Rada Ivekovic

This is a short introduction by the two authors Rada Iveković and Ranabir Samaddar to the issue of the French journal "Rue Descartes" (N. 62), titled "Terrors and terrorisms" or, in French "Terreurs et terrorismes". They start from the idea that what is called "terrorism" isn't in itself an independent phenomenon, but is rather historically produced and then fought by the state as well as by the international system of states, in a vicious circle that radicalises positions and violence. But "terrorism" (or "terror") is nothing in itself, its definition is extremely vague, and it turns around the state and its power.

This paper is mainly about situating the French language within (its) history. It analyzes the nostalgia for a linguistic and cultural imaginary global dimension of French. Although there are different globalities for different purposes, the one most widespread global language is English. English works internationally as an international language, even where it was once the colonial language, now left in heritage to once colonised countries. But the situation of the French language is quite different, its "globality" being much more discrete and more locally circumscribed. (Yet the French often refer to French as a once diplomatic language, which it is not anymore, except for the French and for the "Francophonie"). This is not to deny the different global outreach (and different publics) of such languages as Mandarin, Arabic, or Spanish. In this paper, i compare French as a mainly local, and English as a global/international language in their different and divergent postcolonial configurations. Having access to a global language does not preclude the local dimension, which has several tracks. Contrary to the monolinguistic dream, languages actually inhabit each other. Since languages inhabit one another, plurilinguism is an asset, but it is also quite accessible to anyone. The French often have an inbuilt difficulty and complex (which comes with the way the first language is taught and transmitted) about not being able to speak another language, which inhibits them right from childhood. Crying over the fate of small languages or of languages "divested" of their universal claim seems useless. Language is a living organism subject to transformations and to decay.

Rada Iveković reflects on the significance of modernity in contemporary Indian philosophy. Where the orient has been figured as the other for western philosophers, she asks how Indian philosophy depicts the west, how philosophers such as Kant have been interpreted, and how thematics such as pluralism, tolerance, relativity, innovation, and curiosity about the foreign have been figured in both ancient and contemporary Indian philosophy. While working on the western side with such authors as Lyotard, Deleuze, Serres, or Irigaray, Iveković doesn't exactly indulge in comparative philosophy. Rather, she tries to make the most of the existing “coincidences,” using both western and Asian thought in order to open a new area for the production of concepts and a new field for philosophy in general.

This book examines the antagonistic relationship between new European nationalisms as these often go hand-in-hand with populism, and the phenomenon of migration. Migration has become a significant issue both in Europe and the whole world. Although it has always existed, much of public opinion sees it now as a problem. The latter has been exaggerated through a crisis in hospitality exacerbated by the relatively recently constructed and misplaced feeling of a civilisational threat from islam. Migration is then countered by the escalation of new nationalisms, at least some of which are supported by populism. This book offers an understanding of this conjunction of migration and nationalism in the post-cold war European context. More specifically, the book takes up how the end of the simplified cold war cognitive binary means an unprecedented epistemological confusion and depoliticisation which takes migration as its target, but could resort to other targets too. Discussing the postcolonial background to the new migrations, the book also considers womens' rights, postsocialism and the relevance of the current pandemic, as the issue of migration is addressed in the context of the European crisis-ridden present. This wide-ranging interrogation of how contemporary European migration is conceived and understood will appeal to students, academics, activists, policy makers, and others with interests in contemporary migration, new nationalisms, populism, feminism, colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial issues, as well as socialism and postsocialism.

Rada Iveković reflects on the significance of modernity in contemporary Indian philosophy. Where the orient has been figured as the other for western philosophers, she asks how Indian philosophy depicts the west, how philosophers such as Kant have been interpreted, and how thematics such as pluralism, tolerance, relativity, innovation, and curiosity about the foreign have been figured in both ancient and contemporary Indian philosophy. While working on the western side with such authors as Lyotard, Deleuze, Serres, or Irigaray, Iveković doesn't exactly indulge in comparative philosophy. Rather, she tries to make the most of the existing "coincidences," using both western and Asian thought in order to open a new area for the production of concepts and a new field for philosophy in general.

