Abstract
This chapter explores the biopolitical implications of bodies being articulated through collocations of the “state” (the political body) and “vulnerability” (the corporeal, biological body). Taking the body as a site of operation of affect in culture means understanding certain political body-sites in terms of intensity and relationality and the new materialist shift in social theory as an opposition to realist and constructionist ontologies insisting that social inquiry should focus on how assemblages of the animate and the inanimate together produce the world. This new move radically and transversally extends the traditional materialist analysis between structural levels of the social, dissolving the “mind/matter” and “nature/culture” divides by addressing how desires, feelings, and meanings also contribute to social production placing the researcher with an assemblage.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to Tijana Okić for pointing me in this direction.
- 2.
During the tenure procedure, despite having a sufficient number of required publications, five of my book chapters were dismissed as they had been published in the vacuum between my being an assistant and associate professor, even though they were not “absorbed” in my associate professorship and were left hanging and unaccounted for. This was done at the insistence of a senior Senate member, former member of the Serb Radical Party, to whom at the time no Senate member objected. I had articles published after 2017 when the tenure started but I was unable to include them post factum as they would apparently result in “meddling with an already started procedure,” as I was unofficially told by an administration clerk. They finally accepted an older paper that would fit in the gap, but then the problem was that my internationally published papers “did not have a statement from the journal editors that these indeed were scientific papers.” Getting written confirmations from the journal editors would have dragged the procedure unnecessarily beyond the six-month window, during which I would have lost my job, and I resolved the problem by obtaining a letter from the Republika Srpska Ministry of Education that my papers were “indeed scientific, high-rated journals belonging to SSCI and AHCI lists” and that such practice was in fact discriminatory “towards those who were internationally promoting RS.”
- 3.
My “tale of two bodies” began during this tenure hearing procedure, and only a couple of months afterward, my blood turned against my body staging an autoimmune, body against itself attack, develo** into the still-persisting cold-agglutinin anemia.
- 4.
I am grateful to Azra Hromadžić for pointing me to think in this direction.
- 5.
Contributions to the Skender Kulenović literary prize critique (by Darko Cvijetić, translated by Danijela Majstorović and Zoran Vučkovac)
Verse
Verse A raincoat’s been given to the one who showed where the mass grave in Tomašica was To the one who’d been silent for twenty-two years For heavy rain came down when he showed it - there, there it is, he said Fifteen meters deep Nearly an acre with a thousand bodies But I am writing to you, Hava, you who was told yesterday they’d found the bodies of your six sons and their father in it Hava’s mound of bones My mother Stojanka would have said to cut our orchard to give you the planks For tabuts and nišan tombs Of your six wombs They could’ve failed to find them They could’ve loaded them on wagons with iron ore and then off to blast furnaces in Zenica and Sisak They could’ve been smelted to rods of iron and shipbuilding plates of steel They could’ve returned once, in Rostfrei, polished, welded one onto another And he would be only taxed for sonnets The palms that petted rabbits The grains in a pigeon’s belly And the balls of bread under the tongue I am writing to you Hava of Trnopolje, the mother of six skulls, twelve eyes, twelve arms There, as Knešpolje, Briševo, Zecovi and Mrakovica darken with night It’s me, Stojanka’s aged daughter, who’s writing to you And Skender’s statue shivers in the rain under the cross Wishing to pull its hair, but it’s armless, handless, with nothing to pull it with To you, Hava, whose hand gives the raincoat To that child of someone So he wouldn’t get wet Fifteen meters above her scattered children
- 6.
