Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Translations (2014)

boundary 2 41:1 (2014) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2409730 © 2014 by Duke University Press

Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Translations

Anita Starosta

Everyone was all in favour of the changes, the new order, but not Lucretia and me; we prayed it wouldn’t happen to us.—Michał Witkowski, Lovetown

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition.—Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

That the contemporary global condition is in some sense post-socialist is easily conceded: since 1989 represents the global triumph of capitalism, it also represents the dismantling of state- socialist orders and the institution of a new global order that has done away with socialism as an alternative or a threat, even as this order is also haunted by its remains,

This essay draws on research conducted at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University in 2009–2010, and on initial thoughts presented at the “Imperial Legacies, Post- socialist Contexts” seminars, first at the University of Cali-fornia Humanities Research Institute, at UC San Diego, in the spring of 2011, and then at UC Irvine, in the fall of 2012. I am grateful to Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski, seminar organizers, and Julietta Hua, a participant, for inviting me and for our many informal con-versations. I also thank Wlad Godzich and Matt Tierney, who make everything possible.

204 boundary 2 / Spring 2014

its memory, or the desire to reimagine it.1 But might the reverse also be the case? Might the postsocialist condition also be said to be global—to extend beyond the territories shaped by the legacy of the Soviet experiment and by the more recent transitions to capitalism and liberal democracy? To put it more precisely yet, might the particular postsocialist condition of East-ern Europe be generalized, abstracted from its immediate location without leaving Eastern Europe’s recent historical experience behind altogether? This essay thinks through this possibility in order to move toward an articu-lation of the “postsocialist” as a theoretical and analytical lens and thus beyond its current deployment as a mere shorthand for the postsocialist space of Eastern Europe—a space presumed to be a concrete, bounded reality, or an inert, self- enclosed territory.2

Postsocialist Eastern Europe is here an occasion for bringing to light aspects of globality that may otherwise go unnoticed: the kinds of transla-tion involved in the construction of the global as a possible common frame; and the forging of common time integral to this construction. In Dream-world and Catastrophe, Susan Buck- Morss has written that now—after the fall of mass utopia in the socialist East, and after time itself had been hijacked for totalitarian aims in the process of constructing an alternative, Soviet modernity—“‘we’ . . . may have nothing more nor less in common than sharing this time.”3 And nothing, indeed, seems more self- evident than the fact that “we” exist in the space of the planet in the same interval of time: an apparently neutral and innocuous fact, and raw enough material for a reconstructed collectivity. It thus appears to be a desirably provisional claim, as the postsocialist global collectivity confronts and constructs uto-pian visions of its own that, with the hindsight of the Soviet experience, demand at least caution if not also resistance.

Yet this lowest common denominator of time is far from self- evident. It begs the questions: What constitutes this time? And how, precisely, does

1. See, for instance, The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010).2. Similar analyses might be applied to other postsocialist contexts, such as China, Cuba, or postdictatorship Latin America. The epistemological status of Eastern Europe as such a territory, construed as an object of investigation rather than a source of knowledge, is at least in part a legacy of the area- studies organization, but it has also, curiously, intensi-fied rather than diminished after 1989. See, for instance, Hana Cervinkova, “Postcolonial-ism, Postsocialism, and the Anthropology of East- Central Europe,” Journal of Postcolo-nial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 155–63.3. Susan Buck- Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 68.

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a time—or time as such—come to be shared? A common time might be assumed as an a priori objective condition only if time is imagined as an abstract container. The instantaneous “now” of globality is the temporal correlate of its spatial dimension—of an image produced by the “gridwork of electronic capital . . . the abstract ball covered in latitudes and longi-tudes, cut by virtual lines,” as Gayatri Spivak has put it. Just as “no one lives there,”4 in that space visualized in computer- generated models, so no one lives in the abstract, objective time of the global present.

A “we” held together by sharing this time thus becomes an enigma. How, again, might we “share” it? How do “we” inhabit it? These questions must be pried open because time is not one, and because any sense of con-temporaneity happens within language and not outside it. Any subjective sense of sharing a common time is, instead, forged out of noncoincidences. This forging of common time, I will argue, happens through (reading in the mode of) translation, which is a process of a never- finished synchroniza-tion among multiple temporalities—and, by the same token, the process of forging the only possible authentic “we.”

