Privatna i javna politika teksta
Private and Public Politics of Literature

Summary/Abstract: The article relates political and literary theory and discusses their recent synergistic outcome – the “politics of literature”. “Politics of literature” is not only a conceptual descendant of the postmodern emancipatory tactics that change the society ‘from within’ but a spin-off of the post-M arxist reworking of hegemony theory as well. On the one hand, it involves a break with the emancipation understood as striving for the “rights” articulated by diverse “identities”, and, on the other, it implies a final theoretical abandonment of the base-and-superstructure-determinism according to which literature would be no more than a reflection of reality of production forces. The article repositions the current debate on the politics of literature by channelling it towards a critique of the ideologemes of privatism and passivism. The emphasis is not so much on the critical praxis of reading the texts supposed to be irrevocably immersed into ideology, as on insisting on reading those texts that, even without critical mediation, subvert the above-mentioned ideologemes and possibly even offer a sort of “prospective opening” in their ideological setting. One should keep in mind that the conceptual ambivalence of “emancipation” allows for reshuffling of prospective political (and literary-political) projects so that every emancipatory gesture that approaches the space of public visibility by departing from its previous deprived state could at any moment show its own dispossessing face. The critic’s task is not to read ideology but to observe the textual usage of concepts of “private” and “public” (parallel to “deprived” and “privileged”, “passive” and “active”), i.e. to critically examine the fictively formulated political activity and carefully wait for the moment in which the political turns into politics.

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