Todor KULjIĆ
Filozofski fakultet, Univerzitet u Beogradu
todorunbg@ptt.rs

Left-Wing Counter-Memory: Principles

Abstract: The paper considers some principles of left-wing memory culture after 1989. How should the left remember its own past? It should define its own perception of time and its memory priorities. In dialectical memory one should remember historical antitheses. In the past, one needs to recognize the stronger or weaker internal tensions of certain time segments, not the glorious contents of one’s own past. In the interwar years, the left introduced a new organization of time. This paper views the evolution of the left-wing’s philosophy of history and gives a new definition of the relationship between past and present. It points out the defeated left's gnoseological advantage. Unlike the identity-based linear view of one's own glorious ethnic past, the framework of the left-wing's self-reflexive memory is temporal contingency. It contains the dialectical balance of the contradictions characteristic for the left-wing’s past.

Key words: The Left-Wing, Counter-Memory, Historical Antithesis, Dialectical Memory

Summary

This article presents the principles of philosophical-historical memory of the left’s defeat, deprived of the messianically nurtured hope for the necessary triumph of social justice. It considers the evolution of the left’s philosophy of history and the new definition of the relationship between past and present. Important theoretical impulses for the new organization of time were sought in the leftist philosophy of history between the two world wars. In the philosophy of history, the defeat is considered to be as normal as victory. Therefore, the future is also open to defeats of the left which should not be understood as a definite catastrophe. Epistemologically speaking, only through defeat and not through triumph, the ideas of the left may be more critically considered and dialectically re-evaluated.

The article deals with the question of how the left should remember its own past. Arguments are made in support of the fact that, in the new organization of memory and its own history after 1989, the left should first define its own temporality and re-examine the criteria of historical social time imposed by the victors. The article concludes that linear and homogeneous memory records only the positive aspects of the collective past and is, therefore, not enlightened but glorious, revanchist, combative, conflictual, vengeful, identity-driven, moralizing, and thus devoid of self-reflection. In contrast, the article argues that the left should distance itself from the history of the victors and revive the history of the defeated and forgotten, as opposed to the victorious neoliberal narrative of the end of history which stretches the present into a new teleology of globalized capitalism. The left should accept a pattern of historical temporality that differs from the homogeneous and linear times of historicism and abandon the instrumental relationship toward its own past. Instead, it should start from the vision of an alternative time that is torn, multidirectional, and packed with unfulfilled possibilities.