Tatjana Jukić
University of Zagreb, Department of English, Faculty Member
- Tatjana Jukić is Professor and Head of English Literature in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities a... moreTatjana Jukić is Professor and Head of English Literature in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where she teaches Victorian literature and arts, and film studies. She also teaches on the doctoral programs of Comparative Literature and of Croatian Language and Literature, and has been invited to lecture on literary history and theory by universities and research institutes in Europe, Asia and the United States. Jukić is author of two books: Liking, Dislike, Supervision. Literature and the Visual in Victorian Britain (2002) and Revolution and Melancholia. Limits of Literary Memory (2011).edit
Tragic realism is a concept outlined by Erich Auerbach; in many ways, it summarizes his understanding of mimesis and, by extension, his understanding of philology. While Auerbach employs it mainly to describe the intellectual stakes of... more
Tragic realism is a concept outlined by Erich Auerbach; in many ways, it summarizes his understanding of mimesis and, by extension, his understanding of philology. While Auerbach employs it mainly to describe the intellectual stakes of the novel in the nineteenth century, what it captures is no less than the imperative of nineteenth-century modernity, in the wake of the French Revolution, to sustain and investigate the radical historicity of the world; hence Auerbach’s emphatic concern with the everyday in Mimesis (1946). By then, however, tragic realism has already dominated Auerbach’s thinking, most pointedly perhaps in his Istanbul lecture on realism in 1941–1942: “tragic” suggesting that modern realism entails the intelligence of Greek tragedy, invested as Greek tragedy was in engaging the world’s radical historicity, against which the conceptual apparatus of democracy was negotiated. With a focus on the Istanbul lecture, I propose to discuss tragic realism against three points that Auerbach makes, but does not pursue: first, that tragic realism serves to explain history as a structure of catastrophe, as evidenced by the Second World War; second, that the nineteenth-century English novel sidesteps realism; and third, that cinema takes over as a foothold of realism in the twentieth century. Taken together, these three claims seem to chart a tacit theory of tragic realism that supplements Mimesis and invites a general theory of modernity.
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Sjever-sjeverozapad citat je iz Shakespeareova Hamleta. Kad ga Alfred Hitchcock preuzme kao naslov svoga filma iz 1959. godine, to znači da je posrijedi izričit komentar Hollywooda na moderni svijet kojemu je Hamlet primjerna priča – i... more
Sjever-sjeverozapad citat je iz Shakespeareova Hamleta. Kad ga Alfred Hitchcock preuzme kao naslov svoga filma iz 1959. godine, to znači da je posrijedi izričit komentar Hollywooda na moderni svijet kojemu je Hamlet primjerna priča – i kojemu je Amerika, novi svijet, pretpostavka samorefleksije. Taj komentar najneprikriveniji je i najbrutalniji u završnoj sekvenciji, s kamenim glavama četiriju američkih predsjednika uklesanima u Mount Rushmore u Južnoj Dakoti, sjeverozapadno od New Yorka gdje film počinje. Ako to i jest logična odrednica moga predavanja, neće biti njegov fokus: u fokusu će biti kadar iz čikaške dionice filma, dug 32 sekunde, kojim se otvara glasoviti prizor aukcije kad Cary Grant, glumeći ludilo, prilazi najbliže Hamletu. To je ujedno kadar u kojemu sam Hitchcock prilazi najbliže Hamletu – pa bih, umjesto zaključka, zasad postavila pitanje: što ćemo s razumijevanjem filma ako je sve što je Hitchcock rekao Françoisu Truffautu u seriji njihovih razgovora dijelom bila hamletska podvala? https://kkz.hr/vijesti/hitchcockove-glave-sjever-sjeverozapad
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Pre-Raphaelitism may well be less than the sum of its parts. Even the artists who aspired to claim it for themselves—notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt—assumed that their selves were not exhausted by Pre-Raphaelitism,... more
Pre-Raphaelitism may well be less than the sum of its parts. Even the artists who aspired to claim it for themselves—notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt—assumed that their selves were not exhausted by Pre-Raphaelitism, hence perhaps the emphatic narcissism in their poetry, paintings, and memoirs. Since its inception in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was given over to cultivating relations over and above concepts, selves, and identities. In fact, Pre-Raphaelitism may be a misnomer insofar as a concept is employed to replace, and contain, the intensity of relations that was decisive to the early Pre-Raphaelite collective, and to its place in Victorian modernity.
It is with this distinction in mind that the editors Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby seem to have designed Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, a volume whose ambition is to reassess Pre-Raphaelite poetry at the present time, when the modern ideas of political collectivity and democratic writing are being radically reassessed.
It is with this distinction in mind that the editors Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby seem to have designed Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, a volume whose ambition is to reassess Pre-Raphaelite poetry at the present time, when the modern ideas of political collectivity and democratic writing are being radically reassessed.
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This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by... more
This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell's geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle's metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin's aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold's poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and the Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.
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Drawing on a reference to recompense in Freud’s 1917 essay on mourning and melancholia, I argue that recompense in relation to mourning, along with an economics this entails, serves to process Freud’s earlier psychoanalytic remarks on... more
Drawing on a reference to recompense in Freud’s 1917 essay on mourning and melancholia, I argue that recompense in relation to mourning, along with an economics this entails, serves to process Freud’s earlier psychoanalytic remarks on literature, and anticipates his theory of the death drive in the 1920s. If this is to suggest that the ideation of the death drive is implicated in what early psychoanalysis advertises as literary criticism, it also suggests that psychoanalytic literary criticism is ultimately imagined as a format of mourning. What emerges is a conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis whose cornerstones are bribery, premium, recompense, work and loss: one that aspires to be cancelled in the repetition and lack of the death drive, yet keeps reaffirming both the aesthetics and the economics of mourning.
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With a focus on Jane Austen’s concept-novels (Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Persuasion), I argue that Persuasion binds them into a trilogy, and is this trilogy’s conclusion; also, I argue that Persuasion carries Austen’s... more
With a focus on Jane Austen’s concept-novels (Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Persuasion), I argue that Persuasion binds them into a trilogy, and is this trilogy’s conclusion; also, I argue that Persuasion carries Austen’s theory of the novel to the extreme, until theory has been given up for the novel and betrayed. In Persuasion, the Napoleonic Wars are to Austen’s novel what Mr. Darcy is to Elizabeth Bennet: a foreign body that the novel learns to accommodate in terms of education, intimacy and eroticism until the novel itself, or the novel’s self, has been given up for the relation it has forged. It is thus not merely to history that Austen relinquishes the education of the novel in Persuasion; it is to the history of revolution, or perhaps to history as revolution. Austen implies that global history in the nineteenth century may have no other viable rationale, and that the novel is how this rationale, as well as the rationality that subtends it, is negotiated.
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Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud (1891, 1917) and Carl Schmitt (1956), I show how twentieth-century accounts of melancholia, in psychoanalysis and in political theory, entail a presentation of the world that dovetails with... more
Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud (1891, 1917) and Carl Schmitt (1956), I show how twentieth-century accounts of melancholia, in psychoanalysis and in political theory, entail a presentation of the world that dovetails with nineteenth-century realism. This suggests that realism is fundamentally a response to the melancholy condition that underlies modernity, and could be analyzed as such; it also suggests that realism persists in the twentieth century as a peculiar configuration of melancholia. Erwin Panofsky’s film theory (1936) exemplifies this position. Based staunchly in realism, Panofsky’s film theory is consistent with his comprehensive early exploration of melancholia (1923); no less than the rationale of cinema is thus shown to be moored in the melancholy condition of realism. It is a juncture explored by Lars von Trier in Melancholia (2011): while studiously arranging his cinematic study of melancholia around realism, Trier implies that film’s likely neglect of realism in the twenty-first century amounts to cinematic suicide and, consequently, to the end of the modern world. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/oli.12311
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Drawing on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I first show how the Victorian novel processes translation out of the narrative in order to espouse the metonymic imperative of realism. While this may be how the relation of realism and... more
Drawing on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I first show how the Victorian novel processes translation out of the narrative in order to espouse the metonymic imperative of realism. While this may be how the relation of realism and translation is decided in the Victorian novel, I argue that the subsequent history of translation of Brontë's novel remains inflected in this relation. Taking Croatian translations of Jane Eyre as a case study, I analyze the ways in which they remain predicated on the metonymic imperative of realism, first in Austria-Hungary, when metonymy on these terms was adopted by Austro-Hungarian minorities as a vehicle of modern self-definition, and then in a process that survives the historical Austria-Hungary well into the twentieth century, in Yugoslav modernity for instance. What these translations ultimately sustain, and reveal, is radical realism: not a poetics so much as an apparatus instrumental to negotiating the modern condition in the past two centuries.
https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.xxxii.08juk
https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.xxxii.08juk
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Understanding modernity seems to be inflected in the narrative conditions of Hamlet: Hamlet may be to modernity what the story of Oedipus is to psychoanalysis, a specimen story in which the intellectual constitution of modernity is... more
Understanding modernity seems to be inflected in the narrative conditions of Hamlet: Hamlet may be to modernity what the story of Oedipus is to psychoanalysis, a specimen story in which the intellectual constitution of modernity is decided. In this essay I analyze how industrial modernity finds its articulation in Hamlet, especially in the positions where Hamlet is claimed for realism; realism is taken to mean not a poetics so much as an apparatus instrumental to negotiating the modern condition in the nineteenth century. With a focus on John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–2), I discuss how Ophelia replaces Hamlet as a figure where realism is negotiated in Victorian modernity, also as a figure where modern psychopolitics, with its investment in mourning, finds its foothold in the world of the Industrial Revolution. Lastly, I argue that Ophelia may be where the unresolved narrative conditions of Antigone are retained in Hamlet, along with the political concerns implicit to Antigone’s mourning. http://www.huams.hr/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/wpas_v4_huams_2020.pdf
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Formally becoming one city in 1850, Zagreb forged its modern identity most consistently in the first Croatian novel (The Goldsmith’s Gold, 1871), Zagreb and the Croatian novel relying on each other for self-definition. A provincial city... more
Formally becoming one city in 1850, Zagreb forged its modern identity most consistently in the first Croatian novel (The Goldsmith’s Gold, 1871), Zagreb and the Croatian novel relying on each other for self-definition. A provincial city in the Habsburg Empire and then in Austria-Hungary (1867-1918), Zagreb negotiated in the novel an emphatically chthonic and relational response to the Austro-Hungarian conceptual apparatus. A sense of autochthony in excess of itself was thereby cultivated, in literary and political terms, that persisted well into the twentieth century, when Zagreb was Croatia’s capital in Yugoslavia – the novel and the city assuming for themselves an Antigonic imperative. In the 1990s, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when Zagreb was no longer a city that defined itself by challenging the mandate of the state and the novel no longer its Antigonic language, it was historicism rather than autochthony that the novel and the city began claiming for themselves, even as this historicism, like autochthony, was still distinctly Austro-Hungarian. It was in this way that Zagreb’s involvement with the novel has shown modernity to be incompatible with hegemony.
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Taking “Madame de Mauves” (1874) as a specimen story, I argue that Henry James shapes the focalizing consciousness in his fiction around the work of mourning, to be distinguished from melancholy. If that is how James anticipates Freud's... more
Taking “Madame de Mauves” (1874) as a specimen story, I argue that Henry James shapes the focalizing consciousness in his fiction around the work of mourning, to be distinguished from melancholy. If that is how James anticipates Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia, that is also how James mobilizes mourning to describe the transatlantic relationship, with America engaged for melancholy. James’s Europe, on the other hand, especially Paris of the Second Empire, seems to cohere around masochism, suggesting that masochism, unlike melancholy, may be an intellectual destination equally of mourning and of the focalizing consciousness, in narrative, political and psychoanalytic terms.
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Taking Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden as a point of departure, I analyze how the October Revolution fails to consolidate in the discourses of history and philosophy. Instead, its intellectual consolidation seems to hinge on narrative theory... more
Taking Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden as a point of departure, I analyze how the October Revolution fails to consolidate in the discourses of history and philosophy. Instead, its intellectual consolidation seems to hinge on narrative theory – a proposition implicit to Maugham’s account of the October Revolution, but also to Carl Schmitt, who suggests in Hamlet or Hecuba that explaining political modernity may be premised on a relation forged between narration and revolution. Tellingly, Walter Benjamin identifies a similar configuration in Maugham's Ashenden, with a tacit invitation to examine it against his own narrative theory (of modernity), in The Storyteller. Rather than revealing the October Revolution to be a somewhat disappointing heiress to the French Revolution and to its dazzling effect on modern history and philosophy, this essay aims to demonstrate that the October Revolution confronts twentieth-century modernity with the prerogatives of the English Revolution, as expounded by Schmitt, and possibly exhausts the logic of modernity and of revolution.
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Stanley Cavell’s philosophical interest in Shakespeare is so consistent that Shakespeare seems to have pre-organized an intellectual situation from which Cavell launches the ideation of modernity. I discuss Cavell with a view to similar... more
Stanley Cavell’s philosophical interest in Shakespeare is so consistent that Shakespeare seems to have pre-organized an intellectual situation from which Cavell launches the ideation of modernity. I discuss Cavell with a view to similar constellations in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, but careful of the fact that, unlike Schmitt or Benjamin, Cavell does not privilege Hamlet as a text to which Shakespeare appears reducible. Instead, Cavell’s Shakespeare is collective and paratactic, with the implication that tragedy, taken in isolation (even as it morphs into the mourning play), fails to capture the truth of modernity. What emerges in Cavell is a Shakespeare whose tragedy works from within a Lockean social contract with other genres – a condition crucial to Cavell’s philosophical concerns.
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Hannah Arendt claims that the American Revolution provides a standard against which political modernity can be analyzed, also that subsequent revolutions failed to engage the conceptual purity of the American model. In contrast to Arendt,... more
Hannah Arendt claims that the American Revolution provides a standard against which political modernity can be analyzed, also that subsequent revolutions failed to engage the conceptual purity of the American model. In contrast to Arendt, Jacques Derrida, in “Declarations of Independence,” renounces Jefferson’s thought as inadequate, and excuses himself from engaging it on critical terms. Given the fact that Derrida later mobilizes Marx in order to explore similar concerns, now in terms of secularized messianism and from an Abrahamic angle, I analyze how Derrida’s Marx constitutes a position from which to reassess Derrida’s Jefferson.
