Gal Kirn | Filozofska Fakulteta Ljubljana (original) (raw)

Videos by Gal Kirn

Keti Chukhrov (HSE) – Who Makes Revolution in the Age of Speculative Design Gal Kirn (Berlin Ins... more Keti Chukhrov (HSE) – Who Makes Revolution in the Age of Speculative Design

Gal Kirn (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry) – Awakening of October revolution: from the figure of Lazarus to Marx, Lenin and Vertov

Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto) – Revolution, Repetition, Tragedy

209 views

Lecture at Ohrid Summer School

115 views

Articles by Gal Kirn

Baltic Worlds, 2023

Partisan and decolonial ecology is a notion addressed by Andreas Malm and Malcom Ferdinand respec... more Partisan and decolonial ecology is a notion addressed by Andreas Malm and Malcom Ferdinand respectively, in their texts on the Caribbean maroon partisans – the emancipated slaves – who moved to the more mountainous parts of the islands that were still covered by dense vegetation. This concept is here taken to another historical context, that of Yugoslav partisans’ fight against the fascist occupation in the Second World War. I engage in reading an array of partisan artworks that point to fascist domination/war over nature juxtaposed to emerging solidarity among humans and animals/nature. From poems and short stories to drawings and graphic art material, the subject matter of forest as a site of resistance and political subjectivity emerges. Diverse animals, pack of wolves, birds that continue to sing despite the thorny branches, the figure of the snail as the affect and attitude of resilience – these become “comrades” in the struggle, mobilizing nature in their fight against fascism.

Unwanted Images, 2022

Turning more concretely to Davor Konjikušić's project of unwanted images, we must focus on partis... more Turning more concretely to Davor Konjikušić's project of unwanted images, we must focus on partisan photographic activity. If partisan photography not only captures, represents, and thus helps to interpret the world, how and in what ways can it contribute to changing it? What should we "un-learn" in our reading of the past, and especially the ways how national archives categorise the past - Ariella Aisha Azoulay's (2019) big questions - are here of central importance. Rather than instituting images for the eternity and immortality of humanity, partisan photography, succeeds in the moment it captures "contingency", for our purposes most important to highlight is a contingent character of People's Liberation Struggle. Liberation appears in retrospect as necessary-people had to rise up because of fascism, but in many places and at many times they did not, or even collaborated with occupationist forces. So partisan liberation is not part of a teleological-historical necessity. I would like to argue that also with the help of partisan photography, because partisan "photo-eye" captures the fleeting moment of the partisan present, its "deteritorialising" and ever-changing territory, the way how partisan men and women organised their struggle, their way of life, their symbolic networks of resistance, and not only their military actions/fights.

Alphabet, HKW, 2021

In order to resist the existing order, it has become urgent to counter the tide, to think and en... more In order to resist the existing order, it has become urgent to counter the tide, to think and enact more collective forms of resistance and emancipation.[1] Within HKW’s New Alphabet School format, one possible trajectory is to rethink and return to revolutionary alphabetisation of the past – to return to those thin segments of victories of the “oppressed” that help us move beyond the melancholic seduction of defeat that the left has been holding onto.[2] Such travel to the past can become one important terrain to insist and persist in spite of catastrophic prognoses. This short contribution takes a journey into one of the darkest times of the twentieth century: fascist occupation of Yugoslavia, World War 2. It is worthwhile to consider that despite such impossible circumstances – no developed communication channels, no material base and infrastructure for antifascist resistance (no ammunition, no funding, no food) and an extremely high risk and threat to anyone that dared to think or act in resistance (immediate execution, tortures, camps) – that the genuine articulation of partisan art and politics emerged and contributed to a collective cultural and political form of resistance that was the base for community-in-resistance.

