Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Totalitarianism – drama“

The article is based on the reception theory by Hans Robert Jauss and analyses how Shakespeare’s works were read, evaluated and interpreted in Lithuanian literature in the 19th to 21th centuries. Some traces of Shakespeare’s works might be observed in letters by Povilas Višinskis and Zemaitė where Shakespearean drama is indicated as a canon of writing to be followed. It is interesting to note that Lithuanian exodus drama by Kostas Ostrauskas is based on the correspondence between Višinskis and Zemaitė. The characters of the play introduce the principles of the drama of the absurd. Gell’s concept of distributed personhood offered by S. Greenblatt is very suitable for analysing modern Lithuanian literature that seeks a creative relationship with Shakespeare’s works. The concept maintains that characters of particular dramas can break loose from the defined interpretative framework. Lithuanian exodus drama reinterprets Shakespeare’s works and characters. The plays by Ostrauskas and Algirdas Landsbergis explore the variety of human existence and language, the absurd character of the artist, meaningless human existence and the critique of totalitarianism. Modern Lithuanian poetry interprets Shakespeare‘s works so that they serve as a way to contemplate the theme of modern writing, meaningless human existence, the tragic destiny of an individual and Lithuania, miserable human nature, the playful nature of literature, the clownish mask of the poet, the existential silence of childhood, the topic of life as a theatrical performance, the everyday experience of modern women in theatre. The most frequently interpreted dramas are Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth – Lithuanian literary imagination inscribed them into the field of existentialist and absurd literature.

The subject of considerations is the vision of Poland contained in the Prologue – the only dramatic work by Czesław Miłosz, written during the occupation and published for the first time in „Pamiętnik Teatralny”only in 1981. The author sees the Prologue as a testimony to the awareness of Polish pre-war elites who counted on the rebirth of post-war Poland. He reads Miłosz’s drama as an example of an intertextual workin which one can hear the reverberation of ancient, Renaissance and romantic pieces. He sees in it a record of the spiritual dilemmas of the future Nobel laureate, who had to choose between the attitude of a humanist and the temptation of totalitarianism, and also as an example of a work with universal, timeless ideological significance, speaking about the dilemmas of an individual colliding with the ruthless forcesof historical or political determinism.

Объектом исследования в статье выступает пьеса для актёров и оркестра «Every good boy deserves favour» (в рус. перев. «До-ре-ми-фа-соль-ля-си-Ты-свободы-попроси»), созданная британским драматургом Томом Стоппардом и американским композитором Андре Превеном в 1977 году. Главной идеей пьесы является противостояние тоталитарного государства и личности. В работе раскрываются особенности драматургии и стилистики пьесы в ракурсе воплощения её ведущей тематической линии. Отмечается влияние театра абсурда в драматургии Стоппарда. Особое внимание уделяется специфике сценической постановки, а также музыкальному языку, насыщенному стилевыми аллюзиями и цитатами. Выбор интертекстуальных отсылок, их анализ и интерпретация позволяют утверждать, что музыка становится важным смысловым компонентом всей пьесы, не только отражая главную идею сочинения, но и устанавливая дополнительные смысловые обертоны, раскрывающие судьбу искусства в тоталитарном государстве. The object of the research in the article is the play for actors and orchestra Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, created by the British playwright Tom Stoppard and the American composer André Previn in 1977. The main idea of the play is the confrontation between a totalitarian state and an individual. The article reveals the features of the drama and style of the play from the perspective of the embodiment of its leading thematic line. The influence of the theater of the absurd in Stoppard’s drama is noted. Special attention is devoted to the specifics of the stage production, as well as the musical language packed with stylistic allusions and quotations. The choice of intertextual references, their analysis and interpretation allow us to assert that music becomes an important semantic component of the whole play, not only reflecting the main idea of the composition, but also establishing additional semantic overtones that reveal the fate of art in a totalitarian state.