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I propose to discuss Ernst Lubitsch’s decision to tailor Ninotchka (1939), his film with Greta Garbo, to Garbo in the role of a Soviet revolutionary, which — given the overwhelming importance of Garbo to classical Hollywood — is how the... more
I propose to discuss Ernst Lubitsch’s decision to tailor Ninotchka (1939), his film with Greta Garbo, to Garbo in the role of a Soviet revolutionary, which — given the overwhelming importance of Garbo to classical Hollywood — is how the October Revolution is situated at the heart of American cinema at the time, while Garbo’s proverbial cinematic melancholia is shown to entail the structures of affect residual to revolutions. Moreover, by divorcing Garbo’s revolutionary melancholia from melodrama and attaching it to comedy, Lubitsch extricates this particular psychopolitics from the fact of genre, now as an insight into the construction of film. Finally, I show how Lubitsch engages Russian literature, especially Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as a code-holder for Hollywood iconicity.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Film Studies, Screen Comedy, Comedy, and 19 moreGenre studies, Narrative, Communism, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, Melancholy, Melodrama, Stanley Cavell, Masochism, American Cinema, Biopolitics, Russian Revolution, Film and Philosophy, Socialism, Classical Hollywood, Greta Garbo, Revolution, Ernst Lubitsch, and Melancholia Studies
Socialism depends on capitalism for its constitution, because reflecting on capitalism is how the very raison of socialism is generated; indeed, socialism may be one of the few positions where capitalism crystallizes as or into... more
Socialism depends on capitalism for its constitution, because reflecting on capitalism is how the very raison of socialism is generated; indeed, socialism may be one of the few positions where capitalism crystallizes as or into reflection. While this may be a point of departure to analyzing a variety of socialist cultures, it seems particularly suited to addressing governmentality and economy in Yugoslavia, in what amounts to a case of socialist exceptionalism. I argue that Yugoslav exceptionalism finds its specimen story in its crime fiction: economic logic assumed those positions in crime fiction that were traditionally associated with law, with subjectivation being reconstituted in the process. It is the subjectivation affiliated with masochism: not the Freudian masochism (a fit for state socialism) so much as its Deleuzian variant, which advertises the abolition of law in favor of contract and a marked investment in revolutionary politics.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Film Studies, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, Film Genre, and 15 moreTrauma Studies, Yugoslavia, Art and Aesthetics of the Cold War, Socialism, Eastern European Cinema, Central and Eastern Europe, Central and East European Studies, Slavic Studies, Psychopolitics, Psychoanalysis and Film, Revolution, Cinema of Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, Sarajevo, and History of 19th and 20th Century East Central Europe
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When Stanley Cavell analyzes Hollywood comedies of remarriage, he mobilizes their narratives as a platform from which to address America as a political and a philosophical project. This is also where Cavell acknowledges the affinity of... more
When Stanley Cavell analyzes Hollywood comedies of remarriage, he mobilizes their narratives as a platform from which to address America as a political and a philosophical project. This is also where Cavell acknowledges the affinity of the cinematic narrative and psychoanalysis, most notably perhaps in his sustained interest in the Hollywood woman as a spectacle of crisis and critique. With this in mind, I propose to discuss the Cavellian woman, of his cinema books, who dominates the “green world” of the Hollywood remarriage comedy: the bucolic story-space which Cavell associates with the Emersonian vision of America and identifies as definitive to its critical character. I focus however on the comedy in which there seems to be no climactic green world – Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) – and argue that Hawks’ woman mobilizes metropolitan courtrooms and the adjacent spaces in a similar fashion, as if to suggest that the Emersonian green world is not absent from Hawks’ film but rather metonymic to the positions America would assign to (pure) reason. Finally, I show how this Cavellian complex corresponds to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical fascination with woman, film and America.
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Slavoj Žižek’s view of the Balkans has recently been critiqued as procolonial, in that he casts the Balkans as the unconscious of Europe and therefore deprives it of the cogito, which remains definitive of Europe. This critique, with its... more
Slavoj Žižek’s view of the Balkans has recently been critiqued as procolonial, in that he casts the Balkans as the unconscious of Europe and therefore deprives it of the cogito, which remains definitive of Europe. This critique, with its Cartesian and Lacanian implications, bears on the very constitution of Žižek’s critical gesture, because it tends to homogenise both psychoanalysis and the philosophy Lacanian psychoanalysis engages with into colonialism. Taking up Žižek’s Marx, particularly the way in which his Marx comes together with the Balkans in The Fragile Absolute, I argue that the Balkans in Žižek traces the metonymic logic of the international which dehomogenises Europe to begin with and displaces the logic of colonialism. What emerges instead is a political imaginary where Žižek’s Lacanian script registers a shift towards configurations formative to the work of Deleuze: the shift mobilised already in Žižek’s engagement with Hitchcock’s cinema where Hitchcock labours as the specimen story of Žižek’s philosophy cum psychoanalysis.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, European Studies, Philosophy, Film Studies, and 21 moreMarxism, Postcolonial Studies, Balkan Studies, Cold War and Culture, Revolutions, Postsocialism, Yugoslavia, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Masochism, Postcolonial Theory, Film and Philosophy, Central and Eastern Europe, Socialist and Post-Socialist Area Studies, Balkans, Alfred Hitchcock, Metonymy, Slavic Studies, Psychoanalysis and Film, and Revolution
Starting with the claim that socialism in Yugoslavia, unlike most central European socialisms, had been constituted in the revolution rather than installed bureaucratically, Jukić points out that socialism in Yugoslavia evolved with and... more
Starting with the claim that socialism in Yugoslavia, unlike most central European socialisms, had been constituted in the revolution rather than installed bureaucratically, Jukić points out that socialism in Yugoslavia evolved with and into a raison d'État that could not sustain the libidinal configurations formative to revolutionary communities. As a result, revolution kept depleting the symbolic resources of socialism and deregulating its symbolic economy; also, it is to the extent to which the revolution deregulated the symbolic economy of socialism that it keeps regulating the postsocialist imaginary. From this position, Jukić moves on to analyze Hrvoje Hribar's "What Is a Man Without a Moustache?" (2005), a film paradigmatic of recent Croatian cinema. She shows how the film engages and deconstructs both the ethnography of Croatian postsocialism and the political history of Yugoslavia, in order to yield an insight into an operable memory of the revolution and its assemblages based in melancholia, masochism, and anti-Oedipal brotherhood. Finally, Jukić shows how the structures specific to American cinema, especially to classical Hollywood, participate in the memory regimes thus generated in and for (post)socialist cultures, focusing on the significance of the cinematic poetics of John Ford.
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Taking up sustained references to James Joyce in Danilo Kiš's fiction and criticism, my text addresses the specific position of Joyce in Kiš's various and obsessive representations of the concentration camp experience. I argue that Joyce... more
Taking up sustained references to James Joyce in Danilo Kiš's fiction and criticism, my text addresses the specific position of Joyce in Kiš's various and obsessive representations of the concentration camp experience. I argue that Joyce cuts a narrative figure in Kiš where a zoning of totalitarianism becomes possible, even necessary ; that Joyce in Kiš demands that generalizing approaches to totalitarianism be dismantled in favor of discrete political configurations irreducible to the totalizing of political experience.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Irish Studies, Comparative Literature, Irish Literature, James Joyce, and 13 moreTotalitarianism, Communism, Holocaust Studies, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Narrative Theory, Socialism, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Central and East European Studies, Slavic Studies, Concentration Camps, Danilo Kis, Gulag Studies, and Komparativna Književnost
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Abrahamic Religions, Cultural History, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, and 12 moreBaroque Art and Literature, Walter Benjamin, Melancholy, Modernity, Metaphor, Psychoanalysis and religion, Erich Auerbach, Antiquity, Philosophy and Religion, Mourning and melancholia, Parataxis, and Komparativna knjizevnost
In „The Life of Students, “ an essay he wrote in 1915, Walter Benjamin contrasts empathy (Einfühlung) with a more critical engagement of communal and political life in modernity. Empathy by this account would not properly engage political... more
In „The Life of Students, “ an essay he wrote in 1915, Walter Benjamin contrasts empathy (Einfühlung) with a more critical engagement of communal and political life in modernity. Empathy by this account would not properly engage political modernity; Ilit Ferber (2013) calls attention to this particular grouping in early Benjamin. I begin with the proposition that the engagement thus contrasted with empathy betrays an affinity with Benjamin’s ideation of mourning in The Origin of the German Mourning Play, the suggestion being that empathy provides a backdrop against which mourning in Benjamin takes shape as a peculiar semiosis. Secondly, my argument is that mourning in early Benjamin, even as it professedly cancels empathy, caters to the same structure of subjectivity, so that mourning and empathy reinforce in fact the same modern subject. Finally, I analyze how this subject – and Benjamin by extension – depends on reconstituting and normalizing melancholia, in the position where melancholia may herald a (political) theory of sympathy.// U eseju “Život studenata” iz 1915. godine Walter Benjamin empatiji (Einfühlung) suprotstavlja kritičniji pristup političkome životu u modernitetu. Prema Benjaminu, empatija ne bi bila angažman primjeren modernitetu. U svome tekstu polazim od hipoteze da angažman kakav Benjamin suprotstavlja empatiji odgovara intelektualnoj situaciji koju će Benjamin nešto kasnije pridružiti žalovanju, u Ishodištu njemačke žalobne igre, što bi značilo da je kritika empatije u podlozi Benjaminova argumenta o žalovanju kao semiozi presudnoj za modernitet. Stoga žalovanje kod ranoga Benjamina, čak i kad isključuje empatiju, sudjeluje u istoj strukturi subjektivnosti, pa tako empatija i žalovanje, pokazuje se, osiguravaju i pothranjuju isti moderni subjekt. Na kraju, razmatram kako taj subjekt, a s njim i Benjamin, ovise o rekonstituciji i normalizaciji melankolije i sućuti.
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Taking up Freud's positions on economy and mourning where they depend on the contact they organize with melancholia, Jukić proposes a critical reading of Jacques Derrida's assemblage of mourning and economy in Specters of Marx: the State... more
Taking up Freud's positions on economy and mourning where they depend on the contact they organize with melancholia, Jukić proposes a critical reading of Jacques Derrida's assemblage of mourning and economy in Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Given the fact that melancholia in Freud calls into question what psychoanalysis wants to define as economy, yet is conspicuously absent from Derrida's otherwise Freudian configuration of the work-and-economy of mourning in his book on Marx, Jukić addresses Freud's approach to work in „Trauer und Melancholie“ and proposes that work in Marx be analyzed not against mourning but against Freudian and, more importantly still, pre-Freudian configurations of melancholia.
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Departing from the proposition that socialist states constituted from within revolutions differ structurally from those instituted bureaucratically, I argue that revolt and resistance are definitive to postrevolutionary socialist cultures... more
Departing from the proposition that socialist states constituted from within revolutions differ structurally from those instituted bureaucratically, I argue that revolt and resistance are definitive to postrevolutionary socialist cultures precisely in the positions where revolt relates to revolution yet fails to enact its logic. While this is of interest to the study of socialism and postsocialism in Croatian cultural history, it also invites a more general, comparative analysis of revolutions, especially of their raison and logic. The comparative analysis outlined here sets forth with Hannah Arendt’s perspective on revolutions, and aims to demonstrate that Arendt’s arguments resonate in Foucault’s and Agamben’s attempts to define biopolitics, now as a set of procedures secured fundamentally through raison d’État. While this is also how the studies of biopolitics effectively repress their intellectual debt to the revolutionary logic (in favor perhaps of the logic of revolt), the repressive gesture suggests that psychoanalysis might be needed for a functional grasp of revolutions and biopolitics alike. Finally, I analyze how this complex is recalibrated in Croatian literature of socialism (especially in The Harbor, a 1974 novel by Antun Šoljan), which points to critical positions beyond the ones mapped out in Arendt, Foucault and Agamben. // U svome radu polazim od pretpostavke da se socijalističke države koje se konstituiraju u revoluciji razlikuju od socijalizama uspostavljenih birokratskim putem, te pokazujem da revolt i otpor imaju vrijednost odrednice za postrevolucionarne socijalističke kulture, primarno u poziciji gdje se revolt nužno relacionira prema revoluciji a da pritom promašuje njezinu logiku. To je od kritične važnosti za proučavanje socijalizma i postsocijalizma u hrvatskoj kulturnoj povijesti, no ujedno poziva na općenitiju, komparativnu analizu revolucija, posebno njihove logike i raisona. Komparativna analiza kakvu ovdje predlažem polazi od radova Hanne Arendt, i teži pokazati da njezini argumenti o revoluciji rezoniraju u Foucaultovu i Agambenovu pokušaju da definiraju biopolitiku kao skup procedura koje se u bitnome osiguravaju kroz raison d’État. S jedne strane, iz toga proizlazi da studije o biopolitici potiskuju svoj intelektualni dug revolucionarnoj logici (a u korist logike revolta?); s druge, sama ta represivna gesta upozorava da bi psihoanaliza mogla biti nužna za funkcionalan kritički pristup i revoluciji i biopolitici. Najzad, razmatram kako se opisani kompleks preslaguje u hrvatskoj književnosti socijalizma, posebno u Luci (1974) Antuna Šoljana, pri čemu se otvara prostor za intervenciju u argumente kakve nude Arendt, Foucault i Agamben.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, Cold War and Culture, Revolutions, and 12 moreYugoslavia, Gilles Deleuze, History of Croatian Literature, Modern Croatian Literature, Giorgio Agamben, Masochism, Michel Foucault, Biopolitics, Socialism, Hannah Arendt, Reception of Antiquity, and Antun Šoljan
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, European Studies, Philosophy, Film Studies, and 22 moreMarxism, Postcolonial Studies, Balkan Studies, Cold War and Culture, Revolutions, Communism (Revolutions), Postsocialism, Yugoslavia, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Masochism, Film and Philosophy, Socialism, Central and Eastern Europe, Socialist and Post-Socialist Area Studies, Balkans, Alfred Hitchcock, Metonymy, Slavic Studies, Psychoanalysis and Film, and Communism and national question
In his essay "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature" Gilles Deleuze privileges English and American literatures as a kind of counter-archive where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy, also where the... more
In his essay "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature" Gilles Deleuze privileges English and American literatures as a kind of counter-archive where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy, also where the contact zones of philosophy are negotiated. Anglo-American literature therefore appears to constitute a critical apparatus (dispositif) that preempts, even invalidates, the attempts to found English and American studies as disciplines in their own right; in consequence, English and American studies emerge in this Deleuzian perspective as a curious economy of knowledge based in surplus and structured in metonymy. I test this proposition against a number of Victorian texts (Carlyle, Dickens, Arnold). They all address revolution as a political event of the first order which presses on the archival logic. Yet the revolution as they see it presses on memory regimes precisely in the positions where archives - unlike revolutions - depend on downgrading metonymy and on processing surplus out of existence. While this particular assemblage calls for a more nuanced reading of surplus and metonymy in Victorian culture, now in terms of politics and memory, it also demands that Deleuze's approach to Anglo- American literature be reassessed: not in order to invalidate it, but rather to call attention to its own implicit economy of knowledge.
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Jane Austen's novels seem to be specimen stories of containment and regulation. Indeed, Austen articulated a turning point in the history of the novel by processing the narrative excesses of the eighteenth-century novel into an educated... more
Jane Austen's novels seem to be specimen stories of containment and regulation. Indeed, Austen articulated a turning point in the history of the novel by processing the narrative excesses of the eighteenth-century novel into an educated narrative intelligence, whose coherence resides in the invention of the focalizing consciousness. The focalizing consciousness keeps the novel together by attracting different narrative excesses to itself, as an instance where the boundary keeps breaking between the narrator and the story, so that the excess is contained in this break, now as a demand that a subjectivity be forged with a sole purpose of translating excess into education.
Pride and Prejudice (1813) may be critical in this sense, because it is in this novel that Austen mobilizes her focalizing consciousness not merely around the processing of narrative excess into education, but also around an insight that excess remains residual to an education thus conceived, now as an excess in the very intelligence that is instrumental to this process. The title indicates as much, because both pride and prejudice point to an excess in the intellectual processes and to an overvaluation of consciousness. This suggests that the subjectivation invoked by the novel does not coincide fully with the novel’s constitution, and that an emphatic narrative emancipation runs parallel to the invention of the focalizing consciousness: this being how the novel is identified as a privileged site of modern psychopolitics in the nineteenth century.
Pride and Prejudice (1813) may be critical in this sense, because it is in this novel that Austen mobilizes her focalizing consciousness not merely around the processing of narrative excess into education, but also around an insight that excess remains residual to an education thus conceived, now as an excess in the very intelligence that is instrumental to this process. The title indicates as much, because both pride and prejudice point to an excess in the intellectual processes and to an overvaluation of consciousness. This suggests that the subjectivation invoked by the novel does not coincide fully with the novel’s constitution, and that an emphatic narrative emancipation runs parallel to the invention of the focalizing consciousness: this being how the novel is identified as a privileged site of modern psychopolitics in the nineteenth century.