Memory Studies journal, 2022

The article elaborates on Marx's concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by ex... more The article elaborates on Marx's concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by extending it to the field of memory and introducing a new concept of the 'primitive accumulation of memory'. The article argues that this concept gives us an innovative path to understand the relationship between memory and capital. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the break-up of Yugoslavia and its thoroughly revised memoryscape, this text combines a politicoeconomic analysis with the evaluation of memory-related ideological shifts that are in fact perceived as long-term mnemonic wars in (post-)Yugoslavia. The article analyses how nationalism and memory revisionism are internally linked to capitalist accumulation. More specifically, the article will observe how an ethnocentric mnemonic war sought to openly negate the socialist and anti-fascist past. Indeed, the creation of an anti-communist, and at times anti-antifascist, orientation was integral to the imagining of new nation-states. Juxtaposed to this creative and generative current of memory revisionism, the primitive accumulation of capital in post-Yugoslavia began with the 'deaccumulation' of social infrastructure and wealth, and with the dispossession of working people. The bigger the dispossession, the larger the nationalist accumulation of memory and displacement of class antagonism. Finally, the article discusses what at first glance seems to be a pacifying discourse of 'national reconciliation', which stoked a thorough revision of the public memory of World War II. This revision reconciled fascist collaborationists and anti-fascist Partisans, and it helped to challenge Yugoslavia's anti-fascist consensus, while also framing the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

Artlas Bulletin, Purdue, 2022

The article departs critically from the postsocialist condition in Yugoslavia marked by conservat... more The article departs critically from the postsocialist condition in Yugoslavia marked by conservative revisionism that transformed the memorial landscape. The nation-building process took a clearly negative attitude towards the Yugoslav, socialist and partisan/antifascist past. The first part of the text will shortly present the notion of »counter-archive« and the central features of the method. The second part of the text will offer a short analysis of four case studies: A short partisan poem written by Iztok, a drawing by Dore Klemenčič, a partisan dance by Marta Paulin and a partisan film by Rudi Omota.

Historical Materialism, 2022

The contribution sheds a critical light on the thirty years since the break-up of socialist Yugos... more The contribution sheds a critical light on the thirty years since the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia. It presents three hypotheses for a critical reorientation of the 1989–91 sequence. Firstly, rather than seeing 1989 as the start of the longue durée of a democratic process, for Yugoslavia this trajectory was ‘realised’ as political chaos and ethnic wars in 1991. Secondly, criticising the chronological view of ‘post-socialism’, it posits post-socialism as having already emerged after 1965, marked by market reforms that ‘withered away’ socialism. Thirdly, and specific to the 1990s, in order to facilitate the transition to capitalism, a ‘primitive accumulation’ of memory and a high degree of violence unfolded, which actually dis-accumulated the socialist infrastructure and socialised means of (re)production. The post-Yugoslav transition proved a genuine ‘contribution’ to ‘making our country great again’: ethnically cleansed nation-states on the horizon of European peripheral capitalism. The contribution concludes on an affirmative note, pointing to the slow resurgence of the Left.

Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

This text works at the intersection of film, memory and politics taking the case of Želimir Žilni... more This text works at the intersection of film, memory and politics taking the case of Želimir Žilnik's short film »Uprising in Jazak« (1973) as its object of study. Most notably, the text will present visual and alternative memory strategies. The text argues that Žilnik's film is one of the most prolific examples of making a partisan film in a partisan way from the epoch of socialist Yugoslavia. The film's raw image and cutting is a conscious politico-aesthetical intervention into the dominant genre of that time in socialist Yugoslavia-huge war partisan spectacles also called »Red Westerns«. Žilnik's method consists of a delicate bottom up ethnographic reconstruction of partisan and antifascist memory of the poor villagers in Vojvodina (village Jazak) who − 30 years after the warcollectively tell and renegotiate the stories of the antifascist resistance from the war. The visual language and method of Žilnik stays immensely actual today in post-socialist times of historical revisionism, also in terms of political message. Žilnik succeeds In complementing an Arendtian trope that analysed fascist collaboration from below in terms of »banality of evil« with something I name the everyday deeds and practices of resistances that constituted the partisan community.