Between post-communism and postmodernism. The new Russian drama in search for its cultural identity. Russian drama after 1991, suspended between memory and oblivion, attempts to process an overwhelming trauma of its own tragic history. Evgeny Grishkovets, Vladimir Sorokin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Alexey Shipenko, Oleg Bogayev, Vasily Sigarev, the Presnyakov brothers, Ivan Vyrypaev and others show experiences preceding and following Perestroika and demonstrate the scale of traumatic consequences of old structures disintegration as well as dangers connected with entering the area of freedom. This way Russian drama underwent all the development stages ranging from admiration for freedom to its negation, all the time without losing an interest in the internal man. Therefore criticism of the communist ideology as a kind of utopia and visions showing the risk of the rebirth of totalitarianism in Russia coexist along with the stream of consciousness depicting what is happening in the soul of a contemporary Russian. The process of self-identification of the human being that is decentralised, standardised and attached to stereotypes of mass awareness takes place within the framework of postmodernist mixture of stylistics and aesthetics, deconstruction of the reality and the language, play with culture codes, which is most fully expressed through the ongoing process of searching for cultural identity of the discussed works.Между посткоммунизмом и постмодернизмом. Современная русская драматургия в поисках культурной иден­тичности.Русская драматургия после 1991 года, зависшая между памятью и забвением, пытается проработать сковывающую травму своей трагической истории. Евгений Гришковец, Владимир Сорокин, Людмила Петрушевская, Алексей Шипенко, Олег Богаев, Василий Сигарев, братья Пресняковы, Иван Вырыпаев и др. показывают опыт «до» и «после» революции перестройки, демонстрируют масштаб травматических последствий распада предыдущих структур, а также опасности, сопряженные с вхождением в сферу свободы. Таким образом, драматургия в России прошла все стадии развития — от восторга до отрицания свободы, не теряя одновременно заинтересованности внутренним человеком. Отсюда критика утопического характера комму­нистической идеологии или образы, указывающие на опасность возрождения тоталитаризма в России, которые сосуществуют с потоком сознания, воссоздающим то, что происходит в душе современного русского человека. Процесс самоидентификации децентрализованного, стан­дартного и привязанного к стереотипам массового сознания человека происходит в рамках постмодернистского смешения стилистик и эстетик, деконструкции действительности и языка, игры с культурными кодами, что наиболее полно показывает незаконченный процесс поиска культурной идентичности обсуждаемого творчества.

The purpose of the article. To investigate the history of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Academic Music and Drama Th eater named aft er Mykhailo Starytskyi during its stay in Vinnytsia (1934-1937), to study the creative progress of the team against the background of the era, to fi nd out the peculiarities of its economic life and everyday life. Research methods: the article uses general scientifi c and specifi c-historical research methods, which made it possible to achieve its goal and fulfi ll the set tasks. Th e main thing is the use of the method of analysis and synthesis, which made it possible to study the general trends of the historical progress of Ukrainian theatrical art in the fi rst half of the 1930s through the study of individual compo- nents. Th e scientifi c novelty consists in the comprehensive coverage of the functioning of one of the Ukrainian theaters during the active formation of Soviet totalitarianism and the creation on this basis of an objective picture of the development of national stage art in the era of Stalinism. Conclusions. Th e economic and creative components of the theater’s activity in the Vinnytsia period depended on the peculiarities of the socio-economic and political transformations of Ukrainian society in the fi rst half of the 1930s of the 20th century. Th e economic dependence of the theater group on state funding, the lack of its own premises and constant relocations made it completely dependent on the prevailing political and ideological situation, deprived it of freedom of creativity and limited the artistic search within the framework of “socialist realism”