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Research Interests: Cultural History, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Reception Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, and 23 moreAusten, Class, Postsocialism, Croatian, English, Yugoslavia, Jane Austen, Modern Croatian Literature, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, British Women Writers, Literary History, Socialism, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Socialist Realism, Central and Eastern Europe, Slavic Studies, Literature: Jane Austen, Social realism, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Književnost, Croatian Language and Literature, and Komparativna Književnost
Taking up Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes narrative, I argue that the raison of the Victorian detective story depends on situating the subjectivity as it forms and explains itself in the Victorian... more
Taking up Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes narrative, I argue that the raison of the Victorian detective story depends on situating the subjectivity as it forms and explains itself in the Victorian Bildungsroman, against the logic of Victorian political economy. This happens not least where the Holmes narratives show that subjectivity sustains itself only insofar as it manages to subject law to various micronarratives of capitalization. While this is how the Holmes narratives anticipate what at that point was yet to form as psychoanalysis, they also adumbrate its (Deleuzian) critique; further, this is where a peculiar Victorian biopolitics can be discerned. Finally, I propose that America of A Study of Scarlet is critical to the above configuration, with the American Revolution as the event constituent of Victorian culture.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Victorian Studies, and 16 moreNineteenth Century Studies, Victorian Literature, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Jacques Derrida, Detective Fiction, American Revolution, Biopolitics, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Genre Theory, Narrative Theory, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Revolution, Bildungsroman, Književnost, and Komparativna Književnost
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Kad je Henry James potkraj života sastavljao glasovito njujorško izdanje svojih djela, iz njega je, uz još nekoliko naslova, izostavio Washington Square (1880). Tom gestom kao da je razbaštinio Washington Square: nije ga se izrijekom... more
Kad je Henry James potkraj života sastavljao glasovito njujorško izdanje svojih djela, iz njega je, uz još nekoliko naslova, izostavio Washington Square (1880). Tom gestom kao da je razbaštinio Washington Square: nije ga se izrijekom odrekao, ali ga nije priznao onako kako je to učinio s glavninom svoga korpusa. Godine 1949. William Wyler, jedan od najvažnijih režisera klasičnoga Hollywooda, prema tome romanu i njegovoj kazališnoj adaptaciji snimio je melodramu Nasljednica (The Heiress). Za glavnu ulogu Olivia de Havilland nagrađena je Oscarom, a Martin Scorsese poslije je izdvojio Nasljednicu kao jedan od svojih formativnih filmova. Tako je Washington Square u povijesti filma dobio ono mjesto koje mu je James htio uskratiti u povijesti književnosti: Hollywood je prisvojio Jamesov razbaštinjeni roman, i to kao književnost koju film zamišlja kao vlastito ishodište, pa čak i kao vlastitu inteligenciju.
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It was principally through Antun Gustav Matoš (1873–1914) that Croatian literature received its modernity for the twentieth century, as well as its sense of Europeanness. His essay on Emerson (1904–5) can be analyzed as part of the same... more
It was principally through Antun Gustav Matoš (1873–1914) that Croatian literature received its modernity for the twentieth century, as well as its sense of Europeanness. His essay on Emerson (1904–5) can be analyzed as part of the same agenda, especially in view of its marked Nietzschean overtones; it is Nietzsche’s Emerson that Matoš brings to Croatian culture and, with it, a corresponding inflection of both Europe and philosophy. While this suggests that a Nietzschean America comes to shape the American phantasm for twentieth-century Croatian modernity, I propose to discuss another operation which is equally critical to this placement of Emerson: the way in which Austro-Hungarian cultural practices, definitive to Croatia at the time and at work in Matoš, decide Emerson’s profile and refract some of its Nietzschean features.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, American Literature, American Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and 15 moreReception Studies, American Philosophy, Revolutions, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Modern Croatian Literature, 19th-Century American Literature, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Central and Eastern Europe, Slavic Studies, Austria-Hungary, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Croatian Language and Literature, and Antun Gustav Matoš
I propose to discuss twentieth-century Croatian literature alongside Carl Schmitt’s argument about the intrusion of time in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Schmitt relates this intrusion to the birth of modern Europe out of the spirit of... more
I propose to discuss twentieth-century Croatian literature alongside Carl Schmitt’s argument about the intrusion of time in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Schmitt relates this intrusion to the birth of modern Europe out of the spirit of Protestantism, when the uniform theological platform is compromised and, with it, the legitimizing procedures and the figure of the sovereign. If literature at the time is therefore in a position to reconstitute itself and become an apparatus critical to negotiating the rationale of politics and authorization, the crisis thus brought to the fore demands also that literature urgently reconsider the concept of a tragic event – the implication being that a tragic event, processed by modern literature into mourning, is how to think politics in modernity. What Schmitt thereby implies is that history of modern literature relates structurally to political history; equally, he suggests that modern political history depends, for its rationale, on literature. I address world war as a similar intrusion, especially in the context of Croatian literature, and argue that mourning may no longer be a foothold for literature to process the intrusion of time. Instead, I contend that structures of masochism take over as that position where literature processes the intrusion of time into an intellectual situation. // Polazeći od studije Carla Schmitta o irupciji vremena u Shakespeareovu tragediju, predlažem raspravu o hrvatskoj književnosti dvadesetoga stoljeća u sličnome okviru. Prema Schmittu, do irupcije vremena u tragediju dolazi s rođenjem moderne Evrope iz duha protestantizma, jer se u tome času raspada jedinstvena teološka platforma koja je dotadašnjoj Evropi osiguravala proces ovlaštenja i nenapuklu figuru suverena. Ako je književnost zbog toga u situaciji da rekonstituira sebe kao instrument domišljanja samih uvjeta politike i ovlaštenja, to je ujedno kriza koja od književnosti neodgodivo zahtijeva da se iznova odredi prema tragičnom događaju – s implikacijom da je tragični događaj, koji moderna književnost prevodi u žalovanje, presudan za domišljanje politike i ovlaštenja. Schmitt tako postavlja i pitanje može li se i do koje mjere povijest moderne književnosti izuzeti iz političke povijesti; također, on sugerira da se politička povijest u modernitetu možda uopće ne može razumjeti osim u relaciji prema književnosti. U svome predavanju razmotrit ću svjetski rat kao sličnu irupciju, posebno u kontekstu hrvatske književnosti. Hipoteza mi je da strukture mazohizma preuzimaju funkciju tragičnoga događaja i njegova modernog prijevoda u žalovanje, te postaju uporište gdje književnost domišlja irupciju vremena i stvara uvjete za (vlastitu) povijest.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Modern Croatian Literature, Modernity, and 14 moreMasochism, First World War, Literary History, Carl Schmitt, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Literature and Psychoanalysis, Slavic Studies, Austria-Hungary, Miroslav Krleza, World wars, Croatian Language and Literature, Antun Gustav Matoš, Slobodan Novak, and Vladimir Vidrić
Drawing on two remarks – one by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, about a peculiar character of socialism in Austria-Hungary, and the other by Viktor Tausk, about a peculiar reconstitution of politics and sexuality in Croatian literature... more
Drawing on two remarks – one by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, about a peculiar character of socialism in Austria-Hungary, and the other by Viktor Tausk, about a peculiar reconstitution of politics and sexuality in Croatian literature of the 1890s – I propose a discussion of Miroslav Krleža where his literature occasions a coming together of these two perspectives. It is in this position, I argue, that Krleža articulates an insight into literature cum politics as an assemblage which is equally critical to Austro-Hungarian culture and to the 20th century Croatian culture where it registers its Austro-Hungarian genealogy. For the same reason, Krleža invites to be read alongside Gilles Deleuze and his study of masochism. With his emphasis on the sexuality of masochism in terms of reason, education, contract and politics, Deleuze advertizes masochism as a kind of Austro-Hungarian organon. Krleža in turn signals the configurations where the Deleuzian formula suffers an important inflection, inviting perhaps a new encounter with Freud. // U svome radu polazim od dvaju komentara: prvo od opaske Ernesta Laclaua i Chantal Mouffe o specifičnome karakteru socijalizma u Austro-Ugarskoj, a potom od zapažanja Viktora Tauska o specifičnome preustroju politike i seksualnosti u hrvatskoj književnosti 1890-ih. U književnosti Miroslava Krleže te se dvije pozicije dodiruju, a način na koji Krleža domišlja susretišta književnosti i politike od kritične je važnosti kako za razumijevanje austrougarske kulture, tako i za razumijevanje hrvatske kulture dvadesetoga stoljeća (već u onoj mjeri u kojoj je hrvatsku kulturu prošloga stoljeća obilježila njezina austrougarska genealogija). Zbog istoga razloga Krležu treba čitati i paralelno sa Gillesom Deleuzeom, posebno s njegovom studijom o mazohizmu. Prema Deleuzeu, seksualnost u mazohizmu ujedno je funkcija obrazovanja i politike, to jest stanovitoga tipa racionalnosti; Deleuze stoga mazohizmu pristupa kao austrougarskome organonu. Zauzvrat, Krležina književnost mapira pozicije gdje deleuzeovska formula trpi analitički pomak i otvara se za ponovni dijalog s Freudovom psihoanalizom.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Politics and Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Modern Croatian Literature, and 11 moreMasochism, Memory Studies, First World War, Narrative Theory, Socialism, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Central and Eastern Europe, Austria-Hungary, Miroslav Krleza, Croatian Language and Literature, and Komparativna Književnost
Miroslav Krleža failed to finish Flags, his last and most massive novel; he faced the same quandary while working on The Banquet in Blitva. I propose to address this particular aspect of Krleža's novel-writing in conjunction with his... more
Miroslav Krleža failed to finish Flags, his last and most massive novel; he faced the same quandary while working on The Banquet in Blitva. I propose to address this particular aspect of Krleža's novel-writing in conjunction with his systemic interest in politics. Krleža offers a comprehensive explanation of his view on art and politics in “The Foreword to ‘The Podravian Motives’ by Krsto Hegedušić” (1933); it is here already that this juncture is mobilized as an elaborate politics of affect. Tracing its various Spinozan and Deleuzian implications, I analyze Krleža's politics of affect towards the position it allocates to melancholia. The resulting configurations seem critical to Krleža studies, but also to comparative studies of literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. // Polazeći od činjenice da Krleža nije dovršio Zastave, a sličan je problem prije toga imao i s Banketom u Blitvi, ovdje postavljam analizu Zastava koja se fokusira na taj specifični aspekt Krležine naracije, no usporedno sa sistemskim interesom Krleže za politiku. Svoje viđenje politike u ili kao umjetnosti, te za umjetnost, on je precizno odredio već u “Predgovoru ‘Podravskim motivima’ Krste Hegedušića” (1933); već se u tome eseju pokazuje da je riječ o politici afekta. Prateći različite implikacije te politike, primjerice prema Spinozi ili Deleuzeu, u svome radu razmatram ponajprije poziciju koju kod Krleže zauzima melankolija. Konfiguracije koje proizlaze iz takvoga čitanja mogle bi biti od kritične vrijednosti za krležologiju, ali i za komparativne studije književnosti, filozofije i psihoanalize.
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, Literature and Politics, Melancholy, History of Croatian Literature, and 11 moreModern Croatian Literature, Narrative Theory, Literature and Philosophy, Novel, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Affect (Cultural Theory), Bildungsroman, Miroslav Krleza, Književnost, Croatian Language and Literature, and Komparativna Književnost
Kad je Krešimir Nemec svoju monografiju o Ivi Andriću naslovio Gospodar priče (2016), pretpostavio je ne samo to da je Andrić primarno pripovjedač, nego i to da se kao pripovjedač formira kad zagospodari pričom, pa je priča Andriću... more
Kad je Krešimir Nemec svoju monografiju o Ivi Andriću naslovio Gospodar priče (2016), pretpostavio je ne samo to da je Andrić primarno pripovjedač, nego i to da se kao pripovjedač formira kad zagospodari pričom, pa je priča Andriću fundamentalno relacija vlasti. Ipak, postavlja se pitanje ne počinje li formacija pripovjedača Andrića podčinjavanjem priči, s pričom kao gospodaricom? Da bi, očekivano, završila u času kad pripovjedač suvereno preuzme vlast nad pričom, premda time pokazuje da jedino vlast sama ima obilježja suverenosti? Tome u prilog ide Andrićeva autorska biografija: on počinje kao liričar, ali s uporištem u lirskoj prozi, na granici prema pripovijedanju, te kao glas već neizuzet iz relacija vlasti – kako drugačije razumjeti naslov prve Andrićeve autorske knjige, Ex Ponto (1918), kojim se pisac izrijekom stavlja u položaj Ovidija, možda najpoznatijega podčinjenika zapadne književnosti? Da sâm Andrić tako razumije svoju formaciju pokazuje njegova rana „Priča iz Japana“ iz 1919. Posrijedi je gotovo narativna zigota – priča je toliko rana i malena – u kojoj je priča gospodarica pjesniku, a pjesnik je njezina funkcija. Zato je to ujedno priča o postajanju pripovjedačem; pripovjedač počinje kao lirski glas u službi priče. Da nije toliko malena, bila bi Bildunsgroman, Andrićev David Copperfield; ovako, njezina malenost ima označiti konstitutivnu malenost pripovjedača – pripovjedač je linija uzmaka pred pričom koja se postavlja kao imperativ. (...)
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Drawing on Roman Jakobson's study of aphasia, I first analyze how Jakobson's description of metaphor derives from his concept of the dominant, and demonstrate how that juncture pertains to Shoshana Felman's discussion of metaphor in The... more
Drawing on Roman Jakobson's study of aphasia, I first analyze how Jakobson's description of metaphor derives from his concept of the dominant, and demonstrate how that juncture pertains to Shoshana Felman's discussion of metaphor in The Scandal of the Speaking Body. When Felman relates metaphor to the paternal, and the paternal to metaphor, she suggests that metaphor may be how the very conditions of authority and authorization are articulated. Metaphor thus turns out to coincide with a political function of language, to be observed at its most critical in modernity, in the intersections of literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It is with this in mind that I proceed to analyze the Croatian novel in the 1960s and its emphatic use of metaphor, taking Antun Šoljan’s A Brief Excursion as a specimen story. I argue that metaphor colonizes Šoljan’s narration so consistently that the novel assumes for itself the position of sacrifice, demanding that metaphor be addressed in terms of a theology. It is almost as if it took a theology of metaphor for the Croatian novel to process its modern condition. // U predavanju polazim od metafore kako je opisuje Roman Jakobson; potom Jakobsonov opis stavljam u relaciju prema njegovu shvaćanju dominante, te prema metafori kako joj pristupa Shoshana Felman u studiji Skandal tijela u govoru. Prema Felman, upravo metafora najčišće upućuje na uvjete ovlaštenja, autoriteta i očinskoga u jeziku. Metafora bi zato u krajnjem izvodu bila politička funkcija jezika, a ta se funkcija osobito jasno pokazuje usporede li se diskursi književnosti, psihoanalize i filozofije. Tu konstelaciju uzimam kao polazište za analizu hrvatskoga romana u 1960-ima, koji pokazuje izrazitu sklonost prema metafori ili se prema metafori nastoji odrediti ; nije nevažno što u Marinkovićevu Kiklopu, jednome od najglasovitijih romana desetljeća, metafora ima status dominante. Šoljanov Kratki izlet još je simptomatičniji, jer se nastoji konstituirati oko čiste metafore, ili kao čista metafora, čime se roman stavlja u položaj žrtve a za pripovijedanje se zahtijevaju uvjeti žrtvovanja. Ako to upućuje na stanovitu teologizaciju metafore u hrvatskome romanu 1960-ih, pokazuje se da je teologija metafore hrvatskome romanu bila okvir da domisli uvjete vlastite modernosti.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, Genre studies, Gilles Deleuze, and 10 moreMasochism, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Narrative Theory, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Slavic Studies, Austria-Hungary, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Danilo Kis, Književnost, and Komparativna Književnost
It was principally through Antun Gustav Matoš (1873-1914) that Croatian literature received its modernity for the twentieth century, as well as its sense of Europeanness. His essay on Emerson (1905) can be analyzed as part of the same... more
It was principally through Antun Gustav Matoš (1873-1914) that Croatian literature received its modernity for the twentieth century, as well as its sense of Europeanness. His essay on Emerson (1905) can be analyzed as part of the same agenda, especially in view of its marked Nietzschean overtones; it is Nietzsche’s Emerson that Matoš brings to Croatian culture and, with it, a corresponding inflection of both Europe and philosophy. While this suggests that a Nietzschean America comes to shape the American phantasm for the twentieth-century Croatian modernity, I propose to discuss another operation which is equally critical to this placement of Emerson: the way in which Austrian-Hungarian cultural practices, definitive to Croatia at the time and at work in Matoš, decide Emerson’s profile and refract some of its Nietzschean features.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, American Literature, American Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and 16 morePeasant Studies, Friedrich Nietzsche, History of Croatian Literature, Modern Croatian Literature, American Revolution, Spatiality (Cultural geography), Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Flaneur, Austria-Hungary, Književnost, Flâneur, Croatian Language and Literature, Komparativna Književnost, Andrew Carnegie, and Antun Gustav Matoš
My essay is organized around a comparative analysis of Antun Gustav Matoš's „Around Lobor“ (1907), which foregrounds a peculiar configuration of dreams and Croatian cultural history, against Freud's precepts for the interpretation of... more
My essay is organized around a comparative analysis of Antun Gustav Matoš's „Around Lobor“ (1907), which foregrounds a peculiar configuration of dreams and Croatian cultural history, against Freud's precepts for the interpretation of dreams in Die Traumdeutung. By pointing out the overlaps in these two texts, I argue that Matoš's perspective on the oneiric signals the position where psychoanalysis needs to reassess its investment in dreams in terms of political economy and the management of life. In turn, Freud's Die Traumdeutung provides the framework whereby Matoš's account of Croatian cultural history is tooled up into a critical instrument.