Apparatus, 2020

The paper focuses on the lesser-known moments of the partisan performances from the Yugoslav libe... more The paper focuses on the lesser-known moments of the partisan performances from the Yugoslav liberation struggle by highlighting three points: firstly, all of the analysed performances have survived in the form of photographs by the established contemporaneous partisan photographers Jože Petek and Edi Šelhaus. Secondly, Marta Paulin-Brina, who became the most famous partisan dancer, will be commented on through the prism of the partisan poem “Anthem to Agitprop Theatre” by Janez Kardelj. And thirdly, we will look at the performances of partisan school children that formed a star, a symbol of partisan resistance, and the name ‘Tito’ with their bodies in a snowy field. Despite the political recommendation that partisan photography should be limited to reportage and documentation, the last case studies serve as evidence of peculiar staging and performing for the partisan camera and thus subvert the propagandistic reductionism. These performances were addressing the community-in-resistance, that is, they expressed symbols of the liberation itself, and even anticipated the future ritual performance under the aegis of the Titoist state.

Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity (J-BILD)/ Revue de langage, d'identité, de diversité et d'appartenance (R-LIDA) New Yugoslavia as a Diasporic State, 2021

This article proposes an alternative use of the notion of diaspora. Rather than address a specifi... more This article proposes an alternative use of the notion of diaspora. Rather than address a specific identity, the main thesis explores-in Derridean spirit-a specific diasporic logic of (counter-)state partisan formation in early socialist Yugoslavia. The diasporic character of partisan Yugoslavia has to do with the harsh circumstances of World War II, when Kingdom Yugoslavia disappeared and what remained of it was occupied by diverse fasicst regimes. The People's Liberation Struggle (PLS) not only struggled against the fascist occupation but imagined a new Yugoslavia that was opposed both to the Unitarian royalist idea of integral Yugoslavism and to the current form of ethnically clean nation-states. Diasporic and partisan Yugoslavia presents an open, unfinished, and emancipatory project that continues to go beyond ethnic belonging and national identity. The deterritorialising and diasporic tendency of PLS/Yugoslavia was not based on one specific nation and did not embody one recognised language. In the last part of the article, I show how already during the 1960s in socialist Yugoslavia, another symptomatic event took place: What started as a mere linguistic scientific issue, that is, whether Serbo-Croatian was one or two languages, actually articulated a new political subjectivity (nation). Despite the demise of the federative state and socialism, there was a growing portion of the population that considered themselves Yugoslavs and not members of their respective ethnical communities, taking nostalgic refuge in the virtual state that was withering away. RÉSUMÉ. Cet article propose une utilisation alternative de la notion de diaspora. Plutôt que d'aborder une identité spécifique, la thèse principale explore-dans l'esprit de Derrida-une logique diasporique spécifique de la formation partisane (contre-)étatique aux débuts de la Yougoslavie socialiste. Le caractère diasporique de la Yougoslavie partisane est lié aux rudes circonstances de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, lorsque le Royaume de Yougoslavie disparu et que ce qui en restait a été occupé par divers régimes fascistes. People's Liberation Struggle (PLS) n'a pas seulement affronté l'occupation fascite, mais a imaginé une nouvelle Yougoslavie qui s'opposait à la fois à l'idée royaliste unitarienne de la Yougoslavie intégrale et à la forme actuelle d'États-nations ethniquement propres. La Yougoslavie diasporique et partisane présente un projet ouvert, inachevé et émancipateur qui continue de viser au-delà de l'appartenance ethnique et de l'identité nationale. La tendance à la déterritorialisation et à la diaspora du PLS/Yougoslavie ne s'appuyait pas sur une nation spécifique et n'incarnait pas une langue reconnue. Dans la dernière partie de cet article, je montre de quelle façon, dès les années 1960 en Yougoslavie socialiste, un autre événement symptomatique s'est produit: ce qui n'était au départ qu'une simple question scientifique linguistique, à savoir si le serbo-croate constituait une ou deux langues, a en fait articulé une nouvelle subjectivité (nationale) politique. Malgré la

Stasis, 2018

The text aims to think through a figure largely forgotten in radical philosophy or communist theo... more The text aims to think through a figure largely forgotten in radical philosophy or communist theology discussions today: the Biblical figure(s) of Lazarus. The absence of this figure from current discussions might have to do with something that was pointed out by Balibar as the ongoing "fear of the masses," and with their political awakening that is usually interpreted as violence, failure, riotous noise and absence of political program/ organization. I will perform a close reading of two stories of 1 This text is an edited lecture that was presented at the conference in St. Pe-tersburg. I would like to thank participants of the conference for their comments, Na-thaniel Boyd and especially Dominic Martin for their additional reflections on the political theology of Lazarus, and lastly the peer reviewers for their close reading of lacu-nae of the earlier version of this text.