Backlash, or what are the makers of the new Czech drama afraid of. In November 1989 various theater groups participated in overthrowing the totalitarian regime by improvising discussion forums. After the so-called Velvet Revolution, it was the writer and playwright Václav Havel who became head of state while another playwright, Milan Uhde, became the Minister of Culture and Speaker of the Parliament. Nowadays the Czech theater scene is immensely diversified. We can divide the authors who began writing their dramas after 1989 into two generational groups. On the one hand, there are authors born in 1960–1970, who entered the post-totalitarian times already as mature adults and who at the moment have long experience in their artistic work as playwrights, actors or directors it is quite common that those people write and direct their own work. On the other, there is a younger group which is made of people who were still children during the communist era, and their artistic activity was shaped and took place in most recent years. We are talking about a generation of artists who share a common experience of totalitarianism in childhood and adolescence, as well as the difficult transition between the two systems: communist and capitalist.Backlash neboli čeho se bojí tvůrci nejnovější české dramaturgie. V listopadu 1989 se v České republice divadelní soubory pořádáním improvizovaných diskuzních fór účastnily svržení totalitního režimu. Po tzv. sa­metové revoluci stanul v čele státu spisovatel a dramaturg Václav Havel a další dramaturg, Milan Uhde, se stal ministrem kultury a předsedou Poslanecké sněmovny. V současnosti je česká divadelní scéna nesmírně rozrůzněná. Jména autorů, kteří začali svá umělecká díla psát po roce 1989, můžeme rozdělit do dvou generačních skupin. Na jedné straně máme autory narozené v letech 1960–1970, kteří do posttotalitních časů vstoupili už jako dospělí lidé a v současnosti za sebou mají většinou dlouholeté zkušenosti v umělecké práci, nebo v roli autorů dramat, herců případně režisérů často se jedná o osoby, které svoje kusy píší a zároveň režírují. Skupinu mladých umělců tvoří lidé divadla, kteří v době ko­munismu byli ještě dětmi, a jejich umělecká činnost se formuje a připadá na nedávná léta. Je tu řeč o generaci umělců, které spojuje společná zkušenost totalitarismu v dětství a raném mládí a také obtížný přechod mezi dvěma systémy: komunistickým a kapitalistickým.

The Viennese modern choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser's black coat leads to an analysis of her choreography in four main phases – the early European career; the rise of Nazism; war's brutality; and postwar attempts at reconciliation. Utilising archival and embodied research, the article focuses on a selection of Bodenwieser costumes that survived her journey from Vienna, or were remade in Australia, and their role in the dramaturgy of works such as Swinging Bells (1926), The Masks of Lucifer (1936, 1944), Cain and Abel (1940) and The One and the Many (1946). In addition to dance history, costume studies provides a distinctive way to engage with the question of what remains of performance, and what survives of the historical conditions and experience of modern dance-drama. Throughout, Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1958) provides a critical guide to the acts of reconstruction undertaken by Bodenwieser as an émigré choreographer in the practice of her craft, and its ‘materializing reification’ of creative thought. As a study in affective memory, information regarding Bodenwieser's personal life becomes interwoven with the author's response to the material evidence of costumes, oral histories and documents located in various Australian archives. By resurrecting the ‘dead letters’ of this choreography, the article therefore considers how dance costumes offer the trace of an artistic resistance to totalitarianism.

The article is devoted to the problem of N. A. Berdyaev’s ambiguous and contradictory attitude to Eurasianism - the ultra-right political trend of Russian emigration in the 1920s and 1930s. The author sees the reasons for Berdyaev’s rapprochement with the Eurasians in the collapse of the religious and mystical ideal that captured the philosopher’s imagination during the First World War. Under the influence of religious excitement that seized part of the Russian intelligentsia in the pre-war period, he believed in the nearness of the end of history and the onset of the millennial Kingdom of God on earth. According to Berdyaev, Russia was called upon to fulfill its historical mission in this final act of the world drama. This role (the “Russian Idea”) was to unite the East and the West in a global religious and cultural synthesis. The revolution of 1917 destroyed Berdyaev’s eschatological ideal and forced him to radically reconsider his view. From a Christian anarchist, he turns into a statesman, a defender of conservative values and social hierarchy. During this period, his social philosophy is very close to the ideology of fascism. But fascism was a pan-European phenomenon and in each country had its own original versions. The Eurasian movement was one of the varieties of Russian fascism. Berdyaev’s political sympathies brought him closer to this movement and became the main reason for long-term cooperation with its leaders. However, the commitment to the values of individual freedom and Christian personalism as the basis of his worldview did not allow Berdyaev to go far in his passion for right-wing conservative ideas. In the late 1920s, he sharply criticized the totalitarian features of the Eurasian ideology. After the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Berdyaev gets the opportunity to compare European far-right regimes and creates a general theory of totalitarianism. In this theory, he uses Eurasian concepts and terminology. Thus, Eurasianism becomes a model for him, on the basis of which he develops his theory of totalitarianism. After the end of the Second World War, the philosopher got deeply disappointed. After the end of the Second World War, the disappointment of the philosopher was due to the failure of his hopes for a softening of the political regime in the USSR. He was again seized by gloomy forebodings of an unsuccessful end to human history. And although the hope for a favorable outcome of the struggle between good and evil did not leave Berdyaev until the end of his life, a sense of realism weakened those hopes and faith in the feasibility of the “Russian Idea”.

