The Invisible Armada

27/01/2024

Opening Lecture of the “Dubravka Ugrešić Lecture Series” https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/opening-lecture-heressee (Wednesday, 11 October 2023,
Universität Wien, Aula am Campus, Altes AKH, Hof 1, Spitalgasse 2–4, 1090 Wien)

Dedicated to the memory of Dubravka Ugrešić  [1]

***


Provincialism

In this paper, i see the gender and cold war dichotomies as part of the same complex system of binaries that govern hegemony and domination, and produce war. Since, at a young age, i realized the discomfort and oddity of being born a girl, i have been trying to circumvent the gender binarity sealed in language, and preferred a fluid gender to the masculine and feminine, fixed ones. Likewise with other binaries and “identities”. Binaries tend to support and reinforce each other, and to produce the perception of a bipolar or split world, which amounts to reality presenting itself as – and becoming – (as if) dichotomic. Thereby politics, or political thinking reveals itself as insufficient, and disappears, in ready made formulae that eschew the world’s complexity and abandon any hope through utopia. Non dual categories do exist, but present themselves as an incomprehensible chaos of anti-system options galore, where – progress is not guaranteed by the political process any more. Only binaries ensure some sort of stability, at the price of nuanced reading of a situation. When there are only two poles, one of them, in being alternative, is made subaltern, which is hidden by the apparent symmetry. I noticed the erasure of alternatives, projects, narratives, translations and languages through a dichotomy dialectics, especially after 1989, including the erasure of other people [2]. One of the many agents of erasure is abstract universalism : in many cases, what we get through the universalisation of a dichotomic nationalist paradigm relying on misogyny, is only the overinflated provincializing of the said nationalism. Whatever comes as the carrier or a representative of patriarchal hegemony, is the overinflating provincializing of historically dominant masculinity, regularly bound to nationalism. Every other option is then rendered illegitimate, and erased. Epistemologically, our impoverished political vocabulary signals the degradation to a general confusionality, depoliticisation, desemanticisation. The war-machine operates through language too. This happens in a world where accepted and generalised gender discrimination is constitutive of the general non-egalitarian system of nation states, and sustains, as a pattern, all other inequalities and injustices. This must stop, not only for the sake of women. Proceeding from discontinuities, as a non-species, non-nation, non-identity, non-gender, as i propose, we would give the other species, genders, individuals, other options and “foreigners”, the same chances that we have : only then would we too be safe, inasmuch as others are safe with us [3].

***


Femmage to Dubravka

My femmage that goes to Dubravka Ugrešić will not have the form of a paper about her work, but of some remarks enabled also by her writing, as well as by others. It is togetherness and interdependence, relying on others, that makes us work, feel and think jointly, which could be a part of a project of feminist pacifist ethics. Dubravka had literary tools to deal with, while i was in philosophy. By the end of her life, she had completely understood and deconstructed nationalist-and-misogynous mechanisms without any need of philosophy. I actually believe in the advantages of literature over philosophy in many ways. I am not a specialist on Dubravka or on Yugoslav literatures, but i had been her reader and friend. In an unexpected and retroactive manner, Dubravka has taught me essential things about life because of her peculiar and uninhibited facing of death, that i deem admirable, and respect. She is the only person i know whose death is not defeat. She had been contemplating death singlehandedly, without wanting to burden anyone. I am most indebted to her in also this retrospective lesson. Much of it came as an unexpected and extravagant gift of awareness over the grave.

I was recently reading two papers of mine written some forty years ago [4]. My work at the Institute for developing countries in Zagreb as well as these papers come after the important historic event of a feminist international conference in 1978 in Belgrade, at the Students’ cultural centre. The next most important feminist conference took place in 2015 in Sarajevo, organised by Women in Black. Dubravka didn’t take part in any, but benefitted, as the whole generation, from this critical atmosphere, air du temps. It made her strong, resistant and courageous.

