ‘pričanja,’” Brlić-Mažuranić, “Izjava,” p. 166. 66. Brlić-Mažuranić, “Izjava,” p. 165. 67. Brlić-Mažuranić, op. cit., p. 165. 68. Kos-Lajtman and Horvat argue that Tales of Long Ago cleave to the mythological background more than Brlić-Mažuranić is ready to confirm. They convincingly establish zones of “intertextual contact” between mythology and Brlić-Mažuranić’s imagination (See Andrijana Kos-Lajtman and Jasna Horvat, “Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, ‘Priče iz davnine’: nova konstrukcija izvora i metodologije,” Fluminensia 23, no. 1 (2011): 87–99). 69. “(. . .) sklop (. . .) nesuvislih nagađanja, jedno polje ruševina iz kojeg kao uspravni stupovi vire baš samo imena” (Ibid.). 70. For an important recent reading, see Marina Protrka Štimec, Politike autorstva. Kanon, zajednica i pamćenje u novijoj hrvatskoj književnosti (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada i Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2019). As Potrka Štimec argues: “Ivana Brlić Mažuranić builds new mythology on the ‘names’ of this former world, an order founded upon immense self-renunciation, on the love that goes beyond the borders of its own survival. Only

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in refraining from any personal interest, in the deontology of the ‘ethics of the heart,’ she sees the possibility of common property” (p. 122). 71. Brlić-Mažuranić, Tales, pp. 204–206. 72. Brlić-Mažuranić, “Izjava,” p. 165. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., p. 166. 77. Brlić-Mažuranić, Tales, p. 131. 78. Brlić-Mažuanić, op. cit., p 131. 79. Brlić-Mažuanić, op. cit., p. 117. 80. Ibid., p. 131. 81. Brlić-Mažuranić, Tales, pp. 154–155. 82. Brlić-Mažuranić, “Izjava,” p. 167. 83. Ibid., p. 167. 84. Or, according to Deleuze (Masochism), parthenogenesis, as a second birth, without the father. 85. Brlić-Mažuranić, “Izjava,” p. 167. 86. According to Milanja, due to altering the truth from a mode of life to the form of thinking, Potjeh was detached from the truth by the very act of a quest for it (See Cvjetko Milanja, Alkemija teksta (Zagreb: Znaci, 1977), p. 61). 87. Protrka Štimec (Politike autorstva, pp. 74–77) argues that Brlić-Mažuranić relinquishes the genre borders of the fairy tale to liberate characters from both the “narrative framework” and “the totality of the world (. . .) inundated into an inherited mythological structure” (p. 75). 88. It could be related to the concept a good oral mother from which Deleuze used to disentangle masochism from sadism. 89. Northrop Frye underscores this maternal, nursing, midwifing feature of authorship and conveying tradition: “But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself: her privates he, so to speak. The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind. He is responsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego” (See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 98) 90. Brlić-Mažuranić, “Izjava,” p. 167. 91. Ibid., p. 166. 92. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 35. 93. Brlić-Mažuranić, Tales, p. 137. 94. Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 27. 95. Ugrešić, The Ministry, p. 53.

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96. Deleuze, Masochism, p. 66. 97. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 86. 98. Gasché, Geophilosophy, pp. 22–35. 99. See Dubravka Ugrešić, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać et al. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010). 100. Ugrešić, Baba Yaga, p. 196. 101. Ugrešić, Baba Yaga, 205. 102. Ugrešić, op. cit., p. 178. 103. Ugrešić, op. cit., p. 205, emphasis mine. 104. Ibid., p. 117. 105. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 105. 106. Ugrešić, Baba Yaga, p. 201. 107. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 104. 108. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 124. 109. “The parental characters are not the ultimate terms of individual subjecthood but the middle terms of an intersubjectivity, forms of communication and disguise from one series to another for different subjects, to the extent that these forms are determined by the displacement of the virtual object” (Deleuze, op. cit., p. 124). 110. Ibid., p. 125. 111. Ibid. 112. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 164. 113. Ibid. 114. See Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 190. 115. Ibid. 116. Ugrešić, Baba Yaga, p. 127. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., p. 97. 119. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 150. 120. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 110–111. 121. Ugrešić, Baba Yaga, p. 209. 122. Ugrešić, op. cit., p. 205. 123. Ibid., p. 210. 124. Ibid., p. 205. 125. Ibid., p. 117. 126. Ugrešić, Baba Yaga, p. 266.

Chapter 6

The Floating Middle (Post)modern Time, Transition, and (Post)-Yugoslav Literature

In chapter 2, we discussed the claim that the events of 1989 in Europe are usually perceived as a part of a revolutionary, emancipatory movement. The communist countries of the Eastern Bloc entered a period of transition, and they were expected to accept and develop the values of liberalism, democracy, and the free market. The collapse of second Yugoslavia cannot easily be accommodated to that model of the transition of former communist countries to liberally governed states. The transition through which former Yugoslav republics went through seems like a failure, and it is viewed as incomplete. However, the case of Yugoslavia is not only ominous for the nations of its former republics. Even thirty years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav scenario hovers over the oldest and seemingly the most stable Western liberal democracies. A belief, sprouted on the ruins of World War II, in multinational, multiethnic, multiracial coexistence in the globalized world is now faced with the rise of populism, nationalism, chauvinism, xenophobia, and the cheering of the authoritarian model of governing. The corrosion of the firm ground of liberal democracies, through the processes of liberalization,1 is accompanied by the storming return of socialism, which for the last three decades was written off as a failed political and social project. The Yugoslav scenario incorporates constituents associated with the disruption of the multinational and multiethnic state and the socialist order. The decline of Yugoslavia could be attributed both to the unsuccessful government on its multinational and multiethnic character and to the shortcomings of democratic mechanisms in socialism.2 However, the Yugoslav model of socialism is considered as significantly different from its counterparts in the communist countries of the Eastern bloc. Yugoslav socialism is modified into a governmental technique for managing the tension between integrative 159

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and disintegrative forces in a state that was ineffective in agglomerating the nations of disparate lineages. As we shall see, some authors, such as Andrew Wachtel, claim that the failure of Yugoslavia is an outcome of its ineptitude to evolve into a multicultural society. Every nation, in the conglomerate-state, sought to express its particularity through culture, which thereby fosters disintegrative processes. However, the lesson of Yugoslavia says something else. Its incapacity to develop multiculturalism rather refers to the ineptitude of multiculturalism itself to reconcile the disparateness underlining nations. Both Yugoslav socialism and worldwide capitalism cultivated and delivered self-enclosed elites who deprived the majority of a great portion of their rights. The de-liberalization of Western democracies did not start somewhere else and spread around the globe like a virus. Instead, its epicenter is the Western world itself, which de-liberated its democracies by the erosion of civil, political, and social rights in the ongoing neoliberal transformation of homo politicus into homo oeconomicus. Unitarism and separatism were inextricably intertwined components of Yugoslav political and economic processes. The federal government approached this tension seemingly in a fashion of liberalization by merging the political model of self-determination (samoodređenje) of every nation with the economic model of self-management (samoupravljanje) of every individual worker. At the crest of the resurgence of nationalist resentment during the second half of the 1980s, the attempt of the confederal restructuring of Yugoslavia was supported by advancing economic liberalization and the induction of elements of the free market economy (market socialism). At the same time, the neoliberal transformation of the United States and the United Kingdom was complete. It seemed that self-governing socialism could bend enough to adjust itself to the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy and to accommodate itself to the tools of the free market.3 The homo politicus of Yugoslav self-governed socialism was supposed to be rescued by its transformation into homo oeconomicus. As some authors argue,4 the neoliberal remodeling of the Yugoslav political subject, as a deflection from political to economic categories, came forth in the period of transition. During the transition, the socialist homo oeconomicus was molded into the homo debitor.5 SOCIALISM AND NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATION AS THE DISPOSSESSION FROM THE MIDDLE Branislav Jakovljević6 argues that the Yugoslav national economy passed through a series of transformations spanning the direct-command economy,

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self-management, and associated labor (the indirect-command economy). He considers as turning points the restoration of post-1968 Yugoslavia through the Constitution from 1974 and the Law of Associated Labor from 1976. The enforcement of these documents restructured self-management into associated labor. As a response to the events of 1968, workers were displaced from the position of political subjects. Whereas self-management was based on equality and solidarity, associated labor revolved around the notion of interest. By planting interest at the core of associated labor, the Yugoslav constitutional reform of 1974 heralded a neoliberal transformation: Post-1974 theorizations of associated labor placed interest, and not some other value traditionally associated with proletarian struggles, such as solidarity or equality, at the very core of the ideology of “associated labor.” In doing so, they moved self-management away from the modernist project of the emancipation of labor to bring it closer to the neoliberal idea of its randomization and deregulation.7

In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault separates the subject of right from the subject of interest. Interest is not subsumed to the juridical structure of the contract established between individuals.8The mechanisms of the market are not subjected to the cooperation of the multiplicity of individuals. As subjects of certain rights, individuals always renounce part of their interests when entering such a contract. In the distinction from homo juridicus, interest in homo oeconomicus must be released from the confines impinged by the contract. The political power of the contract is not only contained in the mutual agreement of individuals. They also accept that the contract and its legal properties are represented in the political structure. The governmentality of the contract does not belong to the world of markets and interests. Foucault describes the world of homo oeconomicus as “doubly involuntarily” regarding the unforeseeable flow of things and actions of others who pursue their interest: “So, we have a system in which homo oeconomicus owes the positive nature of his calculation precisely to everything which eludes his calculation.”9 The juridical field of transcendence intervening between particular interests is replaced with the immanent field of the market. In the immanence of the market, every interest is exposed to unpredictable accidents. The action, situation, and benefits of homo oeconomicus are indefinite, uncontrollable, and unable of being totalized by a transcendental sovereign power. By thinking about one’s advancement, without knowing the advancement of others, homo oeconomicus contributes to the collective benefit. But the mutual benefit is in no way established in advance as a goal that is supposed to be achieved; on the contrary, the collective benefit is simply an emergent outcome of separate individual

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enterprises. Foucault switches from theological to immanent interpretations of Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand. Foucault claims that the world of the economy is hidden or obscure to both economic agents and sovereign. In contrast to the political domain, where the hand of the sovereign is visible, the economic domain lacks a visible governor who would conduct individual actions. The sovereign’s government should not intervene in the polyphonic orchestrations of private interests. Moreover, Foucault argues that it is even impossible for the government to totalize the immanent field of private interests and their interplay. The sovereign is powerless in the economic field. In the political domain, individual rights are constrained by the law as represented in the sovereign. However, nothing restrains the pursuit of interests and their fulfillment. The economic category of interest is unleashed from the political category of right, everything about the sphere of interest is potentially unlimited, “There is no sovereign in economics.”10 However, the disappearance of the sovereign and the absence of state intervention does not mean that humanity finally becomes “free” in neoliberalism. Foucault distinguishes between “classical liberalism” and “neoliberalism.” The homo oeconomicus is common to both. In neoliberalism, people become human capital or entrepreneurs of themselves. This neoliberal selfentrepreneur is opposed to the person of exchange as a subject of classical liberalism.11 The neoliberal homo oeconomicus is the entrepreneur of oneself, a person of consumption who can provide satisfaction on his or her own. Neither the classical liberal nor the neoliberal homo oeconomicus is free. Instead, they produce for themselves the condition to be free. One should first produce or manufacture freedom to consummate it.12 One is not free to pursue one’s personal interest, but seeking one’s interests becomes the absolute expression of individual liberty. Freedom is not a notion on its own; instead, it is defined by going after and satisfying one’s interests. Foucault in the lecture from March 28, 1979, concludes that collective interest is invisible and unable to be totalized. Contrary to that, in the earlier lecture from January 24, 1979, he argues that the manufacturing of freedom could pose a threat to “collective interest.”13 Therefore, the production of freedom is correlated to the mechanisms of security. For Foucault, such an interplay of freedom and security is constituted by the panopticism of the disciplinary society. As it is known from Discipline and Punish, the inspector does not need to be in the tower to instill into the inmates the belief of being incessantly supervised. They are subjected to the eyeless gaze or pure supervision without any recognizable entity embodying and exercising surveillance. Anyone could be both the subject and the object of the disembodied gaze of control. One is free but only at the expense of being a medium of one’s subjection. Panopticism is an ambiguous formula of liberalism which “govern[s] without governing.”14

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It announces a power regime different from the disciplinary power described in the chapters of Discipline and Punish that precedes the chapter on panopticism. Panopticism is a diagram of power abstracted from the architecture of the panopticon. It is a diagram of power that could be applied anywhere in the social field, while the panopticon is still a form of confinement. This transformation of incarceration into the diagram is explained in Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies.” If in the disciplinary society the inspector no longer inhabits the tower, in the control society, the whole annular pattern constructed from the tower in the center and the cells at the circumference vanishes. In the control society the “sites of confinement”15 evaporate, and supervision does not diminish the feeling of freedom. With the control society, power becomes decentered and diffused without residing at any palpable point. Human conduct should not be normalized or disciplined; instead, erratic behavior is elicited and encouraged. People are no longer in a factory, but they are engaged in the business all day long. They are immersed in a “continuing education”16 to enhance their business activities. In the control society, people are encouraged to partake in constant self-improvement and self-entrepreneurship. Contrary to the disciplinary regime of power, this modulatory power does not produce objects but objectiles.17 Savat utilizes Deleuze’s distinction between the “fluctuation of the norm” and the “permanence of law,” whereby an objectile, in distinction to the spatial positioning of the object, “assumes a place in a continuum by variation.” Contrary to the discipline, modulation does not produce individuals as stable entities.18 Instead, it generates variations deprived of recognizable forms. While the aim of discipline is a docile and still productive individual, modulation produces functionality.19 The control society no longer operates within the field of the individual. Instead, it appropriates modulations that evade assuming a form and remains outside individualization. By referring to Foucault’s classification of systems of governmentality20 as comprising legal, disciplinary, and security regimes, Jakovljević concludes that post–1974 Yugoslav governmentality alternates between disciplinary and security regimes: In order to regain balance and stability in the late 1970s, Yugoslav authorities employed repressive measures limited to intellectuals and artists (disciplinary modality) while promoting consumerist behavior among the general population (security modality).21

Yugoslav socialism, welding the associated labor and the capitalist conversion to neoliberalism, inheres the concept of interest as its essential trait.22 The production of interest was utilized to convert pre-individual regions,

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existing simultaneously with the individual sphere, into an objectile of control. Control synchronizes these two simultaneous zones and impedes individuals from interaction with the pre-individual zone of subjectivity. By being withdrawn from contact with its pre-individual being, the individual is disconnected from any interaction with other individuals. However, the primary target of both neoliberal and neoconservative socialist23 governmentality is the sole interaction. Neoliberal self-entrepreneurship and socialist self-management were coeval processes.24 Massumi introduces a distinction between two ways of approaching the mutual making of individual and society.25 He argues that the logic of relation replaces the logic of foundation. With the shift from the “once-upon-atime” of determination through individuals, foundationalism is reversed into an “always-already” determination through society. Massumi rejects notions such as hybridity and bordering identity as being founded on already determined in-between relation between individuals. Instead, he proposes a logic of relation that does not merely affirm a “middling being.”26 Nothing is given in advance. With a being already constituted, be it the individual, society, or a hybrid identity, the change would be inexplicable. Therefore, Massumi advocates the “being of the middle” or “the being of a relation.”27 The middle or relation is described as a field of potential, instead of an object. The relation could be catalyzed with various part-subjects (such as a motion of the ball in play). Massumi terms a being of the middle as the part-subject.28 A catalyst as part-subject is itself an effect of relation, creating a field of temporary attraction between players who enter the game by being carried away from their self-interest. Yet, what if relation itself becomes foundational without ever being substantialized? Without losing any of its non-foundational attributes, like indeterminacy and variation, the relation continues to determine and define. One would be determined by something that eludes determination. Massumi dubs this “new power formation” with the “old name” of capitalism. While relationality and belonging without possession have been taken as sites of resistance, they are (re)appropriated by the new power formation of capitalism defined as “the global usurpation of belonging.”29 The notion of a disciplinary society demonstrates the connection between capitalism and individuality. However, with the control society, one is expropriated from the relation itself. As Massumi argues in an earlier essay, “the system is formally undetermined but gives rise to determinations; that it is ungrounded yet grounds.”30 The very being of relation or middling being has been corrupted by communication.31 For Foucault, this usurpation of relation has been exerted by molding the homo oeconomicus. In the governmentality that regulates through the contract, the sovereign still safeguards over the property of individuals. But with the rise of homo oeconomicus, any contractual relationship between

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sovereign and individuals evaporates. With the rise of homo oeconomicus, the state is overcoded with capital. There are only relations, expropriated by circuits of channels, which control by providing opportunities for moneymaking and causing mesmerizing vertigo of consumption. In the second half of the 1980s, the socialist self-managed individual was revamped into a debased correlate of the neoliberal self-entrepreneur. By this transmogrification, the self-managed worker was overhauled into a manager.32 In The Power at the End of the Economy, Massumi rejects the neoliberal fusion of the rational political subject and the economic subject of selfinterest. Markets are reacting more like “mood rings” than like a “steering wheel.”33 Rational decision-making is grounded on numerous irrational and affective factors, such as hope, fear, love, and joy. The rationality of the subject is measured in the affective terms of satisfaction. The rational calculus of probability heavily depends on the “individual’s self-relation to uncertainty.”34 Therefore, Massumi claims, “Even in the best-case scenario, rationality and affectivity cannot be held safely apart.”35 Massumi argues that the rational subject driven by self-interest resides on a level of microeconomic individuality. Beneath this microeconomic level, an infra-economic level is set up as an infra-individual complexity of affective moods that condition rational decisions. Massumi argues that economic power goes beyond the level of individuality, appropriating the level of dividuality, at which the individual is divided by “un-worked-out tendencies.”36 Massumi attempts to avoid the classic sociological hierarchy of collective and individual by connecting infra-dividuality directly to the collective, which pertains to the economic macro-level. Neoliberal ontopower changed affect into the functional equivalent of rationality. Affect and rationality do not simply interact as determined zones of individuality. Rather, they are in intra-action, which “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies.”37 Individuality, as a distinct agency emerges from the intra-action of affects. In the economy, the autonomous subject of interest as an individual agent of choice is replaced by the autonomous act situated at the infra-level of dividuality. Massumi replaces the determinate activity of a cognitive state, statistically expressed, with the bare activity of an affective state of intensities that could only be felt but not thought. It is a doing “done more through me” than “by my I.”38 Massumi defines the entanglement of the calculus of interest with an impersonal and subconscious bare activity as a source of “basic paradox of the economic subject of interest.”39 Massumi investigates how key forms of subconscious choice are engaged and mobilized by neoliberal economics. He proposes to replace the politics of individuality with the politics of dividualism. He adopts Foucault’s notion of the enterprise subject related to its individuality as an enterprise or a goal

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to be achieved. Moreover, Massumi attempts to develop Foucault’s definition of homo oeconomicus as being doubly involuntary.40 The conscious “I,” belonging to the individual, is more a collaborator with bare activity than its actor. The normalizing techniques of disciplinary society cannot produce such a new subject. According to Deleuze,41 the enterprise subject belongs to the control society, which does not relegate individuals to the position of a subject. The enterprise subject is without a fixed place and definite form. However, its self-fashioning and constant self-transformation are “dissipative,”42 resisting any kind of unifying normalization. This enterprise subject is far from being a rational subject making decisions through conscious deliberation. Instead, decision-making is autonomized by being exhibited at the infra-level of affect. The human capacity for modulation is appropriated by transforming of the rational subject of interest into the enterprise subject. Massumi attempts to move one step further than Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault demonstrated that the homo oeconomicus is separated from the liberal governmentality exercised through the contract and the sovereign.43 Massumi, nonetheless, showed that interest is not a zone of immunity to the power exerted from the outside. Interest itself depends on affective moods escaping from rational domination. It is the affect, not utilitarian rationality, that turns individuals into subjects of interest. Homo oeconomicus does not simply mobilize her affectivity to enhance her interests; instead, interest is constituted by affectivity. Massumi’s analysis of neoliberal ontopower coincides with Jakovljević’s analysis of its socialist correlate. Socialist ontopower also avails human affectivity to stir up the pursuit of interest. By employing affectivity, the diligent pursuit of the interest is remodeled into a site of active obedience.44 Both neoliberal and socialist modulations synchronize the simultaneity of affects. They coordinate the pre-individual and individual halves of being and insulate individuals from each other. To counter the ontopower of economy, Massumi returns to Bergson’s notion of intuition. He argues that intuition enables one to modulate the condition of being modulated by control. Intuition separates affectivity from interest. Due to this detachment, the neoliberal subject is not limited to passive modulation by the enterprise regime. By this detachment, they can modulate modulation even though they are not a bearer of their action. Intuition causes “small splashes” in neoliberal undulations. Such singular “small splashes” have the potential for being amplified into waves. These interventions into the disequilibrium of neoliberal conditions are effective on the infra-level of its undulations. Counterpower operates in the field immanent to the neoliberal field of ontopower. According to Massumi, neoliberal ontopower is to be countered

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with ontopower or with intuition as a political act. Freedom is invented45 by contriving the relational field of almost imperceptible actions, tweaks, and gestures. However, since one opposes ontopower only by ontopower, they are indistinguishable. How can one be sure that the enterprise-control regime of power does not already modulate the counter-modulation? How can modulating modulation dodge being remodulated or being the effect of a primary modulation? Massumi has a more elaborated answer in his earlier book Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, in which he developed the concept of the relation-of-non-relation. Intuition relegates us to the domain of art, which enhances “the invention of modes of compossibility among literally excluding contrast.”46 Intuition, like the event in Semblance and Event, “transpires between the differential elements that set the conditions for it.”47 It comes “across differences” and “between the different factors.”48 In The Power at the End of the Economy, Massumi distinguishes the dramatic event of the conjuncture of the right conditions and the ordinary event operating on a modest scale, traversing across non-related singular conditions.49 The instigation of individual flexibility and the reinforcement of social hierarchies are brought into a kind of cloverleaf that bends control and variability upon each other. Both Jakovljević and Massumi assume the reinvention of new modes of individuation as veering disobedience, rebellion, and transgression from the collective to the individual level. Therefore, it is not surprising that Jakovljević terms the management of the self as a new disalienation (d)ef(f)ect.50 Jakovljević considers the case of the artist Goran Đorđević who, in a series of exhibitions, performances, artistic interventions, and artwork staged in the last decade of Yugoslavia (the 1980s), radically put into question the artistic notions of authority and originality. Jakovljević views Đorđević’s enactment of the ephemeral status of the subject—its aphanasis—as dismantling political, social, and cultural values. Jakovljević complements that technique of disalienation with Deleuze’s analysis of forging as an unleashing of the power of the false. This exemption of the copy from the model and the work from the artist is preceded by the unsettling literature of Danilo Kiš, first in the Garden, Ashes, and A Tomb for Boris Davidovič, and then culminating in the polemical essay The Anatomy Lesson. In those last years of Yugoslavia, Đorđević systematically resorted to the orphan model of anonymity and pseudonyms. However, it is not only artistic subversion which required to be understood metaphorically. Maybe, as Jakovljević puts it, Đorđević’s work “is not about the disintegration of the narrative called the Socialist Federative of Yugoslavia.”51 It is about its disintegration as both self-managed and managing the self in conforming to the models of paternity and fraternity. Boris Davidovič was an anonymous bearer of various pseudonyms and masks. Davidovič, only to a certain point, plays the

