engleski

Theory and Trauma

This article questions the cosmopolitan spirit of modern literary theory in the context of its colonial aspirations. Galin Tihanov (2004) put forth the provocative thesis that it was born in the nationally reawakened countries of East-Central Europe in the aftermath of the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its chief proponents lived the dislocated life of exiles and émigrés, travelers and strangers never completely adjusted to their new environment. Due to such traumatic in-between position, they were able to “estrange” the naturalness of any given literature by refracting it through the prism of another one. The same uneasy but productive cosmopolitan legacy, as a necessary presumption of theoretical abstraction, holds for those theorists from the Central and Eastern European countries who in the post-war decades moved to France contributing to the establishment of narratology, structuralism and poststructuralism. It seems hence as if moving from the abandoned scraps of the former political and/or symbolic empire into its now separated center might be designated as a subversive operation that engendered modern literary theory. Through such an unexpected return, characteristic of every trauma, theory reminds both the former colonizer and the former colonized that, although their national terrains are politically divorced, their mutual ethical, cultural and intellectual dependency is still at work. If it is not going to be repeatedly and violently acted out in this divided constellation, it has to be patiently worked through on both sides. But the question remains whether any such self-othering can really surpass the colonial relation. Can one ever be fully conscious of the other or does the other stop being the other at the moment one becomes fully conscious of it?

cosmopolitanism ; colonialism ; trauma ; theory

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