I am now struck by my vocabulary of that time (as part of the generally used political language). It is a jargon full of socialist and non-aligned clichés i must say, although i still agree to many of those ideas. In the same way, today’s political language will appear as antiquated and insufficient soon. Only after the collapse of Yugoslavia did i realize how a mainstream terminology that one unconsciously uses, works within, limiting one’s political imagination. I had been musing on this, on language, translation and epistemology ever since. After the collapse of Yugoslavia and as i migrated to France, i felt that i lack a language making sense, but also that the French, and everyone else, were likewise stuck in the post-1989 mental-politico-linguistic circumstances after the historical cold war, with frozen ideological « scientific » jargons. At a four decades distance, i could re-read my own early papers as someone else’s and from within « capitalism ». I discovered that people living in the former west as triumphant, didn’t necessarily have the privilege of a comparable dispassion/detachment that we had been exposed to in 1989. The cold war division was real and still holding. We were all abandoning the cold war binary governed by the exclusion of third and plural options, but had not found a new shared vocabulary and world-map yet. That is how and why i resorted to the author Radomir Konstantinović [5]. Later, Boaventura de Sousa Santos was and still is valuable on that issue. So are many others, especially feminist reinterpreters of history such as eye openers Silvia Federici and others. Somehow, patriarchy was and still is tacitly tolerated and only very generally critiqued, never seen as constitutive of all inequalities and governing them.

It is through the Yugoslav war that we became political in a new manner. One learns geography and politics when a war hits. Twenty years before it, thanks among others to Konstantinović’s guidance, to Praxis philosophers [6] i was a student of (partly relying on them but partly resisting them), i and others were already political through dealing with women’s issues, contesting both social practices as well as challenging state dogmas. Our becoming political was gradual. We learned about nationalism, its entanglement with, and support from, patriarchy only through the war, having been raised on the transnational ideology of wishful « brotherhood and unity » (bratstvo i jedinstvo) which made us blind to any manifestation of nationalism. We also realized that nationalism, that was to define the Yugoslav conflict, was an instrumental, purposeful populism with no particular ideology of its own but misogyny combined with producing enemies transformed into « others », other nationals, but actually serving other purposes : gaining and keeping political and economic power in its, at that time, only available form – the nation, as well as male domination within a new hegemony that was hurriedly constructed in utter violence. The philosophical issue to study here is how war and violence to women and other subalterns are constitutive, structural and linked in reciprocal support.

When i first met Dubravka Ugrešić in the seventies, she was ironic, satirical and « weird » (somewhat in the sense of the Russian modern concept of ostranenie, of which she was fond), as an already recognised author, rather than directly political. At that time, she rejected the accusation and label of feminism, thrown at her and others as an allegation. She tried to divest herself from it, as was usually the case in the mainstream. Soon to be declared a witch with others, through a violent misogynous media campaign in 1992 in early Croatia and Yugoslavia, she gradually transformed her freaky « witch » tag into her force of resistance, wearing it proudly in essayistic combat. She didn’t join the trans-yugoslav academic feminist movement in the seventies. This is comprehensible, and she cannot be blamed for it. We adopt different and isolated individual strategies in order to resist social or state repression, in the case of women also because solidarity among them has historically been discouraged in order to keep them secluded within separate families. Unlike men’s, their model has not been universalised. But she was too intelligent to stay put. Observing the ugly warmongering politics, she soon discovered that misogyny was inherent in nationalism, which she detested and critiqued. Dubravka soon and purposely earned herself a trans-national status or, as she said, a profile out-of-nation [7]. Her political education, like everyone else’s at that time, came to a great extent from the war. She became daring and outspoken politically out of necessity, indignation and nerve, in particular in her critique of nationalisms, of historical misogyny and femicides and of the politics of post-yugoslav states.

In the second of my two mentioned papers of that time written for the Institute [8], i had attempted a timid critique of the curriculum of the Department of indian studies i had studied at in Zagreb (and after which i had been to India 1970-1972 for a doctorate in buddhist philosophy). Beyond university, i had access to some first elements of subaltern and postcolonial studies in real time, and learned from them. Our whole programme, reading material etc. at university came from traditional western, mainly German and UK indology, in spite of the Yugoslav Non-aligned project. The paradox is that that Department of Indian studies was the most accomplished and immediate product in the country of a long-term non-aligned cultural-educational project, created with the Non-aligned movement as its impulse and inspiration. We also had other departments and courses, of Indian, Arabic or Chinese languages and culture etc. at various universities, many publications and translations in journals, a series of world literature books [9] of which one volume was Southern Asia : Indian, Tibetan, and south-east Asian literatures [10], a trans-yugoslav journal called Kulture istoka in Belgrade, a quantity of translations of literature from southern countries, with various publishers and also in many journals. I was involved in much of this

***

About translation

My purpose is to a great deal epistemological.