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role of the father in Garden Ashes, as someone who was continually deposing himself. Đorđević might be well acquainted with Kiš’s characters as forgers of their identity, incessantly switching and shifting between pseudonyms. Nevertheless, Davidovič, as a man of twist and turns, a foundling and a bastard, wanted to shield his biography. He sets his deceitful character the function of upholding the figure of a revolutionary. Yet, when his contrivances ultimately fail, Davidovič “leaped into the boiling mass” from which “he rose like a wisp of smoke.”52 Davidovič negotiated with his interrogator Fedukin about the text of his confession. Davidovič’s protean drive to shuffle through identities was complemented with Antaeus’s drive for retaining identity.53 The narrator does not impersonalize Davidovič’s evaporation. Instead, the narrator uses the personal pronoun he to personify Davidovič’s disappearance as smoke. The personification of the smoke is perpetuated. Due to his transmutation and transubstantiation into smoke, Davidovič becomes “deaf to their [guards] commands, defiant, free from German shepherds, from cold, from heat, from punishment, and from remorse.”54 According to the London Times, Davidovič resurfaced in 1956.55 Smoke was not another disguise through which Davidovič would be de-synchronized from himself. Before his detainment, Davidovič counterfeits his identity, assuming the role of others. However, in 1956 other revolutionaries appeared as Davidovič. The ephemeral and errant traits of the revolutionary are betrayed. The principle of revolution, “nothing for nothing,”56 was abandoned and the end of the novel depicts a dissolution of the structure of anonymity and pseudonymity as the ceaseless shifting between no one and everyone. By renouncing the principle of “nothing for nothing,” Davidovič uncouples his aptitude for being simultaneously everything and nothing. Davidovič renounces his gift for nothing as the basic principle of imitation and its simultaneity with the gift for everything. In his reading of Denis Diderot’s The Paradox of Actor, Philippe LacoueLabarthe argues that one who imitates does not possess anything proper.57 This paradox establishes the law of impropriety as the law of mimesis. The actor imitates every character and possesses an equal aptitude for each as (s) he simultaneously withdraws from being identified with any of them: The paradox lies, then, in the following: in order to do everything, to imitate everything-in order to (re)present or (re)produce everything, in the strongest sense of these terms-one must oneself be nothing, have nothing proper to oneself except an “equal aptitude” for all sorts of things, roles, characters, functions, and so on.58

Two aptitudes coalesce without being synchronized. They leave the middle—as an empty tomb—permanently vacant and hollowed out. By their

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uncoupling, however, the revolutionary ceases to be one among many in the “equality of anyone at all with anyone else.”59 It is not that Davidovič could be like anyone else, but everyone must find their (revolutionary) origin in Davidovič, a secret father; thus, the many is unified into one. This terror is not only embodied in torture and concentration camps. Its primary objectives are yoking together discipline and security to penetrate the very middle that unhinges individual and pre-individual zones of subjectivity. PLOTTING THE MIDDLE AND MIDDLING THE PLOT: THE DE-SYNCHRONIZED SIMULTANEITY OF THE BEGINNING AND THE END In second Yugoslavia, the federal government and the constitutive republics and regions competed in asserting the similarities and differences between nations and ethnic groups. This is an unending contest because it is impossible to harmonize disparities in a multinational and multiethnic state. In Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Andrew Wachtel argues that the liberalization of political and social life in second Yugoslavia was an obstacle in creating a common (if not uniform) literature and culture. This liberalization may be a dampened unitarism foisted by the federal government. However, it also instigated separatism which was swelling in republics. According to Wachtel, the unity of the multinational and multiethnic state in second Yugoslavia could not be brought about by political means, but only by developing a multicultural country based on a multicultural culture.60 The unity of the second part of the ideological slogan of Yugoslavia—Brotherhood and Unity—was renounced along with eschewing the unitarism that was considered to have totalitarian roots. Wachtel’s argument entails—correctly—that upholding unity does not commit to unitarism. Yet, the second part of Wachtel’s argument states that the singularizing brotherhood was encouraged by withdrawing from the principle of unity. While the principle of brotherhood protects differences, the principle of unity fosters similarities. With the relinquishing of the principle of unity, the project of cultivating “a multicultural culture” was abandoned. Wachtel sees a variety of cultures in second Yugoslavia, which are lacking the synthetic drive that would have devised a multicultural culture. The unity absent in the political domain was supposed to be supplemented by multicultural cohabitation, tolerance, and a sense of attachment. Yet, this claim contradicts the earlier part of the argument, which argues that unity was forgone. If one wants to maintain the consistency of Wachtel’s hypothesis on the non-existence of multicultural culture in second Yugoslavia, one needs to reject the thesis that multicultural culture should be preceded by unity.

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According to Wachtel, underlying cultural singularities spawned cultural separatism. The latter, in ultima linea, stirred up nationalism. On this ground, he dismisses political and economic circumstances from being the final cause of the collapse of second Yugoslavia. Instead, the breakdown is the consequence of the failure to invent a multicultural culture. In this view, culture is supposed to be a connective tissue that centripetally opposes the centrifugal forces in the fields of politics and economy. Wachtel’s argument has several problems. First, Wachtel, akin to the spirit of the liberal humanist tradition of M. Arnold and F. R. Leavis, assumes a concept of culture that homogenizes the social realm by stifling rifts and gaps opened in the political and economic domains. Second, he assigns literature a unifying role. Nevertheless, he claims that most of the Yugoslav writers he analyzed, except Ivo Andrić, deviated from that role. Third, the idea of common culture that would set aside national and ethnic differences were already presupposed in the process of building Yugoslavia.61 The scopes of the state should not limit either building connections through culture or building culture by feeling connected not despite but because of diversity and variety.62 One of the cornerstones of the concept of (post)Yugoslav is a connecting or allying that assays displacing any recognizable form of governance and state formation. As we have seen thus far, the concept of (post)-Yugoslav was both an excessive and a missing part of the concept of Yugoslavism. As Štiks63 shows, the transformation of the model of nation-building in Eastern and Southeastern Europe did not happen only as part of the shift from one political and economic system to another. In the period of transition, the post-communist countries restored the process of nation-building that was supposed to be rejected or at least delayed by the socialist model of social equality. However, in the aftermath of 1989, in the countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the liberal model of individual rights was conformed and accommodated to both legitimize and justify the ideology of national self-determination. The transition from socialism to liberal democracy was (mis)used to empower the formation of national identity. As Štiks points out, the former Yugoslav republics did not achieve the form of liberal democracy. Instead, they upheld a governmental model akin to ethnic democracies—contradicting sets in which democratic means were used to justify the institutionalization of the rule of an ethnic majority. The conditions in the republics and their relations between each other that were established after the demise of second Yugoslavia have many similarities with the era of the federal framework: national resentment, dependence on international flows of capital, banks, creditors, and investors. On the other hand, it is argued that individuals, groups, institutions, and organizations in the decades after the demise, endeavor to ally in the

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face of obstacles and obstructions coming from political and economic domains. The coevality of joining and disjoining, binding and unbinding, was prolonged after Yugoslavia. It appears that Yugoslavia is still spectrally present as the effect of this simultaneity. Moreover, Yugoslavia was continuously passing through its dissolution during its existence as the state. The “post-” of Yugoslavia was inscribed in its present; its “post-” is the time that precedes both its collapse and its constitution. The “post-” does not refer to the succeeding time, particularly not to the states coming afterward. The relationship between pre-Yugoslav, Yugoslav, and post-Yugoslav intervals is not consecutive. The temporality of the “post-” is composed of the simultaneity of the time after and the time before, and yet this simultaneity is not synchronized. Their asynchronicity opens a gap for simultaneous anticipation and delay; the “post-” conceived as this gap does not simply lag behind its actuality. The temporality of the “post-” is the asynchronous simultaneity of the always-already and the not-yet. An attempt to resolve this entangled temporality in the linear succession of sequences would synchronize simultaneity and close the gap or turn it into a transitory period. The time after and the time before are both intertwined and divided. The temporality of the “post-” shares some of its main features with the temporality of the plot in the narrative. In the temporality of the “post-” beginnings and endings are parts of the twotiered process of an anticipatory retrospective and retrospective anticipation. The temporal structure thus becomes the central problem in comprehending (post)-Yugoslav literature. When using this notion, one usually has foremost in mind a work of fiction and to a lesser extent, non-fictional writing written in years after the demise of Yugoslavia and that thematize its demise and compare it to the ages that precede and succeed it. However, (post)-Yugoslav literature is not confined to the opposition between fiction and non-fiction and to the thematization of the 1990s and their aftermath in the former Yugoslav republics. (Post)-Yugoslav literature could be found in periods before Yugoslavia was established and in periods during its existence. It aims to reconstruct the temporality of the “post-” before and after the constitution of Yugoslavia. However, this quest for the temporality of the “post-” is not something peculiar to literatures of South Slav nations. In the attainment of the temporality of the “post-” one literature is exempted from its national background, uprooted from its cultural surroundings while it recovers these backgrounds and roots precisely through this exemption and eradication. The (post)-Yugoslav character of literature is the effect of its not being Yugoslav at all, and in wresting the “post-” from the succession between historical periods. The shift is both intuitive and obvious, but in no way trivial. One no longer considers literature from the standpoint of Yugoslavia and its destruction; instead, the latter

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is unraveled from the stance of engaging with literature. Instead of reducing literature to a simplified view of history, the incomprehensibility of literature is taken as the departing point for the comprehension of historical processes in their complexity. After the literary comprehension of history is established, it is possible to provide a historical account of literature. It is the disalienation (d)ef(f)ect of literature that we have already attributed to the work of Danilo Kiš. In 1989, at the end of his life which spectrally concurred with the demise of Yugoslavia, Kiš declared himself as the only Yugoslav writer. Kiš launched that promulgation in The Anatomy Lesson at the peak of a diatribe against himself. However, he was not defending his biographical person, but his literary persona. He is a Yugoslav writer precisely because he does not engage and get involved in topics that would be approved as Yugoslav. Kiš’s professing himself a Yugoslav writer was simultaneous with the impending break of Yugoslavia, but the two events were not synchronized. As we have seen in the previous discussion regarding the parallel enclosing of the “post-” and the “non-” in parentheses, the “non-” is not the negation of Yugoslavia, but it is constituting it as the problem. One reaches the “post-” by restraining oneself from accepting the historical form of a being as its completion. Because of the temporal gap, the unfolding of being is split into the simultaneity of the always-already-happening, and the not-yet-happened. If that simultaneity retains the asynchronous character of its lines and layers, it develops in the meanwhile as a movement suspended from inspissating itself into a sequence of stages. The meanwhile does not refer to an arrested moment of being, but to the unfolding of becoming. The “post-” is conceived as the meanwhile in this second sense. I will attempt to restate the interstitial temporality of the “post-” in the theory of plot elaborated by Peter Brooks.64 He defines the narrative plot as composed of repetitions, conceiving them akin to Deleuze. Repetition does not only present events in their sameness but also as they vary while being repeated. This repetition is inseparable from variation. The plot is based on the ambivalent mechanism of repetition in which the return of something and a return to something are simultaneously enacted.65 Following this double nature of repetition, Brooks speaks of both the suspension of time and the oscillations within the meanwhile. These two separate movements are tied together in the middle of the plot, and this middle itself can move both forward and backward. Repetition is connected with return and change; something is changed as it returns (the past), but it also cannot be returned if it is not changed (the future). Following Brooks, the transition is replaced with dilatation,66 and in the dilatating process, backward and forward movements ceaselessly alternate. Dilatation is viewed as the gap between the beginning and the end which

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postpones the flow of time. The beginning and the ending do not precede dilatation; instead, they are its effect. However, it would be wrong to think that dilatation exists for itself and that the dilatated middle exists without a temporal dimension. Brooks, nevertheless, conceives the double movement of repetition as lacking temporality. He reduces the teleology of the plot to Freud’s notion of the death drive as an irrevocable impulse to the return to the inorganic. Dilatations delay the fulfillment of the goal of the plot, while pushing it at the same time.67 They prolong life, expanding the middle into a “dilatory space,” dividing thereby the beginning and the end so that one may complete the process of reading in a meaningful way.68 According to Brooks, as life completes itself through the plot, beginning and ending are delayed to found their unity retroactively. The goal of revelation, or the future, is to synchronize what it is (beginning) with what it was (ending). Brooks ascribes a transformative function to dilatory space.69 However, in that transformation, nothing is changed because the narrative is in the end what it was in the beginning and it is in the beginning what it will be in the end. Contrary to Brooks, the middle unhinges the beginning and the end. The plot passes through the various periods of life, unhinges them by drawing them into simultaneity, and yet it resists their synchronization. In the middle, as the dilatory space reconsidered as Deleuze and Guattari’s meanwhile, events and periods are plied and unhinged. For Brooks, nevertheless, the plot is reduced to the task of completing life, which is subordinated to the disclosing of the story. Finitude endows life with contingency. However, constrained to a revelatory function, life loses its contingency and plot annuls its capacity of drawing together the unhinged periods and events of life. The task of a plot is to attune the heterogeneous variety of life into a harmonious congruence. Brooks emphasizes giving priority to plotting over the plot in an attempt to underline the dynamical aspect of plotting, which he sees as compatible with Barthes’s concept of structuration.70 However, time, in this account, can be derived only from the parts of the story. The plot of time remains subordinated to the time of the plot, and Brooks calls this the anticipation of retrospection.71 Using the psychoanalytic model of the psyche, Brooks tries to depart from the linguistic model of narrative.72 Nevertheless, the de-temporalization of plot persists in his claim that a plot is arranged from the connections of irreversible proairetic and hermeneutic codes, in which the latter overcodes the former.73 The “temporal delay” opens a space of dilatation that enables the converging of the “discreet components” of the story into an interpretative whole. Taken from standpoint of Brooks’s interpretation of Freud’s death drive, the parts are deprived of the direction, but they still pursue a goal externally imposed on them. This goal is a schema of unfolding from the beginning to the end. The interlocking of parts is established as a schema of developing

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or “tending toward a finality that offers a retrospective illumination of the whole.”74 For Brooks, the temporary metonymical counterfactual wholes shape the middle and they still contribute to the final metaphor from which the final whole can be unraveled. The narrative text does not accidentally deploy this type of “double logic” of the simultaneous distribution of parts and their ordering with the whole. On the contrary, this twofold quality of the plot determines the text. Brooks uses the example of the detective story in which the plot of the investigation reveals the story of a crime. The parts unraveling the crime are deduced from the story. The plot draws the culprits and the interrogators into narrative complicity (with)in the crime. Determining guilt is inextricably linked to the crime by which the revealing of the crime is turned into its repetition. In that way, guilt is transferred from the characters to the readers, rendering them accomplices. The plot of the crime shifts to the crime of the plot. As Lyotard shows,75 this type of dynamic is the crucial form of rewriting modernity—the culprit and the persecutor are entangled within the same plot. According to Lyotard, the temporal shift does not occur between times or epochs. Instead, the shift appears within time. Lyotard describes these two kinds of shifts as occurring between and within time, as two models for rewriting modernity. In the first model of rewriting modernity, the culprit and the persecutor emerge as involved in the same plot. According to Lyotard, this circle makes the repetition of the crime inevitable. Instead of ending the crime by rewriting it, the crime is reinscribed and repeated. The reason for this is in empowering memory to master the past so to reach or to (re)conquer something that is irretrievably lost. However, this procedure also turns the revealing of the origin of the crime into a crime of the origin itself.76 The interlocking of the two instances is the main theme of the story of Oedipus. In it, two distinct positions are planted in the same person. Oedipus becomes a culprit by assuming the role of the persecutor. By uncovering the other, the protagonist uncovers himself. On the other hand, Oedipus reveals himself as the other. Deleuze77 earlier noticed this connection between Oedipus’s quest and the contemporary detective story. Oedipus’s origin is traced from its revealing. In a detective story, culprits and persecutors share traits to the point of indistinguishability.78 Brooks synchronizes the twofold orientation of the plot progression, thereby enclosing its middle which is oscillating between anticipation and retrospection. They are, through the metaphorical converging of metonymic parts, harmonized into the sequence of revealing the complicity of the culprit and persecutor. The middle is subordinated to the reconciliation of the interminability of the plot. The reason for this could be Brooks’s retaining Freud’s essential conception of the death drive as the compulsion to return to an inanimate state as protection from traumatic experiences.

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Deleuze, however, introduces the distinction between personal and impersonal deaths. While the first conception of death signifies that the “I” dies, or that it ceases to be, the second conception designates an essential fracture between the dying one and the dying “I.” While in personal death the” I” ceases to be, in its impersonal opposite, nevertheless, one dies incessantly in the event that interminably escapes being present. In death as an event that is constantly coming, the dying one and the dying “I” are never synchronized. For Brooks, the death instinct retains its function of cathexis after the vicissitudes and adventures undertaken by both readers and character in an attempt at the resolution of the plot. This being the case, they create a plot of the resolution, instead of taking the plot as a problem. Deleuze, in the discussion about a shift from the second to the third synthesis of time, argues that in the second synthesis Combray resurges as it never was, or Combray as itself standing for the past itself. One attains that pure past by a “virginal repetition”79 inspired by Mnemosyne. Its virginity, before a split of lovers and mothers, is parallel to primal innocence, before the split of culprit and persecutor. (Post)-Yugoslav studies restore the never-lived innocence of Yugoslavia. Even if it reaches the past in-itself, it is enclosed in a circle of recurring events. The past in-itself acquires the features of the events that it grounds, conflating, thereby, the past in-itself with the former present.80 That, according to Deleuze, compels Freud to define the death instinct as the conservative force in human life since it attempts to restore life to its elementary state, whereby it was characterized by an equilibrium of psychic energy. Death in Freud’s model remains within the boundaries of a negation which opposes inanimate matter with life. According to the second model, death is a state in which time is freed from the complicity with the libido. Reminiscence and its fragments form a totality devoid of a unifying force seeking to recover an identity. The duality of the second synthesis generated from Eros and Mnemosyne is in the third synthesis replaced by the duality of a desexualized narcissistic ego and the death instinct. This ego is characterized as “a great amnesiac” and “without love.”81 Instead of imagining or remembering it, Yugoslavia is to be converted into an object of thought. In Deleuze’s terms, to think it is to wrest time from its content, be it imaginary or commemorative. The object does not return to an earlier stage, whereby the never-seen would be confused with the alreadyseen, the strange with the familiar, the lover with the mother, the culprit with the persecutor. The object “dies” when its recognizability is stripped off and as it is grasped in its transformation and metamorphosis.82 The dead object is a condition for the never-seen and the strange to return without retaining their identities. It is not simply that the object is dispersed; instead, it coheres without being put together by any cohesive force, such as identity, self, or resemblance. Repetition is liberated from its dependence on some originary

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term; rather, every term in the series is displaced in relation to a virtual object. The repetition of the virtual object does not consist in its bare actualization. As we shall see, repetition repeats the object, but the sameness between the repetition and the repeated object is derived from the being-unequal of the actual and the virtual. The repeated is the same to the extent of being-unequal with itself, thereby uncoupling the never-seen and the already-have-been. The virtual object is repeated as a disguised and displaced object, but these masks and displacements are not its deferrals of coming into being. Instead, it is the very temporality of its becoming. The prefix “post-” of (post)-Yugoslav studies is determined by the negation of Yugoslavia and something that is Yugoslav; the “post-” is determined by the presupposition that something no longer exists. It is the reactive “post-” which always comes after the fact of negation and then negates negation itself. On the contrary, the (non)-being of Yugoslavia, or its death in the second sense just discussed, is reinscribed as its becoming. The “post-” of (post)-Yugoslav studies needs to be reconceptualized as that parenthesized (non)- that does not simply negate being but refers to its problematics. Contemporary (post)-Yugoslav studies bear a fundamental similarity with the notion of Yugoslavia; both concepts deploy a lost community and broken bonds as their starting point. While thinkers of Yugoslavia dreamed of or imagined regaining that lost community and broken bonds in the form of a (multi)national state, (post)-Yugoslav studies propagate a uniting and bonding that would elude and supersede any governmental form. However, both approaches share the same premise stating that the never-lived community and belonging could be regained. To found and to regain are flip sides of the coin. As Deleuze argues, repetition does not reinstate a fixed and originary term which would return through repetition in the form of its copy. Actual Yugoslavia and its possible version are still identical pertaining to the same genesis. On the contrary, one can posit Yugoslavia as a virtual object— Yugoslavia = x, or Yugoslavia that never existed and that is always coming into being. This (non)-being of Yugoslavia is its real “post-” which simultaneously grounds and ungrounds every actualization of Yugoslavia = x. Contrary to Brooks’s dilatory space, the resemblance of the actualization of the virtual object is the effect of difference. Every actualization of Yugoslavia is engendered as the displacement of the virtual object Yugoslavia = x. Neither of one’s loves revolves around the mother; rather, both lovers and mother are displaced in the series, evading any recognizable form. These displacements spring forth from the zones of traversals which are conditioned by the displacements of object = x. This is the new as difference, like a terra incognita that is beyond recognition and which ceaselessly recommences without ever being established. We can no longer assume Yugoslavia as a determinate term which can be restored by repetition. It is repetition itself

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which dissolves the determining character of the object. Object = x can be recovered only as something disguised, concealing nothing but another disguise. Yugoslavia = x must be ceaselessly withheld from any actualization and from being identified with any of its historical appearances. Following Deleuze,83 object = x brings divergent series into communication, thereby making them co-existent. However, they are simultaneously disparate. In the chapter of Logic of Sense titled “Eight Series of Structure,” Deleuze refers to Lacan’s paradox and Lévi-Strauss’s antinomy between the series of signifying and signified, the first being in excess over the second and the second lacking in the first. Because of this excess and lack, the series refer to each other in “eternal disequilibrium and perpetual displacement.”84 Signifying series are given all at once, forming a “preliminary totality.” Signified series are given part by part which builds a “produced totality.” Starting from the assumption that society belongs to a signifying series and nature to a signified series, Deleuze explains revolution as the disequilibrium between series of economic and social totalities and parts of technical progress. Two series deterritorialize each other while simultaneously being reterritorialized. By abolishing the gap between series, revolution is reduced either to mere reform or to totalitarianism. In contrast to the technocrat and the dictator, the revolutioner avoids conflating the two series. In the “permanent revolution,”85 the gap between series is never abolished. The problem is how the preliminary whole is rendered open, resisting totalization, and how parts are drawn together without being subjected to an unifying principle. Excess opens a displaced place without an occupant and the lack introduces an occupant without a place. The element appears as excess in one series on the condition that it appears as a lack in the other series. This circulation without ever attaining equilibrium is the sense which simultaneously opens excess in a signifying series and the lack in a signified series. (Post)-Yugoslav studies criticize the totalitarian reduction of both former Yugoslavia and the contemporary governmentality of its former republics. However, (post)-Yugoslav studies reduce the disruptive temporality of “post-” to the resuscitation of a once-lost community. Let us get back to Lyotard’s notion of rewriting modernity. He demonstrates that the circle between the culprit and the persecutor makes the repetition of the crime inevitable. Instead of ending the crime by rewriting it, the crime is reinscribed through the very process of its revealing. Lyotard terms this as the second-order plot hovering over the first-order plot. While the first-order plot unmasks the hidden origin, the second-order plot has a function of reviving or retrieving it. Remembering is given the role of seizing the past, of capturing the elusive origin. However, through this unveiling role, remembering converts from revealing the origin of the crime to the crime of the origin itself.