There is a way in which this claim appears to recall Benedict Ander-son’s well- known argument that nations are imagined communities, con-stituted through emergent forms of print capitalism that were also tech-nologies of synchronization. The virtual, simultaneous presence of other readers and other addressees of the same newspapers and novels pro-duced a sense of commonality among geographically distant individuals. Print capitalism, Anderson tells us, provided “a new way for linking fra-ternity, power, and time meaningfully together”5 at the height of imperial expansion. Now, in the presumably postnational present, the nation form persists but other ways of linking postimperial humanity (“humanity” either as a displacement, or a mere updating, of imperial “fraternity”), power, and time must become discernible. One of these ways is captured in the perva-sive image of a digitally produced, objective synchronicity across the globe, which appears to resolve the question of how humanity, power, and time might be linked now. In light of this image, it may no longer be the denial of coevalness, as Johannes Fabian has argued, but rather its enforcement that marks power relations in the postnational, postimperial present.6 This

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press), 72; my emphasis.5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 36.6. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:


enforcement of coevalness entails inscription into the neoliberal regime of productivity and its hegemonic language, accomplished through a violently domesticating translation that insists on contemporaneity, transparency, and univocity—through a mode of reading that, in Paul de Man’s terms, remains on the side of hermeneutics rather than poetics7 and that, in my own terms elaborated elsewhere, values intelligibility over legibility.8

In contrast, another way of thinking the relation between humanity, power, and time emerges through a kind of translation that, without val-orizing opacity, nonetheless registers it and reckons with it. This opacity emerges whenever conflicting or incommensurate idioms, rooted in differ-ent temporalities and historical experiences, are activated in the process of reading within a single text, a single utterance, or a single word. The simul-taneous activation of such multiple idioms reconstitutes the presumably “common” time: it breaks it apart so that a more authentic contemporaneity might emerge. Objective simultaneity, then, is thus only a condition for the possible articulation of a subjective sense of contemporaneity. The forged time we might come to have in common doesn’t forget the fact of having been forged—laboriously constructed or even faked—through effortful engagement with the aesthetic dimensions of texts.

Translation is the mechanism of this reconstitution and articulation of common time because every word is a potential border—between past and present, between different chronotopes, and between multiple contexts that, for Mikhail Bakhtin, amount to multiple accents. In Bakhtin’s view, the accent is a trace of material context, while “context” itself is not limited to a monadic “nation,” “culture,” or “region” that might be knowable in advance. Words are, moreover, double accented, so that reading entails the confron-tation between the context of the utterance and the context of its receiver.9

Columbia University Press, 1983). This enforcement of coevalness is not merely discur-sive or symbolic but is discernible also in various political- economic tendencies, such as the distribution of laptops to children in the Global South; microlending and the sub-sequent incorporation of subalterns into debt economies; the investment in women and girls as engines of development (see Michelle Murphy, “The Girl: Mergers of Feminism and Finance in Neoliberal Times,” Scholar and Feminist Online 11.1–11.2 [Fall 2012/Spring 2013]); or the case of the Zapatista resistance against the attempted eradication of their untimely existence (see Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, “The Herons and Eagles,” in John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket [New York: Pantheon Books, 2001], 223–31).7. Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 73–105.8. See my book, tentatively titled Eastern Europe, Literature, and Postimperial Difference (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming).9. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four


Uttering a word or reading a word is tantamount to confronting a threshold that may be impossible to occupy permanently, even as it is also impossible to avoid inhabiting momentarily. Speaking, writing, or reading entails con-fronting many virtual borders—checkpoints without border guards, where the self- same and the familiar encounter the foreign, or where the foreign announces itself or becomes palpable as such. Only the speaker, or the reader, decides how long to linger and whether to cross. The present tense of a narration and of an utterance, insofar as these demand translation across multiple contexts, thus works—paradoxically—to disarticulate the present in the way a translation disarticulates the original.10