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, Travel Writing, Sigmund Freud, Melancholy, and 13 moreHistory of Croatian Literature, Modern Croatian Literature, Biopolitics, Travel Literature, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Edgar Allan Poe, Slavic Studies, Anthropology of Dreams and Dreaming, Književnost, Flâneur, Croatian Language and Literature, Komparativna Književnost, and Antun Gustav Matoš
Čitanje kriminalističkog romana "Kneginja iz Petrinjske ulice" Marije Jurić Zagorke kao ishodišta za komparativnu analizu Freudovih studija o mazohizmu i melankoliji, a naspram konfiguracija mazohizma i melankolije u knjigama "Hladno i... more
Čitanje kriminalističkog romana "Kneginja iz Petrinjske ulice" Marije Jurić Zagorke kao ishodišta za komparativnu analizu Freudovih studija o mazohizmu i melankoliji, a naspram konfiguracija mazohizma i melankolije u knjigama "Hladno i okrutno" te "Razlika i ponavljanje" Gillesa Deleuzea.
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, Feminist Theory, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, and 10 moreMelancholy, Modern Croatian Literature, Masochism, Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Književnost, Marija Jurić Zagorka, Croatian Language and Literature, and Komparativna Književnost
Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Politics and Literature, Revolutions, French Revolution, and 10 moreCroatian, History of Croatian Literature, Modern Croatian Literature, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Slavic Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Književnost, Marija Jurić Zagorka, Croatian Language and Literature, and Komparativna Književnost
Given the prominent position, in the Croatian cultural imaginary, of Vlaho Bukovac's 1895 painting of the Illyrian Movement, this article argues that the later accounts of early to mid-19th century Illyrian politics and literature remain... more
Given the prominent position, in the Croatian cultural imaginary, of Vlaho Bukovac's 1895 painting of the Illyrian Movement, this article argues that the later accounts of early to mid-19th century Illyrian politics and literature remain contaminated, and structurally so, with Bukovac’s treatment of the visual. This visual contaminant points to different political and cultural practices in Austria-Hungary at the time, including psychoanalysis, not least in the position where psychoanalysis addresses the scope of image and the phantasmatic. Analyzing three paintings in which Bukovac takes up the subject of literature and the phantasmatic, alongside Freud’s “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren“ (1908), I propose that both Freud and Bukovac mobilize literature in order to foreground the political logic of metonymy and the metonymic logic of the political. Finally, I show that Freud, unlike Bukovac, fails to sustain this logic precisely in the places where he sets out to classify wish. //
Budući da „Hrvatski preporod“ Vlaha Bukovca iz 1895. pripada među slike koje su strukturno obilježile prošlostoljetni hrvatski kulturni imaginarij, postavlja se pitanje koliko su preporodna politika i književnost uopće dostupne kasnijoj kulturnoj povijesti osim kroz prizmu Bukovčeva zastora u zagrebačkom HNK. Taj vizualni kontaminant indikacija je također općenitijih kulturnih i političkih praksi u Austro-Ugarskoj s kraja 19. i na početku 20. stoljeća, među njima i psihoanalize, posebno s obzirom na interes psihoanalize za djelokrug slike i fantazmi. U svome prilogu tri slike u kojima Bukovac prikazuje književnost cum fantazmatsko analiziram zajedno s Freudovom studijom „Pjesnik i fantazmatsko“ iz 1908. godine, uz argument da književnost za obojicu upućuje na političku logiku metonimije odnosno metonimijsku logiku političkoga. Nadalje, pokazujem kako Freud, za razliku od Bukovca, tu logiku u svojoj studiji ne uspijeva podržati, i to na mjestima gdje pokušava grupirati i ograničiti želju.
Budući da „Hrvatski preporod“ Vlaha Bukovca iz 1895. pripada među slike koje su strukturno obilježile prošlostoljetni hrvatski kulturni imaginarij, postavlja se pitanje koliko su preporodna politika i književnost uopće dostupne kasnijoj kulturnoj povijesti osim kroz prizmu Bukovčeva zastora u zagrebačkom HNK. Taj vizualni kontaminant indikacija je također općenitijih kulturnih i političkih praksi u Austro-Ugarskoj s kraja 19. i na početku 20. stoljeća, među njima i psihoanalize, posebno s obzirom na interes psihoanalize za djelokrug slike i fantazmi. U svome prilogu tri slike u kojima Bukovac prikazuje književnost cum fantazmatsko analiziram zajedno s Freudovom studijom „Pjesnik i fantazmatsko“ iz 1908. godine, uz argument da književnost za obojicu upućuje na političku logiku metonimije odnosno metonimijsku logiku političkoga. Nadalje, pokazujem kako Freud, za razliku od Bukovca, tu logiku u svojoj studiji ne uspijeva podržati, i to na mjestima gdje pokušava grupirati i ograničiti želju.
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Visual Culture, and 17 moreCroatian, Sigmund Freud, Modern Croatian Literature, Nineteenth-century Art, Literature and Visual Arts, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Visual Arts, Slavic Studies, Austria-Hungary, Slavic Languages and Literatures, The Cultural History of Austria-Hungary, Vlaho Bukovac, Illyrian Movement, Croatian Language and Literature, Komparativna Književnost, and Ivan Gundulić
Contents: Predgovor (7-9) Uvod (11-71) Politika i melankolija: Slobodan Novak , „Badessa madre Antonia“ (73-94) Mazohizam i melankolija: Ivan Slamnig, Bolja polovica hrabrosti (95-197) Dundo Maroje kao scena instrukcije:... more
Contents:
Predgovor (7-9)
Uvod (11-71)
Politika i melankolija: Slobodan Novak , „Badessa madre Antonia“ (73-94)
Mazohizam i melankolija: Ivan Slamnig, Bolja polovica hrabrosti (95-197)
Dundo Maroje kao scena instrukcije: Šoljanov Držić (199-231)
Spleen gulaga: Danilo Kiš, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (233-320)
Literatura (321-332)
Napomena (333)
Kazalo imena (335-341)
Predgovor (7-9)
Uvod (11-71)
Politika i melankolija: Slobodan Novak , „Badessa madre Antonia“ (73-94)
Mazohizam i melankolija: Ivan Slamnig, Bolja polovica hrabrosti (95-197)
Dundo Maroje kao scena instrukcije: Šoljanov Držić (199-231)
Spleen gulaga: Danilo Kiš, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (233-320)
Literatura (321-332)
Napomena (333)
Kazalo imena (335-341)
Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Cold War and Culture, Revolutions, Yugoslavia, Literary Theory, and 12 moreModern Croatian Literature, Modernity, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Narrative Theory, Socialism, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Central and East European Studies, Mourning and melancholia, Danilo Kis, Ivan Slamnig, Slobodan Novak, and Antun Šoljan
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Politics and Literature, Revolutions, Sigmund Freud, and 11 moreMelancholy, Modern Croatian Literature, Memory Studies, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Narrative Theory, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Slavic Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Croatian Language and Literature, Komparativna Književnost, and Slobodan Novak
A comparative analysis of The Better Part of Valour (Bolja polovica hrabrosti, 1972), a novel by Ivan Slamnig, against Gilles Deleuze's presentation of masochism in Coldness and Cruelty (1967).
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Yugoslavia, Literary Theory, Gilles Deleuze, and 13 moreMelancholy, Modern Croatian Literature, Masochism, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Narrative Theory, Literature and Philosophy, Socialism, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Slavic Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Literary Anthropology, Croatian Language and Literature, and Ivan Slamnig
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Genre studies, Literary Theory, Modern Croatian Literature, and 10 moreLiterary History, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Reception of Antiquity, Hamlet, Slavic Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Croatian Language and Literature, Komparativna Književnost, Marin Držić, and Antun Šoljan
A comparative analysis of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) by Danilo Kiš, as Gulag literature, against Kiš's work on Charles Baudelaire and with a view of Kiš's affinity with the critical and historical profile of Walter Benjamin.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Revolutions, Totalitarianism, Yugoslavia, and 14 moreLiterary Theory, Walter Benjamin, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Russian Revolution, Narrative Theory, Socialism, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Charles Baudelaire, Slavic Studies, Concentration Camps, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Danilo Kis, Gulag Studies, and Aesthetics of Totalitarianism
This book focuses on the encounters of literature and visuality in Victorian culture, with a special emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. lt aims at exploring why Pre-Raphaelitism, with its peculiar handling of literature and... more
This book focuses on the encounters of literature and visuality in Victorian culture, with a special emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. lt aims at exploring why Pre-Raphaelitism, with its peculiar handling of literature and visuality, has been granted an important position in recent revisions of Victorian culture. Though the answer to that question is far from unequivocal, the visibility of Pre-Raphaelitism in recent revisions of Victorian culture seems to be due to its affinity with the procedures of contemporary critical theory. Both Pre-Raphaelitism and contemporary theory rely on the concept of borderline--be it the borderline between cultures, media, languages, disciplines or psychic structures. The Pre-Raphaelites, with their keen interest in illustration, ekphrasis, transgression, sensuality, nature, history and cultural others, often operate as an alibi of the very interpretive effort invested in the act of reassessing. This proposition works as the structural backbone of my study, which aims to investigate the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelite procedures have retained their functionality in the sphere of culture.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural History, Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, English Literature, and 26 moreArt History, Feminist Theory, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Victorian Literature, Literary Theory, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Literature and Visual Arts, Victorian Art, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Neo-Victorian Literature, Victorian poetry, Historiographic Metafiction, Pre-Raphaelite Painting, Victorian Shakespeare, Victorian Literature and Culture, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelites, John Everett Millais, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Komparativna Književnost, Preraphaelitism, and Engleska književnost
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural History, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Feminist Theory, and 13 moreVictorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorian Literature, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Victorian Women Writers, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Victorian poetry, Pre-Raphaelite Painting, Victorian Literature and Culture, Pre-Raphaelites, Christina Rossetti, Književnost, and Komparativna Književnost
In many ways „the Lubitsch Touch“ summarizes the impact of the Hays Code on classical Hollywood cinema: not because Ernst Lubitsch devised a – secret – formula that sidestepped the restrictions introduced by the Code, but because this... more
In many ways „the Lubitsch Touch“ summarizes the impact of the Hays Code on classical Hollywood cinema: not because Ernst Lubitsch devised a – secret – formula that sidestepped the restrictions introduced by the Code, but because this formula was in operation before the Code, suggesting that the Code in fact served the purpose of reaffirming the very intelligence that Hollywood at the time saw as seminal to its constitution. With this in mind, I propose to analyze Trouble in Paradise (1932), a Lubitsch film in which this particular intelligence is engaged to mediate the prerogatives of genre in classical Hollywood. Rather than being a screwball comedy or a melodrama, Trouble in Paradise interrogates the rationale of genre and codification, so much so that the story, which is essentially about a pair of con artists, ultimately reveals fraud itself as code and censorship against which the intelligence of film makes itself known. I will also address the fact that Trouble in Paradise entails the groupings that Stanley Cavell later flags as the hallmarks of Hollywood’s affinity with philosophy – the remarriage comedy and the melodrama of the unknown woman – only to unpack them and, with them, the philosophy’s mandate in its encounter with film. https://hollywoodbeforethecode.parisnanterre.fr/index.php/programme/
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U romanu Mirisi, zlato i tamjan (1968) Slobodana Novaka pripovjedač više puta aludira na Shakespeareovu komediju Na Tri kralja (Twelfth Night), uglavnom kad napominje da se ekskrementalni kalendar, koji ravna njegovim pripovijedanjem, ima... more
U romanu Mirisi, zlato i tamjan (1968) Slobodana Novaka pripovjedač više puta aludira na Shakespeareovu komediju Na Tri kralja (Twelfth Night), uglavnom kad napominje da se ekskrementalni kalendar, koji ravna njegovim pripovijedanjem, ima podudariti s Bogojavljenjem, odnosno Epifanijom: otud i naslov romana. Već sam pisala o tome da Novakov Shakespeare nije samo kalendarski nego je Ilirija iz Na Tri kralja preuzeta kronotopski, do te mjere da Novakova priča reflektira temeljne narativne relacije Shakespeareova komada, a onda i političku modernost u čijem je Shakespeare ishodištu (Jukić 2011: 317-320). Ovom prigodom ću, pozivajući se na političku teologiju Carla Schmitta, ali i na Schmittovo čitanje Shakespearea, razložiti Novakovu Iliriju i kao dosljedan komentar na ishodišta hrvatske političke modernosti (Ilirske pokrajine, Ilirski pokret), koja sebepokazuje to ilirsko ime-zamišlja višestruko i partenogenetski, kao modernost koja je uvijek unaprijed redux. Najzad, kako drugačije razumjeti činjenicu da Madonakojoj je između 1965. i 1968. (kad je roman nastajao), kaže, sto godina, "stotinu inpunto"-dijeli rođendan s partenogenetskom Austro-Ugarskom?
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In my lecture I propose to analyze the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, I will show how the concept was unpacked into a busy... more
In my lecture I propose to analyze the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, I will show how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell's geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle's metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin's aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold's poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and the Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry. My close reading on this occasion will focus chiefly on Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, the early novellas of Henry James ("Daisy Miller"), a selection of poetry by Christina Rossetti, and the Pre-Raphaelite painting (John Everett Millais's "The Vale of Rest").
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Hannah Arendt employs process to describe not revolution so much as a response of the revolutionary actors to the events in which they first took part without knowing them to be a revolution – a response steeped in “the metaphors of... more
Hannah Arendt employs process to describe not revolution so much as a response of the revolutionary actors to the events in which they first took part without knowing them to be a revolution – a response steeped in “the metaphors of stream and torrent and current” in which “the revolution is not seen as the work of men but as an irresistible process” (On Revolution, 1990: 49). To Arendt, that is, process describes how revolution is eventually lodged in subjectivity as an index of unassimilated narrative work, so that modern subjectivity is kept in constant psychopolitical and narrative check. Indeed, Arendt notes that the revolutionaries were “possessed and obsessed” with this idea (1990: 42), which – given the formative function of revolutions in modernity, and the formative function of narrative in Arendt’s political theory – suggests that modern subjectivity is predicated on process as narrative excess.
Tellingly, Erich Auerbach argues a similar line in Mimesis, when he writes that the French Revolution was when the “process of temporal concentration” began for Europe, “both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them,” resulting in “modern tragic realism based on the contemporary” (2003: 459, 458). To Auerbach this implies emphatic conscious engagement; he speaks of forceful “modern consciousness of reality” (2003: 459). That he should call this realism tragic, however, suggests that modern subjectivity is kept in the same kind of urgent psychopolitical check that Arendt has identified. That Auerbach – a preeminent philologist – should align tragic realism with the novel in the nineteenth century suggests that the novel at the time was tasked with shoring up narrative excess against the intelligence of tragedy.