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According to Lyotard, this transformation—the repetition of the crime through remembering the crime—can be avoided if the self can be transformed into an impassible screen for displaying scenes and by impeding the self from recalling the origin of these appearances. By curbing judgment, through the insertion of dilatations in judging, it is possible to attain an unfamiliar scene. Although the past is implied in the scene, it withdraws from being represented in it. Enacting its absence, “the time lost” orders the narrative presentation. Interpretation cannot separately explicate the time lost and narrative presentation. On the contrary, its task is to describe how lost time determines narration. This determination is a kind of pretext for any further analysis. One knows that representation is connected to the past, but the past does not appear as an image. On the contrary, “the time lost” alone sets up the scene in which the past is glimpsed. The rewriting is a portrayal of such a scene. Brooks’s conclusion about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions could be extended to his theory of plot: Rousseau writes so many obituaries he finally subverts the necrological form: he is ever reborn, not so much through a Protean change in shape (on the contrary, while claiming multiple beginnings and ends, he also asserts that he has never changed) but more like Antaeus, by repeatedly touching ground with a vision of the essential Jean-Jacques.86

The logic of the plot is Antaean instead of Protean. No matter to what extent the dilatory space between the beginning and the end is expanded, it is finally contracted in the revelatory resolution of the plot. The simultaneity of various beginnings and endings is synchronized in the resolution of the plot. The past is not the object of recognition that itself recedes into a past that one strives to recall. The scene is not rendered by approaching the past. It is, instead, contrived from the effort to take hold of the past itself. Just as the self is suppressed as the agent or creator of the scene, the scene shows itself as it is intended, projected, and devised for no one and as if no one could be both its addresser and addressee. To rewrite modernity is to fathom a time that is not one’s own. Lyotard derives the inhuman form of thought from Kant’s notion of the sublime. The inhuman form of thought connects the sublime to the concept of time. Inhuman time is attained when one gives up the attempt to subordinate it or fix it to concepts. Concepts should be built starting from time. In inhuman time, the only form of things is time itself, which dilates and amplifies things to the limit of their amorphousness.87 By positing the temporal structure of the plot, one must search for how dilatations unhinge the beginning and the endings, how within its zones of traversals there germinate seemingly

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inchoate meanwhiles in which the middle is liberated from the beginning and the end. The now is possessed with a moment that is no longer (the past), and that is not yet (the future). Therefore, it is not a past, present, or future generation that rewrites modernity in that second way of attaining a time that is not their own. Instead, modernity rewrites itself, and the generations dwelling in it are disjointed from their origins. They are simultaneous with modernity and still asynchronous to it. The simultaneity with modernity defines how generations become what they are, while asynchronicity designates their becoming other than themselves. The meanwhile, or the “post-,” is interlocked with the coexistence that is de-synchronized by becoming oneself in passing through the becoming other. These asynchronized coexistences resemble the concept of the non-connective and non-localizable relation-of-non-relation developed by Brian Massumi88 to synthesize the associated concepts of Simondon and Whitehead. The nonrelational relation is a traversal in-between different circumstances and elements that otherwise would remain unrelated. It puts into relation disparate elements without effacing their disparateness. Everything is related without entering the actual connection.89 A similar concept of modernity can be found in Augustine’s Confessions. In Augustine’s conception, time is deprived of extension. Time does not exist because the past is no longer; the future is not yet, and the present does not endure. The lack of extension is superseded by the distension of the soul through memory (retrospection) and expectation (anticipation). The soul approaches the future and the past through this dilatation of the present. In the distension of the soul, the present receives an extension, which means that the present is formed by expanding the soul through memory and anticipation. The present is accessed in the intermediation of the past and the future. As Ricoeur shows in his interpretation of Augustine, the present is threefold because it is made of the past and the future.90 Memory and anticipation are stored in the past and future events and expand the present by implanting them into it. Time is composed of the present in the past, the present in the present, and the present in the future. The present is built from the distension of the eluding point that simultaneously moves backward and forward. In Volume I of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur concludes that with the concept of the distentio animi, Augustine transferred the problem of time from the physical world to the interiority of the soul. However, in Volume III of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur reproaches Augustine’s shift and interpreted it as neglecting cosmological time.91 As Ricoeur claims, speculative solutions of the paradox of time either reduce the flow of time to spatial relations or arrest this flow through an a-temporal category. Augustine attempts to delimit the distension of the soul with the concept of eternity. In other words, Augustin synchronizes the temporary dilations of the soul. Ricoeur’s crucial remark is directed toward

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the speculative concordance of discordant time. Speculative solutions do not offer a genuine solution to the paradox; rather, they suppress their perplexities by relocating the paradox to another level or a conceptual field. The creation of a plot is not a poetic solution to the paradox; the paradox does not dissolve after the invention of the plot. The poetic bringing the discordance of time into accord does not divest a plot from its temporal traits to install an a-temporal logical structure that would array the events. The plot enables the following of a story and its parts remain both connected and opened. In that regard, Ricoeur’s notion of plot avoids some problematic points of Brooks’s notion of plot. The task of a plot is not to impose accord on the discordance inflicted by the distension of the soul. On the contrary, producing concordance starts from the discordance and formlessness of time.92 Post-Yugoslav literature contains both a reinscription of the origin and its rewriting. This twofold operation determines both the origin of the unknown and the unknown escaping its origin. This is the coexistence of simultaneity and asynchronicity in which becoming oneself is indistinguishable from becoming other. The real object of critical (post)-Yugoslav studies is the meanwhile that draws together the multiplicity of lines and layers, unhinging them as they converge. Contemporary (post)-Yugoslav studies are focused on the break of second Yugoslavia and the reflection of its aftermath in literature and culture. However, as they disentangle the two-tiered structure of the meanwhile, they reinscribe the complicity of crime and origin. They strive to restore the lost community by showing the literary, cultural, and ideological narratives springing forth from the simultaneity of various beginnings and endings. Although it can be digressed and dilatated to an extreme measure, the middle instills and transmits a uniformity from the beginning and end. Through these amplifications, the middle may swell to the point of disintegration and demise, but it is a transformative denouement in which the plot is liberated from being a relay between the beginning and the end. It is the middle alone, pure metamorphosis, without origin and goal. The simultaneity of this multiplicity is an asynchronous array of unhinged and disjointed fragments. To put it somewhat programmatically, critical studies of (post)Yugoslav literatures and cultures need to show: 1. Scenes in which the origin reveals itself in its strangeness as the middle of a transformation, and that is itself in an unremitting transformation, the middle that displaces and that itself is displaced. It is not middle in itself, but the middle of its own displacement. Such a middle, coming from the meanwhile of simultaneity and asynchronicity, is both displaced and displacing, irreducible to the effects that would maintain a plot in the discovery of the origin of the unknown.

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2. Dilatations that are not related to the teleology of delay. Instead, we need to recover a middle that escapes the dilatory space that would delimit the stretching and amplifying of germinating events, endowed with direction, and yet without being subordinated to a predetermined goal. 3. Plots gleaned from distension, owing to their form to the stretching and unrolling of time. 4. Detecting temporal structures in which the time of dispossession shows itself, the time not only of non-belonging but which also belongs to no one. 5. How time itself molds sequences instead of being subordinated to a conceptual synthesis (i.e., plot viewed as a synthesis of the heterogeneous in Time and Narrative). Brooks shows that a confessional aspect is instilled in the detective story and that the confessional story is imbued with an investigative impulse. However, the detective story (e.g., Dostoevsky, Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet) is not only engaged in showing the hidden background of the obvious but also in illuminating the intermingling of the obvious and the unknown, telling the truth and creating fiction, and entwining the contingency and the necessity.93 A Postmodernity of (Post)-Yugoslav Literature: Toward a (Post)-Temporal Time that Is Not Our Own Andrew Wachtel correlates Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures on the slopes of modernism and postmodernism.94 He conceives the terms of this complex of relations (modernism–postmodernism; Yugoslav–(post)-Yugoslav) as separated and sequentially distributed periods. They are succumbed to a principle of succession. One needs to presuppose the prior existence of Yugoslav literature, which is followed by (post)-Yugoslav literature. (Post)-Yugoslav literature is not only the successor, but it is also conceived as both descendant and inheritor of the non-existent Yugoslav literature. Wachtel notes that this sequential distribution lies short of empirical status since Yugoslav literature in the period of the first Yugoslavia was something “which one can hope for, more than something real.”95 According to Wachtel, in second Yugoslavia the term Yugoslav literature was a field full of fierce debates and disputes which led to its unsystematic replacement with the term literatures of Yugoslav nations. Therefore, by applying the principle of succession, one may discover that (post)-Yugoslav literature appears both in the first and the second Yugoslavia, since Yugoslav literature did not exist in any of them. Successors retroactively condition the emergence of their predecessors. Yet, if there is no predecessor, why would one need a successor? Therefore, we will add the principle of recursivity.

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In Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation, Wachtel underlines that the fall of both Yugoslavias lies in the dependency of unity on the political means of its institutionalization. The federal politics of unity was never implanted on the level of the republics. As we have seen, Wachtel argues that the idea of unity was replaced with a kind of permission for each republic to blow its own trumpet. This particularism could be surmounted only through the concept of a common, multicultural culture. Wachtel deploys a hegemonic notion of culture as an intermediary between conflicting social domains. He introduces the notion of culture to validate the thesis that political and economic causes cannot spell out the demise of Yugoslavia. Instead, they need to be supplanted with causes coming from the realm of culture. Culture, according to Wachtel, was the first battlefield on which the Yugoslav wars were led. However, the cultural explanation depends on its political counterpart since Wachtel claims that politics neither instigated such a comprehensive culture nor encouraged attempts to create it. He argues that culture accumulated a reservoir of separatist-chauvinistic sentiment from which federal politics tried to distance itself. In a 2006 article, Wachtel argues that (post)-Yugoslav literature manages to avoid the failure of second Yugoslavia, at least in the political and cultural domains. Wachtel’s argument relies on the premise of transnational literature, which repudiates and overrides state governmentality.96 (Post)Yugoslav literature, as a transnational endeavor and solidarity of expellees, nourishes various forms of the commonality of writers and reading audiences. Wachtel’s argument can be formulated thus: Yugoslav literature exists because (post)-Yugoslav literature persists after the breakdown of the state. He infers Yugoslav literature from (post)-Yugoslav literature. (Post)Yugoslav literature substantiates Yugoslav literature as its predecessor; the transnational character of the first confirms the supranational character of the second. That being the case, one no longer needs to distinguish between the two literatures. Wachtel attempts to confirm his argument by distinguishing Danilo Kiš as a Yugoslav writer and Albahari as a (post)-Yugoslav writer. A writer is aligned with the Yugoslav literature if s/he conforms to the following criteria: internationally acclaimed, recognized, and translated; advocating Yugoslavia as irreducible to neither state governmentality nor communist ideology; s/ he fosters ties with other nations, combining postmodernist and modernist literary techniques. It is clear, however, that (post)-Yugoslav writers also fall within this set of criteria. When Wachtel mentions Kiš as an exemplary Yugoslav writer, he underlines his hybrid ancestry, blending and incorporating discordant elements of a Jewish, Montenegrin, and Hungarian descent. Kiš’s multiple descents cannot be subsumed to any of the majoritarian nations of the former republics

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of second Yugoslavia. When he mentions Albahari as Kiš’s (post)-Yugoslav successor, Wachtel is explicit: “Born in 1948, Albahari, like Kiš, comes from a Jewish background, which allows him to escape identification with any of the major ex-Yugoslav nations.”97 Wachtel’s distinction between Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav writers is situated within his conception of modernism and postmodernism as successive stages. Wachtel claims that Kiš is not a postmodern writer even though he uses postmodern techniques.98 Kiš is distrustful regarding postmodernist relativism and its throwing off metanarratives. For Wachtel, insofar as Kiš is not a postmodern writer, he is also not a (post)-Yugoslav writer. However, as we have seen, Wachtel retroactively infers the existence of Yugoslav literature from (post)-Yugoslav literature. If that retroactive inference is applied, then Kiš is not a Yugoslav writer either. Wachtel does not spell out the notions of modernism and postmodernism to which he refers. The mainsprings of the theoretical, philosophical, sociological, and cultural elaborations of modernism and postmodernism are their refusal to adjust to the temporary framework of successive stages. Wachtel portrays a sequence of generations of writers influencing each other. In our discussion on Kiš, we showed his confrontation with such a substantializing and linearizing concept of literary belonging. We will reiterate our discussion of Wachtel’s notion of (post)-Yugoslav literature through Lyotard’s notion of postmodernity. Lyotard reconsiders the thesis stating that succeeding generations contest their predecessor. Successors do not aim at the contestation of their forebears directly; rather, successors contest the very disagreement between the preceding generations. Every generation is aware, to a certain point, that their own contestation will be challenged one day. Every contestation is dispossessed by this projected contestation, which is delayed for a meanwhile. This meanwhile has its temporality. This means that contestation is simultaneous with its own counterfactual contestations. Allowing for a simultaneity with the counterfactual pretender about to come, the actual contestation is not synchronized with itself. By this asynchronicity, actual contestation is not only disjointed; rather, it is the disjoint itself. It folds upon itself, without ever synchronizing with itself. Lyotard establishes the zone of traversals between the principles of succession and recursion. Succeeding generations disclose a proclivity for the means of contestation to avoid entrenching themselves in uncontestable facts. Their predecessor bears in mind that distant and foreign contestation. This contestation that might not happen can be thought of as a precursory. Such anticipation of a contingent contestation prevents lodging within the present contestation. Descendants contest on behalf of the fact that they could and would be contested, and yet the taking place of this contestation might not

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happen at all. The filiation between predecessors and successors is rejected with this counterfactually contested contestation. Modernity is constituted from the delayed perspective of those who are still to come and yet may never arrive. This delay is built into modernity itself, as a rift thwarting its synchronization with itself. From this de-synchronizing rift arises the untimely character of modernity. Moreover, in this way, a succeeding generation cannot restore its belatedness in the prematurity of its predecessors. Lyotard argues that postmodern germinates within modernity,99 and he approaches the temporality of that involute germination with the future anterior. The postmodern presents the modern by projecting itself into what comes after it and which eludes recognition and identification. The convoluted line that sprouts within the modern is enticed with the counterfactual contestation that might have arisen with an ensuing generation. Through its juxtaposed and yet asynchronous operations, modernity produces both the excess and the lack. Insofar as the modernity creates a new object, the postmodernity evacuates a place that cannot be held. Modernity safeguards its feature of being modern only by contesting itself, and this self-contestation is postmodernity within modernity itself. Everything that ensues divests its predecessors from finality and determinateness. Yet, the present generation can reveal itself as a predecessor only when the present is reversed into the actuality of becoming other. Therefore, a work of art becomes modern only in the simultaneity of becoming postmodern. As we have argued, that which contests could itself be contested; the contestation unfolds from the passivity of being contested.100 The modern and the postmodern are distinguished from the standpoint of their relation toward what is yet to come, which becomes and denuded of any form. Lyotard introduces melancholic and paralogical modes which are intertwined and co-exist within the work of art. In the modernist work of art, the unpresentable appears at the level of content, while form strives to impede the disquieting force of the sublime. In that way, it cuts off the pleasure and pain as ambivalent sensations arising from the gap between reason and the imagination. The modern awards a consolation by retreating in front of something that emerges. The postmodern, on the contrary, hints at the unpresentable in presentation alone; it rejects the rules to open itself to what is yet to come.101 The postmodern is not curtailed to innovation; instead, it is the paralogical obviation of the equilibrium and consensus between the old and the new, the work of art and the audience.102 In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard advocated the replacement of immutable institutions with “temporary contracts.”103 The former close language games into a whole by legitimizing totalizing stories about liberation and knowledge. The paralogical condition, however, withdraws from a provisional finishing to keep up with perpetual becoming.104 In Rewriting

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Modernity, Lyotard reminds on the stabilization of the excessive temporality of modernity in metanarratives about renewal and the revival.105 Having this notion of the postmodern in mind, it remains unclear why Wachtel assumes the shift of the modern to the postmodern as a succession from one period to another, while at the same time inferring Yugoslav literature to be the retroactive effect of (post)-Yugoslav literature. If one accepts the relation between Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures to be derived from the excessive temporality of the future anterior and the postmodern implanted within the modern, there would not have been Yugoslav literature that would not have already been (post)-Yugoslav literature. In admitting excessive temporality, the principle of succession is untenable, since it synchronizes the unhinged simultaneities of the meanwhile, reducing them to a mere transition. This reduction of excessive temporalit/y/ies to a transition produces two models for describing the properties of its temporality. The first model is that of a nostalgia that construes the confluence of the “before” and the “after” as a revival of a deteriorated transition and all its shortcomings through the restoration of the past. The second model interlocks the trauma and melancholy in which reclaiming the past is exchanged with portraying its irretrievability, therewith tracing the lost future. Both models fall into a deterministic and finalist concept of transition. If the model of nostalgia aims to liberate the past or that which precedes the transition, the model of trauma and melancholy unlocks the future, or that which comes after the transition. Both models of transition disregard the concept of actuality; they are unable to explain the complicity of the “before” and “after” with the transition; they annul the transition to a passage from one finished form to the other. With such a conception of transition, societies are segregated into those involved in the process of transition and those outside of it. Transition is paternalistically imposed as a process of a distressing, almost arduous maturation after the youthful sins committed in the ages of revolution and communism. A different concept of temporality springs up from the inhuman capacity of thought. However, Lyotard retains the properties of the framework of forebears and descendants. If modernism is a thought of the time outside modernity itself, then postmodernism is a stratigraphic time in which the middle, or the meanwhile, is liberated from the before and the after, the beginning and the end. The middle and the meanwhile dispossess time from ourselves. This means that one thinks of oneself as being dispossessed from the time in which they are embedded. In Garden, Ashes, after the figure of the father disappears from the story, the narrator says that “everything dissolves and dissipates”:106 the narrator encounters the time of foundlings and bastards. It is a time of the propagation and multiplication of worlds from which the narrator is dispossessed:

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In the dream, I was drifting through the same landscapes seen on in the wake, but my consciousness inhabited a time that was thoroughly different from realtime. It was in fact, outside of time because the eternity of the world and the nothingness of my own life in that immense framework of the flow were becoming more visible, almost palpable. That sense of eternity, which is not mine, and which in the dream showed its domination over my small life, seduces me more and more painfully. (U snu sam se kretao istim predelima kao na javi, u jesenjem pejsažu našeg sela, ali moja je svest živela u jednom vremenu sasvim različitom od realnog, zapravo sasvim izvan vremena, jer večnost sveta i ništavnost mog sopstvenog života u tom golemom okviru proticanja postajali su još vidljiviji, skoro opipljivi. To osećanje večnosti koja nije moja, a koja je u snu još jasnije pokazivala svoju nadmoć nad mojim malim životom, zavodilo me sve više i sve bolnije.)107

This time of dispossession is the time within which one thinks, but it belongs to no one, and yet, as a form of thought, it splits the subject within itself. The time of dispossession is not a time different from our own, a time other than us from which we could improve ourselves and widen our horizons. Instead, it is a time that is not our own and which disarranges any filiation both between and within ourselves.108 In The Anatomy Lesson, it is with appalment that Kiš sets forth that his detractors reproach him for “confusing the country (da sam zamenio državu),”109 that he “spits on the people (pljuje na narod).”110 Kiš’s defamers fault him because they argue that A Tomb for Boris Davidovič is a book about Jews and that it does not “talk either about us or to us, which means that it is not ours (ona ne govori ni o nama niti za nas, što znači ‘nije naša’).”111 Kiš identifies his position with that of Borges, who was also assailed for making fiction, which strays from familiar national themes.112 Kiš calls this as a sense of relativity,113 which he connects to the “Jewishness in A Tomb for B.D.”114 Kiš quotes Freud’s “Address to the Society of B’nai B’rith”:115 “and as a Jew, I was prepared to join the opposition and to do without agreement with the ‘compact majority.’” However, he assigns Jewishness the effect of estrangement. The first part of Freud’s sentence that Kiš omits in his quote is: “Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect.” Freud synchronizes Jewish identity by defining it through its dispossession. Being Jewish is to renounce one’s identification with a being a Jew. Jewishness can exercise the effect of the estrangement of others only on the condition that it can estrange itself. It is a de-synchronization of oneself by passing through other becomings.