Because a geographical location or a historical situation is not easily abstracted,11 and thus not easily shared, the “postsocialist” here is not simply another term for the European Second World. It marks instead modes of personhood and modes of locution that are perverse with respect to the reproductive aims of the new global order. These perverse modes of personhood and locution—deriving from the socialist past but not reducible either to its official doctrines or to its official dissident cultures— persist in the present. They obstruct the formation of proper neoliberal subjects by disabling, however momentarily, the apparently closed language of neolib-eral freedom and progress. The temporality of this obstruction is admittedly uncertain: it may be limited by the concrete lived experience of those who retain the memory of times before 1989, even as it is also more perma-nently inscribed, and thus potentially legible, in imaginative renderings of that experience. It is uncertain, moreover, whether this obstruction might be ascribed to Eastern Europe as such—whether it is proper to it or whether, instead, it is common to all those whom the new solidifying order wishes to discard, whom it declares disposable, and who are deemed unable (but may also be unwilling) to adjust.

Turning to two contemporary texts that record the survival of dreams, fantasies, and forms of being at odds with the new order, I will argue that these figurations of Eastern Europe’s contemporary predicament are an occasion to examine broader questions that extend beyond the region.

Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univer-sity of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422.10. De Man, “‘Conclusions,’” 84.11. This remains the case even as “Eastern Europe” is, by definition, a space always already abstracted from itself. A matter of symbolic geography and a mobile signifier of difference rather than an entity contained within fixed physical boundaries, “Eastern Europe” has an imagined coherence or essence. This coherence is articulated primarily in discourse and fitted onto a space only secondarily, retroactively, and always awkwardly.


Michał Witkowski’s quasi- journalistic novel Lovetown (2004) and Szabolcs Hajdu’s magical- realist film Bibliothèque Pascal (2010) document what is otherwise, quite literally, unspeakable and invisible. Lovetown tracks an aging queer community for whom the transition to capitalism and liberal democracy brought not emancipation but, rather, the threat of catastro-phe. The Hungarian- Romanian film Bibliothèque Pascal tells the story of a woman who, returned home from sexual slavery in the UK, struggles to regain custody of her daughter. Yet it is not merely the social and eco-nomic marginality of these subjects that makes these texts apt reflections on the pernicious effects of the neoliberal order and thus, also, indices or instances of a more general global condition. More precisely than that, these subjects’ perverse modes of speech—and the attendant problems of inscription and legibility that both Lovetown and Bibliothèque Pascal under-score—demand a corresponding mode of reading.

This essay puts into practice what I have termed “accented criticism,” a mode of reading attentive to multiple accents that destabilizes entrenched frames of intelligibility in an effort to imagine a world without a center.12 The contexts that Witkowski’s Lovetown and Hajdu’s Bibliothèque Pascal put into play derive not only from within post- 1989 Eastern Europe, where these texts originate,13 but from at least two other sources as well. One of these sources is their protagonists’ lived, bodily experience of forcible dis- location and re- location, which—beyond mere physical passage from one historical situation into another or from one place to another—entails the constant effort to stave off collapse. They “put their words, their language, to use. For their power lies in their words,” remarks the narrator of Love-town, and it will be true for Mona, the protagonist of Bibliothèque Pascal, as well. “They have nothing; whatever they do have they’ve had to make up, lie up, sing up.”14 Thick with accent, their language and their broader imagi-native repertoire bespeak unreasonable attachments, obscene habits, and

12. See Anita Starosta, “Accented Criticism: Translation and Global Humanities,” bound-ary 2 40, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 163–79.13. As a result of the recent transitions within the region and its uneven integration into the EU, and in light of my analysis in the present essay, “post- 1989 Eastern Europe” can be said to constitute a single context only in the most schematic way. “Post- 1989 East-ern Europe” cannot simply refer to a place and time that is self- evident, self- identical, or objectively observable in every instance. The empirically observable time and place must be thought in conjunction with “post- 1989 Eastern Europe” as both a frame of intelligibility and a matter of reading, which is how I invoke it throughout this essay.14. Michał Witkowski, Lovetown, trans. William Martin (London: Portobello Books, 2010), 6. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Lovetown.


a penchant for fantasy and evasion through an assortment of narrative and rhetorical modes such as fairy tale, hyperbole, irony, or outright blasphemy. These are strategies of world- making and world- maintaining practiced by subjects who, always already out of sync and out of place, dwell primarily in language and the imagination, and who take their modes of speaking and seeing with them, across shifts in time or space.