Auerbach credits Stendhal with formatting the novel against this task. I propose to argue that the invention of the focalizing consciousness in the nineteenth-century novel, often attributed to Jane Austen, was how this task was first accomplished, leading up to the novel’s own self-reflection and the foregrounding of narrative theory, with Henry James. It is in this sense that Jane Austen may well be Aeschylus, or perhaps Sophocles, to James’s Euripides, or even Aristotle; Matthew Arnold comes to mind and his Victorian grasp of Greek antiquity. Important stepping stones were provided by Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Finally, if this means that the nineteenth-century novel carries the same critical weight as the mourning play of early modernity (to mention only the studies by Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt), I will also suggest that the invention of detective fiction, in the nineteenth century, may have been how the intelligence of the novel was negotiated against the formats of tragedy and the mourning play. For this I will consult research on form, process and transformation by Fredric Jameson, Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh and Jürgen Osterhammel, among others.
Tellingly, Erich Auerbach argues a similar line in Mimesis, when he writes that the French Revolution was when the “process of temporal concentration” began for Europe, “both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them,” resulting in “modern tragic realism based on the contemporary” (2003: 459, 458). To Auerbach this implies emphatic conscious engagement; he speaks of forceful “modern consciousness of reality” (2003: 459). That he should call this realism tragic, however, suggests that modern subjectivity is kept in the same kind of urgent psychopolitical check that Arendt has identified. That Auerbach – a preeminent philologist – should align tragic realism with the novel in the nineteenth century suggests that the novel at the time was tasked with shoring up narrative excess against the intelligence of tragedy.
Auerbach credits Stendhal with formatting the novel against this task. I propose to argue that the invention of the focalizing consciousness in the nineteenth-century novel, often attributed to Jane Austen, was how this task was first accomplished, leading up to the novel’s own self-reflection and the foregrounding of narrative theory, with Henry James. It is in this sense that Jane Austen may well be Aeschylus, or perhaps Sophocles, to James’s Euripides, or even Aristotle; Matthew Arnold comes to mind and his Victorian grasp of Greek antiquity. Important stepping stones were provided by Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Finally, if this means that the nineteenth-century novel carries the same critical weight as the mourning play of early modernity (to mention only the studies by Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt), I will also suggest that the invention of detective fiction, in the nineteenth century, may have been how the intelligence of the novel was negotiated against the formats of tragedy and the mourning play. For this I will consult research on form, process and transformation by Fredric Jameson, Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh and Jürgen Osterhammel, among others.
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U svome izlaganju polazim od zapažanja da pripovjedna teorija Waltera Benjamina, koju razvija u glasovitoj studiji o pripovjedaču iz 1936. godine, odgovara autorovu ranijem pristupu baroknoj žalobnoj igri (Trauerspiel), u Porijeklu... more
U svome izlaganju polazim od zapažanja da pripovjedna teorija Waltera Benjamina, koju razvija u glasovitoj studiji o pripovjedaču iz 1936. godine, odgovara autorovu ranijem pristupu baroknoj žalobnoj igri (Trauerspiel), u Porijeklu njemačke žalobne igre (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1916-1925). Benjaminov moderni pripovjedač, primarno onaj u romanu, odgovara njegovu ranijem opisu žalovatelja; Benjaminov pak predmoderni pripovjedač, ujedno kazivač, koji u modernosti svejedno istrajava, odgovara autorovim ranijim opaskama o melankoliji. Štoviše, stječe se dojam da tek u studiji o pripovjedaču Benjamin računa na distinkciju između žalovanja i melankolije koja u knjizi o Trauerspielu ostaje nedorečena; to se osobito vidi u dionicama iz 1936. u kojima razmatra smrt kao pripovjednu funkciju. Iz toga proizlazi dvoje: prvo, da bez pripovjedne teorije nema funkcionalnoga razumijevanja žalovanja i melankolije, pa onda ni razumijevanja intelektualnoga intervala u kojem se formira modernost, i drugo, da je moderna pripovjedna teorija ujedno i teorija afekta. Najzad, kako su žalovanje i melankolija Benjaminu prije svega aspekti stanovite političke teologije, njegova studija o pripovjedaču prolegomena je za filologiju koja ima biti korektiv za političku teologiju, i koja ne može biti nego politička filologija. To je pozicija koju u etnologiji i antropologiji možda najdosljednije razvija Claude Lévi-Strauss, kako s obzirom na pripovjednu teoriju na kojoj inzistira, tako i na teoriju afekta u podlozi svoje antropološke formacije, u Tužnim tropima (Tristes Tropiques, 1955).
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It could be argued that the Western epitomizes film as an American art, to which the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1881) supplies a specimen story and a story of origin--a proposition supported by the fact that Wyatt Earp eventually acted... more
It could be argued that the Western epitomizes film as an American art, to which the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1881) supplies a specimen story and a story of origin--a proposition supported by the fact that Wyatt Earp eventually acted as a consultant to early Hollywood filmmakers, including young John Ford. In Ford's version of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral--My Darling Clementine (1946)--the story invites to be considered against an emphatic reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet, suggesting that Hamlet ultimately captures the constitution of the Western, and anticipates the seminal function of American cinema in the ideation of modernity. With a focus on My Darling Clementine, I propose to analyze how Hamlet is accommodated and transformed in the Western, while Ford, freshly returned from World War II, claims for the Western the rationale and the rationality of the early modern mourning play. What is finally at stake is America as a laboratory of political modernity, whose own rationale relies on the thinking of transformation.
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In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens describes the ultimate undoing of the Ancien Régime as the work of a Gorgon; this suggests that, for Dickens, the Gorgon describes both the French Revolution and his novel, insofar as the... more
In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens describes the ultimate undoing of the Ancien Régime as the work of a Gorgon; this suggests that, for Dickens, the Gorgon describes both the French Revolution and his novel, insofar as the French Revolution is its privileged subject. With a focus on the Gorgon's chthonic properties and the impact of those properties on the ideation of the Greek polis, especially of democratic Athens, I propose to analyze how Dickens’s two cities entail a similar political negotiation, to which the novel is instrumental as tragedy was instrumental to fifth-century Athens. The novel, I argue, responds to this negotiation with a story that curiously reenacts the Oedipus-Antigone narrative, not least its chthonic aspect, with Paris pointing to Thebes and London to Athens.
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With a focus on The Aspern Papers (1888), I propose to discuss how Venice contributes to what I call the transatlantic oikos in Henry James's fiction and narrative theory: a mapping whereby modern rationality in the nineteenth century is... more
With a focus on The Aspern Papers (1888), I propose to discuss how Venice contributes to what I call the transatlantic oikos in Henry James's fiction and narrative theory: a mapping whereby modern rationality in the nineteenth century is negotiated, as well as the idea of American literature. Rather than supporting an order that is territorial or terrestrial, or naval, this oikos seems to depend on a set of relations that John Ruskin attributed to Venice. Comparing James's Venice to Ruskin's, I will attempt to show how Ruskin's Venetian architecture, with a peculiar place Ruskin assigns to the ideation of degradation and loss, translates into James's fiction and narrative theory.
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Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's reading of Hobbes's Leviathan, I propose to analyze how the fiction of John le Carré contributes a discourse of self-reflection to the mutating modern body politic. With a steady focus on intelligence in its... more
Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's reading of Hobbes's Leviathan, I propose to analyze how the fiction of John le Carré contributes a discourse of self-reflection to the mutating modern body politic. With a steady focus on intelligence in its different and interlocking meanings, le Carré suggests that modern political intelligence is metonymic and paratactic, which is why metaphors of the body politic, even though they may amount to an operative fantasy, ultimately serve to derail the modern project. If this means that modern intelligence coincides with the pitfalls of melancholy subjectivation, it also means that the end of the Cold War, cohering fast into a privileged metaphor of political reason, was how modern melancholia gave way to uncritical fantasies of self-sufficiency, in narrative, political and psychoanalytic terms. Finally, I argue that le Carré criticizes Brexit precisely as one such fantasy of self-sufficiency.
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With Sead Muhamedagić. Zagreb, 15 March 2021.
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Esej emitiran u Kozmopolisu, Treći program Hrvatskog radija, 25. 5. 2020. Vidi također dulju verziju objavljenu na engleskom:... more
Esej emitiran u Kozmopolisu, Treći program Hrvatskog radija, 25. 5. 2020. Vidi također dulju verziju objavljenu na engleskom: https://www.academia.edu/39786276/Realism_and_translation_Charlotte_Bront%C3%ABs_Jane_Eyre_for_an_Austro_Hungarian_minority_and_beyond
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Tribina Književne revolucije: naslijeđe avangarde u hrvatskoj književnosti. Projekt Hrvatske zaklade za znanost, voditeljica: Marina Protrka Štimec. Sudjelovali: Danijela Lugarić Vukas, Predrag Brebanović, Branislav Oblučar, Tatjana... more
Tribina Književne revolucije: naslijeđe avangarde u hrvatskoj književnosti. Projekt Hrvatske zaklade za znanost, voditeljica: Marina Protrka Štimec. Sudjelovali: Danijela Lugarić Vukas, Predrag Brebanović, Branislav Oblučar, Tatjana Jukić. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, 19. rujna 2019.
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Drawing on the dual revolution as a concept definitive to histories of the nineteenth century (Hobsbawm, Osterhammel), I argue that the Victorian industrial novel anticipates this concept and accommodates it as a peculiar narrative... more
Drawing on the dual revolution as a concept definitive to histories of the nineteenth century (Hobsbawm, Osterhammel), I argue that the Victorian industrial novel anticipates this concept and accommodates it as a peculiar narrative intelligence. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) may be the finest example of how the Victorian novel combines the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution into a narrative intelligence that ultimately results in a sustained schizophrenic split across different narrative instances. Tellingly, a schizophrenic split affects also the presentation of the two revolutions in Shirley, so that the proverbial terror of the French Revolution is hegemonized around and into the Napoleonic Wars, whereas the Industrial Revolution, with profit as its hegemonizing rationale, breaks open into the terror of the Luddite riots. I propose to discuss how Elizabeth Gaskell engages with Brontë’s novel in North and South (1854), mainly by processing the schizophrenic split into the narration based in the focalizing consciousness. While the focalizing consciousness is thus promoted to a narrative apparatus where modern revolutions find their functional articulation, I argue that the story of Antigone provides Gaskell with a template where the schizophrenic residue is contained for further processing.
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I propose to mobilize different concepts of world literature against the theories of modernity to which literature and the world, in equal measure, define the intellectual and the political horizon of modernity (Walter Benjamin; Carl... more
I propose to mobilize different concepts of world literature against the theories of modernity to which literature and the world, in equal measure, define the intellectual and the political horizon of modernity (Walter Benjamin; Carl Schmitt). World literature, I argue, while testifying to the project of modernity, turns out to be processing, into a concept, the relationship of literature and the world that needs to remain metonymic if modernity is to be understood.
Danilo Kiš's The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983) exemplifies this proposition. It is a collection of stories that engages East-Central Europe, especially Austria-Hungary, as a synecdoche of the world whose peculiar narrative constitution reciprocates the rationale of modernity. Whatever aspires to world literature in or about this collection, however, seems confined to the conceptual demands of its title: to knowledge imagined in terms of an encyclopedia, and to the leak in this knowledge occasioned by the elision of death for the dead. While the dead in place of death is how Kiš still retains the relational imperative of literature even as it aspires to world literature, encyclopedia suggests that literature in modernity is always also betrayed for a conceptual apparatus other than itself, and that the intellectual situation of modernity is betrayed with it. Moreover, Kiš suggests that this betrayal may be integral to modernity—that modernity, as well as world literature, may be accessible to theory and philosophy only as a structure of betrayal.
Danilo Kiš's The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983) exemplifies this proposition. It is a collection of stories that engages East-Central Europe, especially Austria-Hungary, as a synecdoche of the world whose peculiar narrative constitution reciprocates the rationale of modernity. Whatever aspires to world literature in or about this collection, however, seems confined to the conceptual demands of its title: to knowledge imagined in terms of an encyclopedia, and to the leak in this knowledge occasioned by the elision of death for the dead. While the dead in place of death is how Kiš still retains the relational imperative of literature even as it aspires to world literature, encyclopedia suggests that literature in modernity is always also betrayed for a conceptual apparatus other than itself, and that the intellectual situation of modernity is betrayed with it. Moreover, Kiš suggests that this betrayal may be integral to modernity—that modernity, as well as world literature, may be accessible to theory and philosophy only as a structure of betrayal.
Research Interests:
There is a relation of authority to poverty in the Victorian novel that informs the very rationality of its narration: narrative coherence is secured by a sense of authority, overlapping or not with the narrator or the focalizing... more
There is a relation of authority to poverty in the Victorian novel that informs the very rationality of its narration: narrative coherence is secured by a sense of authority, overlapping or not with the narrator or the focalizing consciousness, that seems invested with poverty, as if to suggest that poverty secures authority similarly to how authority secures narrative coherence. This is not to say that narrative authority resides with the poor in these novels; rather, authority aspires to an emancipation from wealth and its concerns—the poor in this equation fail to coincide with authority insofar as they may aspire uncritically to wealth. In my presentation I propose to analyze how this Victorian conjuncture anticipates psychoanalysis, especially Freud's ideation of masochism (indeed, Freud, a discerning reader of Victorian fiction, first addresses masochism as an economic problem, to then explain it around the death drive); also, I would like to show how the Victorian novel anticipates a critique of Freudian positions. My point of departure will be the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, with the inflection it seeks in Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.
Research Interests:
Jane Austen's novels seem to be specimen stories of containment and regulation. Indeed, Austen has articulated a turning point in the history of the novel by processing the excesses of the eighteenth-century novel into an educated... more
Jane Austen's novels seem to be specimen stories of containment and regulation. Indeed, Austen has articulated a turning point in the history of the novel by processing the excesses of the eighteenth-century novel into an educated narrative intelligence, whose coherence resides in the invention of the focalizing consciousness. The focalizing consciousness keeps the novel together by attracting the narrative excesses to itself, as an instance where the boundary keeps breaking between the narrator and the story, so that the excess is contained in this break, now as a demand that a subjectivity be forged with a sole purpose of translating excess into education. (Henry James mobilizes his novels around a similar procedure, and James is the founding father of modern narrative theory; he makes it impossible for us to distinguish between the novel and its theory. This is also how the situation of the focalizing consciousness in the novel resembles the psychoanalytic situation: the focalizing consciousness is neither the patient nor the analyst, even as it partakes of both, or perhaps precisely because it partakes of both. An intellectual history of the nineteenth century could be construed around this proposition.)
I argue that Pride and Prejudice (1813) is critical in this sense, because it is in this novel that Austen mobilizes her focalizing consciousness not merely around the processing of narrative excess into education, but also around an insight that excess remains residual to education thus conceived, now as an excess in the very intelligence that is instrumental to this process. Austen’s title indicates as much: both pride and prejudice point to an excess in the intellectual processes and to an overvaluation of consciousness. This suggests that the subjectivation invoked by the novel does not coincide fully with the novel’s constitution, and that a narrative emancipation runs parallel to the invention of the focalizing consciousness. In other words, that which the focalizing consciousness suffers as an excess of intelligence registers in the novel as the intelligence of excess.
I argue that Pride and Prejudice (1813) is critical in this sense, because it is in this novel that Austen mobilizes her focalizing consciousness not merely around the processing of narrative excess into education, but also around an insight that excess remains residual to education thus conceived, now as an excess in the very intelligence that is instrumental to this process. Austen’s title indicates as much: both pride and prejudice point to an excess in the intellectual processes and to an overvaluation of consciousness. This suggests that the subjectivation invoked by the novel does not coincide fully with the novel’s constitution, and that a narrative emancipation runs parallel to the invention of the focalizing consciousness. In other words, that which the focalizing consciousness suffers as an excess of intelligence registers in the novel as the intelligence of excess.
