Revolutionary Dissidence: Critical theory and political resistance in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

“A specter is haunting Eastern Europe, the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” These opening words from Václav Havel's seminal essay The Power of the Powerless are considered to be among the founding documents of a political movement that ultimately contributed to the fall of state socialism: dissidence. Recently, there is a renewed interest within political philosophy and critical theory to reexamine the legacies of socialism in Eastern Europe, in order to reconceptualize ideas of transformative politics. This debate, however, has yet to engage with the work of dissidents. In this dissertation, I focus on dissidence in socialist Yugoslavia (1942–1992) in order to provide a situated theoretical account of revolutionary practice, which challenges central tenets of (Marxist) subject theory. Dissident movements in Yugoslavia offered a distinct form of critique and resistance. Instead of dissenting from revolutionary politics as such, their dissent often concerned a specific state-centric, patriarchal and colonial understanding of revolution. Such revolutionary dissidence breaks with liberal conceptions of Eastern European dissent, which cannot account for the different political visions of opposition under state socialism. By departing from both liberal and orthodox Marxist conceptions of political subjectivity, I aim to provide a yet unexplored engagement with unique theoretical as well as political traditions of resistance from Eastern Europe, which challenge traditional understandings of social transformation. To this end, my research proceeds in dialogue with current feminist and decolonial theories of transformative politics, which are developing non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian approaches that envision radically new ways to understand and do revolution. As Yugoslavian dissidents were situated within the historical failures of revolutionary politics and its reversal into violent authoritarianism, new conceptions of social transformation within critical theory can no longer afford to overlook the theoretical consequences of dissidence.

Short biography

Aleksandar Novakovic, born 1991 in Vienna, studied political science and philosophy in Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt/Main. His Ph.D. project on dissidence in socialist Yugoslavia aims to re-examine the socialist legacies of Eastern Europe in dialogue with critical theory as well as feminist and decolonial theories.