The second source of context beyond that of “Eastern Europe” as a coherent time- space is the very circulation of these texts. As Lovetown and Bibliothèque Pascal encounter readers and viewers beyond the most immediate geographic and temporal boundaries of their production, they interact with these readers’ frames of reference and activate the interpre-tive strategies at their disposal. The novel and the film, in other words, become further inflected with readers’ and viewers’ own contexts—and, thereby, the accents that belong to those contexts, from the most private and nuanced to the most public and banal. This, then, is the proper con-dition of their legibility: instead of serving as transparent windows on the world of postsocialist Eastern Europe, and instead of staging a two- sided encounter between a self- coincident represented reality and equally self- coincident external observers of that reality, Lovetown and Bibliothèque Pascal involve the interplay of multiple moving parts. It is a field in motion.

Inverted History

Half novel, half reportage punctuated with autobiographical disclo-sures by the journalist- author- participant Witkowski himself,15 Lovetown documents the survival (or is it the vanishing?) of a queer community in Wrocław, a city in southwestern Poland. A preoccupation with the passage of time and the search for an adequate language are as central to the novel as the fate of its working- class, queer protagonists. These are, in fact, intertwined, as this fate is inseparable from its expression in language and incomprehensible without attention to time itself. The passage of time further complicates the possibility of documenting the protagonists’ lives in any straightforward way; historical change itself, most readily visible in altered urban landscapes and spaces, is marked by the sudden availability

15. For a discussion of Witkowski’s peculiar mode of authorship, see Dominik Antonik, “Autor jako marka” [The author as a brand], Teksty Drugie, no. 6 (2012): 62–76. The novel itself has had six editions since its original publication, each revised from the previous version, numerous translations, as well as several theater adaptations, and a multiauthor graphic novel based on “The Book of the Street.”


or the sudden disablement of certain words as they come to register new values or as they escape their speakers’ control.

Lovetown is divided into two parts, a structure that only appears to contain and bring order to these temporal difficulties. The first part, entitled “The Book of the Street” is narratively coherent, containing as it does the now- closed period before 1989—or, more accurately, before 1992, the year of Russian troops’ withdrawal from Poland, which for the queens is the more significant event. “The Book of the Street” is told through firsthand reminis-cences of two main characters: “Patricia: a heavy- set, run- down man with a huge bald patch and animated, bushy eyebrows. Lucretia: wrong side of fifty, smooth- shaven, cynical, just as fat” (Lovetown, 3). They are survivors of poverty; of boredom; of street and intimate violence; of AIDS, which took the lives of many of their friends in the course of post- 1989 transitions; and finally of the worst calamity of all—the supposed progress that befell them and to which others, the less resilient ones, succumbed: “the ground simply swallowed them up sometime in the mid- nineties” (Lovetown, 41). Patricia and Lucretia are fiercely attached to the relics of their past: army belts or pieces of barbed wire from the Russian barracks they used to visit that, stuffed in their pockets “for later on, when there was nothing left” (Lovetown, 17), are now stored in plastic bags to preserve the scent of that lost paradise. In their “house of mourning” (Lovetown, 10), the narrator- journalist is an empathetic witness come to record a nearly disappeared world whose existence had rarely ever registered to outsiders in the first place. “They explain how life just isn’t what it used to be. No soldiers, no park; and now the queens entertain themselves in modern, elegant bars that anyone can go to. . . . But they’re not queens anymore, they’re gays. Tanning salons, techno music, frou- frou. And no one has any sense of filth or wrongdoing” (Lovetown, 34–35), they add in a tone of comical lament.

