Unworking Revolution
Unworking Revolution

Summary/Abstract: In the art collection of the Satu Mare County Museum there are a significant number of artworks created during the regime that ruled between 1945 and 1989, known as “communism”. To prepare for a processing and, perhaps, a possibility of interpreting these works, this paper is a preliminary analysis, which sets as its goal to discuss the core matters of the “spectre” (the name of communism in the Manifesto of the Communist Party), against which one can measure, if it is possible at all to measure such things, the deviation or the counter-meaning produced by really existing forms of communism. Doubled in Romania, at some point, with a protochronist ethno-nationalism, the really existing regime provided a quite precise framework for artistic production, establishing not only its general meaning, but also its exemplary forms. The discussion I propose here strongly illuminates the essentially emancipatory character of the communist initial, in order to create a contre-jour effect and, as such, to impress a profile. For this analysis, my paper uses pieces from the theoretical toolbox developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, supplemented with a revisiting of the Western philosophical tradition in political thinking, from Aristotle to Marx, and finds a sort of anchor in Maurice Blanchot’s writings. The notion of unworking in the title translates the concept of desoeuvrement proposed by the latter, a concept reworked for philosophical use and applied to the idea of community/communism by Jean-Luc Nancy, who speaks of la communaute desoeuvree (approximately: the inoperative community, or, in my reading: the unworking community). In his footsteps, I say, in my turn, unworking revolution, that is, idle, without work – thought of without what is, in it, revolutionary oeuvre/work –, revolution pure and simple, if there is a “pure and simple” of revolution at all.

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