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Post-Cold War Eastern European Film & Media (a research symposium)
Co-Sponsored by Miami University and University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Wilk’s Auditorium | May 4, 2018
Co-Sponsored by Miami University and University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Wilk’s Auditorium | May 4, 2018
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Talk delivered at *One Hundred Years That Shook the World: Failures, Legacies, and Futures of the Russian Revolution*, an international conference, 5-7 October 2017, University of St. Gallen.... more
Talk delivered at *One Hundred Years That Shook the World: Failures, Legacies, and Futures of the Russian Revolution*, an international conference, 5-7 October 2017, University of St. Gallen.
https://www.academia.edu/37296953/A_Narrative_Theory_for_the_October_Revolution_From_Maugham_to_Benjamin_and_Back_
https://www.academia.edu/37296953/A_Narrative_Theory_for_the_October_Revolution_From_Maugham_to_Benjamin_and_Back_
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Hannah Arendt claims that the American Revolution provides a standard against which political modernity can be analyzed, also that subsequent revolutions failed to engage the conceptual purity of the American model. In contrast to Arendt,... more
Hannah Arendt claims that the American Revolution provides a standard against which political modernity can be analyzed, also that subsequent revolutions failed to engage the conceptual purity of the American model. In contrast to Arendt, Jacques Derrida, in “Declarations of Independence,” renounces Jefferson’s thought as inadequate, and excuses himself from engaging it on critical terms. Given the fact that Derrida later mobilizes Marx in order to explore similar concerns, now in terms of secularized messianism and from an Abrahamic angle, I analyze how Derrida’s Marx constitutes a position from which to reassess Derrida’s Jefferson. [Published as "Derrida's Jefferson" in Working Papers in American Studies, Vol. 2, 2016, pp. 81-98.]
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In Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, the book whose completion took him nearly a decade, from 1916 to 1925, Walter Benjamin proposes an elaborate pairing off of mourning and melancholia – precisely the pair that Freud researched at the... more
In Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, the book whose completion took him nearly a decade, from 1916 to 1925, Walter Benjamin proposes an elaborate pairing off of mourning and melancholia – precisely the pair that Freud researched at the time. While it is true that Benjamin makes no reference to Freud in Ursprung, he does invoke Freud in "Capitalism as Religion", a 1921 fragment which resonates with the tenor of Ursprung; this is how the two configurations of mourning and melancholia come to constitute an assemblage, and invite to be analyzed as such.
In order to address the particulars of this assemblage, I first propose to distinguish mourning against melancholia, the distinction that Benjamin occludes or, at best, leaves implicit in his book. A close reading of Benjamin exposes mourning to be tied to the Reformation, the event which inaugurates political and philosophical modernity by engaging the world as a spectacle of irrevocable loss; mourning describes the contemplation of the world thus lost, to which death constitutes the horizon of semiosis. Melancholia, on the other hand, couches a prehistory of the semiosis thus invested in modernity, so that the meaning of melancholia derives in fact from a dialectical processing of melancholia by or into mourning.
Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia, anything but occluded or implicit, amplifies Benjamin's arrangement of the pair, and is amplified in turn. What the amplification contributes to Freud is an insight into the structures that mourning, not melancholia, tacitly shares with the death drive, the concept Freud develops in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920). In my conclusion I plan to engage that particular position: the juncture where Freud's explication of the death drive resonates with the semiotic format that death defines for Benjamin in Ursprung.
In order to address the particulars of this assemblage, I first propose to distinguish mourning against melancholia, the distinction that Benjamin occludes or, at best, leaves implicit in his book. A close reading of Benjamin exposes mourning to be tied to the Reformation, the event which inaugurates political and philosophical modernity by engaging the world as a spectacle of irrevocable loss; mourning describes the contemplation of the world thus lost, to which death constitutes the horizon of semiosis. Melancholia, on the other hand, couches a prehistory of the semiosis thus invested in modernity, so that the meaning of melancholia derives in fact from a dialectical processing of melancholia by or into mourning.
Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia, anything but occluded or implicit, amplifies Benjamin's arrangement of the pair, and is amplified in turn. What the amplification contributes to Freud is an insight into the structures that mourning, not melancholia, tacitly shares with the death drive, the concept Freud develops in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920). In my conclusion I plan to engage that particular position: the juncture where Freud's explication of the death drive resonates with the semiotic format that death defines for Benjamin in Ursprung.
Research Interests:
In North by Northwest (1959) Alfred Hitchcock mobilizes his story around the slick advertising world of New York City, to then move it across the United States until its rationale has been fully revealed and enacted on Mount Rushmore—as... more
In North by Northwest (1959) Alfred Hitchcock mobilizes his story around the slick advertising world of New York City, to then move it across the United States until its rationale has been fully revealed and enacted on Mount Rushmore—as if to suggest that North by Northwest entails somehow the rationale of America. Cary Grant is crucial to this logic, because his journey across the States, which coincides with his near-Oedipal quest for a self, reveals America to be precisely the “new continent” which gives rise to a “new man”: the expression Hannah Arendt quotes from Crèvecœur and Adams, but uses to describe a Jeffersonian ideation of America.
Structural to this proposition is the fact that Cary Grant starts off as an advertising agent, a Mad man, whose work and intelligence, indivisible, serve to process work and intelligence into a MacGuffin, so that the idea of a MacGuffin is shown to assimilate Oedipal structures, as well the political economy of capitalism. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, MacGuffins in Hitchcock designate “‘nothing at all’, an empty place, a pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion.” It is only that in North by Northwest the MacGuffin, inseparable from Grant, is revealed to entertain a peculiar intellectual intensity, so that Oedipal structures and the political economy of capitalism are not simply assigned over to a “nothing at all”; instead, the MacGuffin turns out to entail the labor of metaphor at its purest. As MacGuffins are routinely defined in contradistinction to the story, it follows that narrative raison in Hitchcock’s cinema remains heterogeneous and exterior to the ideation reducible to metaphor. Tellingly, the story of North by Northwest assumes the Cold War as its framework, to which capitalism is constituent insofar as it mobilizes socialism as an autoimmune response. Hitchcock, however, suggests that America, not socialism, may be an autoimmune response to capitalism: not any America but the revolutionary, Jeffersonian one, with its chthonic, metonymic debris (with its toxic continental cornfields, exploding oil, impassive rocks…), which weighs upon capitalism and sexuation alike, as they complete their transition into metaphor.
Structural to this proposition is the fact that Cary Grant starts off as an advertising agent, a Mad man, whose work and intelligence, indivisible, serve to process work and intelligence into a MacGuffin, so that the idea of a MacGuffin is shown to assimilate Oedipal structures, as well the political economy of capitalism. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, MacGuffins in Hitchcock designate “‘nothing at all’, an empty place, a pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion.” It is only that in North by Northwest the MacGuffin, inseparable from Grant, is revealed to entertain a peculiar intellectual intensity, so that Oedipal structures and the political economy of capitalism are not simply assigned over to a “nothing at all”; instead, the MacGuffin turns out to entail the labor of metaphor at its purest. As MacGuffins are routinely defined in contradistinction to the story, it follows that narrative raison in Hitchcock’s cinema remains heterogeneous and exterior to the ideation reducible to metaphor. Tellingly, the story of North by Northwest assumes the Cold War as its framework, to which capitalism is constituent insofar as it mobilizes socialism as an autoimmune response. Hitchcock, however, suggests that America, not socialism, may be an autoimmune response to capitalism: not any America but the revolutionary, Jeffersonian one, with its chthonic, metonymic debris (with its toxic continental cornfields, exploding oil, impassive rocks…), which weighs upon capitalism and sexuation alike, as they complete their transition into metaphor.
Research Interests:
Bilo bi zanimljivo istražiti hipotezu da klasični Hollywood usvaja Shakespearea slično kao što je to učinio roman 19. stoljeća: kao ulog u radikalnu emancipaciju pripovijedanja, koje zauzvrat postaje instrument domišljanja moderniteta,... more
Bilo bi zanimljivo istražiti hipotezu da klasični Hollywood usvaja Shakespearea slično kao što je to učinio roman 19. stoljeća: kao ulog u radikalnu emancipaciju pripovijedanja, koje zauzvrat postaje instrument domišljanja moderniteta, posebno politike u modernitetu. Da bih ispitala tu mogućnost, usredotočit ću se na Biti ili ne biti (To Be or Not to Be, 1942), glasovitu ratnu komediju Ernsta Lubitscha. Lubitsch prevodi Hamleta, veliku tragediju upravo o krizi vlasti i ovlaštenja, u registar komedije, i pritom ga sparuje s Mletačkim trgovcem; tako pokazuje da ga Hamlet zanima kao komad koji se ne može se odlučiti i iscrpiti sam u sebi, nego ovisi o pripovjednim odnosima koji u njemu nisu sadržani i razgraničeni. Lubitsch time nagriza Shakespeareov autoritet, pa tako sam Shakespeare – u hollywoodskome okretaju zavrtnja – postaje svojim komadima melankolični princ i poniženi Shylock.
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To describe the Cold War as the age of control would hardly constitute a critical intervention; indeed, one could argue that the Cold War determines how control is understood in the twentieth century, in Europe and elsewhere. (Is it a... more
To describe the Cold War as the age of control would hardly constitute a critical intervention; indeed, one could argue that the Cold War determines how control is understood in the twentieth century, in Europe and elsewhere. (Is it a coincidence that the Benthamite Panopticon is rediscovered at this time and embraced as the ultimate critical fashion?) However, rather than arguing that control in the wake of the Cold War climaxes precisely where it is no longer constrained by ideology, and emerges more and more as a self-serving spectacle, I would like to suggest that control in the past decades has been increasingly assuming the structures of pathetic fallacy, nowhere so pointedly perhaps as in recent discussions of the Anthropocene. In order to explore this hypothesis, I will take up the cinema of Steven Spielberg, or rather Spielberg's as a synecdoche of cinema today, in the position where it depends on reconciling a deep-seated fascination with the Cold War and a structural investment in pathetic fallacy.
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A talk given at *David Bowie – vita, melankolija i politička ekonomija* (Klub MaMa/ Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, 10 January 2017)
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Esej emitiran u "Kozmopolisu", Treći program Hrvatskog radija, 22. 1. 2018. https://hrcak.srce.hr/238157
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Jane Austen's bicentenary is an occasion to celebrate her novels, but also to commemorate them away from contingency and into a well-regulated nostalgia. Put differently, bicentenary is how Austen is contained and regulated, which is just... more
Jane Austen's bicentenary is an occasion to celebrate her novels, but also to commemorate them away from contingency and into a well-regulated nostalgia. Put differently, bicentenary is how Austen is contained and regulated, which is just as well, because her novels are specimen stories of regulation and containment, so that Austen seems to have preempted precisely the culture of commemoration. (Her finest irony perhaps.)
In my talk I will address the first two novels she published – Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) – in order to show how that which we perceive as regulation concerns in fact the crisis of authorization at the heart of modernity. Austen responds to it by styling the novel into a relentless education of sense and the senses, to paraphrase the historian Peter Gay; it is an education without a closure, just as the crisis at the heart of modernity is preemptive in character. I argue that, by neglecting to pursue the education without a closure, we have been closing ourselves off from modernity, which is why Jane Austen may turn out to be more modern than us.
In my talk I will address the first two novels she published – Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) – in order to show how that which we perceive as regulation concerns in fact the crisis of authorization at the heart of modernity. Austen responds to it by styling the novel into a relentless education of sense and the senses, to paraphrase the historian Peter Gay; it is an education without a closure, just as the crisis at the heart of modernity is preemptive in character. I argue that, by neglecting to pursue the education without a closure, we have been closing ourselves off from modernity, which is why Jane Austen may turn out to be more modern than us.
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Što je klasik? Jane Austen, Ponos i predrasude
(HTV3, 11/2016)
(HTV3, 11/2016)
Research Interests:
There is an ekphrastic moment in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) that in many ways decides the intellectual constitution of the novel: it is only when Elizabeth Bennet sees the portrait of Mr. Darcy that she can no longer... more
There is an ekphrastic moment in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) that in many ways decides the intellectual constitution of the novel: it is only when Elizabeth Bennet sees the portrait of Mr. Darcy that she can no longer exercise the control of the narrative conditions, as the novel's focalizing consciousness, and realizes that her idea of regulation coincides with the constraints of her subjectivity. This in turn is how subjectivity is defined in Austen: as a withdrawal of the focalizing consciousness from the prerogative of narrative control, which is also how narrative emancipation is accomplished, always at a remove from subjectivity and as a process parallel to subjectivation. If Austen thereby heralds psychoanalysis, it is by advertising the novel as a site of a peculiar psychopolitics from which modernity is invented; this also suggests that the focalizing constitution of the nineteenth-century novel is where to look for the political genealogy of psychoanalysis. The ekphrastic episode in Pride and Prejudice contributes critically to this dynamic: it takes the portrait of Mr. Darcy in the Pemberley gallery to isolate the focalizing consciousness from its assumption to the story, and to confront it with its conditions as those of (pre)narrative loss.
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https://hrcak.srce.hr/238157 Nasuprot uvriježenome mišljenju, da su romani Jane Austen ogledni primjeri stabilne autorske kontrole i pripovjedne ekonomije, Tatjana Jukić polazi od pretpostavke da Austen u svojim romanima reflektira... more
https://hrcak.srce.hr/238157
Nasuprot uvriježenome mišljenju, da su romani Jane Austen ogledni primjeri stabilne autorske kontrole i pripovjedne ekonomije, Tatjana Jukić polazi od pretpostavke da Austen u svojim romanima reflektira momente krize oko kakvih se konstituira modernitet. Ona je naša suvremenica onako kako je, prema Janu Kottu, Shakespeare naš suvremenik: ne zato što se svijet nije značajno promijenio od njezina vremena, nego zato što nam njezini romani i dalje pomažu da razumijemo tu promjenu. S tim argumentom Jukić će se u svome predavanju usredotočiti na Ponos i predrasude, vjerojatno najčitaniji roman Jane Austen.
Javno predavanje, Centar za ženske studije u Zagrebu, 1. lipnja 2017/ "Jane Austen, Our Contemporary: Pride and Prejudice as a Novel of Crisis" (public lecture), Centre for Women's Studies Zagreb, 1 June 2017
Nasuprot uvriježenome mišljenju, da su romani Jane Austen ogledni primjeri stabilne autorske kontrole i pripovjedne ekonomije, Tatjana Jukić polazi od pretpostavke da Austen u svojim romanima reflektira momente krize oko kakvih se konstituira modernitet. Ona je naša suvremenica onako kako je, prema Janu Kottu, Shakespeare naš suvremenik: ne zato što se svijet nije značajno promijenio od njezina vremena, nego zato što nam njezini romani i dalje pomažu da razumijemo tu promjenu. S tim argumentom Jukić će se u svome predavanju usredotočiti na Ponos i predrasude, vjerojatno najčitaniji roman Jane Austen.
Javno predavanje, Centar za ženske studije u Zagrebu, 1. lipnja 2017/ "Jane Austen, Our Contemporary: Pride and Prejudice as a Novel of Crisis" (public lecture), Centre for Women's Studies Zagreb, 1 June 2017
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Tvrtko Jakovina, Tatjana Jukić, Ian Cliff; HRT3, 24. travnja 2016.