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IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OPEN By enlisting conditions, Wachtel essentializes both Yugoslav and (post)Yugoslav literatures. The concept of belonging retains its central position in Wachtel’s definition of (post)-Yugoslav literature. However, following his examples of Kiš and Albahari, both Yugoslav and (post)-Yugoslav literatures should have revolved around the concept of non-belonging or escaping from any identification, as he put it. This is not a contradiction in Wachtel’s argument. If (post)-Yugoslav literature avoids belonging and escapes identification, it is only to embody a “multicultural culture.” This (post)-Yugoslav multicultural culture, according to Wachtel, flourishes and rises on the ruins of the collapsed Yugoslavia. It furnishes divided nations with a vivid example that overcoming national and cultural differences is possible. Wachtel switches from a model of respective national individualities to a model of their transnational integration. It is a (post)-Yugoslav multicultural culture postmortem. In this shift, the ex post facto community founds a literary canon and providing it with a double function. First, it negates national belonging through the canonization of literature that no nation can appropriate for itself. However, this is a new form of the synchronization and restoration of the lost community since nothing can impede the dispossession by converting to another form of appropriation. By instilling a co-belonging through non-identity, literatures and cultures may be riveted with another form of reviving the once-lost concordance. This leads to the second operation of the canon of (post)-Yugoslav literature because this dispossession must be safeguarded—as previously was the case with supranational unity—through the abridging of non-belonging. Simply put, the imperative is to stop turning a non-belonging into another form of cobelonging and impair the latter from being the sole source of non-belonging. Mutual dispossession and becoming create a middle, a meanwhile, as a zone of traversals independent from the beginning and the end, the self and the other. However, if co- and non-belonging are synchronized, the middle and the meanwhile are annulled in a dilatory space that could be contracted and expanded without unhinging the beginning and the end, the self and the other. Therefore, (post)-Yugoslav literature, now thought of as hyphenated and parenthesized, is not a sequel to Yugoslav literature. (Post)-Yugoslav literature does not arise from a disagreement of particular nations about having common literature. Instead, (post)-Yugoslav literature is the disagreement itself. There was never Yugoslav literature because it was always already (post)-Yugoslav literature. We saw that according to Borges, to be Argentine is foremost to do non-Argentine things. One does not remain Argentine despite doing whatever, but because of it. Similarly, Kiš develops the orphan

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model of literature in which one could equally be the offspring of everybody and nobody, both bastard and foundling, everyone(’s) and no one(’s). If Wachtel’s theses, as elaborated in his book, are reconsidered from the standpoint of his 2006 article, it seems that universal multicultural culture, missing in second Yugoslavia, resurged not after, but from its demise. If the project of multicultural culture failed, it is uncertain what will foster its revamping as a transnational culture. Wachtel uses (post)-Yugoslav literature to empower Yugoslav literature. By that maneuver, Yugoslav literature is legitimized ex post facto from the existence of (post)-Yugoslav literature. Concomitantly, the Yugoslav political association is retroactively authorized from the existence of a (post)-Yugoslav transnational multicultural culture. Insofar as Yugoslav literature was a symptom of the inability of the state to pass from a political union to a multicultural culture, this latter form of nongovernmental community is epitomized in (post)-Yugoslav literature. Problems raised by the concept of (post)-Yugoslav literature are its constitutive part, not something external to it. The empirical status of the literature can be understood if its problematics are relocated to the field of its concept. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze contests reducing the inner structure of a problem to the external criteria of its solution. Instead, he argues that solutions are derived from the internal structure of a problem.116 The problem thus does not arise from what is already known. On the contrary, the unknown, or (non)-being, constitutes the objective existence of the problem. To that extent, the unknown ceases to be a drawback of the problem; instead, it indicates its objective. The problem does not negate either the field or the domain to which it is related. As we have seen, the problem is not the negation of being, in the manner of non-being. The problem constitutes the structure of (non)-being within a domain of already known elements, making them inadequate to respond to a question and solving the problem.117 Deleuze compares the renaissance of modern ontology with the modern novel, the latter being the essentially questioning and problematizing form.118 Parenthesized (non)-being constitutes a zone in-between the questioner and the questioned in which they are united as the expression of their difference. In this zone, the being of the negative is replaced with the being of the question. This paradoxical form of the novel, as opposed to the explanation, is that everything is uncertain, relative, and an object of doubt. Instead, the structure of the problem-question is revealed in things themselves. The structure of the problem-question belongs to the thing in itself and resists reduction to the external obstacles of the system of the solution-response. (Non)-being is revealed as the composite of the problem-solution and the question-response. Yet, this composite does not hide anything; rather, it retrieves the connection between transparency and secrecy. (Non)-being is a secret that ceases to conceal by distorting form and masking content. Instead, the secret is a line that

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cuts through form and content and liberates formlessness and amorphousness as zones of traversals. This is the real meaning of Antaeus’s logic in Brooks’s conception of the plot: to attain transparency instead of unveiling something hidden, to transform the search for meaning into a plane surface that no longer hides. Returning to Lyotard from the viewpoint of this conclusion, one does not retrieve and disclose an original and unknown scene. The point is to free the strangeness of a scene from being an obstacle to knowledge and transform it into an object of thought. The unfamiliar scene strips thinking of its power of recognition and engenders it to attain something that did not exist before. The persecutor does not seek an unknown scene since it is ceded to the domain of the recognizable. As we have argued, (non)-being in the zone of traversals oscillates between the question and the questioned, and neither of them retains their identity.119 Like digressions, in expanding the narrative middle, concepts neither separate nor connect by the principles of concordance and resemblance, as in putting the pieces of puzzles together (les morceaux d’un puzzle). Concepts cohere neither between nor within each other. Rather, they are fragmented totalities and movable bridges whose variations cannot be reduced to discreet points and which “hold together only along diverging lines.”120 They are the contours of events, and they bring about the relationship between history and becoming. They form the consistency between and within them as the nontotalized whole of unhinged concepts and components. Their “junctions” are simultaneous “detours” that are never synchronized through digression. Lundy121 suggested that the simultaneity of universal history is to be replaced by a compositional history that could not be reduced either to becoming or to historicism. This type of compositional history is located in the middle while creating an interspace between the two.122 Lundy defines this creative history as the “third milieu of becoming.”123 A milieu, in this case, is not a separate entity because it is created by composition. Hence, Lundy introduces the concept of an anti-virtualization that follows an anti-actualization. As he later emphasizes,124 the lines of differentiation in Bergsonism occur in the moment of actualization.125 The lines of differentiation are creative because they do not form a relation of resemblance with the virtual they actualize. Let us look at a longer passage from Bergosnism: While actual forms or products can resemble each other, the movements of production do not resemble each other, nor do the products resemble the virtuality that they embody. This is why actualization, differentiation, are a genuine creation. The Whole must create the divergent lines according to which it is actualized and the dissimilar means that it utilizes on each line. There is finality because life does not operate without directions; but there is no “goal,” because

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these directions do no pre-exist ready-made, and are themselves created “along with” the act that runs through them. Each line of actualization corresponds to a virtual level; but each time, it must invent the figure of this correspondence and create the means for the development of that which was only enveloped in order to distinguish that which was confused.126

We have seen how dichotomies of the individual and the community, the part and the whole, fragmentation and totalization, are in a perpetual state of mutual exclusion, which reduces the middle to a transitional corridor between the beginning and the end. Exploration of (post)-Yugoslav literatures should not be confined to a search for whether writers accept and support forms of the state and culture or oppose them. Pinpointing which parts of narratives persist in keeping up with fragmentation or if they still strive to restore the whole is not all that matters. Melancholy, trauma, and exile are important concepts, but they do not explain the structure of (post)-Yugoslav time. However, as seen in the quoted paragraph from Bergsonism, dilatations and digressions are not temporary detours or deviations that delay the arrival at an already established end. Fragments and lines of rupture are gathered around that delay, but as a pre-established finality that seals the whole. In Bergsonism, Deleuze obviates from the analogy of “between two closed totalities” of the whole and that which actualizes it. The whole is not actualized in its totality in the process of differentiation. As Lundy puts it: The virtual whole is distributed in lines of divergence, each of which retains the whole from a certain perspective or point of view. And it is this lines that are truly creative, not the virtual whole on its own or the actual on their own. (. . .) But in saying all this, it must be nevertheless admitted that creation no less involves a closing off.127

This closing off pertaining to creation is what Lévinas questioned as to the immobilization of life in the concept of the meanwhile. However, the “arrest” of the whole that loses “the contact with itself” is a “hesitation.”128 It retains an openness to the whole that is nothing but the open: Man therefore creates a differentiation that is valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is able to express a whole that is itself open. (. . .) man is capable of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition.129

If the lines of actualization do not resemble the levels of the virtual whole, then they do not correspond to each other. Correspondence, although it is

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gained by the invention of its dissimilar figures, synchronizes the whole and the lines of its actualization. It is a figure of drawing together by unhinging. To create a figure of disparity to the virtual whole is to establish a line of differentiation whose openness is asynchronous with the openness of the whole. We do not only seek an escape from the analogy between two closed totalities. Instead, we need to constitute a figure of openness that cuts through, that traverses across both lines and the whole. Humanity does not go beyond; rather, it goes through the openness of its differentiation and the open whole. It would not suffice to “trace out” an open direction to express the open whole. What is traced out is a deformative and disfiguring middle, and the meanwhile, that unhinges and disjoins a correspondence between the line and the whole. It is a condition of keeping them open. One must invent a figure of openness that cuts through the openness of lines and the openness of the whole. We have seen a similar problem in Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. Deforming and distorting time no longer arranges the plot; rather, the plot— through a discordant concordance—gives form to disfigured time. Contrary to this configurative concept of plot, one needs to establish how its disfigurative counterpart is possible, which would unleash the power of discordance. The quest for figures of correspondence is ingeminated in the simultaneous quest for figures of disparateness. These two series of figures should not be synchronized by reversing their order by giving priority to disparateness over correspondence, and discordance over concordance. Instead, the task is to depict figures of the persisting disjoint of these two simultaneous orders. These two series are brought into relation precisely through their unhinging. A disruptive role is assigned to a digression constituting the middle. The middle disrupts the notion of transition as a delay between the pre-established beginning and ending. For example, if the outcome of the transition is a transnational “(post)-Yugoslav literature,” then Yugoslav literature is the modern rewriting of its postmodernity—(post)-Yugoslav literature. NOTES 1. See older arguments such as those given by Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), pp. 113–116, where he deals with the case of Yugoslavia. For him, war arises in democratizing states lacking a sufficiently firm or solid background in liberal constitutionalism. However, recent research, commentaries, round tables, and so on, testify to the backslide of the pillars of liberal democracy—in the United States (Trump), the UK (Brexit), and Western Europe (the rise of support of authoritarian and populist parties). See, as the most recent example, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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2. See, for example, Suvin, Splendour, pp. 271; 273. He states that the emancipatory potential of socialism begins to go downhill in the period of 19651972. Suvin condemns the monolithism of the “partitocratic oligarchy” (op. cit., p. 273), partitocracy, for “/t/he dismantling of the Welfare State (. . .) before the world capitalist offensive of the 70s, but for analogous class reasons” (Ibid.). Second Yugoslavia was a harbinger of the neoliberal changeover overshadowing post-industrial capitalism. Its collapse is set up in averting a chance to create “an all-encompassing plebeian associative democracy” (Ibid., p. 260) through self-management. 3. See Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 66. 4. See the essays of Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, “Samoupravljanje, razvoj i dug: uspon i pad ‘jugoslavenskog eksperimenta,’” pp. 45–75, and Andreja Živković, “Od tržišta. . .do tržišta: ekonomija duga nakon Jugoslavije,” pp. 75–101, in Dobro došli u pustinju postsocijalizma?, eds. Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2015). 5. See Unkovski-Korica, “Samoupravljanje, razvoj i dug,” pp. 71; 73–73, and Živković, “Od tržišta. . .do tržišta,” pp. 99–100. Despite the great insights given by Unkovski-Korica’s and Živković’s studies, we argue that this conversion started much earlier. 6. Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 7. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, p. 205. 8. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), p. 276. 9. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 278. 10. Foucault, op. cit., p. 283. 11. Foucault, op. cit., p. 226. 12. Foucault, op. cit., p. 63. 13. Foucault, op. cit., p. 65. 14. Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies no. 6 (2009): 25–36, p. 29. 15. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” pp. 177–183, in Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 178. 16. Deleuze, “Postscript,” p. 179. 17. David Savat, “Deleuze’s Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation,” pp. 45–63, in Deleuze and New Technology, eds. Mark Poster and David Savat (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 54. 18. “Discipline and modulation, then, produce two very different sets of effects. The disciplinary machine is intensely interested in subjects as individuals. It concerns itself with the well-being of the individual to the extent that it enables it to be a useful force. In that respect, it ‘cares’ for the individual. The modulatory machine, however, has no such concern. It does not have this concern because individuals literally do not exist, or rather, it does not have the machinery to even recognise such entities; after

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all, it recognises and produces events, not essences” (Savat, “Deleuze’s Objectile,” pp. 55–56). 19. Savat, “Deleuze’s Objectile,” p. 56. 20. Jakovljević considers Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchel (New York: Palgrave, 2007). He misses connecting Foucault’s elaboration of interest given in Security, Territory, Population with that in The Birth of Biopolitics. 21. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, p. 209. See also pp. 201–202. 22. Yet, it is not the economy that is debased by using the notion of interest; rather, the very concept of interest was degraded by its insertion into the foundations of the economy. Jakovljević puts forth valuable remarks on the notion of interest developed by Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971). 23. “The overhaul of the Yugoslav economic and political system, epitomized in the 1974 constitution, was a two-pronged response to this two-headed neoconservatism: retrograde socialism at home, and neoliberalism abroad,” Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, p. 201. By retrograde socialism, Jakovljević assumes the constitutional dismantling of self-management into the system of associated labor by which political power was dispersed throughout the total social body. 24. Johanna Bockman, in Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), arguably defends a similar thesis. She explores many correspondences between seemingly disparate economic systems and unfolds the transition between economic orders. Bockman adopts Foucault’s analyses of neoliberalism, but contends his reductive view on socialism. Her contention is correct, since Foucault investigates socialism only passingly, as a transformative stage and renounced alternative to Germany’s SPD (See Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 88–95). 25. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 68–69. 26. Massumi, Parables, p. 70. 27. Massumi, op. cit., p. 70. 28. Massumi, op. cit., p. 71. 29. Massumi, op. cit., p. 88. 30. Brian Massumi, “Requiem for Our Prospective Dead: Towards a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power,” pp. 40–63, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, eds. Eleanor Kaufman and John Heller Kevin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 59. 31. Deleuze, “Postscript,” p. 175. 32. Paul Patton notices that peculiar status of socialism in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics (See Paul Patton, “Foucault and Rawls: Government and Public Reason,” pp. 141–163, in The Government of Life Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 143–152). Patton’s thoughtful discussion on the matter is, to some extent, limited to Foucault’s question regarding the kind of governmentality that would be appropriate to socialism (See The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 94). Foucault’s answer is

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that socialist governmentality is yet to be invented. However, socialism is a governmentality reflecting neoliberalism through the techniques of managing freedom. The Yugoslav model of socialism with its diminution of state control from 1948 to the late 1960s, and the return of state control as an administrative and bureaucratic regime in the late 1970s, is paralleled by the transformation of liberalism into neoliberal governmentality. 33. Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 2. 34. Massumi, The Power, p. 4. 35. Massumi, op. cit., p. 5. 36. Massumi, op. cit., p. 9. 37. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 33. 38. Massumi, The Power, p. 21. 39. Massumi, op. cit., p. 36. 40. In a more technical vocabulary adopted from French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, Massumi explains that instead of being exclusively rational, homo oeconomicus includes a heterogeneous variety of affects, being intra-active at the infralevel of its dividual-transindividual complexity. 41. See Deleuze, “Postscript,” p. 178. 42. Massumi, The Power, p. 38. 43. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 283. 44. Consider the recent proposal for re-using financial algorithms against themselves, or for “/c/reating algorithms which make algorithms useless.” (see Brian Willems, “Natural Instruments: Real-World Adaptations of Fictional Financial Algorithms,” boundary 2, 2018: https​:/​/ww​​w​.bou​​ndary​​2​.org​​/2018​​/10​/b​​rian-​​wille​​ms​ -na​​tural​​-inst​​rumen​​ts​-re​​al​-wo​​rld​-a​​dapta​​tions​​-of​-f​​i ctio​​​nal​-f​​i nanc​​ial​-a​​lgori​​thms/​). 45. Massumi, The Power, p. 54. 46. Ibid., p. 93. 47. Massumi, Semblance and Event, p. 19. 48. Massumi, op. cit., p. 20. 49. Massumi, The Power, p. 94. 50. It is Jakovljević’s pun on placing in juxtapositon both effect and defect. 51. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, p. 286. 52. Danilo Kiš, “Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča,” in Sabrana djela Danila Kiša – Knjiga sedma, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Podgorica: Narodna knjiga, 2010), p. 108. It is the same page in the English translation. 53. A real-life forerunner of Kiš’s remarkable characters was the great Croatian poet Tin Ujević, who declared himself dead by splitting his name Augustin into the hypocoristic Tin, forging a new person as a dead mask. 54. Kiš, “Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča,” p. 108. 55. While the date of Davidovič’s death refers to the period of the culmination of The Great Purge, 1956 was the year the Hungarian revolution occurred and Comintern fell apart. 56. Kiš, “Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča,” p. 90.

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57. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis,” pp. 248– 267, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 58. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Paradox and Mimesis,” p. 258. 59. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 15. 60. Andrew Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 234. 61. See Radmila Gorup, ed., After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) and Catherine Baker, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 120ff. 62. As I read it, Wachtel’s notion of multicultural culture implies cross-national and cross-ethnic bonds despite differences. Considered that way, multicultural culture turns into another way of suppressing variation. 63. Igor Štiks, Državljanin, građanin, stranac, neprijatelj: jedna povijest Jugoslavije i postjugoslavenskih država (Fraktura: Zagreb, 2016). 64. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 65. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 100. 66. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 107–108. 67. Brooks, op. cit., p. 102. 68. Brooks, op. cit., p. 104. 69. Brooks, op. cit., p. 92. 70. Brooks, op. cit., pp. 18–19. 71. Brooks, op. cit., p. 23. 72. Brooks, op. cit., p. 36. 73. Brooks, op. cit., p. 18. 74. Brooks, op. cit., p. 77. 75. Jean-François Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” pp. 24–36, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 76. On the indirect ways of being entangled in the network of victims and perpetrators, see Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). 77. Gilles Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 81–86, trans. Michael Taormina, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 82. 78. Deleuze, “Crime Novels,” p. 83. 79. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 85. 80. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 88. 81. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 111. 82. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 89. 83. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 124. 84. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 48. 85. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 49.

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86. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 33–34. 87. Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” pp. 32–33. 88. Massumi (see Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge: MIT, 2011), pp. 20–23) explicitly mentions Simondon’s concept of “being of the relation” (see Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005), p. 63) and Whiteheads’s concept of “contemporary independence” (see Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 195–196). To these concepts, I add Deleuze’s concept of the free indirect relationship expounded in Cinema 2. As Deleuze put it, the free indirect relationship connects through separation (Cinema 2, p. 260), it is “the new correspondence (. . .) born from the determinate forms of their non-correspondence: it is the limit of each which connects it to the other (. . .),” the connection of “two dissymetric, non-totalizable sides” (Ibid., p. 261). 89. Yet, there is a tension in Massumi’s argument because, in ultima linea, the disparateness of a variety of factors contributing to nonrelational relation is sacrificed to the effectuation of relation of nonrelation. When factors “come into effect” they are in “excess over themselves” (Massumi, Semblance and Event, p. 20) in their extra-being. It is overlooked that the relational field and its tension(s) are due to the disparateness of its elements and the distances between them. 90. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, pp. 5–31. 91. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 49–58. 92. Ridvan Askin proposes a research program for differential narratology: “(. . .) the bond between becoming and narrative is not exhausted by the twofold becoming of narrative (. . .) It also entails the narrativity of becoming as becoming in the first sense is precisely the process of configuring, composing, emplotting, while in the second sense it is that of disfiguring, decomposing, and deplotting revelatory of becoming in the first sense” (See Ridvan Askin, Narrative and Becoming (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 181). Askin matches the distinction between narrativity and narrativization with Deleuze’s distinction between the Idea and its actualization, which goes along two simultaneous slopes of differentiation and differenciation. Yet, it is necessary to find out if the movement of dramatization refuses to synchronize the simultaneity of these slopes. 93. Deleuze, “Crime Novels,” pp. 85. 94. Andrew Wachtel, “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš in Post-Yugoslav Literature,” The Slavic and East European Journal 50, no. 1 (2006): pp. 135–149. 95. Wachtel, “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš,” p. 135. 96. This is a rebound of Eekman’s solution to his own suspicions about the notion of Yugoslav literature: “Another question is whether one can speak of a ‘Yugoslav literature,’ thus underrating the intrinsic distinctiveness of each autonomous national culture within the Yugoslav conglomerate. However, I feel it is quite legitimate to write about the literary creativity of several nationalities (for example, of Great Britain, Latin America, the German-speaking nations) in one survey as long as they possess clear common denominators of geographical, political, cultural or linguistic nature” (see Thomas Eekman, Thirty Years of Yugoslav Literature, 1945-1975 (Ann

