A chance for the sword, but also for discourse

[(CORRUPTION - SALUSTIUS, GC)]

Roman historian, writer and diplomat Sallust (86-34th century AD), about corrupt Romans, those from the upper social class, says this without a hair on his tongue:

"Only a few of them loved their honor more than gold."

Maybe Sallust starts from himself, but he is not in that raspberry.

Although he was in opposition to the old Roman aristocracy, he managed to become enormously rich, since he stood by Cezara in the civil war and gained control of a part of Africa, which today covers several countries known under the diplomatic abbreviation Maghreb.

Once he was even expelled from the Senate, allegedly for immorality, if that qualification is not contrary to the Roman lifestyle - rather I think it is - that is, I do not find any serious contradiction in it, at least not when you look at power and gold through the eyes of Rome.

[(PRINCIPLES - ĐILAS, M; PLAMENAC, J.)]

The most heartfelt work, here, about morality, ethics, are not, as it seems at first glance, Miljanov's Examples of bravery and heroism, although they follow the human heart in wavering and crisis. No, that would be it Đilasova A new class. Why?

Ideological corruption is a serious problem. We understand both of them, Miljanov and Đilas, approximately equally because they carry reports about a man in a crisis of conscience. But for a writer, it is very important what he exposes himself to while writing this or that. What does his story cost the writer, what does he pay, and how much, isn't there a catch?

The old writer has his own Examples of behavior wrote convinced that it would bring him the well-deserved comfort, and the writer from the XNUMXth century, driven against the wall - when we look at the matter on the horizon of expectations - wrote aware that after his studies, prison or death awaited him. And yet he defiantly spoke his mind. He put his hand on the handle of ideological and material corruption, opened the door and stared at the consequences.

Đilas' work is a whipping of the corrupt - he exposed the material privilege of the victors, exposed the duplicity of a regime that talks one thing and thinks and does another - this very important work - influential on a global scale - denounced an ideology, bribed with money, and A new class and moral, not just theoretical instrumentation.

Undermining and discrediting false principles and dubious honesty is a privilege and a hazard - the price paid in falling from power and imprisonment. A paradoxical privilege that reveals a naked emperor - a condition when principles are parasitic "on a high level of generality", as he would say Jovan John Plamenacsystem. (To some people it may seem that to claim that liberals and radicals differ less in their principles than in their beliefs about the social conditions of realizing them and the methods to be used in creating those conditions, is to belittle the difference between them. I don't think so. The principles are at a high level of generality. (Cf. John Plamenatz: Marx's Philosophy of Man, Oxford, 1975, 374.)

In our country, there are some empty stories without personal examples everywhere. From the existence of Marko Miljanov, through Đilas, and Plamenac, who called himself the Oxford man, until today, half a century after him, there is a lot of empty talk. Here, it is easiest to seduce another, and others, by talking about morality, talking about ethics, but without personal sacrifice. Taking a look at the last decades, I don't know a place where some high-profile story without a personal example would be cheaper than in the Balkans. The dry oath of honor is compromised - at least the memories are the freshest - let's look around!

Flamenco is aware of this, in the cold, rational British climate, though I don't know if he would be aware here. The idea of ​​moral freedom, he says, is as much political as it is moral. (Sic!) (Familiar, that, though again variously interpreted, is the idea of ​​moral freedom. This idea, since Rousseau took it over from the Stoics and adapted it to new purposes, has been as much political as moral. (Cf. in detail John Plamenatz: Marx's Philosophy of Man, Oxford, 1975, 330.)

In Đilas, on the other hand, I like that openness, honesty and virtue with courage. Corruption for me is not only the power of money but also the decline of courage, goodness and virtue. Corruption is a crisis of honor; that's why the writer is there, to write as much as he can, for what else?

He did not fare as well as Sallustius, who became so rich in politics that he built his monumental gardens - a suburb of Rome is now called Sallustiana after their ruins - at least as far as gold is concerned. But in the confession of guilt, in the gold of words, Đilas is equal to Sallustius, and even fiercer, especially when he To a new class.

[(WEIGHT - MIĆUNOVIĆ, V.)]

A strongly indicative word for the diplomatic service after World War II is weight. Everything is difficult in the Balkans, relations between countries, mistrust between peoples, economic recovery of countries, intelligence pressures from one, other, third actors.

Bloc politics - heavy as lead. In relation to the USSR, in the then inevitable direction, where the ambitions and needs of international politics lead - the most difficult. Analysis, dispatch, opinion, staging, planning, contracts, receptions, opera, courtesy, style - weight sprinkled over everything.

"Mićunović was aware that a complex and demanding diplomatic mission awaited him, since he was going to the country, one of the two most powerful world powers, which was considered the leader of the bloc of communist countries and the international communist movement in general, with which relations were only recently normalized after several years of conflict" - this is how one comment begins, about the appointment of a party man, as the head of the mission in Moscow - heavy, with the weight of lead, as if the lead, from the typeface and the press, falls on the reader.

Veljko Mićunović he himself saw things through that lens, which is confirmed by his memoirs Moscow years - through the prism of tension, burden, text that presses and grinds itself. It can be seen that he is a diplomat who feels a natural need for a text.

[(INTERTEXT)]

Intertext, the history of influence, essentially forces the simple idea that "presence in the other" is realized not only through the text, other literature, where we are reborn, but that whole cultures are present in the discourse that is born (otherness, otherness). That there are sky and stars, earth and water, communications, general sign system, intellectual techniques, human rights, everything and everything.

And it's nothing new, it doesn't bring these concrete relationships between two texts in the third, only the XNUMXth century - it's an old phenomenon. Without intertext, the concepts of parody, genre, human rights, media are unclear. Intertext aroused curiosity.