Translation and (the national) language or mother tongue come as one and the same capacity, and in the same package with predetermined gender. They have a non-predetermined role in war and violence too. Translation means welcoming otherness in oneself. But backed by an official language policy, it poses or cannot avoid - the national language and gender as given. Deconstructing repressive binaries as a steady war machine requires deconstructing them together, as a dominant system of repressive dichotomies that unfalteringly support each other : gender reduced to only masculine and feminine, body and soul/spirit, identity as construction (always conflicting with another and producing it,), race, citizenship (as opposed to undocumented or illegal immigrant), madness and straightness, east and west or north and south, opposed nationalisms etc. Nationalisms and sovereignty always reinforce the gendered and national/ethnic and class division of societies, as well as other cleavages. While gender is an ambiguous concept [11], i take both nation and nationalism to be lethal especially nowadays, associated with toxic masculinities and toxic sovereignties. The disambiguation of our terms should also help in deconstructing and stopping war, in particular permanent war-faring.
I use my own concepts (“political forgetting”, “erasure”, “useless history”, “partage de la raison”, “in-com-possibles”, “politics of translation”), in a context where i anticipate sharing knowledges, and where it is clear that nation and gender operate together in maintaining knowledge enclosures. These become crucial in nation building. The language itself, as part of the narrative on national culture, becomes a war instrument.

I come from a war and from a language that was once considered one, with plural political standardisations, and sometimes with distinct scripts. The different stylistic standardisations are worked out by political rather than linguistic motivations originating in the mainstream dominant ruled “identities”. They become crucial in nation building. The language itself as part of the narrative on national culture, becomes a war instrument. You now have the same situation between ukrainian and russian. National standardisations of languages are part of the war projects, out of which the national language is (re)born, including by linguistic secession. National projects appropriate the language. National Academies declare themselves the national language owners and custodians exerting language purism. This process is still going on forty years after the war. Dubravka Ugrešić, who wrote in moderate croatian, is of a generation of writers who understood this. So was in particular another important writer, Daša Drndić [12]. The purge was imposed through the media stigmatising writers, and especially women intellectuals produced as witches, and unequivocally called so. Serbocroatian became four official languages, through renaming.
People of course still understand each other over the fences and speak one language, but are blamed for doing so by nationalists. The resistance is called Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku, the « Declaration on a shared (common) language » [13].

***

No innocence of a language

But language is never innocent or neutral [14]. We practice “double-speak” at all times between theoretical and ordinary language : theoretical critical concepts we use in our work are also ordinary words in everyday speech that tend to be normative. Used in social sciences and education, they will often be misunderstood. There seems to be no outright representation of the incompleteness and provisional aspect of knowledge or of language. Our general time of confusionism favours judgemental divagations and misinterpretations that may sometimes have devastating political effects. Wars start also through the irresponsible misuse of words.

Let’s assume that reciprocally incomplete subjects handle reciprocally incomplete knowledges [15] and languages. Taking it into account makes possible the building in solidarity of versatile subjectivities that equally partake in sharing and becoming-together. We need to push Deleuze’s concept of devenir a little further, to devenir ensemble – becoming together. Partial knowledges and subjectivities, made subaltern and subordinate, are disqualified, made invisible or considered non-existent. They become “illegitimate” and are silenced. Yet silence can sometimes also be a resource. As Athena Athanasiou has it, silence is “a socially and culturally devalued genre through which ’subjugated knowledges’ are performed and hegemonic discourses potentially contested. [16]” We have namely discovered, also through reading other languages and opening to other worldviews (cosmovisiones), that different subjectivities (dissident, a-sovereign and in becoming through shared action) can operate and be efficient not only through subjectivation but also through de-subjectivation and de-identification [17].

***

The limits and sharing of knowledge. The double-edge of concepts (f. ex., gender)

The illegitimacy of incomplete and silenced non-hegemonic knowledge [18] and languages is enforced in patriarchal capitalism. Permanent wars and the involvement of the west/Europe in them coincide with the constitutive violence on women and vulnerable social groups by both society and the State, which capture knowledges and languages too. It is women and, often, feminist women and men, who make the connection between the violence to women and violence to others (in war, and nowadays, to migrants), and draw the obvious conclusions.