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Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), p. 3). In the footnote, Eekman refers to Vlatko Pavletić’s vehemently put arguments against the notion of Yugoslav literature. 97. Wachtel, “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš,” p. 149. 98. Wachtel, op. cit., p. 139. 99. Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” p. 25. 100. See Jean-François Lyotard, Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants. Correspondance 1982-1985 (Paris: Galillée, 1988), pp. 24–28. 101. As Lyotard put it: “L’artiste et l’écrivain travaillent donc sans règles et pour établir les règles de ces qui aura été fait. De là que l’œuvre et le texte aient les propriétés de l’évènement, de là aussi qu’ils arrivent trop tard pour leur auteur, ou, ce qui revient au même, que leur mise en œuvre commence toujours trop tôt. Postmoderne serait à comprendre selon le paradoxe du futur (post) anterieur (modo).” (Le Postmoderne, p. 27) 102. See early Lyotard’s formulation of the distinction between paralogy and innovation: “The problem is therefore to determine whether it is possible to have a form of legitimation based solely on paralogy. Paralogy must be distinguished from innovation: the latter is under the command of the system, or at least used by it to improve its efficiency; the former is a move (the importance of which is often not recognized until later) played in the pragmatics of knowledge. The fact that it is in reality frequently, but not necessarily, the case that one is transformed into the other presents no difficulties for the hypothesis” (See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 61. 103. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 66. However, Lyotard adds: “This bears witness to the existence of another goal within the system: knowledge of language games as such and the decision to assume responsibility for their rules and effects. Their most significant effect is precisely what validates the adoption of rules—the quest for paralogy” (Ibid.). 104. These temporary contracts avoid to be stabilized into the consensus between sides involved. A similar notion of contestation which traverses between generations is developed regarding the relationship between modernism and postmodernism: “Étonnante accélération, les ‘générations’ se précipitent. Une œuvre ne peut devenir moderne que si elle est d’abord postmoderne. Le postmodernisme ainsi entendu n’est pas le modernisme à sa fin, mas à l’état naissant, et cet état est constant” (Lyotard, Le Postmoderne, p. 24). 105. Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” pp. 25–26. Although rewriting can bear relation with revelation, redemption, rebirth, renewal, and revolution, Lyotard underscores the aspect of the prefix “re-” that does not point to “a return to beginning” (p. 26). 106. Danilo Kiš, “Bašta, pepeo,” in Sabrana djela Danila Kiša – Knjiga četvrta, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Podgorica: Narodna knjiga, 2010), p. 155. 107. Kiš, “Bašta, pepeo,” p. 168. 108. “Imagining those worlds that are not our own—whether actual, past, or virtual—might do nothing to restore or save the present, and might not offer anything for thought as it has defined itself so far. At a quite banal level one might say that Western thought and its accompanying practices of imperialism, colonization, barbarism and

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enslavement have destroyed many worlds and potential worlds that would not have generated what calls itself the Anthropocene. But even if those worlds cannot provide any exit from the Anthropocene for us, they might intimate an ethics that would be genuinely affirmative of stratigraphic time. Such an ethics would think and act as if one's time were not one's own, as if a thousand other temporalities existed alongside every now. Rather, then, than thinking about recycling, minimizing one’s carbon footprint, purchasing a smaller car and buying local produce—all actions designed to sustain this present into ‘our’ future—one might act and think as if this present with all its desires and interests were not worthy of our care” (Claire Colebrook, “‘A Grandiose Time of Coexistence’: Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” Deleuze Studies 10, no. 4 (2016): 440–455, p. 453. 109. Danilo Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” in Sabrana djela Danila Kiša – Knjiga osma, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Podgorica: Narodna knjiga, 2010), p. 24. Kiš quotes the phrase earlier on page 18. 110. Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” p. 31. 111. Ibid., p. 18. 112. Only to a certain point, of course, because Kiš defines A Tomb for Boris Davidovič as a counterbook to Borges (See Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” pp. 55–56). 113. Kiš, “Čas anatomije,” pp. 36; 40; and 50. 114. Ibid., 51. 115. Sigmund Freud, “Address to the Society of B’nai B’rith,” pp. 273–274, in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 20, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959). 116. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 219. 117. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 253. 118. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 195. 119. According to Sauvagnargues, Deleuze and Guattari switch from Bergson’s to Marx’s notion of the problem (see Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze, l’empirisme transcendental (Paris: PUF, 2008), pp. 342–344.). However, in Bergsonism Deleuze underlines the similarities between Bergson’s and Marx’s notions of the problem, or between the “history of mathematics” and the “history of man” (See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 17–19). 120. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 23. 121. Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 122. Lundy, History and Becoming, p. 9. 123. Lundy, op. cit., p. 181. 124. Craig Lundy, “Tracking the Triple Form of Difference: Deleuze's Bergsonism and the Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible,” Deleuze Studies 11, no. 2 (2017): pp. 174–194, p. 188. 125. Lundy, “Tracking the Triple Form,” p. 182. 126. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 106. 127. Lundy, “Tracking the Triple Form,” p. 183. 128. Deleuze, Bergsonism, pp. 104–105. 129. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 107.

Chapter 7

The Voice of the Mother’s Secret— The Secret of the Mother’s Voice The Acoustics of Memory in David Albahari’s Novel Bait

GERMINAL STORY—IN THE MEANWHILE OF MOTHER AND SON The narrator of David Albahari’s novel Bait dwells between the inspiration of Muses and the fascination of Sirens. The narration traverses from the invitation of the Muses, inspiring the narrator to transmit the story, to a ravishing appeal to listen to the Sirens’ voices. Both the story and the voice could be described as reaching “across time and beyond life.”1 If the narrator listens to the story, the voice eludes him, and if he shifts attention to the voice alone, the story vanishes.2 Recounting of the mother’s life is enacted by recording her storytelling on magnetic tape. Recording of the story counterfeits its objectivity and immediacy. The machine feigns interruption of the familial link between the narrator and the story. However, both listening to the tape and the circumstances of listening to it have an alluring impact on the narrator. He recorded his mother’s storytelling in Serbia on one tape recorder. Then he listens to the tapes on another magnetophone in Canada.3 Operating the tape recorder and the transmission of the mother’s sentences from the tape is described in the present tense. The mother’s story is recounted in the perfect tense. The time of recording and the time of listening are the time of the voice and the time of the story. These two times interpenetrate each other. The possibility of simultaneously being son and narrator is downplayed through the interference of these times. Whereas the son is entwined within family ties, the narrator surges from the interrupted lineage with the story. It is impossible to be both a son and a narrator, and yet these two identities must be connected without coalescence. Giving birth or being born is ingrained within the circle of beginning and ending. 199

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However, the novel opens with the sentence uttered by the mother: “/w/here should I begin?”4The sentence recurs throughout the novel. The tape is like a middle unhinging the beginning and the ending. By being a son, one does not immediately become a narrator. On the other hand, one becomes a son only by becoming a narrator. The mother asks to pause recording in the middle of recounting the time after the birth of the son-narrator and his sister. She notices that she has lost the thread of her narrative. The narrator hears his voice on the tape, but he cannot fathom its meaning. Verb tenses toggle, and both the present and the past tenses mutually refer to recording and listening to the tape.5 As the narrator is making an effort to discern the sounds on the tape, he hears the transmission mechanism of the tape recorder. The narrator compares the familiar space of his home in Zemun in Serbia to the foreign space of the house in Toronto, where he temporarily resides. The sentence “I’m tired6 (Umoran sam)” is inserted into the weaving of the parallels of familiar and foreign spaces, and it cannot be unambiguously determined when and where it was uttered. By listening to the tape, the narrator cannot deduce to which part of the house his mother is moving; he only hears the mechanical sound of reels and rollers. The feeling of fatigue could be related to the listening of the tape and the situation of its recording. The sentence referring to tiredness is in the present tense, just as the preceding description of the difficulties in adapting to a new town. Nevertheless, it is implied that the narrator did not utter the sentence “I’m tired” on the tape. However, the mother utters the next sentence: “Don’t tell me about tiredness.”7 It is an uncanny moment when it becomes impossible to delimit between recording and listening to the tape. The mother’s sentence could indicate what the son said after her request to pause recording as she went into another part of the house. The sentence could be mother’s reply to the son’s words, whose meaning he cannot apprehend by listening to the tape. On the other hand, the mother’s sentence could also refer to the son’s present feeling of being lost in his temporary home in exile. The mother’s response from the tape, which is her time, is enmeshed within the time of listening. The narrator is certain that the recording was interrupted after the mother asked to pause. However, it was as if the recording continued while both mother and son were no longer aware that they were being taped. The forgotten voice of the dead mother joins in conversation with the son. The narrator’s reflection on the mother’s narration co-extends with his attempt to explain the map of Europe and the history of the Yugoslav conflict to Donald.8 Donald interrupts the narrator’s exposition. The narrator not only tries to grasp the dissolution of Yugoslavia from an alien perspective, he can also uncover his mother’s life from a distance, by severing family ties with her. Familiar space is transposed into a strange space, devoid of the

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properties of immediacy and givenness. The mother’s life is simultaneously divided from and unified with the story of Yugoslavia during World War II, and its reconstitution after the war. The narrator attempts to extrapolate the mother’s story that is lodged among recognizable elements, identities, and histories. The narrator drifts away from narrating the givenness and immediacy of being a mother by recounting how she becomes a mother. He needs to expound on how an unknown woman simultaneously becomes a mother and retains her strangeness. This becoming-mother is inseparable from becoming-Yugoslavia. Both the existence of Yugoslavia and motherhood are no longer pre-given stories, which would be transmitted without being infected by the narration. Recording a story appears as a zero-degree narration and fabricates an illusion of the story’s immediacy. Yet, the story could not simply be transmitted and imparted without the stains of narration. Even in the situation when it seems that the story will unfold straightforwardly, the act of narration is incubated within the recounted events. Becoming-mother and becoming-Yugoslavia are inseparable while they still form a zone of traversals. The narrator says that he was silent while his mother did not talk and that he was listening while mother was speaking. She is left on her own in reconnecting and rearranging the patches (“the little pieces”)9 of her life. Although the narrator regrets being a silent interlocutor, he exonerates himself because he was “worried” that he could hamper the unwinding of her story. However, he still feels uneasy because the mother’s putting the pieces of the story together depends on “additional understanding.”10 The object of narrative reconstruction is not the epistemological and ethical reconciliation of collective and individual memory. Instead of their congruence, the narrator discovers the incommensurability of remembering and narration. The narrator seeks how the past and the present are brought together while they ceaselessly outrun each other. They are juxtaposed and joined in their asynchronicity. This relationship between the present and the past is compared to the relationship between the homeland and a foreign country. This relationship is complicated by changing the referential framework and the point of reference of the deictic words “there (tu)” and “here (ovde).” Their referents vary according to shifts in the point of reference. The referent of “here” that points to the homeland is determined through the mother’s history. She says that they could have remained in Israel in 1961 and that the history of the family could have resolved otherwise. His father “remains there (tu), here (ovde), where he at the same time has what he no longer has.”11 In that part of the mother’s story, the narrator stops the tape recorder. He wants to relax the numbness and tension of his spirit through physical exercise. The spirit is focused on grasping the foreign “here” by tracing it through the paternal cartography of “here.” Nevertheless, the map reveals a distorted image of the familial here. This distortion is not

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a shortcoming of the foreign here, but a shortcoming paternal counterpart that turns this extirpation into a new kind of belonging. The paternal here is estranged by laying bare its primary foreignness and turning interminable loss into familiar bonds. As the narrator illustrates, when he looks through the window of his flat in his homeland, every scene could be turned into a story, while in his home in exile in Canada, he sees meaningless scenes escaping any narrative account. There are events, but their agents are withdrawn into the opaqueness of laying behind, maintaining the ungraspable character of their identity. However, in the intimacy and familiarity of the homeland, he could listen to his mother’s voice without being able to convey its story. He must assume a position outside his mother’s tongue to recount the story of its voice. Through the window of his temporary Canadian house, the narrator sees a centerless space; a periphery crisscrossed with forks and cloverleaves. He applies this gaze of the foreigner to the acoustic record of his mother’s story. When the narrator hears his voice without apprehending the words uttered, he summons the space of his home to derive the meaning of the unknown space from the familiar order and its spatial coordinates. He is trying to integrate his voice with familiar meanings, and yet he is alienated from his mother tongue. The narration is constituted on the interference between the unknown and the known.12 The tape recorder is no longer a reliable intermediary between the son and the voice of his mother and the narrator and his voice. The tape does not provide a familiar train of events that could be easily subsumed into the whole. The narrator designates the mother’s narrative account of family life to be both transparent and opaque. He attributes the same properties of the flow of life to his new and interim home abroad in Canada. The mother becomes both close and distant, just as his new Canadian neighbors. The mother recounts the time when she was not yet the narrator’s mother.13 To be capable of narrating about the internal relationship between the son and the mother,14 the narrator externalizes the affiliation onto a relationship between strangers. He attempts to grasp a woman in the asynchronous simultaneity of both not yet being and already being his mother. In a few places in Bait, there are references to childhood.15 What is involuntarily amassed throughout childhood is rejected during maturation, through the process of the cognitive selection of intuitive and sensible material: When children become people, they stop seeing what they were able to see when they were children, they even begin to doubt it, but that doesn’t mean that what they were once able to see no longer exists.16

Childhood returns and is revived from the connection between givenness and mediation. To be able to narrate, the son must break any affiliation and

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kinship and become a child who is not and has never been the son. The narrator ceases to be a son to become a narrator. The object of his narration is not the woman who was his mother, but a woman who could be and could have never been his mother. In the passage from son to narrator, there is an attempt to glimpse an element of contingency in the necessity of birth and motherhood. The narrator no longer strives to take the place of his mother. Instead, he is not “in any place”:17 ovde becomes everywhere and nowhere. Voice and story, memory and sound, enter into circulation through this displacement. This is not about playing roles or temporarily being someone else. The difference between fiction and reality could not capture how the given ceases to be immediate and gets to be created anew. The narrator dubs Donald and himself as “shady creatures (senasta bića).” While Donald comes from the North, the narrator portrays himself as surging from “the land of no return, which has stood eccentrically in relation to all the corners of the world and to the center itself.”18 The narrator attempts to get close to the northern principle, which diminishes the number of intermediaries between oneself and the world. In this northern conception of presentation, “all the more is the world only world, pure and clear in its horrible simplicity.”19 The threshold between recording and listening is constantly crossed: “The only things is that I didn’t go far enough.”20 The center could only be destabilized by starting from the given world, thereby suppressing the playful multiplicity of all its versions. Yet, versions are not variations. This construction does not preclude access to the given world. Rather, it intermediates the emergence of its givenness. Such a construction could be taken as a germinal story. This story would not simply be inherited and transmitted across generations. It is not conveyed from mother to son. The story becomes germinal when it loses its progenitor and stirs up an endless propagation of foundlings and bastards. Giving birth is repeated in the reverse direction; from the son’s story, birth should be given to a woman from whom germinates the mother as the storyteller of her life.21 The storyteller constitutes the germinal story as a proliferation of other stories. The given is no longer a choice between various possibilities (versions); rather, it arises from their de-synchronized co-existence in the same world (variations). The narrator can talk about his mother only when he portrays her as parenthesized and hyphenated (non)-being a mother. The (non)-mother is a female in the sense of the intersection of trajectories of woman and mother. The origin of narration mutates into its goal. The situation of narration that is supposed to imbue its object with meaning turns out to be the sole object of narration. The situation is stripped of its immediacy and its givenness must be regained. Through this transformation, mother and son break the immediacy granted by kinship, and they establish a relationship that is outside consanguinity and family ties. When the narrator reads a letter from the mother’s first husband, he remarks: “At times I have imagined that one benefit of a

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parent’s death can be found in the fact that afterward a man stops being someone’s son and that, at least for a while, he walks as if the world belongs to him alone.”22 The story is not born out of the congenital mechanism of mother and son; it cannot be repeated as and on a recorded tape. The story is pervaded with the external sounds of the situation of recording, which are neither anticipated nor counted as part of the content of the story. However, these contingent sounds cannot be discarded as a noise channel excluded from the message.23 Instead, the sheer materiality of the medium penetrates the very form of the story. As the recording continues, mother and son refer to the tape recorder as an audiocassette, which allows recording new content on the same tape. The mother’s story is an acoustic palimpsest made of infinite and indiscernible layers of sound: “I don’t know why we spoke about the reverse side of the tape when a tape recorder always records on the same side, only in opposite directions.”24 Through this sedimentation of lateral sounds, the narration is separated from the situation out of which it is born. The narration itself ceases to be innate; it breaks out of the model of descent. These lateral sounds are the object of narration. The lost mother tongue dwells in the lateral sounds as an empty voice that narrates a mute story. Aphasia as a Schema of the Mother Tongue The unarticulated noise of the tape recorder’s transmission device blends with the articulated sound of the mother’s voice. A buzz produced by the wheels, pressure rollers, rubber belts, and idlers of the magnetophon does not stifle the mother’s voice; rather, it disperses and scatters attention between the human voice and the sound of the machine. The sound and the voice traverse each other, forming an asynchronous middle in which they simultaneously retain their difference and lose their discernibility. The sound in the voice discloses unarticulated layers of acoustic matter, which interfere with the distinct vocality. This sonority cannot be linked to memory: “I wanted to say something else (. . .) but I no longer remember what.”25 After recording the mother’s story, the narrator put the tapes away on a bookshelf behind the Yugoslav Academy’s Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian (Akademijin rečnik srpsko-hrvatskog jezika).26 He delayed listening to them for fourteen years. When he was leaving for Canada, he took the tapes to rehearse his mother’s story in a foreign country. The language, collected and stored in the Dictionary, was supposed to represent his mother’s tongue. Yet, after hearing his mother two years after recording her, the language she spoke hits him like the indistinct acoustic mass of a foreign language. The mother’s forgetting of forgetting is stored on the shelf behind the Dictionary and surrendered to oblivion. It is the sound of memory dissociated from a connection with any words.

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Bergson27 discusses the psychological and neurophysiological theories, which propose that memories are localized in the brain. These theories build their hypotheses by arguing that recognition impairment is caused by lesions in the cerebral cortex. However, Bergson contends that such hypotheses neglect the impact of the motoric component on remembering. Remembering cannot recall memories because it might lose the capability of responding to stimuli in the environment or it becomes disabled, permanently, or temporarily, of any voluntary act upon external objects. However, this temporary or permanent memory loss does not necessarily entail that memories are destroyed. Bergson looks for a confirmation of his hypothesis in an analysis of word-recognition impairment. Before we proceed with an elaboration of Bergson’s argument, we will anticipate our disagreement with some of its parts. First, the hypothesis of the motor background of memory does not yet refute the hypothesis of the localization of memories in the brain. Second, it is not necessary to reject the hypothesis of brain localization to prove that memories are not destroyed in cases of impairment recognition. If the argument is built by replacing one hypothesis with the other, then the hypothesis about the independent character of memories depends on its antithesis. Third, in Cinema 2 Deleuze shows that the interruption of the motor mechanism is not solely a pathological deviation from the normal functioning of memory. Auditive memory and word recognition challenge the hypothesis that memories are deposited in the brain.28 Bergson compares this to sensory aphasia in which hearers perceive their native language as a foreign language. One is alienated from one’s own mother tongue, hearing it as an indiscernible flux of sounds reduced to a noise that is no longer possible to be apprehended as discrete segments of articulation. For Bergson, this does not mean that one suddenly loses the words of one’s native language. Sensory aphasia is not about losing words at all; rather, it is about the possibility that one could be alienated from the language considered as a net of seemingly inextricable bonds and attachments. This unsettling experience is not solely due to the pathology of aphasia. One does not lose words at all; instead, they are experienced as foreign due to a word-recognition impairment. Bergson finds an explanation in the concept of a motor schema. It is an intervening pattern between auditive memories, ideas, and perceptions. Bergson builds the concept of a motor schema according to his notion of movement. This means that a motor schema simultaneously dissociates and reconstitutes a flow of sound. A motor schema attempts to grasp the continuity of sound instead of segmenting it into small discrete parts. Bergson explains the constitution of a motor schema through an analogy with the imitation of movement. Similar to repetition in movement, a motor schema is obscure at the outset. Yet, already in such an embryonic state it embraces the status of a virtual schema for the further dissociation of movement: “Here a complete analysis

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is necessary, in which no detail is neglected, and an actual synthesis, in which nothing is curtailed.”29 A motor schema adheres to the incessant variation of the acoustic images of words. The mutation of the acoustic image correlates with the “double current” of the general idea, oscillating between pure memory and pure perception. As it oscillates, the general idea traverses the layers and sheets of memory, without fixing itself to pure memory and pure perception as extreme points. Due to this correlation with the manifold of sheets and layers of auditive memory, a motor schema is open to a continuous alternation of auditive images. Speaking is not based on words as individual and isolated units, but on sentences in which words perpetually modify themselves and elicit the modification of other words. Otherwise, speakers would always be expected to articulate uttered sounds in the same pitch and tone to ensure the uniform and immutable association of their auditive images to meanings. Bergson’s conception of language comprehension is developed as a version of the cone of memory. The understanding and recognition of words move through the sections of the cone, trying to maintain the link between the idea, the auditive memory of words, and the uttered word. Bergson’s theses are akin to his analyses of memory impairment. Recollections are not saved in the brain. In the term recognition impairment, on the contrary, the links between auditive memory and the verbal image are interrupted. A patient revolves around an acoustic image.30 Nevertheless, he does not lose its memory, but the motor support (un adjuvant moteur) that mediates the actualization of auditive memory images in uttered words. Bergson mentions various cases in which the motor arc between memory and the word is recovered. Such a recovery would not be possible if the sensory aphasia would have been a disturbance in the keeping of memories in some of the regions of the brain. Bergson speaks about a “continuous movement” in which the nebulosity of the idea (la nébulosité de l’idée)31 is condensed into demarcated stillfluid images yet temporarily solidified and attached to the acoustic matter of sounds. However, as Bergson noticed, it is not possible to determine “a common measure,” or “a point of contact”32 between separated and realized words and their infinite modifications caused by the continuous variation in a sentence. Since it is not possible to single out points of intersection, one could not delineate between confused sounds and the clearness provided by memory images. The “confused movement” is simultaneously a “virtual decomposition” of imitated movement. Bergson contests scientific thought (la pensée scientifique) that divides continuity of change in discontinuous perceptions. These perceptions are connected to words as finished things to which the crude sounds (les sons bruts) of speech are assigned. However, if scientific thought reifies words and sounds into complete things, Bergson’s notion of motor schema propelled

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reification to the level of common measure, to points of contact, as well as to the dividing line between them. Motor schema exhausts the very variability of the flow that undergoes its schematization. In the chapter of A Thousands Plateaus titled “8 1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between three lines. The first line is a molar line of segmentarity that establishes delimited segments. The second line, that of supple segmentation, breaks away from the segments of internally ordered and recognizable relations. Instead, it establishes relations between segments as they escape from being formed into concepts. If we apply this difference to Bergson’s analysis of speech comprehension, it could be concluded that these two lines interlace with each other and simultaneously set up points of solidifications and places of fluidity in the continuity of sound and idea. Bergson’s motor schema itself becomes supple but, at the same time, it removes pliancy from the series of sound and idea to which it is applied. Although motor schema becomes molecular, it simultaneously converts sound and idea into a molar series. Sensory aphasia is an impairment that involves a disconnection from the motor schema.33 The detachment from the motor schema generates a void, or a gap, between memories and words. Nevertheless, there are cases when one would stir the drifting and floating acoustic memories and even enlarge a chasm between them and acoustic images. One does not aim to recover the motor arc but to leave its extremes unhinged, disjointed by the opening middle of traversals without beginnings and endings. The interruption of the motor arc is not only aimed to the extrication of memory from being tied to the acoustic image. Moreover, the acoustic matter is redeemed as “unfindable particles of an anonymous matter.”34 Using language creates ruptures, blanks, voids, and other forms that attract entropy. The third line of flight interferes with the motor schema. Entropy catalysts suppress the stupefying redundancy of communicative frameworks pretending to facilitate conversation. Deleuze and Guattari35 acknowledge Natalie Sarraute’s remark that in every conversation, a subconversation is present, and they call the lines of flight the micropolitics of conversation. In the third line of flight, nothing happens but everything changes.36 Bergson cannot reach the line of flight through the notion of motor schema because sensory aphasia is primarily the pathological degeneration of the capability of speech comprehension. However, starting from the pathology of communication, Bergson also demonstrates that recalling auditive images is not only the process of retrieving them from some of the regions of the brain. Even in the most conventional language use, facilitated by well-tuned patterns, speakers are forced to delay a trajectory leading from uttered words to their auditive images, to frame distension that will render a word full of meaning into an “empty vessel” that would glean what has already been said

