Naslov
Laughing with the monsters

Autori
Vrbančić, Mario

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
Rethinking Humanities and Social Sciences. The issue of the (post)Other: Postmodernism and Other. / Lukić, M. ; Vrbančić, M. - Zadar : Odjel za anglistiku, Sveučilište u Zadru, 2010, 69-69

Skup
Rethinking Humanities and Social Sciences. The issue of the (post)Other: Postmodernism and Other.

Mjesto i datum
Zadar, Hrvatska, 10.09.2010. - 12.09.2010

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
postmodernism, other

Sažetak
In contrast to the mainstream reading of Bakhtin in literary and cultural theory that often reduces his work to various intertextualities, semiotics, or sociolinguistics, we propose a rethinking of his work in the context of his early philosophical writing, Toward a Philosophy of the Act. In our view, there is in this work more than just an echo of Badiou's concept of the Event (with Zizek's intervention). In Bakhtin and Badiou's view the Event is the act that seemingly arises ex nihilo because it cannot be accounted for in terms of the situation and because only later does it produce and generate its own series of determinations that change a whole paradigm. The Event is charged with the radical politics of emancipation, unique happenings founded in themselves, unimaginable breaks and utopian beginnings. Thus, for instance, the carnival, with its suspension of time, its inversion of stuffy hierarchy and its joyful relativity, resembles the Event. However, as later critics have indicated, a carnival is not just a performance of debasement and liberation, but also includes a dark side, violence towards the stranger, the scapegoat, the Other (in other words the carnival as a pseudo-event). For Bakhtin, however, this move to the 'dark side' is a long process which ends when the carnival of romanticism loses its ambiguity ; its gorgeous collective body of people is transformed into monsters, uncanny creatures, doubles 'the Other'. The joyful materiality of human anatomies and the world thus become the impersonal and given, a testimony to the emergence of the traumatic core of conciseness in horror. This foundation of modern subjectivity in horror corresponds to the division of carnivalesque laugher ; the laugher 'loses its body' it becomes disembodied. Hence, it is justified to ask a question about the 'haling' of laugher: is this split horror and carnivalesque laugher forever separated or can we invent a new whirling polyphony in which we can again laugh with the monsters? The implication of this question is deeply political ; it implies the retrieval of the other, repressed side of the carnival: the people, the poor crammed in the global slums, the excluded. Will such awakening be a new Event or a pseudo Event? Will this new monster, a blend of laugher and horror, produce egalitarian terror that from our postmodern safe distance is nothing but sheer horror?

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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