The series of wars and civil wars in Yugoslavia, thereby dismembered, are seen in this paper as basically European wars, wars through which Europe is constructed and questionned in its very being. Contemporary history has alas confirmed this approach, since the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have seen right-wing populisms and nationalisms spread throughout the European subcontinent, the partition of Yugoslavia being the pattern repeated. In this sense, the Yugoslav wars are foundational for Europe which is regularly being reconstructed and (re)founded by the reshuffling of its borders to the east.

In this brief piece in French the author Rada Iveković reviewed and commented some of the work (references in the text) that Ranabir Samaddar did on the theory and practice of dialogue in resolving political and social conflicts. The short piece works also as some kind of portrait of Samaddar. Some years later (2017) Samaddar publishes a challenging book on the crisis in Europe (not reviewed in this piece here): A Postcolonial Enquiry Into Europe's Debt and the Migration Crisis. Publication Date: 2006 Publication Name: Rue Descartes

Rada Iveković reflects on the significance of modernity in contemporary Indian philosophy. Where the orient has been figured as the other for western philosophers, she asks how Indian philosophy depicts the west, how philosophers such as Kant have been interpreted, and how thematics such as pluralism, tolerance, relativity, innovation, and curiosity about the foreign have been figured in both ancient and contemporary Indian philosophy. While working on the western side with such authors as Lyotard, Deleuze, Serres, or Irigaray, Iveković doesn't exactly indulge in comparative philosophy. Rather, she tries to make the most of the existing "coincidences," using both western and Asian thought in order to open a new area for the production of concepts and a new field for philosophy in general.

Various theories of liberation and release in Indian philosophies have often been understood as proclaiming a fixed threshold of ultimate freedom，to be attained by some yoga-technique. The author argues that there is no such thing either within Buddhism or within Brahmanism：the goal to be reached for is perpetually shifting, even beyond the unspeakable of the mystic. She compares the teaching about "kośa" to Foucault's understanding (especially in Deleuze's interpretation) of the relationship within-without，inside-outside：the relative subjectivation is but an "inner" pocket of the externality; it is called "karma" in the Indian tradition.

L'analyse que Deleuze fait de l'emploi et de la creation du temps dans le cinema--qui a la possibilite de s'eloigner de la chronologie et du montage simples et qui par là favorise le pouvoir createur du simulacre, de la copie--est tout particulierement suggestive. L'artiste est un falsificateur par definition, dit Deleuze, et l'art n'est point une forme mais plutôt une transformation. Tandis que le dedoublement-multiplication du temps ainsi que le pouvoir createur du message evoqués par Deleuze renvoient à l'autre, il semble en être autrement de la specula(risa)tion. (edited)

I analyze the relationship between women and nationalism and argue that women's "identity" and relationship to the "Other" is different from that of men, because within the nation women, though included, are so as subordinate to men. I argue, further, that the structures of nationalism are fundamentally homosocial, and antagonism toward women is one of the first forms of attack on the "Other" (including of course towards women of one's own nation). It is constitutive of "extreme nationalism" and is, as subordinate inclusion, the pattern of other excusions.

When posing the political as first, we imply an order. Such civilisational choice distinguishes the political and installs the subject within a sovereignist hierarchy. It forbids the political to those who are constructed as "others" in time, in space or in culture etc. The production of knowledges and (cognitive) inequality are constructed together. Translation is a politics and a technique of resolving that inequality (though it can produce some too). We attribute "ourselves" the political and concede the "pre-political" or the "non-political" to others. Translation, together with some other instruments should allow to target cognitive justice necessary to a future epistemological revolution. It has its politics. The author's idea is, then, to start from intersecting etymologies as well as from the "untranslatables" which, thanks to the context, never make the whole "un-expressible". She gives some examples from "Asian" and "European" philosophies. The difference between the latter is striking when it comes to the fact that "European" philosophies value the subject/agency, while the "Asian" ones do not value it and do not even construct it.

In this paper published in Slovenian, i argue that Jean-François Lyotard could probably not have written his groundbraking book Le Différend in the eighties of the 20th century without having had his Algerian experience as a young teacher there. Lyotard was member of the group of leftist intellectuals "Socialisme ou barbarie" (also name of a journal they issued) around Cornelius Castoriadis. Understanding the "Other" and the relationship between the subject and the "Other" is essential to the line of thought that Lyotard developped in Le Différend. See his book La guerre des Algériens.

