engleski

The Nonhuman World of Luka Bekavac's Fiction

Speculative realism marks the effort in the context of contemporary continental philosophy to rehabilitate the question of the possibility of knowledge of the world in itself, i.e. of the world as independent from and indifferent to human existence and thought. The main suggestion of this paper is that the very idea of such a world constitutes a veritable problem not only for philosophy but for literature as well. Here however the question is not one of knowing the world in itself but of creating a fictional world which would purportedly be both devoid of human existence/thought and alien to our cognitive capacities. This issue will be addressed through an engagement with Luka Bekavac’s fiction, which represents arguably one of the most sustained literary explorations of the possibility of creating such a nonhuman world. There are several different respects in which Bekavac’s fiction can be interpreted as a response to the problem of the idea of a world indifferent to human thought. First, in intrafictional terms, this idea constitutes an explicit thematic concern of the main protagonists in virtually all individual works which develop different aspects of Bekavac’s fictional universe (Drenje (2011), Viljevo (2013), Policijski sat (2015)). Secondly, the question of the possibility of knowledge of such a nonhuman world represents one of the plot devices in all of these different fictional narratives. Thirdly, the explicit considerations of this question can in turn be interpreted as an implicit metatextual reflection on the very possibility of reading in general and these texts in particular. Lastly and most importantly, Bekavac’s fiction attempts to do the impossible and “present the unpresentable” (Lyotard) – it not only tells us about this nonhuman world but on several occasions purports to stage a textual encounter of the human observer/reader with it.

Luka Bekavac, speculative realism, the nonhuman world

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