Literature and Politics

According to Slavoj Zizek we no longer inhabit “civilization” – what he calls “a specific cultural-symbolic world” – but the “neutral economico-symbolic machine” of late capitalism. The geopolitical cast of this machine was forged by the outcome of WW2 and stamped with a rhetorical trace of the Nazi death-camps: “Never Again”. But while this stamp holds prominence on the surface of the machine, the genocide it demarcates against is far from absent. Cambodia (1975-79), Bosnia (1992-95), Rwanda (1994), and Darfur (2003-) are all well documented instances of post-WW2 genocide.

A little over a decade ago there was an organized effort to exhume the dead from mass graves located on the site of the Srebrenica massacre (1995) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Though this effort took place under the guise of transporting the remains to secondary and tertiary gravesites, an ICTY trial determined that the exhumation was an attempt to conceal evidence of the massacre perpetrated by Serbian military and paramilitary against Bosniak men and boys. Identification of the victims was made almost impossible as removal and reburial lead to dismemberment and co-mingling.

While much of our understanding of what occurred in the Nazi death-camps can be attributed to survivors’ personal accounts, many recent literary renderings of genocide are composed as collage, translating multiple stories into one unified narrative. Are the writers of such literature, like those who attempted to conceal evidence of Srebrenica, simply mangling already decomposing narratives for “secondary burial” between the covers of a book? Taking this question as a point of departure and drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s essay, ‘Kant with Sade’, Robert Bolaño’s literary masterpiece, 2666, and At The Drive-In’s song, ‘Invalid Litter Dept.’, my paper transforms metaphors of the mass grave, (de)composition, and secondary burial into a critical framework within which I explore the relationship between genocide and literature in our post-WW2 “economico-symbolic machine”.

Mark is a PhD candidate and tutor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. His thesis combines contemporary critical theory with textual analysis to rethink the concept of genocide as it relates to multiple ideas of modernity. He has delivered papers and has forthcoming articles dealing with philosophy, film, and literature.