zlatan filipovic

Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work 'Memory Unbound' refer to as 'cosmopolitan memory' that emerges as one of the fundamental forms 'collective memories take in the age of globalization', this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized. Since global disseminations of local memory cultures and the implicit canonization of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever calls 'archival violence' and will show its inherent relation to the formation of cosmopolitan memory. Another related concept that I will use and that will problematize the transformation of living, embodied memory into archival, cultural memory upon which the formation of cosmopolitan memory depends is the witness. Using Agamben's writing (2002) in this context that in Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness, I will show that this transformation that determines the very possibility of cosmopolitan memory is far from unproblematic and readily accessible as Levy and Sznaider seem to assume. What will emerge as the most distinctive concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the very formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what should solicit vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives.

The incursion of style upon our ability to read, indeed of stylus, of a pointed object that “might be used in a vicious attack against what philosophy appeals to in the name of matter,” as Derrida writes in Spurs, will here take the form of specific tropological concerns that will be given in terms of Paul de Man’s understanding of allegory and reading. Style, inescapably tied to rhetoric and figurativity as a mode of expression, would be a syncope of cognition present in every text. A disruptive possibility of the text that outmatches its potential to be read. Style, seen in these terms, is a certain excess/lack of text that opens to a jouissance of reading, the pain of having read always too much or too little, of always having read otherwise. What the rhetorical structure of reading points to, as we shall see in de Man’s reading of Proust, is the radical impossibility of its closure.

Reflecting on the political nature of literature and its relation to modern democracy, the essay begins by problematizing any notion of commitment in literature. However, irresponsibility found in literature, far from undermining the political process, is what animates the political field seen as an endless contestability of our social practice. The way our notion of modern democracy informs our understanding of literary practice is explored through a selection of Derrida’s writings where democracy emerges as the possibility of imagining alternatives to the world and “of thinking life otherwise,” as Derrida (2004) says, which is to say that democracy cannot be thought without the possibility of literature. Democracy implies not political stability but a continuous call for unrest that prevents its atrophy, and literature, in its unconditional right to call everything to account, is its rearguard work as it were, keeping democracy forever open, for better or for worse.

This Special Issue would not have been possible without the enduring effort of the contributors whose patience has been paramount to what, at times, must have seemed as an endless unfolding of revisions before we could find the right pitch and I’m indebted to all of you for your commitment and support. Special thanks also is due to the Institute for American Universities and Professor Maria Van Liew whose initiative for a conference on the topic in Barcelona 2018 provided a much appreciated catalyst for the volume. School of Education and Communication at Jonkoping University and its research focus in Communication, Culture and Diversity with Professor Ylva Lindberg at the helm have also been instrumental in providing continuous suport for the project as well as my own Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg with its established research field in Transcultural Studies. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the editorial team at Moderna Sprak and our brill...

The notion of roots, of place and belonging, is always charged with significant emotional investment in diasporic imaginary. The mythogenies of birth, origin, nation, faith and all the other tropological reinscriptions of place are usually seen as closures of identity that produce fixed economies of meaning. Indeed, the exoticism and charisma of authenticity associated with place that has today become the neoliberal mainstay of cultural difference only testifies to its irrevocable demise. And yet, place still retains its power as the primary trope of identity and the difficulty of distinguishing between the two is nowhere more visceral than in the experience of unhomely subjects. Using recent theoretical developments in human geography and the resources of literary and life writing, this paper will explore the significance of place for the experience of diasporic shame that will emerge as the affective articulation of unhomeliness, that which makes unhomeliness feel.

The article is an introductory paper to a Special Issue in Moderna Språk that collects eight contributions focusing on demythologizations of cultural politics. Using Deleuzian concepts of minorization and delirium, the paper attempts to frame cultural difference in a new open terrain where all forms of localisms and regimes of identifications are seen as frames of capture that subjugate rather than emancipate difference. The measure of a culture’s health, I argue, does not reside in atrophy of its self-identity but in its dispersion of atoms everywhere, its schizoid states of intensities and deterritorializations where thresholds of self-consistency are surpassed and zones of indiscernibility entered. In this context, cultural difference could be seen as a permanent disjunction of territoriality, body or code, that which escapes capture to disrupt the self-valorizing forces of its enunciation, a kind of counter-pressure of synchrony in diachrony, a black body within the white imaginary that produces lesions and lines of escape in airtight regimes of definition and multiplies narrative ruptures in every narrative of constitution. With this mind, the paper then proceeds to introduce and analyze eight contributions to the volume that articulate cultural difference in a variety of contexts including translation, cuisine, media, water writing, punk literature, history, urban studies and protest art as well as more theoretically focused deconstructions of territorial fictions that cultural imaginaries rely on.

This chapter argues that, despite its defeat, humanity in McCarthy’s novel is buried alive as a resilience of ethics. Filipovic explores McCarthy’s vision of a humanity backed up against its limit. In a colourless landscape of the novel where all distinctions have been burnt to cinders that cover the Earth as the ubiquitous remainder of their absolute destruction, the topography of what makes us human can yet be traced in the ethical intrigue that, in spite of it all, flickers in the ashes and powers the novel. For McCarthy, Filipovic argues, the call of goodness is the gravity of being whose pull, in the end, remains stronger than its fear of death.

Reflecting on the affective nature of diasporic experience, the article begins by developing Arendt's understanding of displacement as a temporal disjunction of being caught between the claims of the past and the exigencies of the present. The impossibility of salvaging the past against the often stifling imperatives of the present that she accounts for in her essay 'We Refugees' is, however, also what produces affective economies in the diasporic subject that I argue are crucial to diasporic identity formation. In this respect, I focus on shame, which I see as an affective residue of the unsalvageable past in the experience of displacement. In order to determine and further develop the significance of shame for diasporic subject formation, the article considers its impact on subjectivity in a comparative close reading of two contemporary novels, V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, both of which manifest the elision of the past in diasporized subjects and the movement towards strategies of identification articulated in mimicry. Mimicry, seen in Fanon's rather than Bhabha's terms, as a disavowal of the past, fails, however, to provide a viable strategy of identification for a diasporic subject in the novels that testify rather to the affective cost of our incumbent efforts to start anew.

Departing from Levinas, this paper will address the significance of shame in contemporary discourse in order to approach what could be called its ethical intrigue. Focusing on its political, social and phenomenological implications, I intend to reconsider the experience of shame as it has been appropriated within the politics of affect
and account for its relation to ethics, which alone can reveal its transformative possibilities. Shame will emerge as an affect of proximity whose basic structure of being exposed is an attestation of our constitutive openness to others that towers above the politics of interest and the structures of economy that advance the drama of the Ego.

This paper considers the significance of racial shame for the constitution of the black subject and determines its implications for our reading of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. I will argue that the primary expression of black American experience and its determination within the narrow orbit of white narrative is the affective experience of shame. Implicated in the racialized metaphysics of power relations that dominates Ellison’s world, shame both foments the violence of internalized oppression and the violence of self-valorizing racial orthodoxy in black nationalisms. Departing from Foucault’s notion of subjectivization whereby agency is determined by the individualizing strategies of power, the paper, however, plots a different narrative of invisibility in Ellison’s novel that harbors emancipatory possibilities. The totalizing regimes of identification that articulate and structure our social existence will be shown to be effectively undermined by Ellison’s intervention in the racial imaginary, testifying to his ability to look beyond the blockages of his present and anticipate alternate forms of subjectivity that are yet to be realized in the constituencies of our history.