The study sketches out the contexts where Bulgarian film has been developing in the three decades of transition to democracy. The problems associated with the identity crisis, insufficient communication with the national audiences, Bulgarian films’ belonging to the European audiovisual and cultural continuum and critical reflection are partly broached. The cinematic environment has changed in Bulgaria after 2010 with the coming of emerging authors, who gave this country’s filmmaking a new physiognomy. Their works are much more adequate to the globalising world, providing genre diversity and dealing with subjects easier for the audiences to identity themselves with. The plots revolving around the present day and the ramifications of the socialist era prevail. In general, Bulgarian films of the recent decade are in visible demand at international film festivals, attracting the attention of foreign film critics. Awards, however, are not necessarily passports for good reception in the homeland`s milieu. Such is the case with Mina Mileva, Vesela Kazakova’s directorial duo (Actvist 38) and their two controversially documentary films Uncle Tony, Three Fools and the Secret Service (2013) and The Beast Is Still Alive (2016). An analysis of their works shows that reverting to the subject of totalitarianism and the attempt at reaching a consensus-based memory onscreen are still risky in Bulgaria’s cultural environment. Their new full-length future film – the emigrant social comedy-drama Cat in the Wall (2019, warmly accepted and awarded abroad) - surprisingly received the national Golden Rose Debut Award 2019, but the Bulgarian critics` stays still undeservedly reserved.

TOTALITARIAN REGIME AS A SYSTEM OF STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM IN THE LITERATURE OF JANUSZ A. ZAJDELIn the Polish literature of the last two decades of the Polish People’s Republic PRL, science fiction, especially sociological science fiction, served as a substitute for political literature, which was impossible to publish under state censorship. The majority of this genre was anti-utopian or critical of the totalitarian reality. This attitude was hidden under fantastical make-up and was very strongly related to the here-and-now of the period in which the books originated. Janusz A. Zajdel is the most important representative of this genre, however, at the same time he manages to avoid limiting his work to the thinly veiled politics of the time. While the topics of his work very often repeated themselves the stories go beyond the drama of the individuals or groups confronted with the totalitarian regime and focus on certain repeatable mechanisms within the system itself. Due to the above characteristics, his literary work transcends from being just a criticism of the internal workings of PRL into the area of structural functionalism of a universal social system. Social structures that play a central role in Zajdel’s work, are always built from the same, very clearly outlined building blocks. It may seem that the characters and the plot of the novels are only an addition to the views on the structure and the shape of society expressed by the author. Common elements that build that world remain at the core of all the novels and the pretextual story lines of Zajdel make it easier to present those elements in the internal functioning of the sometimes very complicated social systems that Zajdel describes. Dysfunctional elements that prevent the exercise of totalitarian control inside the system, for Zajdel seem to be of far greater importance than his story lines. These relations, so characteristic of the late PRL, referred to in the literature as “dirty togetherness”, are phenomena of exercising control over specific measures and social resources available in the framework of the social system for the implementation of not the objectives, which were designated by those socio-political systems, but by social groups or entities that use them for their own purposes. The main theme of Zajdel’s novels are dysfunctions that occur as part of the totalitarian system, but his social systems never meet the defining criteria of totalitarianism in the classic sense. Totalitarianism is not the main intrest of the novels but is only used instrumentally as the make-up for the description of the mechanism of the internal workings of these dysfunctions. Zajdel sees dirty togetherness as a structural element of the system, without which the continuous functioning of the system would be impossible.

