As to the Essay 3 Postscriptum of 2002, it uses one of my essays on terrorism (“Access,” and see “Exploring”) to compare it with war, and concludes that the boundary between them is being erased.
A pleasing union of my masters and preoccupations then resulted in Essay 4 (2001) on Brecht’s reworking of The Communist Manifesto for our age of world wars. To the last moment of preparing this volume it was unclear whether The Brecht Heirs (an institution which is in the production of The Brecht Industry analogous to capital owners, not least in fettering production) will accord me the copyright permission for the translation of that text. This was finally given against a small payment, but the problem remains.
A theoretical point embodied by that essay is whether poetry (and its sister arts, from narrative prose through painting to music and dance) has a cognitive status. Having learned from them at least half of what I know and cherish, my pragmatic answer is: yes, poetry is cognitive—though in different ways than science and philosophy. I put some arguments to buttress this into Essay 8 (and more in my case study “Cognition”), but this is only incipient greening of—so far as I know—a theoretical desert.
Essay 5 (2003) was sparked by chance and kind friends but gave me a chance to look, with growing dismay, at the discipline of English Studies, in which—though I had other interests too—I faithfully laboured for over one third of a century, teaching much from medieval drama, Shakespeare, and Swift to Woolf. It is a case study of how ideology under capitalism infiltrates and bends an intellectual profession. It tallied with my reflections on my own class, the intellectuals (see “Utopianism” and “On Cognition”) and its “treason by clerics” against emancipation and against its own reason for being. With bitter poetic justice, this class of mine has now been downgraded into a push-pen amanuensis and gofer for the brainwashing at the basis of capitalist power. Only a Swiftian stance can hope to render justice to this monstrosity, and I have stolen from this all-time favourite of mine as much as I could lift.
Indignant frustration at my yearly bouts with residence permits led to Essay 6 (2006-07; and cf. its predecessor “Exile”). It is a case not only of direct link between autobiography and intellectual production, but also of what I feel is the latter’s psychic beauty: that creativity renders the creator omnipotent, albeit only inside the tiny sub-creation and while it is being appreciated by others. But even limited divine status—fortunately also challengeable within a vast pantheon of creative godlets—is preferable to none. Inside the cognitions and pleasures of my work, police bureaucracy is held at bay. As Adorno remarked, “theory is a kind of stand-in for happiness” (53)—and it shared the ambiguous nature of all such ersatzes. Also, the alternative of “civil cohabitation” I argue for is toothless, but it is young and may get some milk teeth at least, if given a chance to grow. Which is why I’m republishing it, inside Leviathan.
Another lucky chance, the review of a misguided periodical issue, led to the brief Essay 7 (2008)—for how could I pass by an issue called “Brecht and Communism”? At the time I had begun work on my major preoccupation in these last years, the anatomy of SFR Yugoslavia, a self-proclaimed socialist State led by a self-proclaimed communist party. Most of the reviewed articles provided a perfect case of what I had to shun if I were, beyond praise or blame, to make sense of either—and Brecht was there to help me along. The essay led to the tangent of how to initially disentangle the term communism (is it a place, a horizon or an orientation?):
You’ve heard much untruth about it from enemies, from friends
Much untruth also.... (Brecht, Das Manifest, vv. 14-15)
Essay 8, “On the Horizons of Epistemology and Science” (2008-09) is, together with the one on war, the longest and possesses the widest scope in the volume. It is, so far, the culmination of what I have understood about cognition in class society: the pernicious Unique Truth, the refusal of human history, technoscience as the life-destroying bludgeon of capitalism, plus how to use Hesiod’s concept-splitting to understand these and how to begin tracing “whither now?” To my initial two (or with Walter Benjamin three) paragons, Nelson Goodman, Gramsci, Marcuse, and Nietzsche had to be adjoined for guidance.
Essay 9, “Death into Life” (2009), was on the contrary an attempt at a summation in 5,000 words of what I would have to say to a more politically awake audience. It is not a foray onto new terrain but a consolidation of already visited terrains. It ranges widely, it had to be compressed; and I decided that I had to overcome my pusillanimous use of verse separately from prose (I’ve published three collections of poetry, see the entries in Suvin, “Bibliography B,” on Armirana Arkadija, The Long March, and Abiko Annual nos. 24 and 25), or as citations to prove a point—say, Blake in the preceding essay—or, at best, as an object of inquiry (say, Brecht in Essay 4). I interleaved in each of the five essay sections a poem with expository prose, and hope the brief repetition in those sections of what I’ve mostly written before would gain a new dimension through the condensed poems’ interaction with them and with each other.
Essay 10 arose from thinking of what I could bring to a conference of Left-wing European economists in 2009, at the beginning of our Great Depression (but before the manmade tsunami had devastated most of beautiful Greece). I went back to basics: having studied thermodynamics and read much in ecology, I tried to bring this into a critical economics, issuing in some initial policy proposals. The presupposition for them is that the power of capitalist financing would be broken. As Buckminster Fuller told us in the 1960s, we are at Utopia or Oblivion.
Essay 11 is the working hypothesis for my forthcoming study of classes in ex-Yugoslavia. My stance here, as elsewhere, is one of a mildly sceptical reuse of classical Marxism—which for me cannot taboo some insights of Lenin—not as a dogma of Truth but as a flexible guide for possible understanding and action today.
So, at the end, are these “sketches of landscapes” by the road of life in these times a well-planned and homogeneous album? I’m afraid not. I believe they share a single Haltung, with a horizon of poetic justice and an intolerance against what degrades people. They might be a collection of some oil paintings interspersed with gouaches and drawings. Perhaps pictures from an exhibition in progress?
Lucca, Italy, April 2012
Works Cited
Presupposed: the opuses of Brecht, Marx, Benjamin, Gramsci, some Nietzsche and much poetry.
This book is, as it were, the third in a trilogy embracing also my two books of 2010 and 2011 cited below; ideally, it should be read together with them, since they look at similar or identical landscapes from various angles and heights.
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “Towards a New Manifesto?” Transl. R. Livingstone. NLR no. 65 (2010): 33-61. [cited as H-A]
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long 20th Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
Braudel, Fernand. The Perspective of the World. Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 3. Transl. S. Reynolds. London: Collins, 1984.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Revolutionaries. London: Abacus, 2008 [original 1973].
Suvin, Darko. “Access to an Identification of >Terrorism<“ (2001) and “Exploring >Terror/ism<“: Numinosity, Killings, Horizons” (2004), both in his Darko Suvin: A Life in Letters. Ed. Ph.E. Wegner. Vashon Island WA 98070: Paradoxa, 2011, 263-305.
—. “Bibliography B,” in his Darko Suvin [see above], 355-62.
—. “Brecht and Subjectivity” (1989-2006), in his Darko Suvin [see above], 133-57.
—. “Cognition, Freedom, The Dispossessed as a Classic” (2007) in his Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction, and Political Epistemology. Oxford: P. Lang, 2010, 509-51.
—. “Exile as Mass Outrage and Intellectual Mission,” in Maria Teresa Chialant ed., Viaggio e letteratura. Venezia: Marsilio, 2006, 69-95.
—. “Utopianism from Orientation to Agency: What Are We Intellectuals under Post-Fordism to Do?” (1997–1998) and “On Cognition as Art and Politics” (1997–1999), in his Defined [see