Literature, Theory and Politics of the Long ’68: The Last Season of Modernism and Peripherality

Abstract

As part of the Yugoslav in-between periphery, Ljubljana became a site of interaction between an antisystemic movement, literature and theory, the fields that in Paris were arguably only co-present during the long 1968. Following Franco Moretti and Perry Anderson’s notion of modernism as a cultural field of force experiencing the imaginative proximity of social revolution, the experimental literature of the 1960s may be viewed as the last season of modernism. This is when modernism in Slovenia synchronized with Paris, the metropole that Pascale Casanova has described as the Greenwich meridian of literary modernity. Peripheries in the literary world-system are, for Moretti, forced into a belated compromise between local perspectives and globalized forms emanating from metropoles. In this case, however, it is due to its peripherality that Slovenian literature was able to produce an innovative political interlacement of theory and literature (for example, the internationally acclaimed neo-avant-garde group OHO and the Ljubljana Lacanian circle). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ljubljana student journal Tribuna published experimental literature, (post)structuralist theory and antisystemic political writings. The mere contiguity of these discourses evoked their interaction. Even stronger modes of interaction characterized their production and mediation, such as writer-theorists translating French theory or various hybrids of theory and literature. Slavoj Žižek’s early hybrid texts show the emergence of theory as a parasite of literature and philosophy. They deconstruct the (nationalist) author function. A scandal provoked by Žižek in 1967 foretells the split of the ‘68 avant-garde between the theoretical and literary faction in the 1970s.