The Burden of the Past, the Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia Woolf's and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of History

Writing in a Paris rife with war-anxieties, refugees and political plots, a stateless individual by the name of Walter Benjamin recorded on 11 January 1940: “Every line that we succeed in publishing today - given the uncertainty of the future to which we consign it - is a victory wrested from the power of darkness.” The fusion of desperation and mystical activism in the face of historical horror, expressed in Benjamin's last letter to Gershom Scholem, was echoed across the Channel. Only ten days later, Virginia Woolf - assailed by a mixture of historical, financial, creative and publishing worries - responded to a commission to write about peace by stating that the “views on peace […] spring from views on war.” </jats:p

Transitional justice and the arts: Reflections on the field

The arts present both a catalyst mechanism and an important information and reparation tool to support societies in transition. Artworks speak of the challenges of transition, foster, and, on occasion, hinder transitional processes. The artistic expressions can provide informal counterparts for the most significant mechanisms of transitional justice: truth and reconciliation process, public lustration, public apology, psychological reparation, demand for public access to governmental records, and others. They can also stimulate awareness of the need to implement transitional justice mechanisms in societies that do not otherwise perceive themselves as being “transitional”. In any of these cases, such unofficial probing of transition exposes the commensurabilities and disparities between the general reading of the rule of law and its local perception, and the external and the internal practices in place to promote legality in a given community

Gaps, Or the Dialectics of Inter-imperial Art: The Case of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle

This article reflects on the challenges posed to literary studies by cases of inter-imperial positionality: their repercussions on our understanding of lived temporalities, the strategies we use to translate this understanding into art and fiction, and the critical tools we deploy to evaluate thus produced artworks. To assist in these ruminations I make operational the category of inter-imperiality and tackle the phenomena of placedness, translatability, and the futurity of artwork. My guides are the multi-ethnic history of the Belgrade district called Dorćol and four modernist artworks from the region: the Yugoslav surrealists’ piece of engagement art "Facing a Wall: A Simulation of the Paranoiac Delirium of Interpretation. Survey" ("Pred jednim zidom: Simulacija paranojačkog delirijuma interpretacije. Anketa, 1932"); two 1935 photographs by Vane Bor; and Marko Ristić’s 1928 anti-novel Without a Measure (Bez mere, 1928)

Beyond Good and Evil? Popular Songs, Mathemes, and Bus Rides (Art and Transition in the Region of Former Yugoslavia)

The article assesses the role of the arts in the context of democratisation conflict, arguing that such evaluation must be nuanced and multi-levelled, approaching the same artefacts across time and from varied angles and latitudes while appreciating the internal and external pressures that the workers-in-culture face. These hermeneutic challenges and the fluctuating sphere of reception are scrutinized in this article in relation to the context of transitional justice and, specifically, democratization conflicts in the region of the former Yugoslavia

History and Active Thought: The Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s Transforming Praxis

This essay examines the “transforming praxis” of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle and their belief in “activating history” through a mutually corrective interaction of thought and matter. This aesthetic-political practice, the essay argues, gets articulated as a historical mandate, and it does so in two ways: as a performative address to the site-moment-specific historical conditions in the early and mid-twentieth century and as a way to conceptualize and respond to the problem of active thinking and acting in history more generally. Drawing on Koča Popović and Marko Ristić’s surrealist philosophical treatise Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational (1931), the essay places the Circle’s negotiation of the legacy of Hegel’s thought on history in their various artworks, poems, novels, photographs and essayistic prose in the context of political past, present, and the future of their practice. Discussing the circumstances and effects of one of the most influential art-practices in the region of Yugoslavia enables the author to pose more capacious questions about the operation of art and history: How does material history turn itself into continuously active forms/represented objects? What implications may the Belgrade surrealists’ mandate for active thought have for our understanding of modernism and history? And what mode of interpretation may fit such visions of historically-politically engaged art

There Was Once A Country An impossible chronotope in the writings of Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić

This article addresses the construction and role of the former Yugoslavia as what the author terms a 'relational chronotope' in the diasporic writing practices of two women writers: Slavenka Drakulic and Dubravka Ugresic. In novels such as Ugresic's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998) and The Ministry of Pain (2004), and Drakulic's S.: A Novel about the Balkans (1999), all of which have had substantial success in the European book market, the times and spaces of the former Yugoslavia coalesce in an impossible chronotope. Rather than being figured as either a space or a non-space, the chronotope of the former country spreads and disseminates, penetrating narratively into various other European places and experiences, and binding these places and experiences to the interiority of the diasporic, or displaced, narrative subject. This 'relational' chronotope and its narrative resultants (the establishment of a memory map of an impossible place or of an interior cadaver) have a distinctive association with the figuration of space and time in melancholia. The article argues that functioning as a potent, if uncertain, channel of reparation, this chronotope presents itself as a particularly adequate strategy for the narrative negotiation of a traumatic history. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

'Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry

CONSTANTINE CAVAFY WAS neither a religious nor a mythological poet in the traditional sense of these terms. A Greek Orthodox Christian, Egyptiote Cavafy attended liturgies (albeit not regularly), keenly read ecclesiastical history and hagiographies of saints, sages and miracle-workers of all faiths, and, as a young writer, mounted a spirited attack on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) for its critique of monotheistic religions and misinterpretation of Byzantine history. Yet, he was mostly silent on any religious feelings he might have had, and his mature depictions of religion are often underwritten by irony and anxiety about the abuse of religion for political causes. A few valuable studies have attempted to read Cavafy’s poetry and prose through the lens of the ‘religious attitudes’ discernible in his opus, notably, his interest in modern mysticism and esotericism, revived Gnosticism, and the lives of Early Christian Fathers. However, most scholars have conceded that the weight of ‘Cavafy persona’ – that multi-layered, observing-ironic-emotive voice that dominates his poetry – is such that it renders any ‘genuine’ religious affect hard to discern, and that the scrutiny of the poet’s theological viewpoints leads only to a ‘well-informed but rather inconsistent set of conclusions’. When Cavafy engages religion, it is less as a religious poet than as a poetic record-keeper of religious expression and its effects on the believing and the non-believing. Noting the deification of the poet-seer and of the labour of creative (re)production in his opus, some scholars have identified Cavafy’s ‘true religion’ precisely in his commitment to aesthetic record-keeping. ‘Although religion, morality […] are treated ironically and are often repudiated in Cavafy’s poetry,’ Gregory Jusdanis writes, ‘aesthetics is never questioned and is venerated with religious conviction.’ At least one commentator and fellow writer labelled this belief position an ‘ascetic Epicureanism’. As it happens, the tension between askesis (of intellectual work/creative production, of religious piety; and, metonymically, the figure of the hermit) and the erotic pulls of the body (of inherent human licentiousness, of morphology of Beauty, of creative production again; metonymically, the figure of the mystic) is also the most mercilessly scrutinised theme in Cavafy’s poetry