Dead Letters

Abstract

In his 2010 novel, Double Negative, South African author Ivan Vladislavić undertakes an ethico-political and literary project of impersonality. Impersonality is understood in four interrelated ways: as an ethos characterized by a paradoxically passionate indifference; as an operation of depersonalisation transforming individuated persons into eventalized singularities; as a poetics, employing such literary techniques as affectless prose or the deconstruction of realist regimes of character; and as an ontological indeterminacy, whereby something is simultaneously posited and subtracted or in which binaries are rendered indeterminate. These general features of impersonality become accentuated and frustrated under historical conditions of postcolonialism. In the case of Double Negative, impersonality falls prey to two dilemmas: the dilemma of postcolonial publicity and that of postcolonial mourning under conditions of rampant neoliberalism. The essay explores the novel's (partial) solutions to these dilemmas and concludes by suggesting that world literature might itself be conceived as a work – and object – of mourning.

• Fetish
• impersonality
• mourning
• person
• Vladislavić
• Ivan
• world literature

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Stuart Taberner and the anonymous peer reviewer for helpful comments on previous versions of this essay. All remaining errors are my own.

ORCID

Daniel Hartley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3290-7251

Notes

1 Double Negative, henceforth DN.

2 Vladislavić has expanded on his parody of magical realism in an interview: “Perhaps it's an extended play on words. The second part of the novel is set in the magical early years of democracy in South Africa … The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had a darker vein of magic running through it. For all its failings, which became clearer as time went by, the Commission created a space in which people were brought to life or laid to rest in the rituals of storytelling … The magical flourishes are also a joke about my own style. When I published my first novel in 1993, I was called a magical realist. You may recall that Ben Okri's The Famished Road appeared in 1991. For the next few years, publishers and scholars were looking for homegrown [sic] African magical realism in every flight of fancy” (Trundle 2013).

3 On postal systems and nation-building, see Bennington (1990).

4 De Boever (2006), via the work of Giorgio Agamben, has even connected Bartleby to the plight of the refugee.

5 Esposito (2012) has attempted to develop an entire philosophy of impersonality along similar lines.

6 This is a clear example of what Esposito calls “immunity”: “Whether the danger that lies in wait is a disease threatening the individual body, a violent intrusion into the body politic, or a deviant message entering the body electronic, what remains constant is the place where the threat is located, always on the border between the inside and the outside, between the self and other, the individual and the common” (2011, 2).