Spectral Histories

"A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility."

Jacques Derrida, quoted in Zhivka Valiavicharska, Socialist Modes of Governance and the "Withering Away of the State", Theory&Event Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010

The article is another one of a series of attempts to re-Present the Left-wing past as a political possibility of today. A close reading of State&Revolution is all the more interesting given that we attempted a similar reading this smester with Ozselcuk.

Valiavicharska does not use psychoanalysis, but her point is similar to that of Yahya-Ozselcuk's discussion of the forms of the commune, especially when Valiavicharska refers to retrospective studies on Soviet experience and the practice of property law. The close reading of State and Revolution gives us a sense of Lenin flirting with what Madra&Ozselcuk call feminine jouissance following Lacan, countering arguments on the domination of beuracratic specialists as the anthropological truth of Soviet experience in all its aspects.

The article is an attempt to re-Present Soviet past and rescue the "pure memory" of communism from its representational chains.