Papers by Gal Kirn

The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Keti Chukhrov (HSE) – Who Makes Revolution in the Age of Speculative Design Gal Kirn (Berlin Ins... more Keti Chukhrov (HSE) – Who Makes Revolution in the Age of Speculative Design

Gal Kirn (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry) – Awakening of October revolution: from the figure of Lazarus to Marx, Lenin and Vertov

Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto) – Revolution, Repetition, Tragedy

209 views

Lecture at Ohrid Summer School

115 views

Baltic Worlds, 2023

Unwanted Images, 2022

Alphabet, HKW, 2021

Memory Studies journal, 2022

Artlas Bulletin, Purdue, 2022

Historical Materialism, 2022

Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

Apparatus, 2020

Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity (J-BILD)/ Revue de langage, d'identité, de diversité et d'appartenance (R-LIDA) New Yugoslavia as a Diasporic State, 2021

Stasis, 2018

The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Historical Materialism

(95 min, Marta Popivoda 2021) Serbia / France / Germany, How can a landscape ... more (95 min, Marta Popivoda 2021) Serbia / France / Germany, How can a landscape speak? It's like wondering whether the grass, the crickets, or the pond are only a backdrop to the events, or whether they actually participate in them, with their shadows, depths, sounds, waiting to become narrators? A. Vujanović Landscapes of Resistance, a film by Marta Popivoda, traces a journey through the memories of antifascist fighter Sonja (97), one of the first Partisan women in Yugoslavia, who was also among the leaders of the Resistance movement at Auschwitz. As Sonja speaks, we travel through the landscapes of her revolutionary youth as they exist in the present time – the Serbian forests and mountains where the partisans gathered and the muddy grounds and countless chimneys of Auschwitz – towards her tiny Belgrade flat where she lives with her husband and cat. Since Sonja is a great storyteller, capable of telling about past events without hindsight, she takes us directly into that peculiar atmosphere and mindset, which gave birth to antifascist resistance. We make her story travel through time towards the bodies of the new generation of antifascists, bespeaking that it is always possible to think and practice resistance. Landscapes of Resistance Teaser

A fascination with archives often entails a longing to return to sources, stories, and their begi... more A fascination with archives often entails a longing to return to sources, stories, and their beginnings. It is associated with a meticulous attention to detail, the uncovering of exciting connections, the collection of testimonies and reliable traces, accounts that corroborate a story, and contribute to the (re)construction of histories from below. However, at a time when the notion of the 'archive' threatens to become a dead metaphor or a cheap replacement for 'canon' or 'corpus', the symposium suggests to take a particularly contentious example — that of the Yugoslav Partisan 'counter-archive' — as a starting-point for its reconsideration of archival politics. The Yugoslav, socialist, and Partisan past was both demonized by the resurgent Balkan nationalist projects of the 1990s and commodified by Yugonostalgic memorialization, stylized as either heroic or droll. Against these versions of a 'frozen' past, a multiplicity of projects, cultural,...

Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, 2020

Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Performancekunst der Partisanen wahrend des jugoslawischen Befreiu... more Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Performancekunst der Partisanen wahrend des jugoslawischen Befreiungskampfes. Es werden folgende drei Punkte behandelt: 1. Alle analysierten Performances sind in Form von Fotografien der zeitgenossischen Fotografen Jože Petek und Edi Selhaus erhalten. 2. Im Artikel werden die Auffuhrungen der bekanntesten Partisanentanzerin Marta Paulin-Brina durch aus das Prisma des Gedichts “Hymne zu Agitprop-Theater” von Janez Kardelj untersucht. 3. Zwei fur den Widerstand wichtige Symbole werden analysiert – der Stern und der Name „Tito“, die Schulkinder mit ihren Korpern auf einem schneebedeckten Feld bildeten. Gegen die politischen Vorschriften, dass Partisanenfotografie auf Reportage und Dokumentation beschrankt sein sollte, dienen diese Fallstudien als Beweis fur eine Inszenierung und Performance fur eine Kamera und untergraben somit den propagandistischen Reduktionismus. Diese Performances richteten sich an die Widerstandsgemeinschaft, das heist, sie druckten...

