Suchergebnisse

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Anna Politkovskaya. Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky, trans., with an introduction by Georgi Derluguian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 232 pp. Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus:. World‐System Biography. Georgi M. Derluguian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 416 pp. Chechnya: Life in. War‐Torn Society. Valery Tishkov. Tatiana Sokolova, trans., with. foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 284 pp.

The question of the sense of writing often hides an attempt to speak about its senselessness. However, the question of sense is secondary compared to the issue of literature's lost legitimacy. The article tries to deconstruct this double-coded process: somebody might complain that there is no 'sense' because he or she does not produce 'sense' by writing with the goal of erasing the ideological field. Literature cannot easily keep alive the illusion that it transcends power. But only cynicism or institutional inertia allow us to argue that there is no literature that exists beyond the boring list of self-defeating words (crisis, fragmentation, anomie, relativisation, loss of freedom, etc.). Instead of speaking about its sense and senselessness, we should be more interested in the way how writing collides with the context that still enables it.