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Abstract
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.

In 1989 the triumphant discourse on the 'end of history' brought the death of socialism and the expansion of liberal democracy. The proclamation of the end of history could also be read literally, as the death of 'history' as a discipline with a homogenized narrative. It is in the same year that Pierra Nora wrote a groundbreaking article, which disentangled the fundamental opposition between history and memory, and at the end assumed the standpoint of memory. The article departs from the diagnosis of post-Yugoslav contemporary accounts of Yugoslav and partisan events. The critique of nationalist and Yugonostalgic discourses discloses shared assumptions that are based on the 'romantic' temporality of Nation and on history as a closed process. In the main part of the article the author works on the special, multiple temporality of partisan poetry that emerged during the WWII partisan struggle. The special temporality hinges on the productive and tensed relationship between the 'not yet existing' - the position of the new society free of foreign occupation, but also in a radically transformed society - and the contemporary struggle within war, which is also marked by the fear that the rupture of the struggle might not be remembered rightly, if at all. The memory of the present struggle remains to be the task to be realized not only for poets, but for everyone participating in the struggle. This is where the revolutionary temporality of the unfinished process comes to its fore, relating poetry to struggle, but again producing a form of poetry in the struggle.

Gal Kirn, Introduction to the Panel 'Beyond Neoliberalism' of the symposium Theory and Politics Beyond Neoliberalism , ICI Berlin, 13 June 2017, video recording, mp4, 17:50

The article departs from the diagnosis of post-Yugoslav contemporary accounts of Yugoslav and partisan events. The critique of nationalist and Yugonostalgic discourses discloses shared assumptions that are based on the 'romantic' temporality of Nation and on history as a closed process. In the main part of the article the author works on the special, multiple temporality of partisan poetry that emerged during the WWII partisan struggle. The special temporality hinges on the productive and tensed relationship between the 'not yet existing' — the position of the new society free of foreign occupation, but also in a radically transformed society — and the contemporary struggle within war, which is also marked by the fear that the rupture of the struggle might not be remembered rightly, if at all. The memory of the present struggle remains to be the task to be realized not only for poets, but for everyone participating in the struggle. This is where the revolutionary temporality of the unfinished process comes to its fore, relating poetry to struggle, but again producing a form of poetry in the struggle. ; Gal Kirn, 'Multiple Temporalities of the Partisan Struggle: From Post-Yugoslav Nationalist Reconciliation Back to Partisan Poetry', in Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 8 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2014), pp. 163–90

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, artistic, or political, have sought to document and aggregate past fragments, diverse snapshots, artworks, political events — a diverse archive to be retrieved in order to unsettle current narratives and mobilize emancipatory changes. The term 'Partisan counter-archive' in particular builds on two recent publications, Gal Kirn's Partisan Counter Archive and Davor Konjukušić's Red Light, which tackle the return to the Yugoslav Partisan struggle and its after-life, going beyond both revisionism and nostalgia. Seeking to connect this particular example to wider revolutionary and decolonial histories, the symposium will also draw on some of the most advanced considerations of archival practices in radical modernist traditions and contemporary art. How can counter-archives connect the testimonies and legacies of past struggles with the victims of today's oppression? What kind of power struggles are produced by counter-archives, and how do they manage to draw attention to what has been lost, overlooked, reduced, suppressed, or omitted from national archives and established ...

The post-1989 social order is crumbling. New forms of political discontent and expression are emerging, but also new military engagements, economic protectionism, a resurgence of nationalism, and a general mistrust of political representation and news media reflected in rampant talk of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts'. It is all the more urgent to question the narratives about 1989 and its aftermath that are being used to determine contemporary history and shared political timelines. The end of the Cold War – interpreted by some as an 'end of history' – reshaped social and political life across the world and was routinely understood to coincide with democratization, globalization, the rise of neoliberal capitalism and global human rights regimes, but also the defeat of socialism and the dismantling of the welfare state. These processes and ideas have preoccupied the social sciences and humanities and dominated the conceptual apparatus theorists rely on to make sense of contemporary politics and societies. More than 25 years after this alleged historical rupture, after the triumph of liberal democracy, and the opening of the social sciences and humanities to transnational and transdisciplinary frames, a number of alternative (dis)continuities emerge: many of the changes associated with 1989 actually can be shown to have started much earlier, while the current crisis of finance capitalism on the one hand and the challenge of authoritarianism and protectionism on the other – not to mention impending ecological catastrophes – run counter to the triumphalist narrative that still serves as the basis of the determination of the current era. Programme 16:00 – 17:45 Panel I: What Happened to Social Theory in 1989? Epistemic Shifts and Continuities Introduction by Marian Burchardt Boris Vormann (John F. Kennedy Institute, FU Berlin) 'No Alternative: How the Third Way Became a Dead End' Respondent Marian Burchardt Boris Buden (Bauhaus University Weimar) 'How Has History Lost Its Language? On the Political Prospects of ...

"Die slowenische 'Antiglobalisierungsbewegung' entwickelte gegen Ende des Jahres 2000 umfangreiche Aktivitäten, die Ende 2001 einen Höhepunkt erreichten. Der wichtigste Motor der Bewegung war zu jener Zeit das Büro für Interventionen (UZI). Aber nach der Anti-Kriegs-Street-Party 'Qatarza' spaltete sich die Bewegung. Die Folge war, dass bis Ende 2002 keine breite Koalition aller Initiativen, die gegen eines der zentralen Projekte der politischen Eliten - den Beitritt Sloweniens zur NATO - auftraten, zustande kam. Zwar gab es vereinzelt Aktionen in verschiedenen Regionen Sloweniens, die 'Bewegung' blieb jedoch auf Ljubljana beschränkt." (Autorenreferat)

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 thou