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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2020
Russian Formalism and the Ljubljana School are two of the most influential Slavic contributions to global critical theory. Yet, cast as the prolegomena and coda of the short twentieth century's groundswell of critical theory, these two theoretical movements are rarely considered in tandem. This article seeks to challenge that perception on both historical and theoretical grounds. It begins by documenting the introduction of Russian Formalism to Slovene literary criticism, and then traces how the early Ljubljana School, while developing its own theoretical platform, was exposed to certain Formalist principles. After chronicling this historical encounter, the article concludes by considering how these two strains of Slavic critical theory might most productively intertwine, and proposes new ways of encountering Russian Formalism in the Ljubljana School.
I would like to thank the following for sharing their thoughts and suggestions on earlier versions of this article: William Nickell, Michael Geyer, Robert Bird, Bożena Shallcross, Eric Santner, Martin Jay, Jernej Habjan, Marko Juvan, Mladen Dolar, Tamás Scheibner, Daniel Pratt, Cheryl Stephenson and Alexander Sorenson, as well as Harriet Murav and the anonymous reviewers at Slavic Review. I am also grateful to the Society for Slovene Studies, the Futures of Intellectual History Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, as the well as the Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe Workshop and the Intellectual Revolution Conference at the University of Chicago; earlier versions of this essay were presented to their audiences, and I am thankful for their feedback and intellectual community.
1 Dušan Bjelić, “An Introduction,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 701.
2 By the “official” start date of the Ljubljana School, I am referring to the symposium that marked the founding of the “Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis,” which took place on October 11–12, 1982. This event is chronicled in: Problemi—Razprave 21, no. 230–31, (4–5, 1983). I should also note that my usage of the term “discourse community” is not intended as an allusion to Foucauldian discourse analysis, but rather is a term I use to describe the fluid theoretical exchange that occurs before the formal platform of a “School” is established.
3 This early chapter in the Ljubljana School’s intellectual history has generally received little scholarly attention. One exception is Marko Juvan’s study on the concept of Intertextuality, which discusses the relationship between French semiotics and the burgeoning Ljubljana School in order to provide a history of the Slovene reception of Julia Kristeva’s term: Marko Juvan, Intertekstualnost (Ljubljana, 2000), 209–25.
4 Boris Eikhenbaum, “Vokrug voprosa o formalistakh,” cited in Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, 1984), 16–17.
5 Without undermining the importance of Jacques Lacan for this movement, one can safely say that this moniker gives the false impression that members of this school all prioritize Lacan at the expense of other thinkers; for just one example to the contrary, see the recent special issue titled “The Slovene Re-actualization of Hegel’s Philosophy,” which was edited by Jure Simoniti and which appeared in Filozofija i društvo 26, no. 4 (2015): 783–84, in which multiple members of the School set out to define the “Ljubljana Hegel,” evidencing the plurality of the Ljubljana School’s interests and influences. It is for this reason that I use the more neutral term “Ljubljana School” in this article.
6 For a detailed account of the “infinite chain of homonymic-synonymic slippage” in delimiting Formalism(s), see Peter Steiner, “‘Formalism’ and ‘Structuralism’: An Exercise in Metahistory,” Russian Literature 12, no. 3 (October 1982): 299–330. Regarding the Ljubljana School, followers of the School will be familiar with the “troika” that consists of Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič Žerdin, and is described in texts such as Jones Irwin and Helena Motoh’s Žižek and his Contemporaries, (London, 2014). While this “troika” is an accurate description of the current state of alliances, this term only emerged in the early 2000s and thus falls outside the historical purview of this paper. There are many thinkers from Ljubljana (Rastko Močnik, Zoja Skušek-Močnik, Drago Braco Rotar, Rado Riha, etc.) who performed essential roles in the development of this discourse and certainly deserve scholarly attention for their contributions to this intellectual movement, even though they are—for a variety of reasons—no longer associated with the “troika.”
