The opening sentence of Tatyana Tolstaya’s literary miniature expresses with remarkable economy t... more The opening sentence of Tatyana Tolstaya’s literary miniature expresses with remarkable economy the brutal factuality of a life subtracted from history: ‘A person lived — a person died. Only the name remains — Sonya’ (2007: 141). The fecund sibilance of the name seems to echo like a trace of the voices who might have been accustomed to utter it, offering a sensuous, sonorous reminder of a once vital presence now faded like an old photograph or ground down like an overplayed phonographic recording. Its articulation appears to manifest that ‘tiny spark of contingency’ which Walter Benjamin describes in ‘A Small History of Photography’ as having ‘seared the subject’ with the material trace of historical reality; its repetition reanimating the desire to identify the immanent potentiality of the historical index contained within it as the ‘inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it’ (1979: 243). The name ‘Sonya’ becomes the index and occasion for an operation of remembrance that is at once recollection and re-imagination; the re-envisaging of a place, time and way of living fundamentally obscured in the annals of the twentieth century. The name ‘Sonya’, as the given name of ‘the woman who was alive there’, is configured theatrically by Tolstaya as the performative nomination of ‘what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps out’ of the frame of the image and comes to occupy the space of the ‘optical unconscious’ of cultural memory (Benjamin 1979: 242–3; emphasis added).
From the publisher's website: In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of ... more From the publisher's website: In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation.
The opening sentence of Tatyana Tolstaya’s literary miniature expresses with remarkable economy t... more The opening sentence of Tatyana Tolstaya’s literary miniature expresses with remarkable economy the brutal factuality of a life subtracted from history: ‘A person lived — a person died. Only the name remains — Sonya’ (2007: 141). The fecund sibilance of the name seems to echo like a trace of the voices who might have been accustomed to utter it, offering a sensuous, sonorous reminder of a once vital presence now faded like an old photograph or ground down like an overplayed phonographic recording. Its articulation appears to manifest that ‘tiny spark of contingency’ which Walter Benjamin describes in ‘A Small History of Photography’ as having ‘seared the subject’ with the material trace of historical reality; its repetition reanimating the desire to identify the immanent potentiality of the historical index contained within it as the ‘inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it’ (1979: 243). The name ‘Sonya’ becomes the index and occasion for an operation of remembrance that is at once recollection and re-imagination; the re-envisaging of a place, time and way of living fundamentally obscured in the annals of the twentieth century. The name ‘Sonya’, as the given name of ‘the woman who was alive there’, is configured theatrically by Tolstaya as the performative nomination of ‘what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps out’ of the frame of the image and comes to occupy the space of the ‘optical unconscious’ of cultural memory (Benjamin 1979: 242–3; emphasis added).
From the publisher's website: In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of ... more From the publisher's website: In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation.
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Papers by Adrian Kear