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and what is yet to be said. This gleaning produces a middle that passes over the openness of auditive images and words. Sensory aphasia is not (or, at least, not only) the inability to render the motor schema between actual words and stored images; rather, it is to narrow language use to what has already been established. The ability to use and understand language does not lie in diminishing the middle that divides words and their meanings. Instead, it depends on stretching the middle to the point of dismembering or unrhyming auditive memory with verbal images. We will not understand each other by attempting to extinguish the middle in-between us, but by finding a way how to distend it, to dilate it to its limits where understanding is conditioned by the extinguishing of ourselves. The recurrent appearance of the sentence “Da umem da pišem (. . .)”37 refers to the act of writing only to the extent to which writing itself assumes and adopts its deprivation.38 The condition of being devoid of the capability to write is connected to the act of writing itself. To write is simultaneously to withdraw from writing. Writing and retracting from writing are de-synchronized through writing about one’s own inability to write. It is impossible to withdraw from writing without being engaged in it. One enacts writing by disengaging from it. Returning to Lyotard, every writing is rewriting because one does not simply write about something (e.g., about one’s mother).39 Instead, one writes about oneself writing, despite lacking the capability to write. The writing arises from its own lack, from being incapable to write. It is a way to unhinge the middle from the beginning and the ending. Nothing heals the rift between writing and being unable to write. One is always in the middle of not knowing how to write about not knowing how to write, as well as writing about that respective not knowing how to write about not knowing how to write: “Where should I begin?”40 is also a question that recurs throughout the novel. Instead of taking his mother as the direct object of writing, the narrator simultaneously writes about his inability to write and to write about his mother, despite being incapable of writing: “I didn’t know where things begin, where they end.”41 These two slopes crisscross and escape each other. Insofar the narrator approaches the givenness of his mother by undergoing his deprivation, this latter experience itself becomes the object of writing. The narrator underscores that he writes, despite lacking the capability to write. If he would have known—umeo—he would have written differently. The present story is contrived about an unwritten story and to a stroy that could not have been written. The (im)possibility of the unwritten story must be taken into account in the course of understanding an actual story. Actual and unwritten stories frame each other. The writability of one story depends on the sheer contingency of the other story being unwritable. Da umem da pišem is not only an operator that is added to a sentence or part of a text, thereby producing effects like the paradoxes of a liar or a

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set of sets. One writes in the middle of one’s deprivation. The gap between writing and its renunciation gives rise to the middle as a zone of traversals without a beginning and an ending as its outskirts. Lack itself becomes writing. Listening to the tape recording is not limited to the effortless linking of memories and concepts with auditive images. The narrator had more technically advanced techniques of recording and devices at his disposal. Yet, he chooses an outdated device to complicate the linking between memory and language. Moreover, he demonstrates that this process never runs smoothly, even in (seemingly) the most regular of situations. The old recording device does not clear up the voice recorded on the tape. Instead, it emphasizes the blurriness of voice, its arduous sonority that could not easily be translated into strings of discrete units endowed with meaning. Listening to the tape is a search for spots in which the linking of memories and sounds fails and fold upon each other. However, it is not only a quest for the middle that unhinges the voice from memory. A decisive step would be to convert the unhinging middle into a relation that would link disjointedness and separation themselves. Aphasia is not taken as a model for understanding writing. Instead, only writing can explain aphasia as the non-corresponding, non-coinciding co-existence of turning the mother’s tongue into an unknown language and divesting the mother from motherhood; a woman who talks. In his seminal book Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, the famous Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev introduces the notion of the sign function as opposed to de Saussure’s notion of the sign.42 According to Hjelmslev, de Saussure did not develop the sign function, but he defines the sign as the interdependence of expression and content. De Saussure presupposes that the two sides of the sign are simultaneously divided and unified. He synchronizes the two sides of the sign and erases the bar between them.43 While language segments the two amorphous masses of ideas and sounds, the substance is determined by form. Contrary to this, Hjelmslev introduces an idea of matter that remains outside the verbal articulation of substance exhibited by the form. Language is just one of the forms of the articulation of matter, which could be articulated in a variety of ways and from multiple points of views.44 Every language delimits matter in a manifold way and cuts the amorphous mass differently, or the matter is demarcated differently in different languages. One can push Hjelmslev’s theory to its extreme. Hjelmslev explains the articulation of matter in different languages, but this process applies to the same language. The matter could be delimited and segmented differently in the same language, considered to be a mother tongue. However, it is precisely this possibility of an ever-shifting mold that makes one language a mother tongue: “If you want a story, he [Donald] said, then you first have to forget about language, is that clear? I asked which language he had in mind. Any, he

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said, whichever, because all languages say the same thing, only their sounds are different.”45 Hjelmslev mentions examples in which matter constantly reshapes and mutates itself, appearing as a substance of always changing form. Therefore, the sign function refers to change itself, instead of to the form which change assumes or to which it can be attached. This conclusion related to the sign function can be transferred to Bergson’s notion of a motor schema, which intervenes as a connection of memories and auditive images. The motor schema, now redefined as a sign function, is closer to aphasic drifting, revolving around memories and auditive images, rather than linking them. The motor schema is an aberration of memory and auditive images. Although Bergson explains sensory aphasia as the disintegration of motor schema, the explanation must be reversed; if motor schema explains language as movement, then sensory aphasia explains the motor schema itself: Words do not exist in time; they are spoken, or they’re not spoken; this is all; there is no third possibility. Even when they’re recorded on tape recorder tape, they don’t exist in the past but only at the moment someone decides to listen to them again, enables them to speak again, at least by means of electronics, plastics, and magnetic currents. Even then, however, they will not speak out of a more or less defined segment of the past but will always be acknowledged in a new opening in the present, which means, of course, that they never will be the same since all parameters that define any moment in the present cannot be repeated twice.46

On the contrary, the motor schema is susceptible to the same criticism that Bergson leveled against associationism. The mother tongue is foremost a failure of the aphasic to arrest the whirling of memories and auditive images, rather than a web of familial ties. When he introduces the motor schema, Bergson defines it as having the features of simultaneously being more than automatism and less than willful acting.47 In Cinema 2, Deleuze develops the notion of the spiritual automaton that refers to a break or rupture in thinking.48 Through this rupture, thinking reaches its own impossibility, which, on the other hand, becomes thought itself. Listening to the tape consists of harking back to sounds that disturb the purity of the mother’s voice. Just as such a-signifying sounds reveal the mother tongue, they also form the sonority of her story. To recount the story of and about the mother is to tell the story of this a-signifying sonority. Similarly, just as the voice dissolves into the acoustic matter, so the story of the mother goes beyond her motherhood, to the limit of the asynchronous simultaneity of becoming-woman and becoming-mother. While listening, attention is dispersed along with the sound of the tape recorder, its rollers, head, surrounding background sounds, the creaks of furniture, coughing, and accidental bumps. This

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sonorous background does not disturb listening; rather, it is the object of listening as sound detached from the voice, acoustic matter embodying the screeches,49 and squeaks50 involved in returning the voice to its preverbal state: the “voice which is no longer a voice, from the beyond and absent.”51 Curbing the mother from the narration, her “no,” refers to a story which would be bereft from “other meaning, (. . .) other interpretation, (. . .) other reading.”52 The mother resists giving birth to the story. She simultaneously “(. . .) rather [. . .] did everything for others,”53 as “she was obstructing the way to her heart.”54 These lateral sounds are medium, enabling to hear the mother’s voice. The mother’s voice becomes a tomb55 of meaning, in which the voice crumbles to the sonority dispossessed from the features of articulate sound.56 The tape recording does not resuscitate, but it anesthetizes the links between the voice and the story. In that deadening sonority, there is everything but the voice, just as in the story, there is “everything but the story.”57 The mother tongue is that sheer sonority, a sound without meaning, similar to listening to an alien language.58 The Secret Which Becomes Perceptible—The Birth of the Mother from the Son’s Story The three lines are co-extensive with the three stages of the secret. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the secret as finite content that is to be revealed, and the secret as the infinite form that defers the revealing of the secret. The secret as finite content is related to something that happened in the past and can be determined. The secret as infinite form refers to an undetermined event. According to Deleuze and Guattari, these different yet connected concepts of the secret brought psychoanalysis to pass from its hysteric to its paranoid version, from the unconsciousness as the content of the secret to its being the very form of the secret. The answer to the question “What happened?” turns out to be that nothing happened. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the feminine concept of the secret, in which content is molecularized and form dissolves. In the feminine secret, the woman is secret without hiding anything. A woman hides by telling everything, to the last detail: Yet it is curious how a woman can be secretive while at the same time hiding nothing, by virtue of transparency, innocence, and speed. (. . .) They have no secret because they have become a secret themselves.59

These are the three stages of the secret—a child’s content, a man’s infinite form, and a woman’s pure line. The stages are the three becomings of the secret, and in the third stage, the secret loses both content and form,

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“becoming a pure moving line,”60 or the unrolling of the tape, which neither hides nor reveals anything. The narrator portrays the mother as believing in what happened, instead of what could have happened.61 The mother undergoes both protean changes of identity and the constant disclosing of her dissimulation. The narrator recounts an event from childhood when he looked at his mother and saw her face glowing. He assumes that the face reflected the light of the moon, but when he looked at the sky, he saw only “still thicker darkness of clouds.”62 The mother’s storytelling does not illuminate anything, and it is not illuminated by anything. Instead, her storytelling is light itself, both straightforward and unfathomable in its being exposed. Just as the narrator disavows the art of telling stories, so the mother claims that it is impossible to mold her life into a story. She denies that her life is worthy enough to be recounted, and she will only “spread out”63 her life as “raw material.”64 The narrator argues that this raw life is not “exalted”65 enough to be the subject of literature. The raw material is a ceaseless change that she undergoes66—her own most being—to preserve the Jewishness from which her first husband had to abdicate.67 On the other hand, the mother struggles to distinguish changing from feigning: “She never wanted to dissemble (. . .).”68 This resistance to fiction turns her life into a secret. Just as the son must redeem his childhood in the germinal story, so the mother must disenthrall herself from hatching the story by becoming-woman. Becoming-woman is neither imitation, through simulation and resemblance, nor a transmutation into a woman. Both imitation and transformation embrace molar entities. Both women and men are equally engaged in becomingwoman. The switch from the subordinate body to the body without organs depends on becoming-woman and it occurs only at the molecular level. The body without organs is first abducted from the girl, which complies with the molar order of womanhood. This establishment of a governable woman, as the clay from which the shape is carved, is a mold for producing the governable body of the boy. The body without organs is retrieved only through becoming-woman. For Deleuze and Guattari, all other becomings start with becoming-woman: Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings.69

Every becoming is minor, although both majority and minority are not included in it. When one becomes minor, then becoming is reterritorialized into a recognizable identity. On the other hand, every becoming is deterritorializing. Just as women pass through becoming women, men’s becoming

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goes through becoming-women. Black people become by passing through white people, and Jews become by passing through the non-Jew. The minor can enter becoming only outside the relationship with the major. Becoming is beyond the opposition between major and minor: Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew.70 A woman has to become-woman but in a becoming-woman of all man. A Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew.71

The universality of becoming depends on the presupposition that the becoming of both Jews and women is conditioned on non-Jews becoming Jews and on men becoming women. Just as the mother, as she is involved in becoming-woman, refuses to breed the story, so the son must become a child without parents; uprooted and autochthonous, an unhatched original, cut loose from origins or paternity. First, the mother’s husband requested her to unbraid the inheritance of her Jewishness. However, the mother transmitted her Jewishness from the first family to the second. The children from the mother’s second marriage adopt the Jewish religion not because their biological father was a Jew, but to continue and sustain the Jewishness of the mother’s first husband. The narrator is created from the previous relationship of the son-mother, to which he bears no affiliation: My life had suddenly become an answer to the life of a man whom I had never seen; I existed in order that he, despite the difficult-to-comprehend idea of universal annihilation, could continue to exist.72

After discovering the mother’s letters exchanged with her first husband,73 the view from a “high-rise” “on the square”74 is devoid of its familiarity. Its intimacy is drained to the phantasmagoric shadowplay projected on the walls in the dark of the living room. The view of the homeland no longer discerns objects and persons; instead, it is immersed in deceitful shadows75. The mother’s story disassembles itself from the son, who turns out to be both the foundling and the bastard. Just as memories and words are coeval without ever synchronizing with each other, the story and the narrator draw a line that traverses the mother’s becoming a woman and son’s becoming a child. When Is Today?—Narrating In-between Amnesia and Paramnesia The narrator first presents himself as a failed poet who wrote long poems in short verses. This narrator is split into the function of transmitting the

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mother’s story and the function of telling a story about his mother. Even when he tells the story about his mother, the real object of narration is not the mother herself, but the germinal story.76 These two stories, that of and about the mother, one recorded and the other listened to, incessantly traverse each other. They create a zone of traversal from which springs the germinal story. The mother is enticed to narrate, but then she turns into the bait that her son will pursue to tell the story about her. He can tell the story of his mother only if he becomes a character in the story about the first-order story. However, if communication is understood as its reduction to one of its constituents, or its inference from the relations between them, the tape recorder is neither a form of communication nor its vehicle. Instead, relation extricates itself from related terms.77 Communication is a traversing quality present in every constituent of communication and its functions, without any being capable of embodying or incorporating it. It is communication without conveying anything at all, which avoids any convergence among the communicative functions. Relation unhinges all the constituents of communication. The transmission of the mother’s story depends on the circumstances of its transmission. The listening of the story is permeated with the surroundings in which it takes place. The story is turned into a simultaneity of its versions, engendered from the various circumstances in which the story is conveyed. The narrator becomes the hero of the embedded story; it is hinted that the story is written in English. The outlined story tells about a poet who attempts to narrate and to shift from poetry to prose. The narrator ignores Donald’s advice to recount a story about his mother instead of himself. However, the two stories are inextricably linked. The poet in the narrator’s story replaces amplified narration with a condensed overview of events. The hero of the embedded story loses his mother shortly before his country collapsed into war: The world around him is falling apart, a war is going on, his mother has died, and he feels, despite all prosaic concision, the story of her life becoming real in him, drawing him into itself and forcing him to play a role determined a long ago.78 (Svet se oko njega raspadao vodio se rat, umrla mu je majka, i osetio je, usprkos svim proznim sažimanjima, kako povest njenog života postaje u njemu stvarna, kako ga uvlači u sebe i primorava da odigra odavno utvrđenu ulogu.)79

With that sentence with the verb in the third person—“And I’d written about a poet (. . .)80 / A pisao sam o pesniku (. . .)”81—the novel could be read as the narrator’s story of his attempts to write about his mother. However, he recounts only the recording and listening to the tapes on which the mother’s

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story is recorded. From the perspective of this sentence, with the shift in the verb’s person, the poet that appears at the beginning of the novel turns out to be a poet-character from the narrator’s story. The narrator, showing himself to be situated outside of the story, pops up from it. The creation transpires from its dwelling in the world in which it is created. The narrator is altered into a character in the story. A voice says: “I didn’t know how to end the story82 / Nisam znao kako da završim priču (. . .),”83 and he invents a character-poet who encounters a girl on the riverbank to whom he said that “love is the last bastion84 / ljubav poslednje uporište,”85 without which everything would be wiped out. Up to that point, the novel was read as a narrator’s story about himself writing about writing on his mother, and how he discusses the writing process with the imagined Canadian writer Donald. Taking a clue from the sentences with a shift in the verb’s person, it could be deduced that the narrator is split into the character of the poet who tries to write about his mother and the narrator who recounts a tale about that character and discusses the writing process with Donald. The inserted verses reiterate the connection and the relationship between the contractions and dilatations because they are described as alternating between consonants and vowels in their “shift of explosions and relaxations.”86 The doubling is redoubled. The narrator puts the manuscript of his story in an envelope, sends it to Donald with a cover letter, which is longer than the story it accompanies. Hence, the accompanying story envelops the enveloping story. Narrative and narrated times collide, pass into each other, come to their limit, thereby forming a zone of traversals. In this zone, everything simultaneously begins and ends, evaporates, and resumes. Perfect and present are toggling. The narrator explicates the circumstances that made him leave his homeland and introduces an abbreviation into the perfect tense: “Then I left on my trip.87 / Onda sam otputovao.”88 This sentence is instantiated by the narrator, who listens to the tapes containing his mother’s story to tell a story about her. He only rehearses the story about telling the intended story. This sentence is counterpointed with a sentence in the present tense: Not immediately afterward, of course, but now I’m rushing with that account because my glance at the square wall clock tells me that soon I expect Donald to arrive.89 (Ne odmah posle toga, naravno, ali žurim sada sa tim iskazom, jer mi pogled na četvrtasti zidni sat kazuje da uskoro mogu da očekujem Donaldov dolazak).90

The differently tensed sentence is related to the immediately preceding abbreviation in the perfect tense. This asynchronizing time loop produces the transgression and collapse of narrative levels. Contrary to a notion of metalepsis

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that is given in spatial terms, this curve of time induces a breaching of narrative levels.91 The intra-homodiegetic narrator is the character of the story that he is not able to write. Two successive sentences in different tenses merge, shifting into a time when the first-degree narrator pops up as the object of the second-order story (it is hypodiegetic). The narration in the present tense is interrupted with a shift to the sentence in the perfect tense, in which we are told that Donald has received the manuscript of the story with the cover letter: He called me when he received my parcel, he still hadn’t opened it, and suggested that he visit me the following Saturday, that is, today, a little after ten in the evening.92 (Javio mi se kada je primio moju pošiljku, još nije bio otvori, i predložio da me poseti naredne subote, odnosno danas.)93

The narrator is transformed from the son who narrates into a son who needs to become the child of the story, the foundling and the bastard in the story. This today (danas) ceases to be a transitive point between the past and the future. Instead, it is their unhinging, elevated to the zone of traversal between the times of recording and listening, the mother’s memory and the narrator’s memory. From this middle arises a germinal story that belongs neither to the mother nor to the son: Even someone who doesn’t know how to write can understand this, can draw lines that from opposite directions hurtle toward the point of intersection, one that records loss and decline, the other that that designates renewal and recovery, to that same place where they are joined by the spiral of memory, which leads downward, and the spiral of self-confidence, which leads nowhere.94

Today is a meanwhile of the mother’s becoming-woman and the son’s becoming-child. They can ally on the condition of disrupting their filiation and removing the woman–child relationship from the framework of affiliation. Middling the Language between Individuation and Association Language moves along two slopes, one tending toward constancy and uniformity and the other aiming to adhere to the mutability and diversity of both form and meaning. Yet, the two slopes, even in their intersection, must retain a middle in their openness. It is not enough that they are open to each other in the form of mutual openness and shared recognition. However, it would be too much to displace openness with a gap.95 The middle is a point of

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unhinging and connecting these slopes without melding their two co-existing operations. The middle forms a meanwhile in which the two slopes are connected through their unhinging and being unhinged as they connect. Otherwise, the asynchronous simultaneity of the slopes is homogenized in a twofold manner. The first slope dominates the second by imposing uniformity on variety. The second slope might be subordinated to the first by yoking variability to invariability. Bergson’s motor diagram from Matter and Memory is an example of putting variation in the service of achieving and maintaining invariants. Variation is drained by its own modulation, as Deleuze demonstrated with the notion of the control society. We will counter this thesis by reconsidering Bergson’s account of language given in Creative Evolution. Bergson’s meditations on language in this book are related to his analyses of the co-existing processes of individuation and association. Every individuation is followed by a subsequent association in which another individuation might take place. Bergson emphasizes that life, stretching from the simplest to the most complex organisms, oscillates or “hesitates”96 between individuation and association. Individuality and association are coeval during the evolution of life. However, no being remains on one of those paths; rather, it retains the simultaneity of spreading within itself. Bergson remarks that co-existence and simultaneity are not synchronized because of wavering between “pure unity” and “pure multiplicity”97 without fixing to any of the sides of its own bordering. It is true that Bergson, at the beginning of this section, describes the vacillation between individuation and association as “balancing.”98 Yet, he immediately privileges misbalancing or imbalance over equilibrium. He depicts the fluctuation of life along the opposed streams of individuation and association in terms of hesitation, an indefinitely leaping, or a “weighing of balance” by “the slightest push.”99 Bergson speaks about cells, but his conclusions could be translated to overall society as a complex organism that is not only an association of individuals and associations that are not individualized. The analogy between the cell and society cannot be overstated, although it could be rather misleading. The analogy is important as an attack on the view portraying society as an aggregate of atomized individuals who are homogenized along with shared values and meanings that become the incontestable core of filiation. The ineluctability of that core is endowed with the status of an indivisible cell upon which the whole edifice of society is erected. For Bergson, however, it is not that important that societies and individuals are susceptible to the dynamics of multiplication and individuation, association and individuation, unification and separation. Rather he emphasizes that even the simplest and most primitive organisms enact an incessant subdivision and that in every subdivided stage other individual cells that can be (re)

