hrvatski

Revolucija i melankolija. Granice pamćenja hrvatske književnosti.

What interests me about cultural memory is how it inherits psychoanalysis and Marxism, given that both psychoanalysis and Marxism form precisely around critical interventions into existing memory regimes. Literature enters all these formations (all these primal scenes?) as a scene of instruction, since both psychoanalysis and Marx’s philosophy rely heavily on literature to articulate the critique they form around. This procedure is exemplified most vividly perhaps by the trajectory Hamlet organizes between Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Derrida’s philosophy, where Lacan’s writing is to acknowledge its memory of Freud and where Derrida acknowledges the memory of Marx as the promise of philosophy. This impoverishes any memory which takes into account the binary of fact and fiction, because psychoanalysis and Marxism privilege what is spectral about memory: towards a position in fact where literature’s structural demand always to challenge this binary is privileged, precisely as a scene of instruction. The same applies to the set of problems defined as regimes of memory insofar as regimes stand to be deconstructed as that politics of memory which aims at hegemonizing what both psychoanalysis and Marxism, forming as they do around critical interventions into existing memory regimes, promise as an emancipating gesture. In which case spaces, texts, and bodies perform as a kind of battleground to what in memory is reducible to controlling legacies, or perhaps to legacy as such. While this proposition seems to be calling for a more detailed discussion of the politics of memory, precisely where it addresses the issue of control, it also foregrounds memory in terms of economy, or else memory as an economic problem. This in turn invokes again the mnemic logic of Marxism and psychoanalysis, not least where both define their critical interest as that of economy (psychic/libidinal economy, political economy). It is also from here that a discussion of trauma ensues, almost logically, where the labor of trauma constitutes in fact the economic problem of memory itself. In an attempt to address these various trajectories this book focuses on the encounters of revolution and melancholia, specifically where they privilege the meeting points of literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The scene of instruction it departs from is Croatian literature, with its meandering memories of the revolution, and of the revolution’s peculiar investment in melancholia. It is this investment that the practices and the protocols of socialism cannot but fail to grasp and work through, and that haunts socialism not unlike the specter from the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto. Also, it is this investment that more often than not unsettles various recent configurations of democracy. So, if the scene this book departs from is that of Croatian literature, the one it arrives at is the volatile contour of postsocialism.

revolucija; melankolija; književnost; politika; psihoanaliza; filozofija

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