The Media of Memory, 2020

Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2015

Council and Parliament is particularly illuminating, helping the reader to navigate the complex w... more Council and Parliament is particularly illuminating, helping the reader to navigate the complex world of co-decision, COREPER and comitology. Likewise, the authors’ explanation of the role of bodies such as the Committee of the Regions and the numerous agencies involved in policy-making help to guide the reader through the EU maze. However, the section on non-institutional actors is rather sparse, providing only a brief discussion of highly influential groups such as large companies, professional lobbyists, employers’ federations and the Commission’s expert advisory groups. This perhaps illustrates the limitation of adopting a largely institutional approach: bodies with no formal power and with rather ad hoc working practices can appear peripheral to the Commission’s work and their importance to the process is therefore easily underestimated. The book’s final section concerns the EU’s decision-making processes. The first of these chapters demonstrates how the changing competences and procedures introduced through the various treaties have shaped the EU decision space by altering the processes both within and between the institutions. The next chapter demonstrates how the decision-making models have adapted to accommodate new policy instruments such as the OMC and provides an interesting but rather brief discussion on the measures taken by policy-makers to increase the extent to which civil society dialogue informs the policy process. The final chapter adopts a policy network approach, providing a clear explanation of aspects such as agenda setting and advocacy coalition formation in an EU context. One limitation of this work is that its focus on the changing dynamics within and between the EU institutions as an explanation of ‘how the EU really works’ means that it affords little space to the role of the actors within the institutions. The historical-institutional explanation for the EU’s ‘Darwinian evolution’ is, of course, well established, but as an approach it gives scant regard to the role of individuals in shaping the policy agenda. Nonetheless, this book is a solid, well-crafted and extremely readable explanation of the complex world of the EU institutions and the ancillary groups around them, and will be a boon to any student of EU studies.

Retracing Images

This chapter focuses on the characteristic features of post-socialist ideology in the post-Yugosl... more This chapter focuses on the characteristic features of post-socialist ideology in the post-Yugoslav context. One of the most important signifiers of nationalist ideologies has become "national reconciliation." The most exemplary case, which is examined closely, is the management of monuments, which is fashionably labeled the politics of memory. Post-socialist revisionism, framed as the critique of totalitarianism on the one hand and national reconciliation on the other, is thus the main ideological trajectory and vehicle, which in the last instance rehabilitates fascism, glorifies parliamentary democracy and further disqualifies any emancipatory politics. The author examines this question in three parts. In the beginning, he examines the indicated transformations in the landscape of monuments in the Croatian context using Bogdan Žižic’s film Damnatio Memoriae. In the second part he talks on the reconciliation discourse in Slovenia and the concluding part exposes a discussion on the Partisan movement. Keywords:partisan liberation struggle; post-Yugoslav context; Slovenian reconciliation; socialist revolution

"Universities and art schools alike have been subjected to the pressure of recent austerity ... more "Universities and art schools alike have been subjected to the pressure of recent austerity politics and the ongoing attempt to transform higher education on the basis of neoliberal principles. In this context, there is an urgent need to conceive of alternative frameworks and methodologies of study--whether this is within, outside or at the margins of academic institutions. This book examines what is currently at stake in education through a series of conversations with artists, theorists, activists and educators who are all actively involved in developing new models of study. Ranging from self-organized learning to critical teaching methodologies, the conversations gathered here offer a resource for those interested in the renewed politicization of education and alternative modes of pedagogy and inquiry." -- p. [4] of cover

