Epp Annus

Teesid: Artikkel lähtub teesist, et armastus kui tunne on lahutamatu sellest, kuidas seda tunnet sõnastatakse ja mõistetakse, ning analüüsib armastust kui kultuurilist kujutelma, mille äratundmine toimub vastavalt ühiskondlikele tõerežiimidele. Analüüsin armastusekujutust kirjandusteostes Alain Badiou armastusmudelite abil ning lisan juurde „omailma-armastuse mudeli“, mis rõhutab armastatu lahutamatust teda ümbritsevast ruumist: armastus ei hõlma vaid armastatut kui kindlalt piiritletud kehalist üksust, vaid ka seda, kuidas armastatu suhestub teda ümbritseva ruumiga ja inimestega. This article presents and analyses Western cultural models for speaking and thinking about love. According to Michel Foucault, each society establishes its regimes of truth: certain types of discourses are approved as truthful while others are declared unreliable. Each society includes mechanisms of control, which distinguish true statements from false, and assign some people the authority to judge the true and the false, the acceptable and the unacceptable. Regimes of truth also establish paradigms for judging the truthfulness of love: according to the romantic regime, for example, love is something ephemeral, ungraspable and immeasurable, it transgresses established boundaries and norms; according to the pragmatic regime, by contrast, love can be expressed in economic terms and thus measured: a precious gift expresses commitment. There may be no common ground for one regime to concede legitimacy to a value asserted by a competing regime. In the view of the romantic regime, for example, the pragmatic regime might be judged as cynical and failing to grasp the essence of love – such weighing of feelings belongs to modern regimes of truth. Both romantic and pragmatic regimes of truth belong to the larger field of cultural imaginaries. Regimes of truth order and systematize the sphere of cultural imaginaries. I understand cultural imaginaries as the common ground for cultural identifications, a cultural complex that links together cultural memory, the value systems of one’s present era, and commonly shared expectations of the future. Cultural imaginaries are grounded partly in national culture, including the cultural knowledge shared by the national community and communicated in classic texts of that culture. In addition to specifically national cultural knowledge, cultural imaginaries of course include supranational value systems. The sphere of cultural imaginaries includes many inconsistencies and incoherences and it is always in flux. Alain Badiou outlines four philosophical models of love: romantic, practical, sceptical, and existential. I suggest that only two of these, romantic and practical, have attained the status of truth regimes. Badiou foregrounds the existential model: according to this model, love is the refashioning of the world through the two, the replacement of an egocentric perspective with a new perspective based on difference. The greatest enemy of such love is not an intruder from the outside, but the self itself that prefers its own egocentric world to the love-world that is constituted through difference. Following some popular models of romantic relations in novels, I point to frequent tensions between the different models of love in fiction: contract-love versus romantic love, love as desire versus love as a friendly attachment, and I promote a model of love as encompassing not simply the figure of the beloved, but also his or her surrounding world. The conglomerate of relations that surrounds the human body and plays part in its identification could be called, following Jacob von Uexküll, an environing world of love. Thus, in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or in Kasuema by Silvia Rannamaa, the female protagonist loves her male counterpart within the context of his environing world, where the beloved’s situatedness in the world becomes a defining part of the amorous relationship. Novels and films offer also a model of love which runs against Badiou’s ideal model of existential love: in some texts, the reader witnesses the birth of agency through love. In Asta Willmann’s short story “Patu vili”, the main character Berit grows from a passive, suffering, violated woman into an active, powerful figure who has strength enough to make groundbreaking decisions. She does not experience love as an existential relationship that offers her the possibility to relate to the world through the two, but she does grow as a human being and she finds strength and support in her relationship. The article concludes with the analysis of Mäetaguse vanad by Anton Hansen Tammsaare – in face of the death of one of the longterm partners, this short story exemplifies important qualities of shared life.

