engleski

The Time of Dispossession: The Conflict, Composition and Geophilosophy of Revolution in East Central Europe

If every revolution creates its calendar by which time starts anew, then the revolutionary events of 1789, 1917 and 1989 are paradoxically related. Although the revolution of 1917 is considered to have broken with the political and social values of 1789, those revolutionary events still belong to one revolutionary tradition. According to that tradition, the revolution is conceived as a rupture in or break with the previous order. However, the event of 1989 was defined as a re- connection with the political and social values from 1789 and as a rejection of their Enlightenment background. The revolutionaries of 1989 distanced themselves from the notion of revolution as an overturning event, claiming, instead, that they were restoring the order destroyed by the event of 1917. The event of 1989 is not simply related to East Central Europe, but is also a kind of spectral revenant of 1789 that haunted Western Europe for two centuries. Larry Wolff proposed understanding “the extraordinary revolution of 1989 as an incitement and opportunity to reconsider our mental mapping of Europe” (14). This paper will extend Wolff’s suggestion to an understanding of the event of 1917. What is the character of transgression in the events of 1917 and 1989? Was there transgression at all and is it necessary to conceive revolution as a transgression? Some scholars reject the definition of the event of 1989 as a revolution. Karol Soltan, for instance, considers it a rebirth, which he conceives as radically different from revolution. While revolutions are breaks between the past and the present, rebirths restore continuity with the past. Yet Soltan is unable to explain “the disappointment of 1989”, which comes from replacing the “sovereignty of the communist party” with the “sovereignty of money” (34). Other thinkers, on the contrary, emphasise the traumatic background of 1989. The dissolution of Yugoslavia is a historical example that would not fit Soltan’s model of rebirth. In this paper two models for understanding the complexities, contradictions and paradoxes of this East Central European ‘coming out of age’ will be outlined and contrasted: the model of conflict and the model of composition. In the model of conflict, social and political transformation is conceived as a struggle for recognition via mutual determination. While the event of 1917 is explained following the model of conflict as a rupture, the event 1989 is, on the contrary, defined as a restoration or rebirth. Following Bignall’s redefinition of postcolonial agency as “becoming-compatible” (212), it is possible to consider a shift from the model of revolution as conflict to the model of revolution as composition without reducing revolutionary composition to a rebirth. The revolutions of 1789, 1917 and 1989 are failed events for (at least) two reasons. First, every revolution possesses a utopian character, a kind of ‘yet to come’ by which many injustices of actuality will be superseded. However, in the events of 1789 and 1917 actuality is absorbed by the utopian character of the new order. Second, despite the idea of rupture, the events of 1789 and 1917 are reduced to a linear and finalist conception of history. The event of 1989 depends on a cyclical and finalist conception of history which argues for the past’s return in the future. A genuine revolutionary event is never oriented solely toward the past or toward the future ; rather, it is composed of both temporal constituents, ‘what is yet come’ and ‘what is already there’. Hence transgression must be connected with actuality or with what emerges both in the past and the future. But transgression does not simply divide, be it through the linearity of rupture or through cyclical rebirth. On the contrary, transgression creates compositions from seemingly irresolvable dialectical constituents. It is such compositional revolutions that one must search for.

Revolution, conflict, time, sublime, Southeast Europe

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