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Talk given at Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, 11 May 2016
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Film Studies, Trauma Studies, Yugoslavia, Melancholy, and 11 moreMelodrama, Socialism, Eastern European Cinema, Socialist and Post-Socialist Area Studies, Psychoanalysis and Film, Revolution, Cinema of Yugoslavia, Theories of Socialism, Film Narrative, History of Croatian and Yugoslav Film, and Branko Bauer
When Martin Scorsese translates Wharton's The Age of Innocence into a cinematic narrative, he adopts for it the structure of melodrama: the adoption he specifies when he remarks that watching William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) was... more
When Martin Scorsese translates Wharton's The Age of Innocence into a cinematic narrative, he adopts for it the structure of melodrama: the adoption he specifies when he remarks that watching William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) was formative to this task. That Wyler’s melodrama assumes the function of a rationale to Scorsese’s can also be evinced from the fact that Wyler too translates American literature into a cinematic narrative (Henry James’ Washington Square), focusing on the positions where this literature’s engagement with the memory regimes peculiar to America invites a reflection on the memory regimes implicit to cinema. Scorsese thus promotes melodrama into a laboratory of cinematic memory, as if to suggest that (American) cinema cannot address its past in structural terms without mobilizing the raison of Hollywood melodrama. This can be further explored in the positions where Scorsese engages for his film the landmarks of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the implication being that Vertigo, the specimen story of Hitchcock’s cinema and perhaps of cinema as such, depends for its coherence on the logic of melodrama in classical Hollywood.
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An interview, Kulturpunkt
<http://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/kako-pamtimo-revoluciju-kako-melankoliju>
<http://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/kako-pamtimo-revoluciju-kako-melankoliju>
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Revolutions, Yugoslavia, Melancholy, and 11 moreHistory of Croatian Literature, Modern Croatian Literature, Memory Studies, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Revolution, Mourning and melancholia, Danilo Kis, Književnost, Croatian Language and Literature, Komparativna Književnost, and Ivan Slamnig
Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja – i Brešanov komad i Papićev film – pripada među naslove koji su obilježili hrvatsku kulturnu povijest 20. stoljeća u tolikoj mjeri da za nju imaju vrijednost simptoma. To bi ujedno značilo da... more
Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja – i Brešanov komad i Papićev film – pripada među naslove koji su obilježili hrvatsku kulturnu povijest 20. stoljeća u tolikoj mjeri da za nju imaju vrijednost simptoma. To bi ujedno značilo da Shakespeareov Hamlet za tu povijest ima vrijednost simptoma ili čak primjerne priče, onako kako je ima za Marxovu filozofiju i za psihoanalizu (o čemu su, također u drugoj polovici prošloga stoljeća, pisali Jacques Derrida i Jacques Lacan). Polazeći od spomenutih studija Derridaa i Lacana, u svome predavanju želim analizirati rezonanciju koja se među njima uspostavlja, posebno kad se omjere o hrvatskog socijalističkog Hamleta, uz pretpostavku da adekvatan opis socijalizma priziva psihoanalizu, jednako kao što se psihoanaliza ne može adekvatno razumjeti osim uz uvjet stanovite političke logike. Nadalje, razmotrila bih pitanje može li se ta konstelacija uopće analizirati osim uz književnost kao specifičan kritički instrument, što za sobom povlači i sljedeće pitanje: uzme li se u obzir dezintegracija institucije književnosti u 21. stoljeću (dezintegracija književnosti kao institucije), ne znači li to da nam psihoanaliza, socijalizam i 20. stoljeće postaju kritički nedostupni? Također, ne znači li to da bi u 21. stoljeću povijesti književnosti mogla pripasti uloga koju je u dvadesetome odigrala književna teorija?
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, European Studies, Revolutions, Cold War, and 13 morePostsocialism, Trauma Studies, Yugoslavia, Sigmund Freud, Melancholy, Memory Studies, Socialism, Trauma, Central and Eastern Europe, Austria-Hungary, Theories of Socialism, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Austro-Marxism
Sandwiched between Lyell and Darwin, the Pre-Raphaelites emerge as a Victorian configuration where a deconstruction of scale takes place, symptomatic of a more general reconstitution of biopolitics at the time. The Pre-Raphaelite... more
Sandwiched between Lyell and Darwin, the Pre-Raphaelites emerge as a Victorian configuration where a deconstruction of scale takes place, symptomatic of a more general reconstitution of biopolitics at the time. The Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with detail, that is, ensures that the question of scale gives way to visibility in terms of a metonymic assemblage, with the suggestion now that scale is defined around metaphor, or else that scale depends on the logic of metaphor. As the metonymic constitution of detail is also how to understand the Pre-Raphaelite insistence on “truth to nature”, it follows that metonymy entails a truth which is not to be accessed through metaphor, almost a type of rationality which both metaphor and scale need to sidestep if they are to claim their reason. Insofar as this rationality is predicated on nature, where nature is to secure the Epicurean swerve so to speak rather than the empty space (of metaphor), the Pre-Raphaelites make sense only as relative to other Victorian discourses on nature and life, primarily those of Lyell’s geology and Darwin’s biology. For this reason, I propose to discuss the Pre-Raphaelites as symptomatic of a more general Victorian “naturalism” and of the biopolitics implicit to it, in the position where they point to the rift between Lyell’s scale and Darwin’s deconstruction of it.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, English, and 10 moreVictorian Literature, Nineteenth-century Art, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Biopolitics, Pre-Raphaelite Painting, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Metonymy, Charles Darwin, Scale, and Charles Lyell
When Gilles Deleuze privileges Anglo-American literature as a scene of instruction for philosophy, or at least as the position from where to recalibrate the raison of philosophy, he notes a peculiar affinity of the English thought and... more
When Gilles Deleuze privileges Anglo-American literature as a scene of instruction for philosophy, or at least as the position from where to recalibrate the raison of philosophy, he notes a peculiar affinity of the English thought and capitalism, suggesting in fact that the two work from within an assemblage. I propose to test this Deleuzian suggestion against Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), the novel which undertakes to dissect the political economy of Victorian capitalism as a libidinal venture, adumbrating – as it turns out – many of the founding concerns of psychoanalysis. Given Deleuze’s interest in the critique of psychoanalysis, what follows is a discussion of Gaskell’s insight into the constitution of capitalism, also a discussion of how this insight contributes to Deleuze’s perspective on masochism.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, and 8 moreVictorian Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Capitalism, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Masochism, Victorian Women Writers, Psychoanalysis And Literature, and Gaskell, Elizabeth
Foucault famously asserted that „perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian,“ thereby implying that his own investment in the twentieth-century refashioning of history was to be assessed against Deleuze’s positions. In order... more
Foucault famously asserted that „perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian,“ thereby implying that his own investment in the twentieth-century refashioning of history was to be assessed against Deleuze’s positions. In order to explore this opening I propose to discuss volume I of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, particularly the critical function it attaches to Victorian culture, against Deleuze’s argument about the superiority of Anglo-American literature. What interests me is the ensuing assemblage of thought where Foucault’s and Deleuze’s “English” figures and formulae stand to be recalibrated, reconstituting in the process the platform from where to approach both Deleuze’s take on philosophy and Foucault’s on history and sexuality.
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In his essay "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature," Gilles Deleuze privileges English and American literatures as a kind of counter¬-archive where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy, also where the... more
In his essay "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature," Gilles Deleuze privileges English and American literatures as a kind of counter¬-archive where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy, also where the contact zones of philosophy are negotiated. Anglo-American literature therefore appears to constitute a critical apparatus (dispositif) which preempts, even invalidates, the attempts to found English and American studies as disciplines in their own right; in consequence, English and American studies emerge in this Deleuzian perspective as a curious economy of knowledge based in surplus and
structured in metonymy.
In my presentation I would like to test this proposition against a number of Victorian texts (Carlyle, Dickens, Arnold). They all address revolution as a political event of the first order which presses on the archival logic. Yet the revolution as they see it presses on memory regimes precisely in the positions where archives - unlike revolutions - depend on downgrading metonymy and on processing surplus out of existence. While this particular assemblage calls for a more nuanced reading of surplus and metonymy in Victorian culture, now in terms of politics and memory, it also demands that Deleuze's approach to Anglo- American literature be reassessed: not in order to invalidate it, but rather to call attention to its own implicit economy of knowledge.
structured in metonymy.
In my presentation I would like to test this proposition against a number of Victorian texts (Carlyle, Dickens, Arnold). They all address revolution as a political event of the first order which presses on the archival logic. Yet the revolution as they see it presses on memory regimes precisely in the positions where archives - unlike revolutions - depend on downgrading metonymy and on processing surplus out of existence. While this particular assemblage calls for a more nuanced reading of surplus and metonymy in Victorian culture, now in terms of politics and memory, it also demands that Deleuze's approach to Anglo- American literature be reassessed: not in order to invalidate it, but rather to call attention to its own implicit economy of knowledge.
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When Cary Grant, in The Awful Truth (1937), fails to sustain the suave, rational act in face of Irene Dunne’s presumed infidelity, she says that he is “out of his continental mind”. This could well be the very awful truth of their... more
When Cary Grant, in The Awful Truth (1937), fails to sustain the suave, rational act in face of Irene Dunne’s presumed infidelity, she says that he is “out of his continental mind”. This could well be the very awful truth of their narrative: that there is a mind apart to America, a type of rationality independent from inclusions and exclusions constituent to the continental mind (and philosophy). It is in this position that Stanley Cavell engages philosophy and with it; what is more, it is not the truth so much as its awfulness that Cavell is concerned with. This is where philosophy for Cavell demands recourse to psychoanalysis; also, it is in this position that Cavell mobilizes gender into a dispositif where awfulness, truth and constitution come to combine for America to become.
With this in mind, I propose to discuss the Cavellian woman, of his cinema books, who dominates the “green world” of the Hollywood remarriage comedies, warranting the rules of engagement which are out of the continental mind. I will focus on the comedies where this seems not to be taking place – Adam’s Rib (1949) and His Girl Friday (1940); their woman however does the same to courtrooms and the adjacent spaces, as if to suggest that the green world is not absent but rather metonymic to the very places they would assign to (pure) reason. Finally, I propose to show that this Cavellian assemblage is where Deleuze’s philosophical fascination with woman, film and America suffers a critical reconfiguration. // Ko se Caryju Grantu v Strašni resnici (The Awful Truth) ne uspe galantno odzvati na domnevno nezvestobo Irene Dunne, mu slednja odvrne, da je »izgubil svojo kontinentalno pamet«. To bi lahko razumeli tudi kot strašno resnico njune zgodbe: obstaja pamet, ki je specifično ameriška, poseben tip racionalnosti, ki ni odvisen od vključevanja in izključevanja, značilnega za kontinentalni duh (in filozofijo). Prav v tej točki se s filozofijo sooči Stanley Cavell: še več, ne zanima ga toliko resnica sama kakor pa njena strašnost. To je tudi točka, kjer filozofija za Cavella zahteva vrnitev k psihoanalizi; poleg tega Cavell natanko v tej poziciji mobilizira spol v dispozitiv, kjer se strašnost, resnica in ustava združijo za Ameriko v nastajanju. S tem v mislih predlagam razpravo o Cavellovi ženski, ženski iz njegovih knjig o filmu, ženski, ki dominira nad »zelenim svetom« hollywoodskih komedij ponovne poroke in zagotavlja pravila zaroke, ki so izven kontinentalne pameti. Osredotočila se bom na komediji Adamovo rebro in Njegovo nezvesto dekle. Kljub temu, da se zdi, da ne ustrezajo Cavellovi definiciji, ženski s sodnimi dvoranami in njihovimi pripadajočimi prostori vendarle ravnata tako, kot bi s tem sugerirali, da zeleni svet ni odsoten, temveč je metonimija za tiste prostore, ki bi jih pripisali (čistemu) umu. Nazadnje predlagam, da ta miselni sestav predstavlja točko, v kateri Deleuzova filozofska fascinacija z žensko, filmom in Ameriko terja kritično preoblikovanje.
With this in mind, I propose to discuss the Cavellian woman, of his cinema books, who dominates the “green world” of the Hollywood remarriage comedies, warranting the rules of engagement which are out of the continental mind. I will focus on the comedies where this seems not to be taking place – Adam’s Rib (1949) and His Girl Friday (1940); their woman however does the same to courtrooms and the adjacent spaces, as if to suggest that the green world is not absent but rather metonymic to the very places they would assign to (pure) reason. Finally, I propose to show that this Cavellian assemblage is where Deleuze’s philosophical fascination with woman, film and America suffers a critical reconfiguration. // Ko se Caryju Grantu v Strašni resnici (The Awful Truth) ne uspe galantno odzvati na domnevno nezvestobo Irene Dunne, mu slednja odvrne, da je »izgubil svojo kontinentalno pamet«. To bi lahko razumeli tudi kot strašno resnico njune zgodbe: obstaja pamet, ki je specifično ameriška, poseben tip racionalnosti, ki ni odvisen od vključevanja in izključevanja, značilnega za kontinentalni duh (in filozofijo). Prav v tej točki se s filozofijo sooči Stanley Cavell: še več, ne zanima ga toliko resnica sama kakor pa njena strašnost. To je tudi točka, kjer filozofija za Cavella zahteva vrnitev k psihoanalizi; poleg tega Cavell natanko v tej poziciji mobilizira spol v dispozitiv, kjer se strašnost, resnica in ustava združijo za Ameriko v nastajanju. S tem v mislih predlagam razpravo o Cavellovi ženski, ženski iz njegovih knjig o filmu, ženski, ki dominira nad »zelenim svetom« hollywoodskih komedij ponovne poroke in zagotavlja pravila zaroke, ki so izven kontinentalne pameti. Osredotočila se bom na komediji Adamovo rebro in Njegovo nezvesto dekle. Kljub temu, da se zdi, da ne ustrezajo Cavellovi definiciji, ženski s sodnimi dvoranami in njihovimi pripadajočimi prostori vendarle ravnata tako, kot bi s tem sugerirali, da zeleni svet ni odsoten, temveč je metonimija za tiste prostore, ki bi jih pripisali (čistemu) umu. Nazadnje predlagam, da ta miselni sestav predstavlja točko, v kateri Deleuzova filozofska fascinacija z žensko, filmom in Ameriko terja kritično preoblikovanje.
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U glasovitoj studiji o žalovanju i melankoliji (1917) Freud nekoliko puta ističe da se radi o argumentima koji su još otvoreni i nedomišljeni. Jedna takva pozicija jest specifična ekonomija melankolije, a na nju je, kaže, upozorio Viktor... more
U glasovitoj studiji o žalovanju i melankoliji (1917) Freud nekoliko puta ističe da se radi o argumentima koji su još otvoreni i nedomišljeni. Jedna takva pozicija jest specifična ekonomija melankolije, a na nju je, kaže, upozorio Viktor Tausk. Nedugo poslije toga, u nekrologu nakon Tauskova samoubojstva, Freud će spomenuti da je Tausk pisao o stvarima za koje još nije došlo vrijeme, naprimjer o vezama psihoanalize i filozofije. U privatnoj prepisci dopustit će si i stanovito olakšanje zbog Tauskove smrti, jer je ovaj, kaže Freud, predstavljao prijetnju budućnosti psihoanalitičkog pokreta. Tausk tako mapira u Freudu mjesto gdje se sijeku melankolija, ekonomija, filozofija i nepravovremenost; tu bih poziciju uzela kao polazište za komparativnu analizu Freudova nasuprot Tauskovu opisu melankolije.
Tausk se fokusira na melankoliju u studiji o „takozvanim ratnim psihozama“ i razmatra je u uvjetima svjetskoga rata, kao dio repertoara ratnih simptoma, među pacijentima u austrougarskoj vojsci. U tome okviru melankolija se kristalizira kao specifičan skript heteroseksualnosti, pritom posebno otvoren za pripajanja i pridruživanja u skupove – u simptomatske i dijagnostičke kolektive (melancholia cum paranoia). Usporedi li se s Freudovim, takav opis melankolije otvara niz prolaza u dalju analizu, od kojih me primarno zanimaju dva. Prvo, mogućnost da se zahvaljujući Tausku i kroz Tauska povežu melankolija, koja je Freudu nedomišljen ekonomski problem, i način na koji će Freud 1924. domisliti mazohizam upravo kao ekonomski problem (posebno uzme li se u obzir izrazita rodna konstitucija mazohizma kod Freuda). I drugo, zanima me mogućnost da se kroz Tauska domisli relacija takvoga Freudova mazohizma i mazohizma kako ga za filozofiju opisuje Gilles Deleuze u studiji Hladno i okrutno.
