The Time of Philosophy (with Svetlana Alexievich)

ABSTRACT

Weaving between anecdote, memoir and ‘empty time’, this fictional conversation with the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich, stages another genre of philosophy that would be, like her polyphonic style of documentary writing, not heroic as much as intimate. Set in Athens, while reaching towards Siberia, the conversation moves between the wartime 1940s and the late 2010s, gently broaching taboos of philosophical discourse: confession, ‘personal life’, memoir, love, family relations, doubt, fear, audience, and the time and place of writing, to arrive at a bare space of philosophical address, where nothing much happens except time passing. At once classically philosophical in its search for a form of life truthful to the Heraclitean dictum to search (for) oneself, and to Rousseauvian and Cartesian gestures of meditation and reverie, the essay also offers a language for thinking the textures and movements of thought – its quiet choreography.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporality
• writing
• choreography
• intimacy
• women
• war

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kélina Gotman is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies in the English Department at King’s College London, and Hölderlin Guest Professor in Comparative Dramaturgy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. She is author of Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of (Routledge, 2018) and Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory, Oxford University Press, 2018, winner of the David Bradby Award for research in international theatre and performance), as well as co-editor of Foucault’s Theatres (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2019). She writes widely on disciplines and institutions, critical practice, language, translation, performance and dance, including for SubStance, parallax, Textual Practice, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance, About Performance, and numerous edited volumes. She collaborates widely in theatre, dance and post-opera productions in Europe and North America, as well as with medical and art galleries and museums.

Notes

1 Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948), author of The Unwomanly Face of War (first published in English as War’s Unwomanly Face by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1988), won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for “her polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”; other works include Second-Hand Time   (2016 [2013]), which chronicles life in the former Soviet Union. Celebrated for forging her own genre between journalism, history, and literature, Alexievich here interviews women fighters on the Soviet front in 1941. She seeks the grain of sand, rather than the sky or sea (2017 [1985], 141); the history of human emotion, of feelings (19); of “soul,” rather than that of military monuments (88). What is this “soul,” this “feeling”? She writes, “For me the path of a soul is more important than the event itself”; and again, that this is different from official historiography, that after decades of silence and whispering, “Voices … Dozens of voices … They descended upon me, revealing the unaccustomed truth, and that truth did not fit into the brief formula familiar from childhood – we won. An instant chemical reaction took place: pathos dissolved in the living tissue of human destinies; it turned out to be a very short-lived substance. Destiny – is when there is something else beyond the words. What do I want to hear decades later?” (19). And what is it we want to hear – what is it we (what is it I) seek for? I find myself thinking, how unfashionable is this … talk of “destinies” and of “soul.” But there is something in here that draws, that quiets. An upheaval, and at the same time an almost nothing – something so nearly nothing it is enormous, it shatters all that we know, and yet it confirms all that we know, it is too simple to be said. Perhaps I may be accused of “quietism”; it is an accusation I think, for now, I am ready and willing to shoulder – if this is not politics, politics quietly and with rage and with care, then I don’t know what that “politics” is that should matter very much more.