Without the benefit of comparable historical closure, “The Lewd Beach”—the second part of Lovetown—is more chaotic and fragmented. It takes place in the post- 1989 present in Lubiewo, a resort town on the Baltic Sea near the border with Germany, whose name in Polish connotes both “love” and “lewdness.” This is where the queens used to spend their state- guaranteed vacations and where they continue to go, despite the influx of a new generation. Without a fixed narrative vantage point, “The Lewd Beach” recounts the queens’ living on in the present, their valiant resistance in the face of clean, reasonable fun. This second part of Lovetown is a rela-tively open book, in which the narrator- journalist now appears as one of the characters.


Yet, despite this two- part structure of the novel, the past and the present are not actually so neatly separated. “The Book of the Street” recounts the past through the vantage point of the present, with full con-sciousness of loss, inflected by nostalgia; in “The Lewd Beach,” the defi-cient present is experienced through the lens of the past.

To say that Lovetown recounts an inverted history is, at once, to invoke the obsolete sexological term for homosexuality and to call attention to the way in which its protagonists experience the world: from the other side of accepted mores, gender norms, and conventional versions of recent history, be they national or global. In a particularly emblematic moment in “The Book of the Street,” the narrator recalls a small Orbis bar under the generous patronage of “Mother Joan of the Homos,” the bartender whose ample bosoms “went unheeded, unneeded, by everyone” (Lovetown, 39). The bar was a refuge. “Out of boredom, we would ponder the word ORBIS painted across the glass, which from inside was inverted: SIBRO. Sibro, the most beautiful word in the world!” (Lovetown, 35). This bit of linguistic nonsense, part of their argot, is also their dwelling place.

This other side, inhabited by the queens and marked by inverted words, is literal in every sense—at once spatial, linguistic, and subjective. “The Book of the Street,” especially, is attentive to the manner in which they occupy and, by thus occupying, transform otherwise common urban spaces. A story of one of Lucretia and Patricia’s outrageous nightly esca-pades in the city park ends with a reflection on their absolute separateness from clean, polite society. In darkness, the park is a zone of vague shadows and indistinct shapes that promises sexual opportunity, or danger, or both. Daylight turns it into an alien space:

At five in the morning, panic sets in. It will soon be daylight, and all the imagined lads will have changed back into trees, No Entry signs, boulders, and monuments. No deceptions remain. . . . In a moment, the park will fill up with people. Unfortunately, it won’t be drunken, horny grunts, but ordinary people taking their shortcuts to work, nannies with children—they’ll look at us from the other side of an invisible wall. . . . Hideous and sober, freshness unfurls along with the breaking day. . . . Brrr. It’s better to run away from this scene of desecration. (Lovetown, 53)

The park at night recalls what Michel Foucault has termed a heterotopia, one of those emplacements that “have the curious property of being con-nected to all the other emplacements, but in such a way that they suspend,


neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented by them. Those spaces which are linked with all the others, and yet at variance somehow with all the other emplacements.”16 At night-time, when the park belongs to the queens, relations and values proper to “ordinary people” are indeed completely reversed, as common words take on opposite values. At the break of day, freshness and clarity of vision become repugnant agents of “desecration,” even as, for those ordinary people, it is precisely the queens’ illicit sexual encounters on park benches, behind the bushes, and in public restrooms that constitute a defilement. No compromise, no meeting, is possible between the two worlds, except for a momentary meeting across “an invisible wall” at dawn.

Yet this is not a classic heterotopia secured by physical markers that might grant a permanent space to the marginalized. There is no institution, no concrete structure or territory to contain it. The space of the park accom-modates two incommensurate worlds, albeit at different times. The “invisible wall” between them is made up primarily of language—not merely reflected in a language that would make up the queens’ argot, or in the accents given to specific words, but also actually constituted in language and in the prac-tices sanctioned by this language, as if it were a material reality in its own right. But, because this wall is carved out entirely in language and secured only by boundaries of time, it is a peculiar barrier, both absolute and perme-able: even as one can live only on one or the other side of this wall, the con-flicting accents that certain words acquire become simultaneously audible in these words. Military headquarters, discharge from the army, the picket line, or the very terms man and woman become inseparable from the inver-sions to which the queens have subjected them. And so language is also where this heterotopia overlaps with hegemonic spaces—where the same and the other meet without meeting, without tearing down the invisible wall. This heterotopia infects all other spaces because it is eminently utterable—forcibly shared in as soon as certain double- accented words are spoken, yet without erasing their unshareable aspect, its fundamental antagonism.

