BB: Post/Socialist Nachträglichkeit

The lecture traces post/socialist affective atmospheres in state-socialist prisons and/or secret services headquarters that were turned into immersive museums, and accounts for their political implications. I claim that these sites of experience economy best epitomize the co-articulation of the atmosphere (as something evasive, potentially extra-linguistic) and political trauma, arranged around the concept of ineffability, or the moment “when the words fail” in the face of men-made historical atrocities. More specifically, my claim is that the discourse of ineffability, or the claim that words fail when faced with trauma, plays a crucial role in the articulation of the socialist past as predominantly violent and traumatic. To put it simply: it is very hard to challenge the narrative that reduces the socialist past to political violence in the context in which we are said that words have no place; we are, in a way, coerced to identify with the traumatic narrative we are immersed in. I use the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit (belatedness, afterwardness) in order to account for the retroactive re-framing of the socialist past. I claim that, in the context of the historical communal trauma and its articulation, we can say that as much as the ineffability of the real, historical traumatic experience initiated the traumatic narratives about state socialism, what is also at play on the very fundamental level is the process through which this very traumatic framework (constructed afterward) through which these stories continue to haunt us, retroactively inscribes the violence, the fear, the lack of privacy, the humiliation, etc. as the most important aspects of lived state socialisms.

Petar Odak is a Visiting Professor at Central European University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz. He holds a Joint Doctorate in Philosophy and Humanities from the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, and the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University. His research fellowship stays include Freie Universität Berlin and New York University. Research interests: queer theory, affect, and psychoanalysis; dark tourism, trauma and memory studies; post/socialist timespace.