7 The OHO group itself echoes certain tenets of Futurism and Formalism. As Dubravka Djurić has noted, the OHO group “gathered around a doctrine described by Taras Kermauner as Reist. Reism describes the penchant of Slovenian poets for placing the word at the center of focus. . . Reist ideology implied that poets had become aware of their devices.” Dubravka Djurić, “Radial Poetic Practices: Concrete and Visual Poetry in the Avant-Garde and Neo-avant-garde,” in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, ed. Dubravka Djurić and Misko Šuvaković (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 82. Later, in the 1980s, a more developed Ljubljana School would have another overlap with the Neue Slowensiche Kunst (New Slovenian Art) movement. For more on NSK, as well as the nature of this overlap, see: Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach in NSK (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
8 The collection Pericarežeracirep (Maribor, 1969) is named after a famous Slovene palindrome that translates literally as: “The washerwoman cuts the duck’s tail.” The collection, which was finished in 1967, featured visual poetry, and included contributions from Tomaž Šalamun, Vojin Kovač, Chubby, Iztok Geister, Plamen, and Marko Pogačnik, among others. Žižek’s contributions are hard to characterize; they have a theoretical tone, but are far more experimental with language than the essays he published in Problemi at the time. For example, the “cartesianische meditationes” piece begins with the (untranslatable) word play: “Pred kaj se meče pred-met? Pred sub-jekt (pod-met).” The piece ends with the fragment (in English in the original): “Will you be staying long, Mr. Bomb?/ It’s Bond, B-O-N-D.” Incidentally, this is not the only time Žižek referenced James Bond in his early work; see also: Slavoj Žižek, “The Spy Who Loved Me,” Problemi: Časopis za mišljenje in pesništvo 6, no. 67–68 (July–August 1968): 122–24.
9 Lubomír Doležel, review of The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, by Fredric Jameson, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 16, no. 3 (Autumn/Automne 1974): 509–11.
10 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 454.
11 This count is conservative, and excludes several co-authored volumes, as well as “research reports” that, while often book-length, are not quite monographs.
12 This article provides all quoted material in the original Slovene, alongside English translations, in order to uphold the field’s philological commitments.
13 Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 1981), 279.
14 Viktor Shklovksii, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, trans. Shushan Avagyan, (Champaign, Ill., 2011), 7. Of course, one would have to translate this paradigm into the theoretical idiom of the Ljubljana School to find traction here. Namely, one would have to translate “nonsense” fairly literally as that which is beyond sense, beyond logic or meaning: the Lacanian Real.
15 Daniel Vukadinovič Levski, “Nemurnost ruskega formalizma” (The Nemurnost of Russian Formalism), Problemi—Razprave 11, no. 128–32 (August–December, 1973): 37. The key word in this title, nemurnost, is invented by Levski; it does not exist in Slovene. While it does evoke and echo certain Slovene words (such as its similarity to nemirnost [restlessness], or the combination of nem [mute] and urnost [swiftness]), it is nevertheless impossible to determine which of these references would best facilitate an honest translation.
16 Due to this focus, as well as length limitations, this paper must overlook some of the other figures who deserve mention with regard to the history of Russian Formalism in Slovenia, but who do not contribute materially to the story of the Ljubljana School, such as A.V. Isachenko, N. S. Trubetskoi’s student and son-in-law, who worked as a Privatdozent in Ljubljana from 1938–1941 and wrote a Formalist-inspired analysis of Prešeren; or Lucien Tesnière, a French linguist who came to teach French in Ljubljana and had been quoted by Algirdas Greimas (although his own work had no true Structuralist element); and Boris Paternu, a Slovene literary theorist who wrote about Czech Structuralism, and employed some Formalist and Structuralist principles in his own literary analysis. Likewise, as my timeframe concludes in 1979, later Slovene critiques of Formalism, such as the work of Aleksander Skaza, Drago Bajt, and Jola Škulj remain peripheral to this inquiry. For a broader historical account of Formalist and Structuralist thought in Slovenia, see: Alenka Koron, “The Impact of European Structuralism on Slovene Literary Criticism, 1960–2000: Local Reception and Main Achievements,” Slovene Studies 36, no. 1 (2014): 3–17.