The queens’ heterotopian location—that is, their context—is trans-muted into their accent. This is how this heterotopia “dessicates speech”: not by disabling the common ground on which this and that might be think-able together17 but, on the contrary, by inverting ordinary language, forcing

16. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Essen-tial Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 178.17. Michel Foucault, preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-ences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973), xv–xxiv.


it to speak the unspeakable, and proffering it as that unthinkable common ground. The different spaces and times become superimposed and simul-taneous when they become embedded in words, which then come to con-tain and carry their very incommensurability, so that these spaces indeed remain “linked . . . yet at variance” with each other. This is not simply a sub-version of dominant language or an invention of a new one but its thicken-ing with accents foreign to it. Lovetown will thus confirm the coincidence between Foucauldian heterotopia (and heterochronia) and Bakhtinian heteroglossia.18

Scandalous, comical, or both, this dessicated speech put on dis-play in the novel—speech that is actually made pregnant and full rather than barren—will resonate differently depending on the reader. To put it more precisely, if also somewhat schematically: two distinct invisible walls might be said to emerge in the process of reading Lovetown. One wall, most immediately apparent to a “national” reader, divides official narratives of Polish national history from its irreverent appropriation by the queens. Patricia and Lucretia commit breathtaking sacrilege as they poke fun at one national piety after another. The “homos” not only believe in God—they assert, as if to claim full belonging in the Catholic nation—but “many gods, even. Any minute, out on the street, young gods are coming around every corner” (Lovetown, 11). The Romantic bard Adam Mickiewicz’s The Fore-fathers’ Eve is mercilessly blasphemed—along with the nineteenth- century history of armed uprisings against Russian rule memorialized in that play’s famous soliloquy—when a particularly lascivious queen speaks the words of its revolutionary martyr- hero: “my name is Million!” (Lovetown, 14). The more recent history, of the Solidarity strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, is also shockingly (or hilariously) inverted when the heroic narra-tive of revolt is exposed as a basically masculinist, heteronormative affair. There were no Solidarity queens, the narrator muses, because what pos-sible role might they “have played in that men’s game, when the women in the shipyards were slicing bread. . . . They wanted the system to take them from behind; they enjoyed being passive, submissive, obedient” (Lovetown, 27–28). This mockery of the ethos of anti- Soviet and antiregime resistance contravenes accepted values but may not be entirely surprising—in the aftermath of this heroic period, the Solidarity movement proved not to be immune to critique.19 It is an allusion to Jacek Kaczmarski, a beloved Polish

18. According to Wlad Godzich, it was Foucault’s coinage of heterotopia that led French translators of Bakhtin to come up with heteroglossia (private correspondence).19. See Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); and, for a scholarly perspec-


singer- songwriter whose affective resonance could only be explained by comparing him to Bob Dylan and Vladimir Vysotsky, that really borders on blasphemy. In a scene outside the walls of a psychiatric prison, where Lucretia and Patricia would go to tease—and be taunted by—the inmates trapped inside, both sides get so aroused that “finally [the queens] couldn’t help but break out in song: ‘And the walls will fall, fall, fall!’” (Lovetown, 61). Without losing its pathos, Kaczmarski’s song, once the hymn of the Soli-darity movement, here becomes an orgiastic vehicle of perverse desire—not for freedom and truth but for bondage and abjection. Inconsolable after the departure of Russian troops and the dismantling of army barracks, Patricia wonders aloud, “Maybe we’ll be invaded again, Lucretia. What do you think? Maybe we could get occupied by the Germans?” (Lovetown, 54). If for most readers being occupied by the Germans recalls the atrocities of World War II, for the single- minded Patricia it connotes only the promise of even more perverse pleasure—the Germans, from all she’s heard, are especially adventurous.