The presence of one text in another, nascent text is engaged precisely in modern thought. Mikhail Bakhtin radicalized the dialogic character of one text in another. And he is considered, at least by Americans, to be the father of intertextuality because of his "dialogical word", "internal dialogue", "ambivalence", "multiple meanings", "polyphony".

The presence, the pregnancy of something in something else, she also absolutized Julia Kristeva, starting with the entire text, in which there is the presence of the other and otherness prerequisite. The latter, since it arises from an influential rush, from a storm of influence, is already a new status of semiosis. This is where a new intertextual relationship, comparatism, totality is born. Diplomacy is a typical intertext both in oral and in written form.

The totality of influence on the author and his text, present in modern diplomacy, radicalized the New Yorker Harold bloom (1930) in Reception, Criticism, Controversy. He concreted it, hard, Roland Barthes (1915-1980), for whom the influential situation around the helpless author, everything that surrounds him, and the greatest textuality, is actually the condition of every new text. The text, he says, is just a network of quotations, a scrap of weaving, part of the general cultural texture. Literature is exhausted, the author is dead, says Barthes.

Literature renews itself. hosing around, riding around, as today's diplomats, especially the English, like to say, obsessed, always, with the drive towards the concrete, guided by the dialectic of the concrete. The author is compensated by the performance of the production, says Barthes ("death of the author", 1977). He, the so-called author, he is more of a commentator, editor of former texts, he has nothing new to say. Everything has been said, no one can make a new text, only the old textures can be varied. No author. What was that writer, who is that?

Renate Lachmann (1936), a German Slavist from Berlin, insists on "remembering the text" and approaches culture as a storehouse of the past, texts and past knowledge. The dynamic constitution of meaning, dual, polyvalent reading, is its support. Not accumulation, she says, but the creation of new symbols. Not a straight line, adds Leichmann, but a new semiotic potential. This is where, in the relationship between their creativity and the broader traditions into which diplomacy introduced them, our diplomats - writers, are the strongest. The most interesting - certainly. Those who, like Mićunović - I mean them - measure their presence in diplomacy by the text and thus, the urge towards the text, feel unforced: the early Bokelji, all Petrovici, Soldiers, and further, the actors of the new era - Hajduković, Tomanović, Mijušković, Lalić (was cultural attaché at the SFRY embassy in Paris), Lekić, Lukovac, so many others.

Bohumil Foržt (1972), a Czech theoretician, graduated from the school that is closest to me, because my teachers are still alive, from the Prague structuralist tradition, advocates an intertextual strategy with a clear attitude towards tradition. Namely, tradition is either challenged or adopted in artistic creation, but not so in diplomatic and literary writing. An artist is conditionally separable from tradition, while a diplomat is inseparable. With his teacher at Charles University, Lubomir Doležel, Foržt worked on the theory of fictitious worlds (the work of the same name, 2005). Diplomacy is slow to change. Foržt considers the diplomatic letter, a tradition, to be largely irrefutable, since it is an area with a conservative radius of change. In diplomacy, newness arrives in a flash, but actually, since it is sifted through the craft in a practical sense, comparatively, it is no longer so new. In diplomatic discourse, a novelty grows old quickly, it cools like ice in the canon of a craft, which always strives for the possible, unlike literature, which strives for the impossible.

[(NEGOTIATIONS - LJUBIŠA, SM)]

What is in Kanjoš Macedonović more important: that a minor man kills a tyrant, and the manner in which he kills, or that a minor man says and how he speaks? What is dominant, the act or the discourse? Is there an advantage in that, and where is it if there is?

An idea like Kanjoš, inspiration, narrative - in my opinion, comes straight from the negotiation, eo ipso diplomatic experience of the writer. A significant part of the novel is occupied by the basic negotiation assumption - dialogue. Complete Ljubisin the narrative carries a dialogic and negotiating character both side by side.

In Kanjoš, there are always negotiations everywhere. First, the Paštrovići negotiate who to send to Venice, to save face, and then Kanjoš himself, with his own, then with the tyrant, leads the negotiations until the end, until the execution. He turns Megdan into a negotiation process, and in particular he negotiates with the Venetians even after freeing them to attack. He speaks while wielding a sword, speaks while killing, speaks while thinking, speaks while silent, speaks while sleeping and this is what makes Kanjoš a bloodthirsty humorist.

I definitely believe that behind this rare, Macedonian inspiration about David and Goliath, about the chance of minor anonymous people, who otherwise have no chance in life, is Ljubiša's long negotiating experience, accumulated in the mileage of sluggish sessions of the Austro-Hungarian Reichstag in Vienna. It's just that this experience was formally moved to a context where the main tools of an outsider who got a chance will work most sharply: anger, spite, fury, humor, laughable absurdity - in the hated space of oppression of those who have no chance. To Venice. There, where the writer sent arrows of his rebellion, resistance and struggle throughout his life, Ljubiša directed his executioner-humorist, Kanjoš, to kill the tyrant, but also to talk about the murder. A heroic and negotiating humorist - that's Canjos, a not-so-distant descendant of Don Quixote.

Polyphonic and dialogic (diplomatic) form Kanjoš Macedonović - the chance of those who have no chance. A chance for the sword, but also for discourse. The presence of dialogical, negotiating, diplomatic discourse is not only equal to heroism, megdan, narrative about death, but at times it is dominant. Ljubiša's prose is more full of negotiated (consensual) discourse than any other Yugoslav prose of the 19th century.

Writers Petrović, all but one (Bishop Vasilije) have an absolutist tone and discourse. Ljubiša's narrative is characterized by a different, and negotiating, intonation. Ljubiša, like the Jews, is always and unreservedly turned to seeking compromises. The last word has not yet been said about his dialogue, compromise, vocation, and diplomatic experience.