As Belgrade historian Dubravka Stojanović writes, "[Patriarchy and nationalism] are inseparable. Nationalism sees the nation as an extended family, as a blood relationship. (...) That is why every nationalism must be misogynous, because the very appearance of women (...) would destroy that authoritarian pyramidal creation in which the hierarchy is not questioned but obeyed. I am ready to go so far as to say that nationalism was invented as a means of maintaining patriarchy, as well as a means of gaining power, strengthening it, preserving it… That is, nationalism is used as a means to immobilise society, for development never to come, to stifle all modernity. [...] I want to radicalize this and add that maintaining the patriarchal order was one of the strong motives for the disintegration of Yugoslavia, because within closed national constructs this social order is far easier to maintain than in a complex multi-ethnic, multi-confessional community. In essence, it poses a constant challenge to a closed society and a patriarchal matrix. [19]”

At the same time, correlatively and in return, women and the defiant supposedly “weak and vulnerable”, represent the dissenting destituting element and cannot be reduced to a binary or to the received and fixed socio-political configuration crowned by sovereignty. This is because their subordination represents the basis and the constituent condition of the system, but their destituting insubordination (dispossessed of sovereignty) outlines a powerful though formally non-sovereign and unrecognised dissenting subjectivity [20].

There are subjects considered “vulnerable”, “damaged”, “incomplete”, or made invisible in the mainstream. To different degrees, all subjects are necessarily “incomplete”, because the possible scope of our subjectivity is inexhaustible. Historically, subjectivity has socially and politically been denied or hampered in women and marginalised people, as well as in colonised continents. Whatever the span of subjects, they need to assemble and they need allies and a larger front. This is where systematic “disremembering” by various agencies intervenes [21]. In addition, many of the non-western epistemes not only do not particularly cultivate the concept of the subject (while subsuming it in the sense of sub-understanding it). They rather prioritize collective subjects or at least do not lose sight of these, because they don’t nurture the extreme individualism known to the (modern) west/north.

Self-sufficient and systemic state sovereignty, largely imaginary for most, which today changes its function and scope in order to maintain itself also in regional unions such as the European Union (EU), also reinforces the gendered division of societies seen as natural, as well as prescribed knowledges, and therefore also the subordination of women among others. The resistance by the mainstream or the establishment of power as such resorts to reproducing binaries, including new ones. Binaries implanted in the minds are there to pretend equivalence and equality in symmetries, but they really attempt to reinforce hierarchy, verticality, and domination at every turn, as well as hegemony. They reinforce also the erasure of alternative knowledges. This permanently maintained and regularly updated subordination is rendered invisible in order to be efficient. The European Union, but also some other countries, dictates a selective political amnesia from the point of view of the present post-cold war and neoliberal triumphalism. It is the EU’s choice of ethno-nationalisms and populism that leads to its closure. The concept of the political (le politique) has become normative. The history taking into account women, “aliens” and other species, but in the first place life and the living, will necessarily be intersectional.

Useless history is then a methodical “political oblivion” and muzzling, a programmed erasure of that past history that has not led to the current state of things, or of alternative histories. This concerns particularly the history of non-dominating nationalities and other « identities », while it is more pernicious with regard to gender and women’s history, because women’s subordination is much older than any other, and has never been deleted from the mental assemblage as a possibility of imagination. Dubravka Ugrešić in her essays, and in particular in her extraordinary Brnjica za vještice, “A muzzle for the witches” (with Merima Omeragić), knows something about it. Silvia Federici, who worked admirably on historic “witches” and the inquisition, too.

Only the official or mainstream scenario that has actually led directly to today’s situation considered as paradigmatic and legitimate, will be remembered, recalled or evoked, in its most reductive and crude form. Gender appears here to be an unstable double-front term (strangely sometimes identified with “women” themselves) [22]. It discloses alternative histories, such as women’s history, but also the history of our disciplines and subjects of research. The grids/registers of the conceptual apparatus ordaining our knowledge interact and are isomorphic with our social organisation and hierarchies. The same hierarchies work in the social sphere and among our disciplines, as well as in theoretical knowledge. This happens nowadays within a general epistemological confusionism and artificial intelligence too, that we face in public opinion, which draws on all fronts.