Recognition (Annerkennung)
Verse
Verse I recognize them I see them on the street They’ve bought plastic toys for the kids They’re unwrap** them in the back seat. They are in Germany With the Covid rampant Lights somehow shine brighter As the streets dampen. Nobody cares about their names. Nor where they come from any more. But how much overtime they can put At Flughafen, Pflegeheim or in a store. Rasim dreams of Livno horses While he does maintenance for Deutsche Bahn At weekends, he drinks at a lady friend’s He mostly drinks, “here, one starts in deep shit.” Tatjana buys an orchid at Rewe She knows how to submerge them, the ideal light “Don’t move them a lot and never leave them in cool night” She used to manage a flower shop for 500 Now she cleans a condo for a Schwabian Frau Shelving at a pharmacy Is my dream job, “genau”! Josipa is on a scholarship For her Oxford English and a thesis on memory politics Nobody here really cares She can be a Mitarbeiterin for a famous Heidelberg Chair Get an Eigene Stelle for a limited term When she’s done, she’ll be 50 and without anything firm But even that’s better than where… I recognize them By their almond eyes, by their high cheekbones While they rummage for change And “sammeln die Punkte“ Beautiful, alone. Radenko supports Frau Kraemer Who does not know her son but remembers the war and family silver Radenko would gladly row a dajak on the Vrbas river But there is only the muddy Main There are no rapids on the Main. They need not say a word, nor are they “gefragt” I recognize them in a bit when buying markers for my kid Frau Muller hat das gesagt They’ve come to work To run away and askew To make themselves anew Thousands of memories don’t mean much In an endless, Offenbach November night Into which we fled from tyranny and plight I don’t mind it, there is still life to be had At least for the kids When David could not have a tad After work, I’ll do another Baustelle shift Another 100 EUR, in Corona no one’s a spendthrift I recognize them My homeland’s bodies that will never go on collective work activities Nor rise against a hundred times stronger enemy Who couldn’t find employment Without connections with the party They work their fingers to the bone in conditions dire In Germany they know their effort’s worth Of their basic rights there is a dearth Ah, leave it, we’ll go back when they retire They recognize me, too Their look at me longer than people here do There are no people there who I once knew.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Garavice is a graveyard and an extermination location established by the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) during WWII near my hometown of Bihać where over 12,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma civilians were murdered in 1941 at the beginning of WWII https://jadovno.com/zaboravljen-ustaski-zlocin-nad-12-000-srba-na-garavicama/#.X1Ffii1h00Q . See more in Dedijer (1992)).
- 11.
Interesting work on these topics was done in a theoretical and artistic assemblage “Mathemes of Reassociation: Towards the Matheme of Genocide” done by the Monument Group 2009. Available at https://grupaspomenik.wordpress.com/mathemes-of-re-assotiation/%20towards-the-matheme-of-genocide/
- 12.
Saying that the civil war was in fact pre-emptive echoing Semelin’s argument of the “actors destroying ‘them’ in order to save ‘us’” (Semelin, 2007).
- 13.
A trope or “commonplace” is a semi-logical, semi-ideological proposition, recognized as probable by a social formation, which serves to ground various arguments (Leps, 2004, p. 283). A topos of history (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 36) as an argumentative strategy in legitimating the past and projecting it onto the future beside the topic also reveals the ideological character of history. Instead of establishing some sort of positivistic knowledge aiming to arrive at a “historical truth,” it establishes what Foucault calls “regimes of truth” or truth effects, which are further linked to statements of power (Foucault, 1981).
- 14.
“Invocation of larger set of ethnically targeted mass killings … as part of the late 1980s and early 1990s nationalist political mobilization of Serbs in hostility to Croats and Muslims” (Hayden, 2013, p. 138) was part and parcel of a strong, media fuelled moral panic (Cohen, 2011) of the early 1990s and the fear that “history would repeat itself” and that Serbs would be exterminated by Croats and their Muslim accomplices like it happened in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) (Dedijer, 1992; Denitch, 1994, p. 368; Dulić, 2005). Interestingly, this fear of a repetition of the extermination of Serbs, as carried out by the ISC in 1941–1945, existed even though ethnicized victims and atrocities against specific ethnic populations had not been part of an official master narrative in the SFRY. Instead, victims of ethnicized violence were represented as general victims of German and local fascists, according to Ranka Gašić’s (2010) analysis of Serbian history textbooks in the 1990s that reveals that past and present were connected in a way that suggested the “inevitability” of these developments, with an ongoing war as a “longue durée” phenomenon in post-Yugoslav Serbia (Ibid.).
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Majstorović, D. (2021). From Discourse to Body and Back via Critical Materialism: Bringing Discourse and Affect Research Together. In: Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_4
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