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are post-exotic texts about post-exotic writers, texts shot through with a revolutionary discourse stripped of any historical reference to our world but made all the more haunting for that.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."
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