Stalin’s Boots and the March of History (Post-Communist Memories)

I would like to propose here is precisely the invention of a relation to history and the public sphere of sociality that deconstructs the trauma/nostalgia opposition. The theoretical goal is to separate concrete narrative forms from actual political contents. It follows from the previous point that it might be possible to conceive of historical moments or concrete rhetorical situations in which we need to rely on nostalgic rather than traumatic narratives in order to imagine progressive political change. In these situations, the political task could be the development of a certain “critical nostalgia” that does not try to replace trauma as a master trope of historical understanding. I would like to show here that the deconstruction of the trauma/nostalgia opposition can make it possible for us to counteract the modernist vision of the future as a therapeutic utopia (by insisting on the fact that the past exceeds our narratives of suffering), to thwart the kind of postmodernist nostalgia that turns the past into a homogenized resource of empty textual surfaces, and to uncover unfulfilled possibilities in the past that might reactivate radically new possibilities in the present. In order to provide some historical substance to these theoretical observations, I will examine here the opening picture of a book of photographs edited by Reg Gadney, entitled Cry Hungary! Uprising 1956 (published in 1986), which commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution. I will interpret the photograph as an allegory of the birth of the revolutionary subject marked by an indelible gesture. But since the allegory narrates an essentially unnarratable event, my focus will be the catachrestical naming of freedom as it is inscribed by the photograph in different affective economies: the traumatic and the nostalgic

The Parapraxis of Translation

Within the context of politics and culture, provides a theoretic framework for the analysis of modern translation. Includes section titles, The paradoxa of translation, The pragmatics of translation, and The truth of translation

The politics of mood: Ádám Bodor and Eastern Europe

My reading of Ádám Bodor’s novel Sinistra körzet (Sinistra District, 1992) shows that the political dimension of literary production cannot be reduced to the problem of referentiality (the correct representation of an empirical reality in a realist or an allegorical narrative). In fact, Bodor’s fiction suggests that it is precisely the breakdown of the referential paradigm that is the privileged political moment in literature. As I argue, Bodor’s text suggests that beyond the political realism of historical referentiality we find a new kind of geopolitics based on a regionalist aesthetics of “mood.” In this regard, it becomes clear that the “Sinistra District” is not an allegorical representation of a historical reality (the world of totalitarian regimes) but a rhetorical figure which stages the ideological fantasy that structures that given historical realty

The Sexual Sinthome

Psychoanalysis possesses the means to think the difference of the sexes without relying on the phallus. Lacanian theory of the sinthome offers an alternative by articulating a new quadruplicity (R, S, I, and the sinthome), which allows us to think the relation between the sexes and the generations without necessarily referring to the Name-of-the-Father or the phallus as absolute norms. Thanks to this theory, we can avoid the moral and political prejudices that accompany the grand questions of society posed to us at the dawn of the 21st century: the treatment of “mental health,” the legislation of marriage, filiation, and adoption

The Sexual Sinthome

Psychoanalysis possesses the means to think the difference of the sexes without relying on the phallus. Lacanian theory of the sinthome offers an alternative by articulating a new quadruplicity (R, S, I, and the sinthome), which allows us to think the relation between the sexes and the generations without necessarily referring to the Name-of-the-Father or the phallus as absolute norms. Thanks to this theory, we can avoid the moral and political prejudices that accompany the grand questions of society posed to us at the dawn of the 21st century: the treatment of “mental health,” the legislation of marriage, filiation, and adoption

Introduction to \u3ci\u3eThe Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture\u3c/i\u3e

The first half of The Naked Communist is devoted to the theoretical and historical foundations of my reading of anti-Communist fictions. After the theoretical introduction, I examine anti-Communist aesthetic ideology by first analyzing its political and then its aesthetic components. In the second half, I examine the way the culture of anti-Communism defined the “world” as the ultimate horizon of political imagination. Included is a brief overview of some of the most popular texts of the given genre. Finally, I conclude these chapters with a reading of particular authors

\u3ci\u3eMary Barton\u3c/i\u3e and the Dissembled Dialogue

Analyzes the successive critiques of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in 1848. Uses the concept of the dissembled dialogue to account for both the poetics and the politics of the text. Borrows the concept of dissembling as a critical tool for a reading of Gaskell\u27s text from Deirdre d\u27Albertis, who argues that Gaskell\u27s dissembling fictions use several strategies to create a poetics of narrative dissimulation