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COMMUNICATING VESSELS
Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999-2018
Darko Suvin
COMMUNISM, POETRY
COMMUNISM, POETRY
COMMUNICATING VESSELS
(Insubordinate Writings 1999-2018)
Darko Suvin
Political Animal Press
Toronto • Chicago
Copyright © 2020 Darko Suvin
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Le choix que je suis [The choice that is me]
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant (1943)
… [C]ontent warnings serve as advance notification of difficult
material…. to enable participants to work effectively with the material.
Content warnings should not serve the purpose of avoiding controver-
sial content.
From MLA Statement on Content Warnings (2018)
People for the most part (99 per cent of the bourgeoisie, 98 per cent
of the liquidators, about 60–70 per cent of the Bolsheviks) don’t know
how to think, they only learn words by heart. They’ve learnt the word
“underground.” Firmly. They can repeat it. They know it by heart. //
But how to change its forms in a new situation, how to learn and think
anew for this purpose, this we do not understand.
V.I. Lenin, “Letter to Inessa Armand,” transl. A. Rothstein (1913)
Understanding the poem is not only an intellectual act, but a political act.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1959)
The Beginning is near!
Slogan of Occupy Wall Street people
Paul Gauguin, D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous (1897)
translated as Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
To Fred Jameson:
Almost half a century of friendship, mutual reading, learning from you
With love and solidarity
Contents
Mottoes; Dedication; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements and Thanks
Introduction: “Here Is the Rose” 11
Poems 0 (“I seem insane”; “Drummer, drum on”; Mehr Licht) 24
1. Capitalism Means/Needs War (1998–2001) 26
Poems 1 (Ex: Fudô 2000) 50
2. Brecht’s “Manifesto” Today (2002): Bertolt Brecht: The Manifesto 51
[transl.] + On Brecht's The Manifesto: Comments for Readers in
English
Poems 2 (Zum Geleit: Das Manifest) 79
3. Explorations of Terror, Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism (2001–04) 80
Poems 3 (“Red-eyed bloody”; Reading Cecco’s “S’i fosse”) 111
4. 15 Theses About Communism and Yugoslavia, or the Two-Headed 112
Janus of Emancipation Through the State (2010–11)
Poems 4 (Le Ceneri di Tito) 133
5. Power Without Violence: A Lesson From Tribal Communism 135
(2009–13)
Poems 5 (Die Verwandlung, 1990s) 147
6. What Is to Be Done?: A First Step (2015) 149
Poems 6 (In the Ice Age; Doctrine) 170
7. Communism Can Only Be Radical Plebeian Democracy (2016) 172
Poems 7 (In the Ruins of Leningrad; C. Kavafis: Desires) 193
8. What and How Are Poets for in Our Age of Want: Cognition, 195
Emancipation, Communism (2017)
Poems 8 (Haecceitas – This Here & Now) 215
9. In the Shadows of Never-Ending Warfare: Use-Values of Lenin 216
Today (2018)
Poems 9 (Problem; Upon the Discovery of Pharaoh Woseribre 225
Senebkay)
10. Using Negativities: Brecht, Politics of Death (2018) 227
Poems 10 (Pillaging the Gnostics; C. Kavafis: Anthony…; My 244
Lady Hope)
Endnotes 248
Works Cited in this Book 263
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & THANKS
Special thanks to my landsmann from ex-Yugoslavia Sezgin Boynik, a 2015
interview with whom first nudged me to explicate the image of communicating
vessels between historical cognitive forms and politics; who commissioned for
a book edited by him an essay that is here much changed as Essay 9; and who
read various other essays in this book.
For all matters relating to ex-SFR Yugoslavia, indispensable guides were
Boris Buden, Mladen Lazić, Gal Kirn, and Marko Kržan; Ozren Pupovac,
together with Ivana Momčilović and Slobodan Karamanić, stimulated my
thinking about about its singularities. Many more debts are detailed in my book
Splendours.
Thanks also to the editors of all periodicals mentioned below who helped
much, and especially to Victor Wallis, who improved all essays published in
Socialism and Democracy. In such first publications, longer thanks to friends who
helped with materials and suggestions may be found.
Warm thanks for comments on various stages of the Introduction go to to
Boynik, Jameson, and Nenad Jovanović.
Bertolt Brecht, Das Manifest, in: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frank-
furter Ausgabe, Band 15: Gedichte 5. © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp
Verlag 1993 – with thanks to the Suhrkamp Verlag for speed and kindness.
First publications of the contents were as follows: essay 1 in Socialism and
Democracy 16.2 (2002); both parts of essay 2 in Socialism and Democracy 16.1
(2002), containing a long note of thanks, especially to Fred Jameson, Tom Kuhn,
and Marc Silberman for all their inputs into my Brechtian considerations; essay
3 is a shortened reworking of two essays on terrorism from Rethinking Marx-
ism 14.2 (2002) and Socialism and Democracy 19.1 (2005); essay 4 in Critical
Quarterly 57. 2 (2015), but before that in translations into Macedonian, Croa-
tian, and Slovene; essay 5 in www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Power-With-
out-Violence-A-Lesson-from-Tribal-Communism.php and a later version in
Serbian translation in 2013; essay 6 in Socialism and Democracy 30.1 (2016),
with special acknowledgement of the exchanges with the Novi Sad comrades
Gordana Stojaković, Maja Solar, Andrea Jovanović, and Lazar Atanasković,
as well as thanks to Eric Canepa, Mladen Lazić, Marcelline Krafchick, and
Michael Stöppler; essay 7 in International Critical Thought 6.2 (2016); essay 8
in Minnesota Review no. 91 (2018), with special thanks to editor Janell Watson
and the staff for corrections during my illness. Essay 9 is a radical redoing of
the postface to S. Boynik ed., Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language,
Helsinki 2018; essay 10 an even more radical rewrite of passages from an essay
of mine in Arcadia 5.2 (2017), with thanks to Vladimir Biti, Ivana Perica, Gloria
Macmillan, and to my long duration comrade and co-fighter Tom Moylan for
his unpublished paper on Bloch and Postmortality.
