Volume 41, Issue 2

To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal life. Pico della Mirandola, Speech on the Dignity of Man (1487)

Published and archival documents in Italian archives reveal how Marinetti sought to fuse art and life in order to foster an action-oriented (rather than reflective) artistic practice. Of particular interest is the Futurist political engagement in Anarchist and Syndicalist circles, and the impact of this on Futurist artistic practices in the 1910s. Selected examples from the theatrical genres of Serate and Public Actions and their relation to the beaux gestes libertaires of the Anarchist movement illustrate why the self-proclaimed Anarchist avant-garde and Futurism could not join forces in order to activate a country deeply steeped in traditionalism. Paradoxically, Futurism dealt more successfully with the bourgeoisie than with the revolutionary Left.

Although the Hungarian avant-garde (1909-late 1930s) was radically innovative, it contains a classicist element that has not been adequately studied, probably because it contradicts quintessential avant-garde features. The young György Lukács supported the avant-garde painters because he preferred their newfound order and control to the ephemeral and the subjective in Hungarian Impressionism. – The classicist vein of the Hungarian avant-garde related to its political program. Poet, writer, painter, editor and publisher Lajos Kassák, who became the leader of the avant-garde, articulated several times his position with regard to the state: as a social democrat and anarchist anti-war activist during World War I.; as an oppositional artist during the 1919 Hungarian Commune who nevertheless claimed state support; as a leading avant-garde authority in exile (1919–1926); and as an editor and poet with increasingly classicist leanings after his return to Budapest. Between 1919 and the 1930s, he aspired both to the position of an anti-establishment artist and to that of a rival to political leadership. – Kassák adopted Dada in 1921 but categorically rejected it a year later in favor of the austere order of constructivist geometry. His choice indicated not only his preference of clarity and authority but also a Central-European (mis)understanding of Russian Constructivism.

Dada's origin is generally associated with the protest movement against the First World War, yet scholarship on this issue is relatively thin. An examination of a few key Dada figures (Tzara, Ball, Huelsen- beck, Arp) and some artists that have been associated with the movement (Van Doesburg, Feis, Van Ostaijen, Vaché) indicates that the Dadaists were by no means pacifists, though they were alarmed and disgusted by the Great War. Whether they asked for a real, political (communist) revolution or an artistic-spiritual one, their rhetoric and iconography were heavily drenched in violence.

European Dada can be read as a political force in its own right. A stubborn contradiction has been at work in Dada studies: European Dada has been institutionally framed with models derived from the socially relatively stable late nineteenth century, but consensus also has it that Dada emerged in times of instability and contingency. The cultural instability of Zurich and Berlin forced Dada, and Richard Huelsenbeck in particular, to operate in a sphere that was both literary and political. The texts and poetics of Dada reveal its cultural project: to reclaim literature's social status in times of extreme politicisation.

Voicing initially a rather general critique of bourgeois culture and society – which was characteristic also of other European vanguard movements such as futurism, Dada, constructivism and surrealism – many militants of the Romanian avant-garde groups moved in the 1930s and 1940s towards an outspoken Marxist engagement, as evinced by the publications of Stephan Roll (pseudonym of Gheorghe Dinu) in the last issues of the review unu . As a result of this engagement, Marxist avant-gardists came to regard the avant-garde itself as a product of a decadent, bourgeois mindset, and called for a “true” aesthetic engagement in proletarian struggles, following the example of the USSR. Signs of an “engagement” may also be discerned in the surrealists Gherasim Luca and Gellu Naum in the 1940s. In line with André Breton they tried to reconcile the surrealist programme with the “total liberation of mankind.” Ironically, however, the Romanian communist regime muzzled the avant-garde: the old avant-garde militants had to submit to the ideological commands of “social realism” or leave their country.

How can we outline the historical and geographical spread of the so-called “historical avant-garde” An examination of the historiographical status of a few movements that are commonly considered as part of this avant-garde illustrates the lack of a consensus. For instance, some accounts ascribe a pivotal or privileged role to cubism and expressionism, whereas others explicitly exclude them. Neither the self-understanding of the “historical avant-garde” nor the innovations of its literary, artistic, and political practices yield a satisfactory definition. Instead, we should start viewing the “historical avant-garde” as a network and map it out as a rhizomatic complex.

Just as the avant-gardes themselves spread between 1910 and 1930 through all of Europe and even overseas, so did their aftereffects. We may find them in very different cultures, for instance in the Vienna Group and the Transfurism in the USSR. A comparison shows that these two heirs of the historical avant-garde are cognates, in spite of their different social and cultural environments. Both continued and further developed their formal traditions as well as their revolutionary social and ideological aims.

Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze, two key figures of French post-structuralism, developed paradigms of literary theory that revolve around a certain idea of subversion. Interestingly, both authors illustrate the subversive impact of modern literature with a view to a psychoanalytic reading of sexual “perversions”: Whereas Kristeva stresses the paradigm of fetishism, Deleuze underscores the subversive core of masochism. Kristeva's position is elucidated by way of James Joyce and Georges Bataille, that of Deleuze with Elias Canetti and Franz Kafka.

The theory of the performative – in its initial version by J.L. Austin and in its poststructuralist revisions – allows us to explore speech acts within C.P. Cavafy's poem as well as how his poems themselves can function as performatives. Performativity in these poems functions along four interrelated planes of performance, all of which are central to Cavafy's poetry: the erotic, the theatrical/public, the historical, and the linguistic. Recurring instances of “infelicitous” performatives in Cavafy's poems, especially unkept promises, reveal the critical and creative potential of this infelicity. The repeated failures and communicative gaps in the poems nevertheless work towards a notion of a felicitous poetic event, in which failure is transformed into a critical act and a motivating force for practices of constant revaluation.

Het vijfde zegel (The Fifth Seal), published by the Dutch writer Simon Vestdijk in 1937, follows the nineteenth-century tradition of literary novels on painting, practised by such writers as Stendhal, Gautier, and Zola. But Vestdijk also offers a more modern case of intermediality, for the novel can be understood as a psychologically motivated reading of El Greco's life and final phase of work. Protagonist and paintings develop through apollinic (orderly) and dionysic (creative) conventions. The novel can also be read as critique of avant-garde conceptions of representation. The interpretation of this fascinating text is accompanied by some general reflections on ekphrasis.

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis has a profoundly pessimistic conclusion. The present paper takes seriously the consequences of the apocalyptic rhetoric therein introduced for Auerbach's humanist historicist project, arguing that Auerbach holds responsible his own brand of secular humanism – whose story his book tells and whose method it implements – for the “Nivellierungseffekt” he so clearly deplores. As an exile on the outskirts of European space and time (Istanbul, 1945), Auerbach possesses a privileged philological perspective from which to synthesize a history nearing its end; the techniques he employs in order to do so, however, are for him complicit in the destruction. The final chapter of Mimesis , so often considered a weak point of the work, provides a condensed and lyrical account of this predicament.

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