17 After World War II, Ocvirk oversaw the development of an independent department of comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana, which had previously been subsumed under the bracket of Slavic Studies. For a more thorough history of this development, as well as Ocvirk’s biography, see: Darko Dolinar, “Anton Ocvirk and Slovene Comparative Literature Today,” Slovene Studies 30, no. 2 (2008): 283–90.
18 Anton Ocvirk, “Historizem v literarni zgodovini in njegovi nasprotniki,” Ljubljanski zvon 58 (1938); “Formalistična šola v literarni zgodovini,” Slovenski jezik 1 (1938): 154–61. He also mentioned Russian Formalism in the text Teorija primerjalne literarne zgodovine (Theory of Comparative Literary History) (Ljubljana, 1936), but his engagement with Formalism in that text is less sustained than in the articles mentioned above.
19 See: Daniel Vukadinovič Levski, “Nemurnost ruskega formalizma,” Problemi—Razprave 11, no. 128–32 (August–December, 1973): 51.
20 Janko Kos, “Anton Ocvirk, 1907–1980,” Slavistična revija 28, no. 2 (1980): 238.
21 Anton Ocvirk, “Pesniška umetnina in literarna teorija,” Primerjalna Književnost 1–2 (1978): 4–21. It is worth emphasizing the symbolic stature of this article, which was published as the first article in the first issue of Primerjalna književnost, the main Slovene-language journal for comparative literature.
22 Ibid., 17.
23 Viktor Shklovksii, O Teorii Prozi (Moscow, 1929), 7.
24 Darko Dolinar, “Anton Ocvirk and Slovene Comparative Literature Today,” Slovene Studies 30, no. 2 (2008): 286.
25 Observations about the collective response to the publication of this text were gleaned from an author interview in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with Mladen Dolar, January 7, 2016.
26 For a detailed analysis of Ocvirk’s commentary on Kosovel’s constructivism, see: Janez Vrečko, “Ocvirkova teza o konstruktivizmu pri Kosovelu,” in Primerjalna književnost v 20. Stoletju in Anton Ocvirk, ed. Darko Dolinar and Marko Juvan (Ljubljana, 2008), 155–68.
27 Katarina Šalamun-Biedrzycka, “O literarnozgodovinski znanosti” (On Literary Historiography), Problemi 8, no. 86 (1970): 23: “Zato, ker se mi zdi, da je na Slovenskem prav v zadnjih letih nastal preobrat, ki je skorajda identičen s situacijo v ruski literaturi tistih let.”
28 Ibid.: “Tako lahko tudi slovenska literamozgodovinska znanost končno odvrže ves ideološki, vzgojni, spoznavni, psihološki itd. balast in skupaj z zaledjem—s slovensko avantgardno literaturo—uveljavlja svoj program in si postavlja delovne naloge, ki jih ni malo; raziskati je treba tako rekoč vso slovensko literaturo na novo.”
29 Ibid., 25: “Povsod, kjer se danes zavedajo avtonomnosti umetniških tekstov (in to je praktično po vsem svetu, razen tam, kjer je taka zavest zavrta in dušena iz političnih razlogov), imajo ruske formaliste za najdragocenejše predhodnike. . .”
30 Boris Majer, Strukturalizem: poskus filozofske kritike, (Ljubljana, 1971). More specifically, according to Majer’s entry on the SAZU website, he “was a member of the Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia responsible for the department of science and culture,” at www.sazu.si/o-sazu/clani/boris-majer.html (accessed September 15, 2019).