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associated could be produced. In that new bond, individuation and association are perpetuated. However, the ensuing association and individuation are independent of the preceding ones. Hence, he concludes that “(. . .) the apparent individuality of the whole is the composition of an undefined number of potential individualities potentially associated.”100 The same mechanism is transferred to society: “Individuals join together into a society; but the society, as soon as formed, tends to melt the associated individuals into a new organism, so as to become itself an individual, able in its turn to be part and parcel of a new association.”101 This conclusion can be adopted as the excoriation of core values, identities, and meanings to which individuals must unquestionably comply, thereby making compliance a factor of the homogenization of otherwise atomized individuals. Earlier in Creative Evolution, Bergson rejects society as the privileged goal of life. Life ceaselessly divides and dissociates itself in diverging directions. Bergson opposes insect societies, “as ordered, united and stereotyped,”102 to human societies, as “open to every sort of progress, but divided, and incessantly at strife with themselves.”103 It is impossible to create a “society that would be always in progress and always in equilibrium.” As life evolving along continuingly diverging paths becomes more complex, the two classes of properties only “vaguely” complement each other. Later, in the course of developing an argument against mechanism and finalism and drawing a distinction between animals and vegetables, we find the striking definition of a group that is no longer “defined by the possession of certain characters, but by its tendency to emphasize them.”104 According to Bergson, the principle of evolution is dissociation. When he shifts focus from states to tendencies, he defines what both unites and separates animals and plants. They share an impetus of life in which both animals and plants diverge into different functions. Bergson returns to the comparison between insect and human societies, but at that point, he redefines their distinction based on distinguishing the languages of these two forms of society. The language of insects is invariably attached to respective objects and actions. Human language, on the contrary, varies to be capable of extending from known aspects of reality to those that are not yet known. The signs of human language are mobile and can be applied to various objects. The same impetus diverged differently in animal and human languages. While animal languages are carved from an instinctual relationship to the world and are directed toward a matter, human languages emerge from intelligence and attempt to treat life as inert matter. For Bergson, language has the essential role of binding intellects in society. Therefore, the conclusion devised for the language can be employed in society. Just as language is in the service of the intellect in taming the wholeness and mobility of duration— through fabrication (la fabrication), which simultaneously decomposes and

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recomposes life—so society puts its creative and inventive capacities in the function of the riveting variability of life. The solitary relationship between person and object switches to the communal relationship between persons through language. Consequently, a personal relationship with the world is intermediated through interpersonal relationships.105 By way of language, society refrains from being open to closing upon itself; its function, connected to fabrication, is to treat progressive societies as stereotyped. Human society synchronizes and restricts the perpetual and incessant oscillation between individuation and association to thwart the creation of new individuals and new associations. Human societies invent open and variable means to turn human bonds into closed and invariable ties, to overhaul tentative bonds into a tight filiation. In the animal world, invariability is pre-given, while in the human world it is attained and enforced by variable means. In the last chapter of Bergsonism, Deleuze underscores this line of Bergson’s argument. Deleuze argues that human societies are not less closed than their animal counterpart. Deleuze rejects the possible idea that the human leaps out of a closed society by way of intuition. There is something else distinguished between both the egoism stemming from intelligence and the order imposed by the realm of instinct. This difference—or de-synchronization—is ensured by way of the interval between intelligence and society. In that interval, the creative emotion detached from both social obligations to obey pressure and individual efforts surges while it upsurges in resistance to them. Creative emotion breaks the circle of individual contestation, social constraints, and fabricating of compelling persuasions. This escape from being trapped in a closed society by the open means of fabrication is likened by Deleuze to the “cosmic memory”, which actualizes all planes at once. Only exceptional individuals are capable of embodying cosmic memory and yet they are also able to convey it to the average individual enshrined in a closed society and ensnared by its fabrications. Such a surrendering of emotion is enabled by the precedence of the latter over the representation. This emotion, which dispenses with representation, does not have an object, but an essence, “which spreads itself.”106 This emotion does not express any particular society, but it outlines an open society or “society of creators.” It is ambiguous whether the society of creators springs up from the interval or whether it produces such an interval. Moreover, Deleuze does not dispense with the relation between an exceptional individual and those affected with the one in his later writings. In Cinema 2, Deleuze displaces exceptional individual with exceptional people. In advocating an agonal post-democratic narratology based on Hannah Arendt, Croatian literary scholar Ivana Perica attempts to overcome both “exclusive and conservative mechanisms of the community” and the “radical

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passivity of particularizing subversive metapolitics.”107 Perica proposes “third generations of hi/stories”108 that require a minimal consensus as the ground for dissensual agency. I am thoroughly sympathetic toward Perica’s project, but if one installs minimal consensus into dissensual politics (an agreement upon disagreement), one must answer how to obstruct the possible spreading of consensus over dissensus. Hence, every disagreement would be measured upon the background of minimal consensus, and an initial agreement on disagreeing would threaten to extinguish any further disagreement. Perica’s thesis is closer to the proponents of the recognition theory. I adhere to the view that the notion of consensus is to be reinvigorated, but I think that the real object of political theory is to defend disagreement as a genuine political agency. We do not only agree on disagreement; we also disagree about ways how we—eventually—arrive at agreeing with each other. We diverge in the process of converging with each other. Every consensus is at least minimally, to the point of imperceptibility, stretched by dissensus. A middle—or, a middling being—hinders consensus and dissensus from overlapping each other. This stretching has the temporal structure of the meanwhile as an incessant traversal between consensus and dissensus. The relationship between consensus and dissensus, agreement and disagreement, is two-layered. They are both simultaneous and asynchronous. Therefore, one needs to inquire into what curbs agreement and disagreement, converging and diverging, concordance and discordance, from merging and overlapping each other.

NOTES 1. David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 66. I will occasionally compare the English translation with the original edition of Bait in the Serbian language, published as David Albahari, Mamac (Beograd: Arkzin, 1997). 2. Recent critical readings of Bait dismiss this aspect of voice: see Iva Kosmos, “David Albahari—apolitični autor o političkim pitanjima i kolektivnoj odgovornosti,” pp. 153–165, in Tranzicija i kulturno pamćenje, eds. Virna Karlić, Sanja Šakić, Dušan Marinković (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2017) and Aleksandar Pavlović, “Progutati M/mamac: čitanje Albaharijevog predstavljanja Holokausta u kontekstu postjugoslovenskih ratova,” pp. 131–145, in Holokaust i filozofija, eds. Mark Lošonc and Predrag Krstić (Beograd: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju Univerziteta u Beogradu, 2018). 3. Longinović gives an important account of these topics. See Tomislav Z. Longinović, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011), pp. 175–176. 4. Albahari, Bait, p. 3.

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5. “‘What did I want to say? Can we stop for a moment?’ I hear my voice but I don’t understand the words. I imagine that the voice of someone who’d been crouching under the table would sound like that, and I certainly hadn’t been there. ‘Fine,’ said Mother and she got up. She had struck the table with her arm, or knee, perhaps with both her arm and knee, because two dull sounds reached my ears. Again, I hear my voice and again I don’t understand the words. Donald would find in this who knows what kind of hidden meaning. I bring my ear right next to the speaker of the tape recorder to hear Mother’s footsteps, the door opening and closing, or at least the coarse rustle of her palm smoothing her skirt, wrinkled from sitting. And while the squeaking of little rubbers belts reaches my ears, I know the exact number of steps she had had to take to get from the living room to the anteroom, from the anteroom to enter the kitchen. There, I could pass through the entire apartment with my eyes closed and not touch anything. Here, where the place never became my own, regardless of the cramped space of the house, I’m always running into something, looking for electrical switches in places where they are not located, stooping down when I should be standing upright, pushing the door instead of pulling it, turning when I should be going straight ahead. The reels are turning, the tape is becoming taut. I’m tired ‘Don’t tell me about tiredness,’ says Mother. I gaze at the tape recorder with astonishment. There was nothing to suggest that we had continued with the recording, that she had returned from the kitchen, that a new day had dawned" (Albahari, Bait, pp. 39–40). The ending of the novel with its doppelganger scene reiterates the feeling of alienation in a foreign space: “Then cautiously, quite cautiously, I move rearward until something touches me in the back” (Albahari, Bait, p. 117); “Tada se oprezno, sasvim oprezno, udaljavam natrag sve dok mi nešto ne dotakne leđa” (Albahari, Mamac, p. 139). While listening, the schema of familiar space is not employed in an alien environment. Instead, the foreign space turns into a schema of displacing and disrupting the familiar space. Relations between voices, persons, meanings, and situations reveal the cracks and fissures between them. Yet, they are related through this discontinuity. 6. Albahari, Bait, p. 40. 7. Albahari, Bait, p. 40. 8. Albahari, Bait, pp. 33–34; 44–45; 68; 73; 85; 94. 9. Albahari, Bait, p. 36. 10. Albahari, op. cit. p. 36. 11. My translation from the original in the Serbian language: “(. . .) i zato ostaje tu, ovde, gde u isto vreme ima i ono što više nema” (Albahari, Mamac, p. 48). The English translation is inaccurate: “(. . .) and that’s why he was staying here, here, where at the same time there was no longer that which there no longer was” (Albahari, Bait, p. 37). 12. In Bait, it is possible to discern classic literary devices and techniques drawing from the tradition of the novel. The narrator does not claim that he will directly recount persons and events. Instead, he presents himself as rendering the content stored on the tape recordings from voice to written text. It evokes indirect narration by conveying a found manuscript and rehearsing someone else’s witnessing or participating in the story. The narrator of Bait repeatedly inserts the claim that he does

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not know how to write. It is a variation of the well-known technique of narration when the narrator contrives himself as inadequate to the task. To complete narration results in the birth of the writer who can be ingrained only by the text. This textual becoming of the writer is in Bait complicated by the re-doubling of the son into Donald and the mother into Donald. Donald is the middle where both mother as beginning and son as ending disappear. Vladiv Glover (2010) and Obradović (2016) argue that Albahari is a postmodernist writer who absolutizes the textual aspect of literature. For that reason, his writings are indifferent to external reality. Obradović opposes the ethics of representation to Albahari’s postmodernist poetics. “Kako život leprša iako je vezan za određeno mjesto” (Albahari, Mamac, p. 129). 13. “Her [Mother’s] first husband (. . .) had contracted with my mother, who wasn’t my mother then, for a civil marriage.” (Albahari, Bait, p. 14). 14. Albahari, Bait, p. 14. 15. Albahari, Bait, pp. 26; 55–56. 16. Albahari, op. cit., p. 25. 17. Albahari, op. cit., p. 109. 18. Albahari, op. cit., p. 62. 19. Albahari, op. cit., p. 67. 20. Albahari, op. cit., p. 67. 21. We have in mind the notion of germinal life developed by Keith Ansell Pearson in Germinal Life. He defines it as a generation of new creative lines of life that master its speeds and molecules. An immobile voyage, developed in A Thousands Plateaus, does not refer to an impediment to movement or traveling. Instead, it is to take hold of one’s speed: “the nomad is, on the contrary, he who does not move. (…)” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousands Plateaus, p. 381); “Here, fixed does not mean immobile: it is the absolute state of movement as well as of rest, from which all relative speeds and slownesses spring” (op. cit., 267). 22. Albahari, Bait, p. 109. 23. “The voice is captured on an old fashioned magnetic tape, whose static and other noise interfere with the clear transmission of her story” (Longinović, Vampire Nation, p. 175–176). 24. Albahari, op. cit., p. 87. 25. Albahari, op. cit., p. 99. 26. Ibid., p. 100. 27. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 116–129. 28. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 108–109. 29. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 112. 30. Bergson, op. cit., p. 119. 31. Bergson, op. cit., p. 122. 32. Bergson, op. cit., p. 118. 33. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 120–121 34. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 196. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., pp. 196–197. 36. Ibid., p. 197.

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37. The sentence appears as a negation in the indicative mood “I don’t know how to write” (see for example, Albahari, Bait, p. 34) and most often as an if-clause: “If I knew how to write (. . .)” (Albahari, op. cit., pp. 11; 16; 25; 41; 54; 57; 109). 38. Šakić correctly observes: “Bait is neither (fictional) autobiography, nor a biography, which is underscored through playing with biographical evidence. Albahari wrote the novel and the protagonist of the novel does not know how to write at all, which is his crucial problem” (see Sanja Šakić, “Smrt u izgnanstvu: pisanje kao pisanje-postajanje,” Umjetnost riječi 58, no. 2 (2014): 225–241, p. 239). It is not clear to whom the pronoun ‘his’ refers in the sentence quoted from Šakić’s study since its referent can be Albahari, the novel, or the protagonist. Does the fact that Albahari wrote a novel whose protagonist does not know how to write at all (sic!) necessarily entail that the novel is conjuring up biographical evidence? Yes, if one accepts that there is a biographical tie between Albahari and the protagonist of Albahari’s novel. It is precisely this tie between biographical and literary exile that Šakić—rightly— refutes. However, to say that one does not write at all implies something else. The notion of the problem underlined by Šakić is not just an obstacle or limitation; rather, it is their conversion into the objective domain of the problem: “Sometimes I think it’s just as well I don’t know how to write because whenever I think about writing, I’m confronted with questions, never with answers” (Albahari, Bait, 54). Albahari’s narrator-character/character-narrator, depending on the shift between narrative levels, is certainly not the first of its kind in the history of narrative ruses and ploys displacing the narrative voice, level, and participation in the story. 39. Lyotard reconceptualizes the rewriting as infantia, especially in essays on Joyce and Freud (see Jean-François Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991), pp. 12–14; 24; 28; 133–137; Jean-François Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991). See especially Lyotard’s definition of Freud’s das Infantile as “(. . .) neutre, troisième personne. In-fans, cela a de la voix, mais n’articule pas. Non référentielle et inadressée, la phrase infantile est signal affectuel, plaisir, douleur” (Lyotard, Enfance, p. 138). 40. Albahari, Bait, pp. 3; 5; 6. 41. Albahari, op. cit., p. 6. 42. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 47–60. 43. It is not an overstatement to say that synchronization spawns the era of the theory starting in the 1960s. It is precisely that aspect of de Saussure’s notion of the sign that was dismantled in the writings of Benveniste, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and many others. They attempted to unleash the bar from its subordination to the unifying functions represented by arrows in de Saussure’s diagrams. The bi-directional character of arrows and ellipsis enclosing the barred signified and signifier suggested that those two sides are “intimately linked,” simultaneously “triggering each other.” The earliest of de Saussure’s schema of “the speaking circuit” survived the course of its deconstruction (as masterfully demonstrated by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology). 44. Hjelmslev, Prolegomena, p. 51. 45. Albahari, Bait, p. 93.

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46. Albahari, op. cit., p. 111. 47. “There is more in these various phenomena than absolutely mechanical actions but less than an appeal to voluntary memory” (Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 114). 48. Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 157–160. 49. Albahari, Bait, p. 88. 50. Albahari, op. cit., pp. 6, 9, 10; 88. 51. Albahari, op. cit., p. 107. 52. Albahari, op. cit., p. 8. 53. Albahari, op. cit., p. 9. 54. Albahari, op. cit., p. 25. 55. Albahari, op. cit., pp. 13; 28. See: “A voice, ashes, what’s the difference,” p. 50. 56. “I hear us clearing our throats, first she, then I, and the immediate silence begins, which, a little later, I recognize as the sound of unrecorded tape. I don’t know whether I could describe that sound as a sound; it is, after all, muffled by the squeaking of ungreased spindles or decrepit rubber belts (…)” (Albahari, op. cit., p. 52). 57. Albahari, op. cit., p. 45. 58. In discussing the minor in its relation to becoming, Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 127) explain, following Pasolini, becoming minor as language X which is language A in the actual process of becoming language B. 59. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 289. 60. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 290. 61. Albahari, Bait, pp. 49–50. 62. Albahari, op. cit., p. 26. 63. Albahari, op. cit., p. 36. 64. Albahari, op. cit., p. 57. 65. Albahari, op. cit., p. 57. 66. “Whoever lives with history is not living with life, he’s a corpse even when he’s alive. Life is gulped with a big spoon or sipped from a small one, but you can’t just sit there and look at it” (Albahari, op. cit., p. 59) 67. Albahari, op. cit., pp. 101–102. 68. Albahari, op. cit., p. 6. 69. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 277. 70. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 291. 71. Ibid., p. 292. 72. Albahari, Bait, p. 103. 73. Albahari, op. cit., p. 101. 74. Albahari, op. cit., p. 37. 75. In interpreting this scene with the letter from the mother’s first husband, Stijn Vervaet concludes: “Not only the family history of the mother but also his multiple identities as a Yugoslav of mixed Serbian-Jewish descent make him particularly attuned to the suffering war inflicts on his fellow countrymen and countrywomen. In this sense, Bait is an anti-nationalist novel that resists ethnocentric account

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of history and victimhood” (See Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory: Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 108). 76. Albahari, Bait, pp. 17–18. 77. “Identity, in fact, must be left behind or subordinated to the genuine political character of mere relation. It is those who are present, insofar as they actively expose themselves to one another as existents clothed only in their uniqueness, who produce the local political character of the context” (See Adriana Cavarero, “Politicizing Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 506–532, p. 521). 78. Albahari, Bait, p. 96. 79. Albahari, Mamac, p. 115. 80. Albahari, Bait, p. 96. 81. Albahari, Mamac, p. 115. 82. Albahari, Bait, p. 96. 83. Albahari, Mamac, p. 115. 84. Albahari, Bait, p. 97. 85. Albahari, Mamac, p 115. 86. Albahari, Bait, p. 97. 87. Albahari, Bait, p. 104. 88. Albahari, Mamac, p. 125. 89. Albahari, Bait, pp. 104–105. 90. Albahari, Mamac, p. 125. 91. In commenting upon “the symbolic coincidence” between “Mother’s whirled fate” and “the political fate” of his country, the narrator concludes that the mother had no other choice but to repeat “what had been written into the space around her, just as the hero of my story had had to repeat it, if indeed it is a story” (Albahari, Bait, pp. 112–113). 92. Albahari, Bait, 105. 93. Albahari, Mamac, 126. 94. Albahari, Bait, pp. 107–108. 95. Consider, for example, an actual debate between Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, centered on the notions of recognition and disagreement (see Eds. Katia Genel, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)). 96. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 284. 97. Bergson, op. cit., p. 284. 98. Bergson, op. cit., p. 282. 99. Bergson, op. cit., p. 284. 100. Ibid. 101. Bergson, op. cit., p. 282. 102. Bergson, op. cit., p. 112. 103. Ibid. 104. Bergson, op. cit., p. 118. 105. Bergson, op. cit., pp. 313–314.

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106. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 110. 107. Ivana Perica, “Treća generacija pri/povijesti,” pp. 85–111, in O pričama i pričanju danas, eds. Jelena Marković and Ljiljana Marx (Zagreb: Biblioteka Nova etnografija, 2015), pp. 103–104. 108. Perica, “Treća generacija,” p. 104.

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Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir. “Samoupravljanje, razvoj i dug: uspon i pad ‘jugoslavenskog eksperimenta’,” pp. 45–75. In Dobro došli u pustinju postsocijalizma? Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks (Eds.). Zagreb: Fraktura, 2015. Vervaet, Stijn. Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory: Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav literature. London: Routledge, 2018. Vidulić, Svjetlan Lacko. “Književno polje SFRJ-a: podsjetnik na tranziciju dugog trajanja,” pp. 27–45. In Tranzicija i kulturno pamćenje. Virna Karlić, Sanja Šakić and Dušan Marinković (Eds.). Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2017. Virno, Paulo. A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004. Vladiv Glover, Slobodanka. “Potisnuta prošlost u romanu ‘Mamac’ Davida Albaharija.” Sveske: časopis za književnost, umetnost i kulturu 20, no. 97 (2010): 67–75. Vukajlović, Željka. “Delikatesa (Daša Drndić: Leica format.” Književna republika: časopis za književnost 3/4 2 (2004): 273–275. Wachtel, Andrew. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Wachtel, Andrew. “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš in Post-Yugoslav Literature.” The Slavic and East European Journal 50, no. 1 (2006): 135–149. Weber, Samuel. “Mass Mediauras; or Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” pp. 27–49. In Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. David Ferris (Ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. London: Routledge, 2013. Westover, Jeff. “National Forgetting and Remembering in the Poetry of Robert Frost.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 213–244. Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967. Willems, Brian. “Natural Instruments: Real-World Adaptations of Fictional Financial Algorithms.” Boundary 2, 2018 (https​:/​/ww​​w​.bou​​ndary​​2​.org​​/2018​​/10​/b​​rian-​​wille​​ ms​-na​​tural​​-inst​​rumen​​ts​-re​​al​-wo​​rld​-a​​dapta​​tions​​-of​-f​​i ctio​​​nal​-f​​i nanc​​ial​-a​​lgori​​thms/​). Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Zakaria, Fareed. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. Zlatar, Andrea. Tekst, tijelo, trauma: Ogledi o suvremenoj ženskoj književnosti. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2004. Živković, Andreja. “Od tržišta…do tržišta: ekonomija duga nakon Jugoslavije,” pp. 75–101. In Dobro došli u pustinju postsocijalizma? Srećko Horvat, i Igor Štiks (Eds.). Zagreb: Fraktura, 2015.

Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 15, 22n22, 125n33 Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 22n23, 58, 76– 77, 86nn33–34, 88n54, 90nn95–96, 157n92 Albahari, David, 6, 89n83, 182–83, 187, 199, 220nn1–4, 223nn37–38 Althusser, Louis, 6, 10n18, 27 Anderson, Benedict, 2–4, 9n4, 19, 93, 94, 103, 106–8, 113, 115–17, 121, 125n33, 126n45, 127nn80–81, 128n90, 128n94, 129n112 Ansell Pearson, Keith, 158n14, 222n21 Antohi, Sorin, 28, 44n3, 44n18 Archer, Rory, 9n10 Askin, Ridvan, 196n92 autochthonous, 147, 213; foreigner, 108, 113, 147, 202; genital propagation, 150, 204; germinal community, 150; inept motherhood, 148, 150; native soil, 110, 147 Badiou, Alain, 49n141 Baker, Catherine, 195n61 Bakić-Hayden, Milica, 44n8, 44n25 Balibar, Étienne, 104–5, 107, 126n38, 126n42 Barac, Antun, 11, 21n1, 91, 95–99, 102, 105, 109, 124n11, 124n13, 124n18, 124n29

Barad, Karen, 194n37 Battersby, Christine, 47n86 Bauman, Zygmunt, 117, 125n38, 128n93 Beeckman, Tinneke, 153n17, 155n58 Beganović, Davor, 10n15, 10n22, 129n14 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 6, 19, 27, 56, 61– 62, 65, 71–72, 75–76, 78, 80, 86n26, 87n46, 88n54, 89n77, 89–90n89, 90n98, 122, 139, 154–55n52, 155n62 Bergson, Henri, 6, 29–30, 45n29, 45n34, 54–56, 59, 62, 66–70, 73, 75, 86n23, 88n64, 89n75, 127n62, 131– 32, 152n5, 153n14, 166, 189–90, 198n119, 205–7, 210, 217–19 Beronja, Vlad, 12–14, 22n11, 22n14 Bhabha, Homi, 5, 6, 14–16, 18–19, 22n18, 23n40, 23n42, 32–33, 36–37, 45–46n53, 46n62, 106, 115, 117, 121–22, 126n43, 126n45, 127n83, 129n113, 129n115 Bignall, Simone, 30–31, 45n38, 45n40 Biopolitics, 161; control, 162, 164–67, 194; control society, 163–66, 217; counterpower, 166–67; diagram, 163; disciplinary society, 162–64, 166; discipline, 163, 169, 192n18; expropriation from pre-individual domain, 164–65; freedom, 34–37,

239

240

Index

39, 47n91, 70, 73, 89n74, 93, 110, 121, 135–36, 150, 162–63, 167, 194n32; intuition, 34, 37, 38–39, 54, 69, 132, 166–67, 219; liberalism, 159, 162, 194n32; modulation, 163, 166, 217; object/objectile, 163–64; panopticon/panopticism, 162–63; socialism, 12, 159–60, 163, 170, 192n2, 193nn23–24, 193n32; Yugoslav governmentality, 8, 27, 163–64, 166, 177, 182, 194n32 Biti, Vladimir, 47n86, 49n119, 108–9, 125n31, 126nn49–51 Bloch, Ernst, 6, 10n18 Bogue, Ronald, 132, 153nn8–9 Borges, Jorge Luis, 109–11, 113, 126n53, 126n56, 127n58, 181, 186– 87, 198n112 Božić Blanuša, Zrinka, 124n16 Brebanović, Predrag, 5, 10nn14–15 Brlić-Mažuranić, Ivana, 6, 134, 137, 141–45, 154n28, 156n64, 156n83, 156n85, 157n87, 157nn90–91, 157n93 Brooks, Peter, 172–76, 178, 180–81, 189, 195n64, 195n74, 196n86 Buchanan, Ian, 86n24 Buck-Morss, Susan, 87n39 Butler, Rex, 48n109 Cadava, Eduardo, 86n29, 88n66 Cavarero, Adriana, 225n77 Caygill, Howard, 89n81 Charney, Leo, 88n69 Cheng, Vincent J., 126n45, 128n96 Clewis, Robert R., 37–38, 46n69, 46n80, 47n98, 48n99 Cohen, Lenard J., 192n3 Colebrook, Claire, 198n108 community, 1–2, 8–9, 12, 14, 26, 36–37, 39, 52–53, 103–5, 112, 115–17, 125nn32–33, 125n38; adjacency without adherence, 7–8, 21, 72, 76, 92–93, 95, 101, 104, 149, 151; alliance without filiation, 13–14, 72, 81, 83, 92, 101, 104, 109,

112, 184, 186, 202, 213, 216, 217, 219; anonymity of the meanwhile, 101; in-between generations, 74; co-existing processes of individuation and association, 72, 216–19; cultural difference, 121–22, 129n115, 187; de-synchronizing memory and forgetting, 117–21; duality of the people, 96; guilt, 137, 139–41, 148, 174; immanentist myth, 8, 91, 97, 100, 103, 114–15, 124n16, 128n96, 176–77, 180, 187; inchoate, 3, 6, 8; missing family, 150; multitude, 4, 7, 101, 106, 114–15, 150; non-appropriable nonbelonging, 100; non-filiate heredity, 81; orphan model of anonymity and pseudonyms, 167; people to come, 39, 133; (post)-Yugoslav, 95–96, 102–3, 138, 140, 187–88; proliferation without ancestry, 84; synchronization of individuation and association, 72, 216–19; syphilitic, 63–64, 81–84; transversal generation, 64, 72, 74, 147–48, 151, 179, 183– 84, 203 concept, 1, 5, 20–21, 30–31, 39, 41–43, 92, 105, 111–12, 126, 170, 176, 185, 187; adjacency without adherence, 95, 189; asynchronous simultaneity, 2, 6–7, 15; inhuman time, 178; line, 71, 86n24; non-coalescing mutuality, 2, 4, 6–9, 10n25, 102; of (post)-Yugoslav, 2–3, 8–9, 91, 123, 123n10, 170; of (post)-Yugoslav literature, 1–3, 5, 20, 91–92, 187–88; temporal structure of, 179, 185, 189–90; and virtual object, 148–49, 176; zones of anonymous traversals, 7, 92–93, 103–8, 176, 220 Dagognet, François, 88n71 Debeljak, Aleš, 2–4 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 18, 20–21, 29, 54, 59, 92, 113–14, 118–20, 132, 134, 147–49, 157n88, 166, 172, 175–77,

Index

188, 190, 196n88, 198n119, 205, 210, 217, 219 Deleuze, Gilles (with Guatarri, Félix), 6–7, 10n20, 18, 20–21, 23n38, 31, 38–42, 44, 46n63, 71, 94, 104, 150, 173, 207, 211–12 Derrida, Jacques, 20, 223n43 Devisch, Ignaas, 125n32 disagreement, 183, 187, 220; minimal dissensus, 220 disappearing, 5, 53–57, 58–60, 62–69, 71–74, 77–78; decay, 60, 62–63, 65– 66, 68, 72, 74; dialectical image, 62, 76; dialectics of eddy and becoming, 72; duration, 53–56, 59–62, 66–69, 73, 86n23; transition, 57, 66–68 dissolution of Yugoslavia, 4, 11, 26, 51, 60, 112, 159, 200; scalar state, 8; state-centered approach, 4 Đorđević, Goran, 167–68 Drndić, Daša, 6, 52, 53, 84 Duda, Dean, 10n23 Dufresne, Todd, 155n58 Eekman, Thomas, 11, 21n5, 196–97n96 enthusiasm, 31–34, 37–38, 41, 48n100, 48n107; and immanent revolution, 39, 43; as related to the aesthetic idea, 33–34, 39; as related to sublime, 33–34, 37–39 Eriksen, Erik O., 7–8 European Turkey, 35–36; and community acquis, 36; incapacity for revolution, 35–36; as milieu, 41; as terra nullius, 36 event of 1989, 26–27; rebirth, 26–27, 31, 35; revolution, 26–27, 31–37, 39; spectral revenant of 1789, 26; traumatic background, 26 exile, 1, 51, 53, 132, 136, 190, 200, 202, 223n38 father, 82, 109, 111–13, 127n74, 137– 41, 147, 148, 150, 155n63, 156n84, 157n89, 213; dead, 137–38; deposed,

241

112, 168; secret, 169; son, 112–13, 137–39, 141, 143–44; traversed, 185 fairy tale, 78–79 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 107 Foucault, Michel, 32–33, 125n34, 161–62, 164, 166, 193n20, 193n24, 193n32 Freud, Sigmund, 61, 88n54, 138–40, 155n58, 155n61, 175, 186 Frye, Northrop, 157n89 fugue, 53–54, 56–59, 61–67, 69–75, 78–82, 84, 85n20, 86n23, 87n37; adjacency without adherence, 72, 76; asynchronous simultaneity, 69; caesura, 76–77, 90n98, 128n102; detached zone of abutment, 72; history, 71, 79, 82, 90n98; line, 62–66, 69–72, 77–78, 81–82, 90n98; non-filiate heredity, 81; optical explosion, 61; photography/ cinema, 54–56, 59–63, 65, 86n23; remembering/forgetting, 53–54, 59, 61, 63, 67, 72–74, 82; technological reproducibility, 56, 62; whole, 55– 56, 58–60, 62, 65, 69, 82 Gailus, Andreas, 48n100 Gajević, Dragomir, 12 Gandhi, Mahatma, 26 Gearhart, Suzanne, 47n97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 103, 108–9, 111, 124n29, 125n31, 126n52, 126n54 Gordy, Eric, 4 Hägglund, Martin, 10n25 Hegel, G. W. F., 25–26, 40, 48n111, 155n61 Hirsch, Marianne, 13–14, 20 history, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 10n16, 20, 41–42, 64, 71, 75, 81, 94–95, 123n9, 126n45, 128n96, 134–35, 137, 150– 51, 154n30, 155n61, 172, 189, 201 Hitzke, Diana, 10n22 Hjelmslev, Louis, 209–10

242

Index

homo oeconomicus, 160–62, 164–66, 194n40; doubly involuntary, 166; enterprise subject, 165–66; freedom (see Biopolitics); microeconomic individuality, 165; neoliberal ontopower, 165–66; as neoliberal self-entrepreneur, 164–65; right/ interest, 161–62 Horvat, Jasna, 156n68 identity, 2–3, 7, 14, 19–20, 26, 45n38, 58, 84, 100, 106, 110, 112, 116, 121, 128n96, 133, 145, 148, 164, 168, 175, 202, 212; aphanasis, 167; becoming-Yugoslav, 100–102, 201; biography, 52, 168; disalienation (d)ef(f)ect, 167, 172; homo-duplex, 133; identification, 3, 183–84, 186, 187; incommensurability between/ commensurability with, 122–23; and memory, 78, 133, 135, 136; middling being, 220; non-filiate heredity, 81; paradox of actor, 168; people as a multitude of anonymous, 101; proliferation without ancestry, 84; syphilis, 63–64, 81–83; syphilitic becoming, 84; toggling, 9, 104, 115, 146 immanence, 39–43 Inglehart, Ronald, 191n1 interest, 161–65, 193n20, 193n22; and affectivity, 165–66; socialist ontopower, 166 interstitial temporality, 6, 9n5, 18, 20, 94, 172; adjacency without adherence (see community); concept; fugue; deferring, 6; delay, 5–6, 16, 19, 60, 70, 93, 95, 144, 149, 173, 184, 190–91; dilatation, 181; meanwhile, 16–19, 70–71, 73, 77–78, 80–81, 83–84, 93–95, 101, 108–9, 113–15, 121, 125, 172, 179– 80, 183, 185, 187, 190–91, 216–17; time-lag, 6, 19, 32–33 intuition, 34, 38–39, 54, 69, 132, 166–67, 219; as asynchronous

simultaneity of modulation and countermodulation, 163, 166–67, 217 Isaac, Jeffrey C., 26–27 Jakovljević, Branislav, 163, 167 Jullien, Dominique, 126n54 Juvan, Marko, 124n27 Kant, Immanuel, 31, 33–38, 47n89, 47n91, 47n97, 48n109 Keenan, Thomas, 125n34 King, Martin Luther, 26 Kiš, Danilo, 6, 12, 21n5, 91, 109, 111–14, 127n74, 167, 172, 182–83, 186–87, 194n53, 198n112 Klinkowitz, Jerome, 152n2 Koselleck, Reinhart, 6 Kos-Lajtman, Andrijana, 156n68 Kosmos, Iva, 220n2 Kouvelakis, Stathis, 46n74 Kovačević, Nataša, 4, 28 Kramarić, Zlatko, 125n32 LaCapra, Dominick, 88n54 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 168 Lampert, Jay, 119–20, 129n111 Langford, Martha, 126n45, 129n112 language, 15, 51, 58, 99–100, 103–5, 135, 184, 197n103, 204–11, 216–19, 224n58; acoustic matter, 204, 206–7, 210–11; anagrams, 149, 151–52; aphasia, 205–10; asynchronous simultaneity between auditive memory and word recognition, 206, 209; dispossession of national philology, 11, 100; of inability to write, 208; mother tongue, 202, 204– 5, 209–11; palindrome, 135, 152; sign function, 209–10; translation, 122; variability, 5, 167, 207, 217, 219 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 5–6, 15–19, 190 longevity, 147, 150, 152; becomingold, 150; genital/genetic, 150; maternal/paternal model of, 148–52; repetition, 148–52

Index

Longinović, Tomislav Z., 220n3 Lukács, Georg, 103, 125n33, 153n24 Lukić, Jasmina, 53 Lukić, Sveta, 11, 124n29 Lundy, Craig, 189–90 Luther, Martin, 103 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6, 32, 33, 36–38, 174, 177–78, 183–85, 189, 197n101, 197n103, 197n105, 208, 223n39, 223n43, 223n47, 223n97 Maksimović, Desanka, 135, 137 Martin-Jones, David, 128n92 Marx, Karl, 26 Massumi, Brian, 6, 164–67, 194n40, 196nn88–89 Matijević, Tijana, 14 McHale, Brian, 152n3 Melegh, Attila, 27–28 Meltzer, Françoise, 153n18 memory, 1, 13–15, 61, 63, 65, 71–73, 77–78, 87n37, 116–19, 128n96, 132–38, 140, 143, 147–48, 150, 174, 179, 203–9, 216; fugue (see fugue); memoranda, 59, 118–21; syphilis (see identity); testimony, 58, 72 middle, 18, 71, 84, 104–6, 164, 168–69, 172–75, 179–81, 185, 187, 189–91, 200, 204, 207–9, 216–17, 220, 222n12; abode without fringes, 95; being of, 172; and the death drive, 173–74; empty tomb, 168; and language, 216–20; synchronization of neoliberal self-entrepreneurship and socialist self-management, 164; third milieu of becoming, 189; unhinged from beginning and ending, 9n5, 173, 180, 207, 217 Milanja, Cvjetko, 156n86 Milošević, Slobodan, 135 modernity, 15–16, 19, 23n42, 27, 32– 33, 99, 174, 177–79 mother, 143, 148, 150–52, 155n63, 157nn88–89, 200–205, 208–16; asynchronous simultaneity of becoming-woman and becoming-

243

mother, 201, 210, 212–13, 215; asynchronous simultaneity of becoming-woman and the becomingchild, 150, 215; authorship, 142–44, 157n89; becoming, 201; daughter, 148; dementia, 147; filiation, 202, 213, 216; germinal, 150, 214; love of, 175–76; son, 200–203, 216; voice of, 200–216; youth, 143, 145–48, 150–51 narration, 18, 51, 59, 72–73, 107–8, 131–34, 142–43, 152, 178, 199– 204, 211, 214, 216, 221–22n12; and detective story, 174, 181; as dilatation of middle, 172–73, 181; discordance, 133–34, 220; fabulation, 131–35, 142, 145, 147, 152, 152n5; figuration, 132–33, 135; germinal story, 203, 212–14, 216; plot, 171–75, 177–78, 180–81, 189, 191, 196n92; and story, 58, 72–73, 87n37, 131, 134, 143–44, 149–50, 173–74, 180, 199–204, 214–16, 221n12; and unfamiliar scene, 178–79 nation, 1–3, 8, 19, 35, 43, 94–97, 99–108, 110–14, 115–21, 125n38, 127n34, 127n87, 160, 187; anomie of Yugoslavia, 115; anonymity of the meanwhile, 101; in-between generations, 74; bipartite structure of, 115; daily plebiscite, 116–17, 121–22, 128n91; ethnonationalist fiction, 3, 104–5, 107; forgetting of forgetting, 115, 118; immanentist myth (see community); limited heterogeneity of, 116; linearity of calendar time, 3, 19, 121; multipronged anonymity, 3; simultaneous multiplicity, 3–4; simultaneity of anonymous individuals, 2, 4; synchronization of meanwhiles, 106, 125n33; synchronized co-existence, 3; synchronizing projection, 107 Norris, Pippa, 191n1

244

Index

Obradović, Dositej, 102–3, 105, 114 Obradović, Dragana, 222n12 Patton, Paul, 48n109, 193n32 Pavletić, Vlatko, 11, 124n29 Pavlović, Aleksandar, 220n2 Perica, Ivana, 220 Petitot, Jean, 126n52 Popović, Pavle, 11, 91, 95, 98–109, 114, 123n11, 124n11, 124n29 postmodernity, 183–84, 191; and crime, 174, 177–78; de-synchronizing modernity, 93, 184–85, 191; and modernity (see modernity) (post)-Yugoslav literature, 1–5, 7, 11–12, 14, 20, 60, 92, 100, 101, 122–23, 125n31, 171, 180–83, 185, 187–88, 190–91; as disalienation (d)ef(f)ect, 172; expropriation from non-belonging, 100, 187; as field of contestation, 183–84, 197n104; heterogeneous variation, 5; linguistic form, 5, 17; lost immanent community (see community); (post)Yugoslav studies; and multicultural culture, 169–70, 182, 187–88, 195n62; multinational, 2, 8–9, 96, 101–2; (non)-being of, 176; not being Yugoslav at all, 171; paradox of criteria for, 182; postmodernity of, 181–87; punctuation, 5, 12, 14–15, 92, 114, 121–23; as rewriting modernity, 174, 177; transnational, 1, 3, 7–8, 14, 94–95, 100, 105, 182, 187–88, 191 (post)-Yugoslav studies, 1, 6–9, 10n22, 17, 19, 92–93, 176; complicity of crime and origin, 180; complicity of the culprit and persecutor, 174–75; never-lived innocence of Yugoslavia, 175–76; as postmemory studies, 12–14, 94; and postmodernity, 176; (post)-Yugoslav transnational multicultural culture, 188; and repetition of crime, 60, 177; and

resurrection of immanent once-lost community, 102–3, 176–77, 180; and synchronization of revolutionary series, 17, 176–77 (post)-Yugoslav writer, 12, 112, 182– 83; criteria, 182; Jewish model of, 183, 186 Primorac, Strahimir, 51–52 Rakočević, Robert, 14, 17 Rancière, Jacques, 225n95 Renan, Ernest, 106, 115–17, 121–22, 126n45, 127n87, 128n90, 128n96 Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 133–34, 179 Robert, Marthe, 127n71 Roksandić, Drago, 123n3 Rothberg, Michael, 85n18, 90n105, 155n57, 195n76 Said, Edward, 28 Šakić, Sanja, 220n2, 223n38 Santner, Eric L., 88n54 Sauvagnargues, Anne, 198n119 Savat, David, 163 Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume, 49n143 Silverman, Maxim, 127n85 Simondon, Gilbert, 179, 194n40, 196n88 Smith, Adam, 162 socialism, 4, 8, 12, 27, 36, 159–60, 163, 170, 192n2, 193nn23–24, 193–94n32; associated labor, 161, 163, 193n23; constitutional reform, 161; disalienation (d)ef(f)ect, 167, 172; neoliberal transformation (see Yugoslavia); self-management, 8, 160–61, 164; socialist ontopower. See interest; Yugoslav, 163; Yugoslav governmentality (see Biopolitics) Soltan, Karol, 26–27 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 22n36 Štiks, Igor, 170 Štimec, Marina Protrka, 156n64, 156n70, 157n87

Index

Suvin, Darko, 125n32, 192n2 temporality, 2, 6, 9n5, 10n17, 13, 15, 17–18, 32, 57, 70, 91–95, 107–8, 115, 123n9, 125n33, 183–85; asynchronous simultaneity, 20, 171– 73, 176–77; exogeneous, 8; germinal community, 150; incongruous coevals, 144; kairological, 76–79; multilayered, 2–4, 6; of the “post-”, 10n17, 17, 171–72; switch-points, 3, 75; synchronized co-existence, 3, 107–8; the time long ago, 141; time of disappearance, 69; of transition, 68, 92, 170, 185, 191 Tomba, Massimiliano, 123n8 Trubar, Primož, 100–101, 124n27 Turvey, Malcolm, 86n23 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 6, 131, 133, 135–37, 140–41 Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir, 192nn4–5 Vervaet, Stijn, 13, 224n75 Vidulić, Svjetlan Lacko, 4 Virno, Paulo, 104 Vladiv Glover, Slobodanka, 222–23n12 voice, 143, 199–205, 207, 209–11, 213, 215, 220n2, 221n12; as a-signifying sound, 210; as tomb of meaning, 211 Vukajlović, Željka, 85n20 Weber, Samuel, 87n52 Westover, Jeff, 117–18, 126n45 West-Pavlov, Russell, 10n17 Whitehead, Alfred North, 179 Willems, Brian, 194n44 world literature, 109–11, 124n29, 125n31; arborescent model of, 109; duality of anonymous and pseudonymous, 112–14, 167; literary fatherhood, 111–13, 127n74; orphan model of, 112, 114, 167; promiscuity of, 112

245

Yugoslavia, 2–5, 8, 11–14, 26, 93–95, 137, 159–60, 171–72, 182, 187; asynchronous simultaneity of virtual and actual, 94–95, 171, 176–77; conceptual death of, 17, 23n38, 175–76; de-synchronizing modality and temporality, 94; duality of selfdetermination (samoodređenje) and self-management (samoupravljanje), 26, 96–97, 160–70; liberal democracy, 25, 36, 170, 191n1; multicultural culture (see (post)Yugoslav literature); neoliberal transformation, 160–61; (non)-being of, 176; as object = x, 176–77; as the object of thought, 175; paradox of the non-existence of multicultural culture, 169; presupposition of nonexistence, 170, 176, 181; remapped onto (post)-Yugoslav studies, 92–93; temporality of the “post-“, 10n17, 17, 84, 171–72; terra incognita, 176; totem, 137–40 Yugoslav literature, 2, 10n15, 11–12, 91, 96–101, 105, 108–9, 111, 114, 122–23, 123n11, 124–25n29, 125n31, 181–83, 185, 187–88, 190–91, 196–97n96; nation-centered notion of, 98–99; (post)-Yugoslav sentiment, 100–102, 114; reactive ‘post-’, 176; remapping, 2, 8–9, 96; state-centered notion of, 95–98, 105; synchronization, 91, 100–102, 104–7, 114; world literature, 109–11, 124n29; Yugoslav thought, 99–106, 114 Zakaria, Fareed, 191n1 Živković, Andreja, 192n5 Zlatar, Andrea, 52 zone of anonymous traversals, 21, 72, 104, 106, 113, 183, 187, 189; alliance without filiation, 101; asynchronous simultaneity of becoming-mother and becoming-

246

Yugoslavia, 201, 216; coetaneous rupture and junction, 71–72; duality of foundling and a bastard, 112, 114, 185, 203; empty space of bifurcations and ramifications, 100; haphazard junctures, 79; heterogeneous juxtaposition,

Index

79; hyphenated affixation, 71; hyphenated and parenthesized (post)-, 102, 187; (non)-being, 18, 188–89; and non-relational relation, 9, 167, 179; open, 55, 78; zone of indistinction, 21, 92

About the Author

Aleksandar Mijatović is a Croatian literary and cultural theorist and critic. He is associate professor of literary theory at the Department of Croatian Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. He is the author of books and other publications combining literary and cultural analyses of South Slavic topics with continental philosophy in Lacanian, Deleuzean, and other traditions. He has also published in the fields of aesthetics, political philosophy, semiotics and philosophy of language, visual studies, and cultural studies.

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