The article is focused on Lesia Ukrainka’s famous drama The Stone Master (Kaminnyi Hospodar), her remake of the Don Juan legend. The author of the article, Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, localizes Lesia’s masterpiece in a broader European tradition of the legend. He compares The Stone Master with the previous version of the Don Juan legend, by Tirso de Molina (The Trickster of Seville), Moli re (Dom Juan), Mozart (Don Giovanni), Hoffmann (Don Juan), Grabbe (Faust and Don Juan) and others. He analyzes Lesia’s originality within this tradition. He also reads The Stone Master in the context of the dialogue between different epochs: the Baroque, Classicism, Rococo / Enlightenment, Romanticism, Post-Romanticism. Each of the epochs develops its specific version of Don Juan legend, according to Yermolenko, which reflects a specific concept of human being and human relations developed at each particular period. While the “Baroque” Don Juan of Tirso de Molina marks the crisis of the culture of honor, the “Classicist” Don Juan of Moli re shows the development of a culture of knowledge and general concepts, and the “Romantic” Don Juan of Byron and Hoffmann is a symptorm of a new 19th century culture of will and transformation. In this respect, it is important to look at Lesia Ukrainka’s text as a battleground of “Romantic” will to freedom and “Post-Romantic” (or fin de siècle) will to power. In this context, Yermolenko reads The Stone Master (written in 1912) as a criticism of the fashionable topic of “will to power”, and as a political warning, with Lesia Ukrainka showing the upcoming horrors of the 20th century’s authoritarianism and totalitarianism. With the help of the concept of eropolitics, the author shows how, through the erotic topic, Lesia Ukrainka passed a major political message to her epoch — and ours as well.

The paper considers the trilogy of novels by Ulas Samchuk “Ost” as a genre variety of a family chronicle. The main issues are its genre nature, correlation of the work with traditions of the classic Ukrainian novel and the modern novel forms, its relation to the concept of “high literature”, the ideological and aesthetic views of the author. The main point of the paper is the interpretation of Ulas Samchuk’s novel as an attempt to implement the idea of high literature substantiated by him. The concept of high literature in Ulas Samchuk’s sense is related to the concept of classical literature, and the very idea of literary work in exile is connected with the idea of the lost statehood. The realistic basis of Ulas Samchuk’s novels originates in his understanding of realism as an artistic style and principle of depicting reality, the “universal key to the door of reality”. At the same time, the researcher testifies to the blurring of style shapes in Ulas Samchuk’s postwar prose and points to the combination of realistic traditions and modernist tendencies in it. Focusing on the concept of generation and family in the novel, the author emphasizes the relations between the generations, because each one plays its significant role in the complex drama of the family and national histories. The family, as the subject of action and one of the main actors in the theater of history, becomes a symbolic embodiment of the trauma generated by history. The notion of idyllic chronotope is connected with the sacred space of family, the motive of searching harmony. The basic element of such chronotope is the topos of hamlet as a form of ideal national existence. The idea of destroying the hamlet during the revolution is related to the process of destroying the family idyll. In general, the history of Moroz’s family in Ulas Samchuk’s novel is a reflection of the national history, and the destroyed space of the family is a field in which the Soviet totalitarianism repressive mechanisms were tested.

The article examines the work of Stalinist playwright Alexander Nikolaevich Afinogenov (1904-1941) through the prism of his complicity in the ideological campaigns of the Bolshevik Party. The study of the impact of party-state ideology on the broad masses of people during the Stalinist era is a priority direction of historical science. However, this direction needs further thematic and problematic expansion. The ideological campaigns of the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s found their artistic expression on the theatrical stage, in the plays of the most famous playwrights. This interaction between propaganda and theater art has not been studied sufficiently. There are practically no generalizing works. This is partly due to the fact that sufficient empirical material has not yet been accumulated. Almost every play by A. N. Afinogenov corresponded to one or another vector of the ideological struggle of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. The play "Fear" (1931), which became a full-scale artistic expression of one of the most powerful ideological campaigns conducted by the Bolshevik Party until the time of the "Great Terror" - the campaign to "purge" state and party organs, is of particular interest. The original manuscript of this play, found in the Moscow Art Theatre Museum, significantly expands the understanding of how the play was understood by contemporaries. The initiator of the changes in the text of the play was K. S. Stanislavsky, who persuaded A. N. Afinogenov to introduce the figure of the "investigator" into the play. A. N. Afinogenov significantly remade the main pictures of the play - the eighth and ninth, in fact, they were rewritten anew. The play "Fear" was staged in two theaters - in the State Drama Theater (Leningrad) and in the Moscow Art Theater (Moscow). In Leningrad, where the performances began earlier than in Moscow, they used the original text of the play (at least until the end of 1931), and in Moscow used the revised version. This in no way contradicted A. N. Afinogenov, the playwright, who saw his work as a continuation of the ideological struggle in the artistic images of Soviet dramaturgy. In the found original version of the play and in the revised version there are different accents in the characterization of the characters of the play (in the eighth and ninth pictures, the final ones). But it was not the artistic side of the theatrical work that mattered, but the ideological basis, the meaning of which in both editions was reduced to the most important postulate of totalitarianism - to recognize the class basis of morality, to renounce oneself, one's views, one's "own" science, to erase one's former life in order to enter the "objective" state of collective unanimity without one's own personality.