Tausk se fokusira na melankoliju u studiji o „takozvanim ratnim psihozama“ i razmatra je u uvjetima svjetskoga rata, kao dio repertoara ratnih simptoma, među pacijentima u austrougarskoj vojsci. U tome okviru melankolija se kristalizira kao specifičan skript heteroseksualnosti, pritom posebno otvoren za pripajanja i pridruživanja u skupove – u simptomatske i dijagnostičke kolektive (melancholia cum paranoia). Usporedi li se s Freudovim, takav opis melankolije otvara niz prolaza u dalju analizu, od kojih me primarno zanimaju dva. Prvo, mogućnost da se zahvaljujući Tausku i kroz Tauska povežu melankolija, koja je Freudu nedomišljen ekonomski problem, i način na koji će Freud 1924. domisliti mazohizam upravo kao ekonomski problem (posebno uzme li se u obzir izrazita rodna konstitucija mazohizma kod Freuda). I drugo, zanima me mogućnost da se kroz Tauska domisli relacija takvoga Freudova mazohizma i mazohizma kako ga za filozofiju opisuje Gilles Deleuze u studiji Hladno i okrutno.
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Interes za kulturu obilježio je Nietzscheovu filozofiju do te mjere da bismo u tome interesu mogli situirati logiku njezine koherencije. Simptomatičan je za to „Schopenhauer kao obrazovatelj“, jedno od Nietzscheovih „nesuvremenih... more
Interes za kulturu obilježio je Nietzscheovu filozofiju do te mjere da bismo u tome interesu mogli situirati logiku njezine koherencije. Simptomatičan je za to „Schopenhauer kao obrazovatelj“, jedno od Nietzscheovih „nesuvremenih razmatranja“. U njemu Nietzsche razmatra kulturu kao takav kritički pogon kakav osigurava neprekinutu transfiguraciju physisa. Naravno, „ja“ je instrumentalno za kultivaciju takve transfiguracijske inteligencije i racionalnosti; ipak, upravo zato „ja“ u kulturi svodi se na scenu nasilja, jer kultura nije skript njegova održavanja (čak i kad zadovoljava njegove potrebe). Pozivajući se na Emersona, Nietzsche kulturu stoga opisuje kao revolucionarnu; iz toga proizlazi da revolucija označava političko kulture, ono u kulturi što je fundamentalno politično, i obratno, da se u revoluciji vrijednoj toga imena pokazuje ono što je u politici fundamentalno kulturno. Istina, revolucionarnoj kulturi Nietzsche suprotstavlja kulturu i politiku koje nisu združene i ne pridonose transfiguracijskoj kritičkoj praksi, niti su u njoj utemeljene; ako naoko i služe održavanju ega, one to čine po cijenu represije njegove transfiguracijske inteligencije, pa je „ja“ i opet primarno scena nasilja. U tome okviru zanimaju me dvije pozicije. Prvo, želim postaviti hipotezu da je revolucionarna kultura kod Nietzschea metonimijski kompleks, za razliku od kulture koja ne pridonosi transfiguraciji physisa, a utemeljena je u metafori. Drugo, želim pokazati kako se, refrakcijom kroz Nietzschea, Emersonov projekt Amerike nameće kao prascena za Freudovu teoriju sebstva u kulturi.
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Taking up Ninotchka as the point of departure, where it is around Garbo in Ninotchka that Lubitsch organizes his position on the political, I argue that The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be work as cinematic sessions to... more
Taking up Ninotchka as the point of departure, where it is around Garbo in Ninotchka that Lubitsch organizes his position on the political, I argue that The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be work as cinematic sessions to process the implications of this position. It is for this reason that I address the three films as trilogy. Entailed in these sessions is a peculiar political economy which, of course, bears on Marx, but is as symptomatic of the conditions of film as such. Also, this political economy demands a recourse to psychoanalysis (just as Lubitsch invokes psychoanalysis in That Uncertain Feeling, a kind of syncope in the above trilogy). This in turn provides a position from where to address the economic problem of psychoanalysis itself.
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The Sherlock Holmes narratives seem to want to dispense with the fantastic – with what Conan Doyle, in his first Sherlock Holmes case, A Study in Scarlet, describes as necromancy. Or: they seem organized around the effort to revise the... more
The Sherlock Holmes narratives seem to want to dispense with the fantastic – with what Conan Doyle, in his first Sherlock Holmes case, A Study in Scarlet, describes as necromancy. Or: they seem organized around the effort to revise the very condition of the fantastic by relegating it to the realm of phantasm, illusion or incomplete analysis. It is here already that Conan Doyle proposes in fact that his late Victorian detective fiction be approached from what at that point was only to form as psychoanalysis. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes emerges as downright fantastic himself precisely where he manages to expose the fantastic as the phantasmatic or else as the underanalyzed. A Study in Scarlet provides also the position where such an approach to the fantastic hinges on the clinical, just as psychoanalysis depends on the point of contact of the critical and the clinical. It introduces Dr. Watson as the chronicler of the Holmes cases and the principal instance where the Holmes narratives are pieced together, so that Holmes comes into being always already contaminated with the knowledge of pathology. Further, Dr. Watson is shown to have met Holmes with his health “irretrievably ruined” because of the wound he had sustained in the Second Afghan War and typhoid he there contracted. Watson, the very instance where the Holmes narratives are assembled, shows therefore as irretrievably punctured, perforated and humoral: as comparable in fact to Deleuze's and Guattari’s description of the “body without organs.” Also, pathology and the critical are tied up for Watson with his account of the war, which means that the very emergence of the narrative voice in Conan Doyle is implicated in biopolitics. (Not to mention Conan Doyle’s lifelong interest in the study of warfare.) Consequently, if the main interest of the Holmes narratives is the reassignment of the fantastic which anticipates psychoanalysis, both the reassigned fantastic and the adumbrated psychoanalysis show in Conan Doyle as biopolitical concerns. The positions that I would like to explore in my lecture are therefore the following: what happens to the narrative which imagines its voice as that of medical knowledge in search of psychoanalysis? What happens to the literary fantastic once it gets mobilized as integral to this process? What if murder is the only crime adequate to the imaginary of detective fiction? Could it be that all other crimes, in detective fiction, are but inadequate substitutes for this originary biopolitical phantasm? Can detective fiction be taken up as the privileged position where the fantastic gets mobilized as the phantasmatic? Also: is not (late Victorian) detective fiction, for this reason, the privileged place from where to approach the biopolitical implications of the fantastic?
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Ako je korpus Danila Kiša obilježila opsesija prikazom totalitarizma (nacizma i staljinizma), simptomatično je što se kroz tu opsesiju kao kakva sistemska metonimija proteže književnost Jamesa Joycea. Predavanje će se bazirati na... more
Ako je korpus Danila Kiša obilježila opsesija prikazom totalitarizma (nacizma i staljinizma), simptomatično je što se kroz tu opsesiju kao kakva sistemska metonimija proteže književnost Jamesa Joycea. Predavanje će se bazirati na argumentu da je takav Joyce u Kišu pozicija koja omogućuje ili čak zahtijeva detotalizaciju totalitarizma, a prema analizi političkih konfiguracija nesvedivih na totalizaciju političkog iskustva. Nadalje, upravo je to pozicija gdje se, iz Kiševe literature, relacija nacizma i staljinizma može artikulirati kao relacija Lacanove psihoanalize i njezine kritike kod Gillesa Deleuzea.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Irish Studies, Comparative Literature, Marxism, James Joyce, and 14 morePolitics and Literature, Revolutions, Totalitarianism, Gilles Deleuze, Masochism, Holocaust Studies, Biopolitics, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, Slavic Studies, Stalinism, Nazism, Concentration Camps, Danilo Kis, and Gulag Studies
Predavanje polazi od pretpostavke da Derridino povezivanje žalovanja i Marxove političke ekonomije, u Sablastima Marxa, korespondira sa spregom žalovanja i ekonomije kod Freuda, posebno u „Trauer und Melancholie“. Freud međutim spreže... more
Predavanje polazi od pretpostavke da Derridino povezivanje žalovanja i Marxove političke ekonomije, u Sablastima Marxa, korespondira sa spregom žalovanja i ekonomije kod Freuda, posebno u „Trauer und Melancholie“. Freud međutim spreže žalovanje i ekonomiju tek nakon što žalovanje stavi u relaciju prema melankoliji, pri čemu melankolija dovodi u pitanje upravo ono što psihoanaliza teži odrediti kao (svoj) rad i ekonomiju. S obzirom da melankolija upadljivo izostaje iz Derridine konfiguracije rada i žalovanja, predavačica će prvo razmotriti kako Freud povezuje rad i melankoliju, da bi potom razložila zašto Marxov pristup radu želi analizirati ne prema žalovanju, već prema Freudovoj ali i predfrojdovskim konfiguracijama melankolije.
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When addressing "the peculiar distribution of power between arts" (here, between film and literature)— at that point in Contesting Tears where he aims to posit film and psychoanalysis as technologies where philosophy is inherited— Stanley... more
When addressing "the peculiar distribution of power between arts" (here, between film and literature)— at that point in Contesting Tears where he aims to posit film and psychoanalysis as technologies where philosophy is inherited— Stanley Cavell uses Henry James as a figure that anticipates this positionality from within literature. James seems to mark this spectral positionality throughout Cavell, most conspicuously perhaps in a chapter title like "Henry James Returns to America and to Shakespeare" (Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow)— the chapter concluding symptomatically with a reference to Derrida's Specters of Marx. One could almost argue that Henry James is to Cavell what Hamlet is to Marx and then to Derrida, in Specters of Marx: both the ghost of literature and the literature of ghosts, where this "both" opens as a positionality to philosophy's own (mnemo)technology. In order to approach Henry James from this perspective, and see what Cavell in turn does to James in the reemergence of James within philosophy, I will take up Washington Square as a kind of parable. On the one hand, in James's oeuvre this novel emerges as a ghost confronting what James acknowledges as legacy and anticipation of literature ; on the other, this novel was ultimately inherited as film (William Wyler's The Heiress, 1949), specifically where film exposes its co-genealogy with psychoanalysis— the juncture towards philosophy that Cavell in Contesting Tears analyzes as the Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman.
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Prijevod pjesama "U godini je maj tek jedan" (There is but one May in the year) Christine Rossetti i "Majski cvijet" (May-Flower) Emily Dickinson. https://www.najboljeknjige.com/vijesti/prozor-u-poeziju-christina-rossetti-i-emily-dickinson
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Prijevod pjesme "Snow flakes" Emily Dickinson. Vijenac, br. 777 - 778, str. 1, 21. prosinca 2023.
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Research Interests: Cultural History, European Studies, American Studies, Visual Studies, Art History, and 16 moreFilm Studies, Canadian Literature, Colonialism, Fashion History, Memory Studies, Twentieth Century History and Culture, Vietnam War, Alice Munro, Jean-Luc Godard, American Architecture, Nazism, Short story, John F. Kennedy, The Holocaust, Nobel Prize in Literature, and Tom Ford
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Glosa o Hitchcockovu filmu Prozor u dvorište// A gloss on Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
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Afterword to the revised Croatian translation of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
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Afterword to the Croatian translation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
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Afterword to the Croatian translation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.
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Socialism depends on capitalism for its constitution, because reflecting on capitalism is how the very raison of socialism is generated; indeed, socialism could well be one of the few positions where capitalism crystallizes as or into... more
Socialism depends on capitalism for its constitution, because reflecting on capitalism is how the very raison of socialism is generated; indeed, socialism could well be one of the few positions where capitalism crystallizes as or into critical reflection. It is almost as if the reason of capitalism – its logic, its rationality – can be fully accessed only through socialism, so that the demise of socialism signifies not the victory of the capitalist reason so much as its decline.
It is with this in mind that I propose to discuss the socialist culture in Yugoslavia, but sensitive above all to what I understand as Yugoslav exceptionalism. Yugoslavia, that is, articulated its cultural, political and economic practices at a remove from other socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, so that socialism itself in Yugoslavia was inevitably bound up with crisis and critique. A number of issues contributed to this exceptionalism, all of them resulting in the configurations of governmentality and economy which were different from those in other Central and Eastern European socialisms: the communist revolution which coincided with the Second World War, the much publicized 1948 breakup with Stalin and the Soviet doctrine, the focal role of Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement which was how Yugoslavia reinvented itself geopolitically and geoeconomically, but also contributed to reinventing the world in and for the Cold War…
In order to address the culture of socialist Yugoslavia on these terms, I will take up its crime fiction. Its crime fiction, especially in the 1980s when the Yugoslav project was all but exhausted, tends to focus on the narrative subjects that seem to be reduced to probing reason and rationality, as if to undermine this fiction’s very generic rationale: that of investigation and reflection. This is also how capitalism comes to be reconstituted in the late socialist imaginary: no longer simply the practice to be outlawed, it enters the narrative as an exercise in deconstructing reason and rationality and, by extension, the law itself which defines what constitutes crime to begin with. (There is an angle to be observed here where exceptionalism converges with what critical theory describes as the state of exception.)
I plan to engage The Rhythm of Crime (Ritam zločina, dir. Zoran Tadić, 1981) as a specimen story for the above argument, not least because Tadić’s film was scripted by Pavao Pavličić, who in many ways defined crime fiction for the socialist culture in Yugoslavia. While amply symptomatic of the positions I have outlined, Tadić’s film also demands that I address in my analysis the issues which surpass the scope of the symptom: the role of cinema in the constitution of the socialist reason; the everyday life in socialism as a critical practice (interestingly, before The Rhythm of Crime Tadić was known for his documentaries); the psychoanalysis of dwelling in socialism and its Heideggerian implications; the metonymic underpinnings of socialism’s internationalism.
It is with this in mind that I propose to discuss the socialist culture in Yugoslavia, but sensitive above all to what I understand as Yugoslav exceptionalism. Yugoslavia, that is, articulated its cultural, political and economic practices at a remove from other socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, so that socialism itself in Yugoslavia was inevitably bound up with crisis and critique. A number of issues contributed to this exceptionalism, all of them resulting in the configurations of governmentality and economy which were different from those in other Central and Eastern European socialisms: the communist revolution which coincided with the Second World War, the much publicized 1948 breakup with Stalin and the Soviet doctrine, the focal role of Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement which was how Yugoslavia reinvented itself geopolitically and geoeconomically, but also contributed to reinventing the world in and for the Cold War…
In order to address the culture of socialist Yugoslavia on these terms, I will take up its crime fiction. Its crime fiction, especially in the 1980s when the Yugoslav project was all but exhausted, tends to focus on the narrative subjects that seem to be reduced to probing reason and rationality, as if to undermine this fiction’s very generic rationale: that of investigation and reflection. This is also how capitalism comes to be reconstituted in the late socialist imaginary: no longer simply the practice to be outlawed, it enters the narrative as an exercise in deconstructing reason and rationality and, by extension, the law itself which defines what constitutes crime to begin with. (There is an angle to be observed here where exceptionalism converges with what critical theory describes as the state of exception.)
I plan to engage The Rhythm of Crime (Ritam zločina, dir. Zoran Tadić, 1981) as a specimen story for the above argument, not least because Tadić’s film was scripted by Pavao Pavličić, who in many ways defined crime fiction for the socialist culture in Yugoslavia. While amply symptomatic of the positions I have outlined, Tadić’s film also demands that I address in my analysis the issues which surpass the scope of the symptom: the role of cinema in the constitution of the socialist reason; the everyday life in socialism as a critical practice (interestingly, before The Rhythm of Crime Tadić was known for his documentaries); the psychoanalysis of dwelling in socialism and its Heideggerian implications; the metonymic underpinnings of socialism’s internationalism.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Lana Ribarić, "Novi BBC-jev hit prema Austen", Jutarnji list, 23.06.2022.
(‘Ako romane Jane Austen doživljavamo kao ljubavne, manje smo moderni od same književnice‘)
(‘Ako romane Jane Austen doživljavamo kao ljubavne, manje smo moderni od same književnice‘)