31 Majer, Strukturalizem, 5: “Iz vsega tega izhaja, da strukturalizma—vsaj doslej—ni mogoče obravnavati kot somostojno filozofsko gibanje in še manj kot enotno filozofsko smer, ki ji manjka prav tista teoretična filozofska utemeljitev, ki šele omogoča, da dobi kaka nova miselna smer status filozofske teorije.”
32 Ibid., 68.
33 Ibid., 97: “Odločilna filozofska in teoretična pomanjkljivost Lotmanovega koncepta strukturalne estetike je po mojem mnenju v tem, da je pri opredeljevanju ‘specifičnosti’ umetniškega modeliranja docela izpustil izpred oči ‘model praktično-revolucionarnega spreminjanja sveta’ (v Marxovem smislu).”
34 Ibid., 106: “Človeka, subjekta ni več.”
35 Jones Irwin and Helena Motoh, interview with Mladen Dolar in Žižek and his Contemporaries: On the Emergence of the Slovene Lacan (London, 2014), 98.
36 Slavoj Žižek, interview, Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 24, 2014. Žižek stated that Majer didn’t really object to his thesis but was concerned that if Žižek became a dissident in the future, it would reflect poorly upon him (Majer) that he granted Žižek an MA. According to Žižek, the entire drama of refusing the degree and requiring the additional chapter on Marxism was purely a proverbial insurance policy for Majer, such that he would be politically absolved if things got heated later. Although it is virtually impossible to verify this version of events, it does seem plausible. Regardless of his motivations, Majer’s actions did create obstacles for Žižek’s academic career, in this incident and others.
37 The added chapter in question was entitled, “Teorija pisanja: materijalistička teorija ‘produkcije ljudi’” (Theory of Writing: The Materialist Theory of the ‘Production of People’). The entire thesis was published in Serbo-Croatian the next year under the title Znak, oznacitelj, pismo (Sign, Signifier, Letter) (Belgrade, 1976).
38 Slavoj Žižek, interview, Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 24, 2014.
39 That is to say, he let them get away with things that he could have prohibited due to his position in the party.
40 Regarding Pirjevec’s arrest, some accounts describe this event as a patently manufactured communist show trial, while others assert that Pirjevec was in fact guilty of gruesome war crimes. For greater detail on many aspects of Pirjevec’s (political and intellectual) biography, see the collected volume: Seta Knop, ed., Dušan Pirjevec: slovenska kultura in literarna veda (Ljubljana, 2011).
41 Nadežda Čačinovič, “Efekt Pirjevec,” in Dušan Pirjevec: Slovenska Kultura in Literarna Veda, 264: “Efekt, o katerem pišem, je bil v tem, da je Pirjevec predavanja iz primerjalne književnosti spremenil v bojišče, da je šlo tako rekoč za življenje in smrt tudi tam.”
42 Dušan Pirjevec, “Vprašanje strukturalne poetike (teze in gradivo),” Problemi—Razprave 10, no. 116–17 (August-September, 1972): 1–19.
43 Majer, Strukturalizem, 98: “[Strukturalizem] krepi pozitivistične tendence v humanističnih znanostih, odvzema jim njihovo filozofsko razsežnost in jih tako potiska v vlogo ‘molčečega orodja kapitala’ ali vsaj molčečega orodja obstoječe družbene pozitivitete.”
44 Pirjevec, “Vprašanje strukturalne poetike,” 9: “Umetnina je vsekakor čutna realizacija duha, a hkrati to tudi ni. To je bistveno ‘sporočilo’ Heglove estetike in pomeni natanko isto kot Lotmanova ugotovitev, da se ‘formula umetnosti glasi’: ‘znani neznanec; to, vendar ne to.’”
45 Ibid., 15: “[Vendar strukturalizem proti obstoječi družbeni pozitiviteti ne postavlja neko novo, drugačno in še neobstoječo pozitiviteto,] marveč samo razliko, dihotomijo, protislovje, ki že vnaprej in vselej omogočajo ‘izstop’ iz sleherne pozitivitete, sedanje in prihodnje.”