The anti-utopia presented in Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money functions as a mirror-image of Great Britain from the 1980s when its Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher unleashed the forces of capitalist anarchy and relieved the citizens of any moral and social responsibility. İn this play, featuring the brokers from London stock exchange, Churchill dramatizes the hedonistic world of insanely rich and immoral people who in their pursuit of profit and ways to increase their corporate and financial empires follow the precepts of selfish opportunism and ignore all social scruples. Using theatrical devices to achieve an alienating effect and prevent the identification of viewers with the characters and the presented material, such as the use of songs and especially the text written in verse, Churchill puts emphasis on the critical observation and consideration of this play, whose political efficiency is sometimes questioned. However, this satirical portrayal of commercial totalitarianism should not be taken as politically restricted because Churchill’s political attack functions, not through the politics of utopia, but effective criticism which aims at the very center of the system. Through material criticism of this anti-utopian world in which neoliberal ethical laws are exposed as pitiful values worthy of hooligans, yobs, and parasites, Churchill actually breaks down the trajectory of capitalist reform and calls into question the entire system of capitalist economy.

This essay explores the paradoxical relationship between Václav Havel’s dramas and his essays, in particular, The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s plays aimed at creating a new community awareness of the “post-totalitarian” system in which people were trapped. His essays employ similar dramatic and analytic techniques to show a way out of that trap by “living within the truth,” that is, living in a way that exposes the mendacity of “post-totalitarianism” and spreads the virus of truth and change throughout society. The present essay argues that the ultimate aim of the “existential revolution” Havel calls for is in fact the regeneration and strengthening of civil society and the creation of institutions that serve people, not power. It concludes by looking at the continuing relevance of The Power of the Powerless today.

Abstract This paper aims towards identifying those protagonists who occupy the position of mediator in the process of decoding the message by uniting detached ideologies in Carlos Morton’s The Miser of Mexico (1989) and Trumpus Caesar (2021). On the level of the narrative, border-resurfacing and its impact on society are presented by anecdote and humour. Jon Yates’s 2022 book entitled Fractured. How We Learn to Live Together mentions that in order to reconnect divided societies, ideologies, and races, the factor of laughter proves to be the most effective means: “If the person smiled, you knew you had someone in the mood to buy; if not, it was time to move on” (Yates 2022, 17). Slavoj Žižek in his work entitled Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion argues that humanity can restore communication with the Divine only by the mediated assistance of Jesus Christ, who “must sacrifice himself” (Žižek 2002, 50) in the process. In order to mend broken relationships, Carlos Morton’s subjective-participative mediators assume the position of honest advisors, critics, non-judgmental and non-political entities, individual and self-sufficient characters, who by partial or total detachment point out the tragic in the comical. With the help of humour and satire, the playwright’s protagonists in the dramas mentioned above captivate audiences by softening critical situations through mutual acceptance and tolerance.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? [What? You still want to live?] […] and right then I found it odd, since it could not have been warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational (187).AcknowledgmentsMy sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, for their interest, encouragement and patience. Thanks also to Sadie, especially for her comments on the final section. ReferencesAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1974.Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.———. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999.Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia U P, 2005.Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.Clarke, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Late Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2005.Deák, István. "Stranger in Hell." New York Review of Books 23 Sep. 2003: 65-68.Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. 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