***

Non-alignment against east-west block-binarism and possibly other binarisms too

In the 1960s-70s, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), now useless history but nevertheless a powerful concept, effective at that time in international politics and in the UN, UNCTAD, OECD [23], etc., was a complex, social and cultural joint transnational and translational political project, comprising the idea of international equality between States and of a new and just economic world order. It rejected the two blocks of that time and supported anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, the cancellation of poor countries’ debt, etc.
It proclaimed gender equality in principle, yet made it wait forever like the rest of patriarchal formations. It was a good project at that time, and much could be learnt from it especially today (2023 [24]). The emergence of a global market from the 1960s on, contemporary with NAM and an international division of labour, favoured a further sexual division of labour.

***

Ignorance. Dépaysement

The EU has, for example, largely failed its women and other groups (since murderous violence against women continues as does de facto inequality, despite great legal and mores’ advances). These thereby constitute themselves into subjects. Women and migrants, two politically destituting or de-constituting and upsetting elements, as well as all those that are in opposition, have an interest in associating while constituting themselves, in a solidarity spirit of resistance struggles by which they construct themselves together - as subjects, both collective and singular.

We are witnessing changes in borders and partitions of countries (or sometimes recompositions) including in Europe, all linked to violence against women and “foreigners”. One last example is the war on Ukraine. The issue of borders appears in sovereignist projects of new exclusive nationalisms, including in what is seen as “useless history” today. The western hegemonic injunction proposes to southern and post-socialist countries to "catch up" with the rich countries, and to the women to catch up with men and to conform to their imagination, all the rest being useless history and erased. On the other hand, useful history is now the redoubling of the conversion to neoliberal capitalism and capitalist globalisation. Organized political oblivion is at the service of this enterprise, which also includes monolingualism [25], amnesia or the prohibition/rejection of languages that have been constructed as foreign, as well as a depoliticization of language.

To be continued...

Note: 

[1] A version of the present paper, under the title “Radical Togetherness and Non-Binarism for Caring, Sharing and Survival”, was presented as the Opening Lecture of the “Dubravka Ugrešić Lecture Series” https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/opening-lecture-heressee at the University of Vienna, Department of History, on october 11, 2023, at the invitation of prof. Zsófia Lóránd that honours me. I thank her for her cooperation and the occasion she gave me to discuss my anti-war, anti-violence and connected ideas from a feminist philosophical position.

[2] See the case of the “erased” citizens from other Yugoslav republics living in Slovenia at the time of the independence in the 1990s, for ex. J. Dedić, V. Jalušič & J. Zorn, The Erased, Ljubljana, Mirovni inštitut 2003 ; Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, Borders as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor, Durham, Duke University Press, 2013 ; as well as B. De Sousa Santos’s concept of non-existence in much of his writing, by which the « erased » are rendered invisible and condemned to non-existence.

[3] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, see “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching”, Diacritics, 32, n°3-4, december 2004 ; “Speaking for the Humanities”, Occasion : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 1, n° 1 (october 15, 2009), https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/occv01i01_Spivak_3.pdf .

[4] "Položaj žene (u okviru strategije socijalnog razvoja u svijetu)" (1979 : The position of women (within the framework of the social development strategy in the world) and "Pretpostavke za suradnju na polju kulture i obrazovanja s obzirom na domaću političku, društvenu i ekonomsku orijentaciju" (1982 : Assumptions for cooperation in the field of culture and education with regard to the domestic political, social and economic orientation). The latter was part of a collective work Pregled privredne suradnje SR Hrvatske sa zemljama u razvoju (« An overview of economic cooperation between the SR of Croatia and developing countries »), as part of the project "Unapređivanje suradnje privrede SR Hrvatske sa zemljama u razvoju" (Improving cooperation between the economy of the SR of Croatia and developing countries). Both had been written as part of my work at the Institut za zemlje u razvoju in Zagreb (Institute for developing countries, previously called Institut za Afriku, Institute for Africa). After the Institute, i went to work regularly at the Department of philosophy of Zagreb University (Filozofski fakultet), giving classes on asian philosophies to philosophy and indology students, as well as classes on western philosophies. I had already been teaching as a "volunteering assistant" at the Philosophy Faculty.

