post-exoticism decoded

In one of his contributions to a book of Volodine criticism entitled Défense et illustration du post-exotisme  en vingt lecons, in the essay "A la frange du réel," Volodine writes:

Sur les trois ou quatre mille pages [!] que nous avons aujourd’hui publiées, on peut mettre en évidence des tonalités bien différentes, mais je crois qu’on aurait du mal à déceler la moindre contradiction idéologique. Il y a des pages baroques, fantastiques, lyriques, des cris et des murmures, mais toutes obéissent à une seule et même vision de la société et de l’histoire. … aucune voix post-exotique ne s’écarte d’une philosophie de jusqu’auboutisme politique, d’une philosophie fondée sur l’insurrection et l’égalitarisme. Cette unité idéologique est voulue, cette philosophie n’est invoquée par hasard. La communauté post-exotique s’est constituée sur une base militante radicale bien précise.

Reading Volodine criticism, I sometimes think the consistency of post-exotic ideology hasn't been fully appreciated; book reviews that blandly evoke "the tragedies of the twentieth century" seem to pass over the centrality of revolution's tragic defeat in post-exoticism (even if Volodine himself sometimes uses that phrase, the tragedies of the twentieth century, revolution's defeat isn't just one tragedy among the others, for post-exoticism).

On the other hand, I'm cautious about writing in a such a way that "la sympthatisante, c'est moi." Because post-exotic jusqu'auboutisme is so consistent and so frank ("Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses."), because its extreme-leftism is so upfront, it seems silly to decode it. I might end up writing a leftist equivalent of a history of Hogwarts, a kind of ponderously academic fan-fiction, fully immersed in the world of the fiction.

On the other other hand, I think post-exotic texts produce narratees (sympathizers) for whom chamanizing and interrogating the enemies of the people are just what you do. Are just what is to be done. That narratee needs no persuading, so post-exoticism never stages debates, never poses problem-tales about whether something else ought to have been done instead.

One could wish Volodine hadn't used the word "insurrection" there; to American ears, at least, it recalls insurrectionary anarchism. The revolution (and the party) so obscurely* evoked in post-exoticism seems to me to have less to do with spontaneous actions and more to do with "the totalising temporal imaginary of revolution that so marked the visions and strategies of the modern left" and "an advancing, unifying and largely homogeneous planetary movement of liberation." (Alberto Toscano, "Logistics and Opposition").... Then again, so many of post-exoticism's clashes are between ultra-leftists and party stalwarts, but always within the horizon of "la revolution mondiale."

["obscure" only to the extent that revolution is never narrated in post-exoticism.]

post-exoticism, antidote to Left melancholia

In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, but not the rationality of the ambition. Transition, to capitalism, shadowed by the enumeration of crimes, through a ‘transitional justice’ that is both an exorcism and a prevention of any attempt to repeat that doomed exploit.

and:

Revolution is only tragic from the standpoint of a commitment to its drive, process and aims.

Alberto Toscano, “Politics in a Tragic Key,” Radical Philosophy, July/August 2013.

Post-exoticism never debates revolution; there are no post-exotic novels of ideas. Instead, there are post-exotic texts about post-exotic writers, texts shot through with a revolutionary discourse stripped of any historical reference to our world but made all the more haunting for that. We learn about the post-exotics only in a mass, obscurely; we're told that the post-exotic writers participated in “the war for egalitarianism and the punishment of the pogromists;” that they “rose up to destroy unhappiness, root and branch” (Ecrivains); that their post-exotic writing joined in the “bare-handed plot…against the universe of capitalism and its countless degradations" (Le post-exotisme).

The disaster of revolution's defeat remains obscure in post-exoticism. It is not narrated, and, for all that post-exoticism is suffused with a poetic, tragic discourse ("la lutte contre le malheur"), its texts are not "about" revolution (they do not tell its story), though they're about almost nothing else. Post-exoticism writes the defeat of revolution (a long defeat, for example from the founding of the Cheka all the way to 1989, not the abrupt failure of Germany 1919) but without ever recounting the incidents of the defeat. It writes revolution's defeat in such a way that it answers Toscano's criticism: post-exoticism evokes the depth of the fall and the justness of the ambition, the magnitude of the suffering and the rationality (even if doomed) of undertaking a global lutte contre le malheur.

(To the extent that post-exoticism harks back to the Soviet Union, it refers us to our own past [and present]; to the extent that it harks back to “la revolution mondiale,” it refers us to a past we never had, not really, even though anti-colonialism was global, even though communist revolutions were all over the world but only in staggered, uncoordinated ways. But in a way this is worse: revolution there succeeded on a scale never seen in our world, and it failed all the more.)

Even if, as Toscano says, revolution is tragic only from the standpoint of a commitment to revolution, I am not sure that is the novels' standpoint. Commitment to revolution is the standpoint of the characters and writers of post-exoticism (but with this latter, we enter the vexed ground of post-exoticism's borders: in a way, one can say with certainty that Volodine shares his characters' commitments, but only because "Volodine" is interior to the fictional edifice of post-exoticism, in that he writes pseudonymously and speaks publicly only as a spokesman of post-exoticism.) Post-exoticism is addressed to sympathizers, but those may not be its actual readers. But within the closed (fictional) world of the (fictional) creation of (fictional) post-exotic texts, where to write is to struggle against the universe of capitalism, there, the failure does not occasion Left melancholia but amor fati. Freed of anxieties, calculations, doubts, regrets; in some ways, the exemplary post-exotic bearing is that of this atheistic monk from Bardo or not Bardo: "Il se fiche tranquillement de tout sans éprouver d’anxiété nihiliste."

post-exotic anarchism II

L'homme qui s'adressent aux mineurs est le coordinateur des secours, un ingénieur brutal, Kamatchkine, avec qui Moreno et Lougovoï ont été plusieurs fois en conflit pour des raisons syndicales. Ils n'ont pour lui aucune estime et lui, de son coté, les déteste pour leur anarchisme.--Volodine, Bardo or not Bardo.

Post-exoticism's heretical Buddhists seem entirely different, to me, than its defeated communists. It's a question at all, their similarity or difference, because of their frequent co-occurrence & strange entanglements, as in the above quoted passage, where these anarchist miners trapped in a mine (these miners who also have had dealings with "reseaux de soutien à la lutte armée") become dissident Buddhists of a sort, for a little while.

(Or, it's a question at all because, despite the strange entanglements--"revolutionary shamanism" and the respect afforded the unrepentant revolutionary who takes refuge at the lamassary in the first segment of Bardo or not Bardo--despite those entanglements, it's not as though post-exotics are doubly, comfortably ensconced in some disenchanted world after "the end of grand narratives.")

Throughout Bardo or not Bardo, there's the the peculiar fact that heresy (for example, atheism) hardly goes against Buddhism. It almost seems like Buddhism perfected. Here, in Des enfers fabuleux, a foundling named Wikeyoon has been brought up in an Arctic lamassary known as Wookarone:

À dix-sept ans il reçut enfin les dernières verités, une compréhension globale du monde. Rien n’avait de substance, sinon le terreur d’être. Dans ce néant, Wookarone n’était qu’un pivot secret, cher à ton couer Wijeyekoon, mais remplaçble, à l’égal de millards d’autres miroitements de réalité. Vous suivez? Et Wookarone était seulement une légende, un alignement de rochers basaltiques que balayait le vent glacial, à la lisière d’un océan sur lequel marchaient les ours, onze mois sur douze. 

But the defeat of the revolution is not a "last truth," and revolutionary activity doesn't come to an end in post-exotic books, even though they're set after the end.