46 Ibid., 18: “Da je ontološka diferenca pravzaprav tudi izvor deavtomatizacije . . .” When Močnik says that “[Heidegger’s] ontological difference is the source of [Shklovskii’s] defamiliarization,” I read “source” as a claim about the theoretical essence of defamiliarization, not a genealogical claim about historical influence (which, in this case, would have required time-travel).
47 Ibid., 15: “In navsezadnje: ali ni ruski formalizem vendarle v neki zvezi z oktobrsko revolucijo; in realno zgodovinsko se je tudi že pokazalo, da je njegova alternativa v socializmu samo še ždanovizem.”
48 Rastko Močnik, “Pesmi 1854: Levstikovo utemeljevanje literature,” Problemi: Časopis za mišljenje in pesništvo 6, no. 69–70 (1968): 243.
49 Zoja Skušek-Močnik “Konstitucija estetskega objekta,” Problemi—Razprave 17, no. 192–193 (9–10, 1979): 105. “V svojih predavanjih o strukturalizmu je Dušan Pirjevec razvil tezo, da je fenomenologija prikriti vir strukturalizma. Tu lahko opustimo morebitno pravdo o genealogijah, saj je pač očitno, da sta oba projekta ‘komplementarna’; sodita v isti horizont, pač v horizont nekega določenega momenta zahodne metafizike; zato lahko rečemo celo, da si temeljno ‘pripadata’ prav, kolikor sta zavezana istim metafizičnim postavkam: naj samo opozorimo na Derridajevo Gramatologijo, ki se začenja ravno s ‘hkratnim’ branjem Husserlovega in Saussurovega teksta.”
50 Slavoj Žižek, “Dva aspekta,” Problemi—Razprave 16, no. 177–80 (1–4, 1978): 208: “Kot je znano, je tudi Pirjevčeva predavanja zadnjiih let v temelju opredelila ta enigmatska praznina: skoraj vsako leto najavljena predavanja iz ‘strukturalne poetike’ so se običajno končala pri Tainu, nikoli ni prišlo do temeljnega spoprijema z osnovnimi teoretskimi sklopi: Derrida, Lacan itd. To praznino mu je kajpada šteti v dobro—tako je vsaj prostor ostal odprt, za razliko od kopice prehitrih kritik, ki so skušale zapolniti razpoko, ki jo je prinesel ‘strukturalizem.’”
51 For a recent example of this trend, see footnote 4 above.
52 The quotation is taken from an interview with Mladen Dolar, published in Mladina on December 31, 2014, where he cites “the split, the rift, the break” as the red thread that defines his work on multiple levels.
53 Slavoj Žižek’s three essays were compiled into a separat (that is to say, cut from extra copies of the journal and stapled together) in 1972, while Močnik published a substantially reorganized version of his essay a decade later in Mesčevo zlato: Prešeren v označevalcu (Ljubljana, 1981).
54 Many arguments have been made for strictly demarcating—or blurring—the lines between Formalism and Structuralism, all of which, given a specific frame, can be convincing. For a meta-commentary on this problem, see Steiner, Peter, “‘Formalism’ and ‘Structuralism’: An Exercise in Metahistory,” Russian Literature 12, no. 3 (October 1982): 299–330CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In their Slovene reception, however, these projects were linked and interpreted along a certain theoretical continuum; whether or not that continuum is objectively correct is a separate question and not particularly pertinent here.
55 Močnik obviously provides this citation in Slovene, but I have chosen to quote the English edition of Roman Jakobson’s Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 426, with the following exception: “signans” is rendered here as “signifier,” in order to be consistent with the terminology of the Ljubljana School.