In international political language, within the framework of globalisation, there is nowadays a new and reversed usage of the terms and concepts “terror” and “terrorism”. I shall analyse these new meanings in political discourse as well as their implications in international politics. To some extent (and according to the needs of the moment, i.e. the needs of the powerful), the old and traditional meaning of those terms now still apply to conflicts and situations considered as local and inoffensive globally, or as having no global reach or dimension, such as the conflict and terrorism in Sri Lanka or in Nepal. In such “local” conflicts, the larger context of state terror(ism) may still be in view and (in)directly acknowledged. On the other hand, following the paranoia instituted by the “nine-eleven” re-foundational moment of history, the new-fangled usage of, and the recent meanings credited to those terms now roughly apply to the complex vaguely denoted as “Arabic-country-ethnicity-religion-and/or-Islam”. State terror is now considered to be exclusively defensive and justified in advance. However, it still includes para-statal terror and international “anti-terror strategies”, together with wars, torture, extraordinary renditions, extraterritoriality and extra-legality of detention, secret detention, man-made droughts, pollution, climate change, famines, forced migrations, terror against women and feminicide, trafficking of humans, sex-tourism etc. I consider language as being not only the possibility for evening-out differences and conflicts through necessary and welcome negotiations, but also as providing a possible space for conflict. Language can be (but needn’t be) as much a weapon as any other. I will therefore explore the politics of language, as i believe that the political (but not politics) “precedes” language. This is not only a question of freedom of speech, but a question as to who, for what purposes and under which conditions lays out those rights and that freedom. (2004)

The decolonization of France is not over yet. Blind to what was coming , France is now badly hit by the boomerang : linguistic isolation, postcolonial studies in slumber, deafness towards the boys and girls of the suburbs : words are cruelly lacking for institutions to make sense of what’s happening. At a loss, the media can only multiply distortions in media coverage and the authorities produce repression/selection at the borders. In this paper, the author develops the apparent differences between English and French as colonial and postcolonial languages, as well as the difference between the language and politics of young boys and girls from the suburbia in France.

The present article is a review of the very exhaustive and comprehensive academic book by Michel Roux, Les Albanais en Yougoslavie. Minorité nationale, territoire et développement, Paris, Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1992. Indeed Yougoslavia, partitionned in the decade long war/civil war of the nineties, was composed of six federal republics and two autonomous regions, one of which was Kosova or Kosovo (and the other was Vojvodina). Kosovo was one of the several stumbling stones of that conflict, and the Kosovo Albanians, a minority in Yugoslavia, were the majority in their province where the Serbs, otherwise the majority in the republic of Serbia (where Kosovo was imbedded at the time), were a local minority. (The Albanian national minority has lived in Serbia and Macedonia.)

The author analyses new meanings of "terror" and "terrorism" in political discourse as well as their implications in international politics. To some extent (and according to the needs of the moment, i.e. the needs of the powerful), the old and traditional meaning of those terms now still apply to conflicts and situations considered as local and globally inoffensive, or as having no global outreach or dimension. Following the paranoia instituted by the “nine-eleven” re-foundational moment in contemporary history, the new-fangled usage of, and the recent meanings credited to those terms now roughly apply to the complex vaguely denoted as “Arabic-country-ethnicity-religion-and/or-Islam”. State terror is now considered to be exclusively defensive and justified in advance. However, it still includes para-statal terror and international “anti-terror strategies”, together with wars, torture, extraordinary renditions, extraterritoriality and extra-legality of detention, secret detention, man-made droughts, pollution, climate change, famines, forced migrations, terror against women and feminicide, trafficking of humans, sex-tourism etc. The author considers language as being not only the possibility for evening-out differences and conflicts through necessary and welcome negotiations, but also as providing a possible space for conflict. Language can be (but needn’t be) as much a weapon as any other. She therefore explores the politics of language, as she believes that the political (but not politics) “precedes” language. This is not only a question of freedom of speech, but a question as to who, for what purposes and under which conditions lays out those rights and that freedom, or triggers violence.