This essay argues for the construction of a Yugoslav Partisan counter-archive capable of counteri... more This essay argues for the construction of a Yugoslav Partisan counter-archive capable of countering both the dominant narrative of historical revisionism, which increasingly obfuscates the Partisan legacy, and the simplistic Yugonostalgic narrative of the last few decades. But if we are to engage in rethinking and recuperating the Partisan legacy we should first delineate the specificity and cultural potential of this legacy. This can only be done if we grant the Partisan struggle the status of rupture. The essay discusses three artworks from different periods that successfully formalise this rupture in three very diverse forms, namely poetry, sculpture and film. The aim of these three studies is to contribute to the (counter-)archive of the Yugoslav Partisan culture. Эта статья посвящена восстановле нию югославского партизанского анти-архива с целью дезавуирова ния как доминантного нарратива исторического ревизионизма, все более игнорирующего партизанское наследие, так и упрощенног...

The Partisan Counter-Archive, 2020

Partisan Ruptures Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia, 2019

Introduction describes the space of intervention, both politically in postsocialist and post-Yugo... more Introduction describes the space of intervention, both politically in postsocialist and post-Yugoslav context, as well as theoretically into nationalist and transition studies that have been marked by anti-socialist and anti-Yugoslav ideological positions. Introduction highlights the major theses and contributions of chapters organized around the term "partisan rupture" (people's liberation struggle, workers' self-management and non-aligned movement) and their gradual exhaustion from 1965 onwards (market reform, liberalism and nationalism), which sheds new light of the break up of Yugoslavia.

Jernej Habjan and Gal Kirn have edited a special issue of Slavica tergestina devoted to the Yugos... more Jernej Habjan and Gal Kirn have edited a special issue of Slavica tergestina devoted to the Yugoslav Partisan art. All the chapters are in English, with abstracts in Russian and English as well as summaries in Slovenian. The chapters are preceded by the introduction by Gal Kirn, and followed by reviews of new books on the Yugoslav Partisan art.

French philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped define the politico-theoretical con... more French philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped define the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. Today, there is a recrudescence of interest in his thought, especially in light of his later work, published in English as Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006). This has led to renewed debates on the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, on the event as both philosophical concept and political construction, and on the nature of politics and the political.

These original essays by leading scholars aim to provide a new assessment of Althusser's thought, especially in relation to contemporary debates. Organized in four sections that represent the main currents in Althusser's scholarship, the book discusses materialism and the different formulations of the relationship between politics and philosophy, Althusser's interpretations of political thinkers (including Machiavelli, Deleuze and Gramsci), the resources he provides to critique political economy and politics in post-Marxist thought, and the theorization of ideology and politics.

Encountering Althusser is a groundbreaking resource that highlights Althusser's continuing relevance to contemporary radical thought. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/encountering-althusser-9781441146366/#sthash.qsXzSemE.dpuf

Knežević, V., Lukić, K., Marjanović, I., Nikolić, G. (eds.), Free and Sovereign. Art, Theory and Politics. A collection of essays and interviews about Kosovo and Serbia, Novi Sad: Cenzura, 2013. ISBN 978-86-86559-19-7, 2013

Authors/Writers and Contributors: Sezgin Boynik, Gal Kirn, Agon Hamza, Besnik Pula, Vjollca Krasn... more Authors/Writers and Contributors: Sezgin Boynik, Gal Kirn, Agon Hamza, Besnik Pula, Vjollca Krasniqi, Staša Zajović, Žarana Papić, Marina Gržinić, Petar Atanacković, Driton Hajredini, Fitore Isufi-Koja, Lulzim Zeqiri, Alban Muja, Artan Balaj, Flaka Haliti, Vida Knežević, Kristian Lukić, Ivana Marjanović, Gordana Nikolić.

Manchester University Press , 2022

Book Launch events in Europe for "I am Jugoslovenka!" Feminist performance politics during and af... more Book Launch events in Europe for "I am Jugoslovenka!" Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism, published by Manchester University Press, February 2022.

Interview with Gal Kirn and Niloufar Tajeri - on the concept and the exhibition developed for Aka... more Interview with Gal Kirn and Niloufar Tajeri - on the concept and the exhibition developed for Akademie Solitude

BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM Edited by Marian Burchardt & Gal Kirn