56 Močnik, “Mesčevo Zlato,” Problemi—Razprave 9, no. 106–107 (December, 1971): 53: “Iz tega lahko sklepamo, da je metalingvistično prelaganje funkcija subjekta—ravno tista operacija, s katero se subjekt, izključevan-izključujoč se iz označevalne verige kot vselej manjkajoči označevalec, konstituira kot lingvistični govoreči subjekt, kateremu jezik kot zmerom že metajezik (vendar ne kot tisto, kar je ‘prek’ nekega drugega jezika, temveč kot prehajanje, preseganje označevalca) daje moč nad označevalcem.”
57 As quoted in Močnik, ibid., 57: “Jezik ni ne proizveden ne dojet: biti mora že poprej (mora preeksistirati), zakaj tako tisti, ki govori, kakor oni, ki posluša, se opirata nanj.”
58 Ibid.: “Subjekt je subjekt po glasu, a ta glas je nem: le nemi subjekt je priseben.”
59 Ibid.: “[Čeprav je jezik, kakor razberemo iz Trubeckoja,] hkrati produkt in pogoj za produkcijo.”
60 Ibid., 51: Močnik includes a quotation from Roland Barthes’s Elements of Semiology in the discussion of metalanguage mentioned above.
61 Močnik was not the only factor here; there were other individuals who were also involved in this exchange.
62 Močnik, 87: “Označenec je v znaku predstavnik sledenja označevalcev v njegovi redukciji; predstavnik izrinjenega razločevanja drugih označevalcev. S tem povemo, da tisti označevalec, kateri označenec zmerom že je, spada v drugo označevalno verigo, ne paralelno ne homogeno tej, ki prek nje kot označevalna drsi, v katero pa se ta označevalec, ki mu pripisujemo označenec, vendarle vključuje, saj, kakor pravimo, v označencu nosi njeno sled.”
63 Ibid.: “O tem, kako ta druga označevalna veriga v svoji temeljiti drugačnosti ni vendarle nič drugega od zavestne verige, in o težavnosti, da to drugost mislimo, gl. npr. vse metafore, is katerimi Freud opisuje ‘drugo prizorišče.’”
64 Slavoj Žižek, “Temna stran meseca I,” Problemi—Razprave 10, no. 113–114 (May–June, 1972): 93: “Strukturalna matrica je hkrati ‘idealna’ v pomenu ‘formalno-racionalnega’ konstrukta brez empiričnih primesi in ne-zavedna.”
65 Ibid., 109: “Gre za vprašanje ‘o tem, kako ta druga označevalna veriga (na našem nivoju berimo namesto druge verige le še ‘nezavedno’—op. S. Z.) v svoji temeljiti drugačnosti ni vendarle nič drugega od zavestne verige, o težavnosti, da to drugost mislimo’ (R. Močnik, Mesčevo zlato), in katerega rešitev se nakaže šele v Lacanovi misli o ‘dvojnem vpisu,’ ki seveda že presega polje ‘strukturalizma.’” Of course, Žižek would later claim that Lacan is in fact one of the only Structuralists not to give in to the post-Structuralist impulse.
66 Žižek provides a Slovene translation of Lévi-Strauss’s original quotation; given here is the English translation by Monique Layton, cited in Vladimir Propp’s Theory and History of Folklore, ed. Anatoly Liberman, trans. Ariadna Martin and Richard P. Martin (Minneapolis, 1984), 167, which includes Lévi-Strauss’s essay as a supplement.
