ПИСАЊЕ КАО НАСТАВАК БОРБЕ ДРУГИМ СРЕДСТВИМА: СЛУЧАЈ БОРИСЛАВА ПЕКИЋА
WRITING AS A CONTINUATION OF STRUGGLE BY OTHER MEANS: THE CASE OF BORISLAV PEKIĆ

Summary/Abstract: The paper opens with an examination of the myth of literature, which is comprised of the following elements: the conviction that literary creation is symbolically set above the manufacturing of goods; the dominant aesthetic and cognitive function of a work of literature; the autonomy of literature; the conviction that the reader is not a consumer of literature, but a human endowed with aesthetic needs, as well as the need to get to know the world and finally, the conviction that literature can be used as the consciousness of society in the sense that it is an example of the existence of universal cultural values. Pekić distanced himself from such an understanding of the myth of literature because he deemed political activism as his primary profession. Since he was denied the ability to practice political activism within a communist dictatorship, Pekić saw writing as a means of continuing the struggle by other means. Such a self-proprietary concept of writing influenced Pekić’s poetics as well, which is characterized by: 1) the ideal of an endless sentence and an endless opus; 2) the understanding of a literary text as an answer to a political question; 3) the expansion of the context of the reply, which would result in generating new enquiries and listing of different possible replies to the same question. At the end of the paper, we highlight the importance and topicality of Pekić’s concept of writing in an age marked by the anti-myth of literature, whose origins are a consequence of the abandonment of humanism in the era of posthumanist/anti-humanistic Megalopolis.

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