Citizen writer

The discussion was not about the responsibility for the previous period, but about the responsibility for the time that is immediately ahead of us. We agreed that the situation in which we found ourselves gaping open for intellectual, public, cultural, moral and, of course, political participation, participation as a being of democracy, with equal chances to act constructively or destructively, in discontinuity with the previous one or in continuity , which depends on each individual. We agreed that the discontinuity must not remain merely formal. It is necessary, for the sake of literature as much as for the sake of the public, to act in a formative, constructive way, directing efforts on the one hand towards raising the general standard of cultural supply and demand, because it is a beneficial prevention against base instincts, fear, hatred, aggression, necrophilia, and on the other hand towards the direct confrontation of the public with individual and collective responsibility for the events that make up our history, recent and future.

Of course, there were also differences of opinion, which is normal among writers, and good because it contributed to a lively dialogue and a true exchange of personal and principled options, a dialogue of cultures and aesthetics, a dialogue of beliefs and doubts, identity and language. The discussion was primarily about the differences in approach - to act on the discontinuity in the way of thinking and on the established patterns of language, or to act directly in the political sphere. Act as a citizen writer, or as a citizen writer.

I argued for a distinction between the engagement of art and the engagement of artists. Art is created as a private act, but if it really happens, then it means that there is something in the work that concerns every person, even those completely devoid of taste and imagination. Much like the Pythagorean theorem applies to every man, even the ignorant. Just as Kant's categorical imperative concerns all of us, even moral idiots. There is something in a work of art that in itself legitimately demands that it pass from the private sphere of the artist to the public sphere, into an open field of mutual communication, because it concerns everyone. In a sea of ​​different experiences and identities, art simply points to the basis of each experience as experience, the basis of each identity as identity. It is not an experience about history, but a history of experience, of the process of articulating and designing experience, in a certain way a history of history. And as legitimately public, art is necessarily political, because the public belongs to politics. Like it or not, art, if it is art, enters the domain and field of political forces. Politics, of course, has no idea about these uncontrolled intrusions on its own property or, when it does, it naturally demonstrates a hostile attitude. That is why the action of art itself is much more effective politically than the action of artists, that is, actions that are immanently political and not artistic. Interventions of classic political engagements are easily recognized and instrumentalized by politicians for their own purposes, because they are too naive for its standards, inferior in relation to real political practice and the consciousness of orthodox political institutions and subjects, those whose lives literally depend on politics, who live on politics and for politics, to the same extent that the artist lives for art and from art.

Our books, when they are good, are true and effective because they consist of sentences, not events. Readers are usually not ready for the truth. In this sense, artistic truth is no different from other truths - illusions, within the strict and narrow limits of the already known world, have always been far more popular. It is a space worthy of action.