67 Hegel in označevalec contains a critique of Lotman on similar grounds. Interestingly, this critique of Lotman had been published anonymously in Problemi—Razprave 13, no. 147–149 (March–May, 1975), five years before Žižek included it in Hegel in označevalec (Ljubljana, 1980). While in some academic traditions the “recycling” of materials is generally perceived as dubious, it was in fact a very common practice in Ljubljana in the 1970s. Both Močnik and Žižek’s pieces were culled from “research assignments,” which were a component of funding schemes for researchers in the Yugoslavian academic system. Močnik’s essay was based on his research assignment “Bistvo, sociološke razsežnosti in organizacija znanosti” (The Essence, Sociological Dimensions and Organization of Science), while Žižek’s, as mentioned above, was used for his research assignment Znanstvenost in Filozofičnost Strukturalizma (The Scientific and Philosophical [Character] of Structuralism). Although these “research assignments” are preserved in the form of (single) mimeographed copies that are housed in the National and University Library in Ljubljana, they were otherwise unpublished, so it was common for academics to repurpose the content of these assignments in later articles or books. This historical habitus is significant, given the scandals that arose—decades later and in an American context—wherein Žižek was accused on various counts of “self-plagiarism.” For one example, see the Editor’s Note appended to “ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism,” New York Times, September 3, 2014, at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/isis-is-a-disgrace-to-true-fundamentalism (accessed September 15, 2019)
68 Žižek, Hegel in označevalec (Ljubljana, 1980), 177:“Označevalna praksa ‘odraža’ družbeno vsebino, toda hkrati se z njeno potlačitvijo ta vsebina šele konstituira. . .Označevalna praksa, vtem ko “odraža” družbeno “vsebino,” ‘je’ sama njena Resnica; družbena ‘vsebina’ šele v svojem ‘odrazu’ dobesedno pride do svoje Resnice.”
69 Rotar, who had a background in art history, had written the textbook in the late 1960s, but it only appeared in print in 1972, along with the author’s acknowledgment that—as the first Slovene-language book on semiotics—the text had certain limitations and deficiencies.
70 This episode evinces the complicated and inconsistent nature of Titoist cultural politics at this time.
71 The authors who contributed to this debate (Slavoj Žižek, Rastko Močnik, Mladen Dolar, Miran Božovič, and Ervin Hladnik) would all go on to be involved in the early iterations of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis.
72 Mladen Dolar, “O nekaterih stranpoteh semiotične analize” (“On certain deviations of semiotic analysis”), Problemi—Razprave 17, no. 184–186 (1–3, 1979): 100. “[. . .] da je temeljna razlika med semiotičnim in simbolnim le sama simbolna, da Ducassova pot torej ni subverzivna v tisti meri, kolikor je naperjena na prekoračitev zakona, na njegov onstran in njegovo potlačeno, temveč prav v meri, kolikor pripoznava škandalozni in nepričakovani značaj zakona samega. . . Ko je izkusil paradoksalno in noro naravo zakona, se je Ducasse zdaj sam lotil pisanja zakonov.” It should be noted in the context of this article that this final “zakonov” is a figural reference to this citation from Ducasse: “Mislim, da sem po nekaj tavanjih končno našel svojo dokončno formulo,” a formula which Dolar describes as having crystallized in poetry. Given this context, I have translated it thus and not as “laws,” which—out of context—would be misleading.
73 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), 38.
74 Viktor Shklovskii, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE, 1965), 12.
75 Shklovskii, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, 442–43.
76 Viktor Shklovskii, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” at opojaz.ru/manifests/kakpriem.html (accessed September 15, 2019). “Автоматизация съедает вещи, платье, мебель, жену и страх войны.” Perhaps even in 1917 Shklovskii was aware of this problem of regarding objects as the bearers of ostranenie. One could interpret his enigmatic and emphatic proclamation that “Искусство есть способ пережить деланье вещи, а сделанное в искусстве не важно” (Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important) as a way of distancing himself from the conspicuously psychological and metaphysical objects (“one’s wife and fear of war”) which he listed as fodder for habitualization.
77 Through several generations, scholarship on Formalism has developed other answers to this question, and I don’t contend that this resolution is more valid that those ones. I merely claim that this resolution provides an additional perspective that broadens the Formalist legacy and suggests a new avenue for further research.
78 Rather than translating Dolar’s Slovene translation of the French translation of Shklovskii’s original, I have provided the quote here in a canonical English translation. Shklovskii, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, 7.