[5] Konstantinović (1928-2011), an author who accompanies me to this day : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radomir_Konstantinovi%C4%. First result : Iveković, La balcanizzazione della ragione, Manifestolibri, 1995 ; also : Autopsia dei Balcani. Saggio di psicopolitica, Raffaello Cortina, Milan 1999.

[6] An informal school of Marxist humanist non-mainstream philosophy and social sciences in Yugoslavia in the ninety-sixties, which published the journal Praxis and organised international summer schools on the island of Korčula until 1974.

[7] See a like project in Alienocene. Journal of the first Outernational, https://alienocene.com/

[8] "Unapređivanje suradnje privrede SR Hrvatske sa zemljama u razvoju" or Improving cooperation between the economy of the SR of Croatian and developing countries (within the volume 1, no. 3/4 year 1981 titled "Pregled privredne suradnje SR Hrvatske sa zemljama u razvoju", (« An overview of economic cooperation between the SR of Croatia and developing countries »).

[9] Povijest svjetske književnosti, a series published by Mladost-Liber, in Zagreb.

[10] R. Iveković, "Južna Azija : Indijska književnost, tibetska književnost, književnosti jugoistočne Azije" in Povijest svjetske književnosti 1 , ed. Svetozar Petrović, Mladost-Liber, Zagreb, 1982.

[11] In this paper, i shall also be drawing on my previous paper “Programmed political forgetting” from the conference “Traffic in Gender. Political Uses of Translation Within, Outside, and Against Academia”, organised by Eric Fassin, Marta Segarra and Ilana Eloit at the research unit Legs, at CNRS, Université de Nanterre and Université de Paris-8, in Paris on 12-14 april, 2022. It can be found on my page of www.academia.edu under “Talks” : https://www.academia.edu/74631145/IVEKOVI%C4%86_Programmed_political_forgetting.

[12] Daša Drndić (1947-1918), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da%C5%A1a_Drndi%C4%87.

[13] Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku : https://jezicinacionalizmi.com/deklaracija/, English : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Language

[14] Luce Irigaray, Parler n’est jamais neutre, Minuit, 1985.

[15] Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Justice against epistemicide, London-New York, Routledge 2014 ; The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham & London, Duke University Press 2018.

[16] Athena Athanasiou, Agonistic Mourning. Political Dissidence and the Women in Black, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2017, p. 232.

[17] Athena Athanasiou, Agonistic Mourning, p. 254, confirms this approach that i have been practicing.

[18] About hegemonic knowledges, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Sousa Santos, op. cit. 2014 & 2018.

[19] Darko Vujica, “Intervju sa Dubravkom Stojanović : Ništa nije večno, pa tako ni nacije”, in Prometej, 31-1-2022, http://www.prometej.ba/clanak/intervju/intervju-sa-dubravkom-stojanovic-nista-nije-vecno-pa-tako-ni-nacije-5153.

[20] Athena Athanasiou, Agonistic Mourning, p. 19.

[21] Jie-Hyun Lim, “Mnemonic Solidarity in the Global Memory Space”, global-e. Global Dynamics, 12, no. 4, January 31, 2019, https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/january-2019/mnemonic-solidarity-global-memory-space ; “Triple Victimhood : On the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crime, and Colonial Genocide”, Journal of Genocide Research, april 13, 2020, https://doi .org/10.1080/14623528 .202.1750822, and “Victimhood Nationalism and History Reconciliation in East Asia”, Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/2700211/Victimhood Nationalism and History Reconciliation_in East Asia ?emailworkcard=view–paper

[22] I have worked elsewhere on the relation of gender to sexuality, which is particularly relevant in french where the confusion à propos is great. To make a long story short, let me say that both concepts are mediated for us through the first, and not the second. It is through social spectacles that we see both social as well as “natural” realities. That binary doesn’t actually hold, although we have been using it in feminism to convey that the discrimination of women is not dictated by nature. In addition, the binary works differently in different languages. Which means however that we must defend gender studies and women’s studies under fire.

[23] UNCTAD : United Nations Conference for Trade and Development ; OECD : Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

[24] Paul Stubbs (ed.), Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement. Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries, Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023.

[25] “I have only one language, and it is not mine”. Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Paris, Galilée 1996- & 2016, p. 13.