This article analyses the current state of research in studies of Soviet colonialism and considers inner tensions within this emerging field. By now, dozens of monographs and hundreds of articles touch upon the various aspects of Soviet postcolonialism, yet the field is fragmented and full of inner contradictions and unanswered questions: What is the relationship of research in Soviet colonialism to postcolonial studies in general? What is its relationship to traditional Sovietology? Areas of tension are found through historical and geographical perspectives, in the Russian neglect of its own Soviet imperialism, and in the long-distance scholarship dominant in the area. This paper argues that what we are witnessing now is the pains of a paradigm change, further aggravated by special complexities within the field. The article offers a historical overview of the development of studies of Soviet colonialism and shows that a decisive turn took place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 1990s, postcolonial perspectives were more widely employed in analyses of Tsarist-era Russian history. In the 2000s, several important monographs about the Soviet Union were published, yet, interestingly, their main focus was the inter-war period, before the Baltic states were annexed to the Soviet Union. Thus, for research into Baltic Soviet history, these collections and monographs can only provide background information. As for the post-WWII era, most important work from the perspective of Baltic studies – that is, general arguments about the developments in Soviet Union – remain on the level of single articles, the best known of these being David Chioni Moore’s „Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique“ (2001). The article makes a distinction between the general term „empire-studies“ and the more restricted notion of „studies of colonialism“; it further distuinguishes post colonial studies as a sub-category of studies of colonialism. Empire-studies approaches the Soviet Union as a multinational empire, but not necessarily a colonial one. Studies of colonialism argue that Soviet Union was indeed a colonial enterprise where subordinated nations and ethnicities were exploited in the interests of the central power. Postcolonial Soviet studies would apply a postcolonial critique to the research of the area: this would involve a bricolage analysis of power-relations, mechanisms of desire, the hybridity of the colonial subject, and its traumatic identity; it would shift the focus of research from the politico-historical features to socio-cultural features of the period. Though the notions „colonial“ and „postcolonial“ are widely in use in contemporary Soviet studies, the postcolonial turn is far from complete.

This article investigates ways of writing about the everyday in contemporary life. It starts by posing the question of why literature thrives especially on violence and extraordinary events. If literature strives to speak to us through our experience of being in the world, and aims to help us understand our common human experience, should it not rather avoid the extraordinary? Without a doubt, a topic needs to captivate its writer no less than its reader--otherwise the writing and the reading would not take place at all. For perfectly understandable reasons, whenever literature proposes to face death, this implies that the given text is something to be taken seriously; it signifies that here one is dealing with existential matters, not just with the myriad small nothingnesses of the everyday. However, the present article analyzes a different way of intensifying the quotidian: turning the everyday into an experience of beauty. A writer can find moments of special importance from within the everyday, relieving the reader from the boredom of „nothing happens” by other means than through an encounter with death and the extraordinary. Through a close reading of several Estonian novels („Indigo” by Peeter Sauter and „Tõde ja õigus” by Anton Hansen Tammsaare), the article suggests that, instead of underlining the burdensome boredom of the everyday, literature has the potential, through the power of its imagery, to aestheticize the everyday, even against the conscious will of the writer. If the routine of the everyday involves the automatization of life and a loss of the intense feeling of being in the world, Heidegger reminds us that the work of art opens up being in the world as a whole – and art does so precisely by relying on the everyday, not on moments of extraordinary significance. Thus, art would imply the disappearance of the everyday as a locus of boredom, unfullfilment, obligation and repetition, and the replacement of the everyday with pidulik elu, a life at once festive and solemn. For Heidegger, the everyday is a based on a structure of Care. Indeed, Care is the existential meaning of the everyday and the basis of human existence. Insofar as literature might aim towards revealing the structure of Care, this effort would involve the creation of festive life precisely out of the ordinariness of the everyday. Thus, in addition to the way literature might depart from the everyday by means of the violent and the extraordinary, literature might also recover the solemn festivity of the everyday as a way of making a piece of fiction readable, thus creating loci of desire and interest in the text.