The heterotopian space of the novel is set apart by an affective (figu-rative) wall from the space occupied by the reader as multicultural global citizen.20 If most of these local references would be fully intelligible only to readers familiar with Polish history and must otherwise be explicated in a translator’s note, then the queens’ general refusal of agency, sover-eignty, and emancipation in favor of passivity—along with the rejection of bourgeois- individualist striving that would mirror world- historical collective striving for progress—is, to transnational readers, more clearly detectible than its particular national nuances. This second wall—which is also a temporal fault line—separates an investment in global historical progress, whether liberal or neoliberal, from intimations of its undesirability and potential failure. That the queens appear unemancipated and unprepared for liberal political personhood, moreover, perfectly conforms to the larger narrative in which sexual and gender equality emanates from advanced- capitalist centers. Their irrational attachment to so obviously inferior a past

tive, Magdalena Grabowska, “Bringing the Second World in: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies, and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism,” in “Unfinished Revolutions,” ed. Phillip Rothwell, special issue, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 385–411.20. I follow Jodi Melamed’s articulation of the term global citizen, elaborated in “Making Global Citizens: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Literary Value,” in Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, 2011), 137–78.


(drab in appearance and plagued by a shortage of freedom and other com-modities) also confirms the large- scale, overriding presumption of Eastern Europe’s own backwardness.

This unpreparedness and this fierce attachment alone, however, would not disqualify the queens from the kind of reeducation and retool-ing that the region as a whole underwent. What lends force to the fault line between the world of the reader as global citizen and the world of the novel is that the queens have no desire to become good (neo)liberal subjects. They are useless to the new order and, for their part, have no use for it. They prefer the artifice of their obsolete forms to the suspect “naturalness” of the newly liberated desires of emergent bourgeois gay culture. They see that natural-ness as nothing but a form, too, a posture adopted to maximize the intelli-gibility of finely differentiated identities, perfectly adapted to the new order. In other words, the supposed liberation of suppressed identities and desires in post- 1989 Eastern Europe is actually a transfiguration—a construction of new identities fit for a new time, a mere passage from one form into another.

For both the national and the transnational reader, then, the separa-tion between the proper and the inverted becomes exposed in the process of reading Lovetown. Yet it does not necessarily allow readers to remain safely on one or the other side. It does not guarantee the reader- as- cultural- translator a fixed point of observation that would authorize normative judg-ment in a straightforward way, and it does not result in the obliteration of one side by the other, or in the domestication of one context by another. On the contrary: as single words become inflected with multiple accents, their proper and inverted denotations are activated at the same time. This simul-taneity sets into relative motion multiple spaces, multiple emplacements, and disables the possibility of a static center.21 This is nothing other than the work of irony—the making manifest of multiple, and incompatible, refer-ential contexts that might underlie a single utterance and, by virtue of this simultaneity, the mutual disruption of these contexts.

This is an outline for a dynamic notion of reading as cultural trans-lation, which bypasses normative, Eurocentric transition narratives of the recent history of Eastern Europe. From within, the normative account is the familiar story of heroic resistance of dissident intellectuals and rebel-

21. What I am describing is distinct from “provincializing” Europe or the West, which resembles the Copernican revolution to the Ptolemaic paradigm in that it displaces one center in favor of another. I am proposing instead (the theory of) relativity as it might be seen to be at work in reading, in reading- as- translation, and in the constitution of collectivities.


lious workers, their efforts rewarded with a long- awaited, if still incomplete, “return” to Europe. From without, the less sentimental account is built on the logic of development, which organizes humankind according to a hier-archy of stages along a more or less linear, progressive, upward path—a logic according to which “it seems that in many respects postcommunist Europe is following the sexual trajectory of the West, probably with a delay of some two or three decades.”22 In these normative narratives, national lib-eration from Soviet control and subsequent entry into Western economic and security frameworks coincide with the supposed emancipation of gen-der and sexual minorities and with a consumerist awakening to the plea-sures of diversity offered by capitalism (through its commodities) as much as by liberalism (in the value placed on discrete identities)—an awakening coded as liberation- cum- individuation.

Neoliberalism, then, entails two translational aspects: it presents itself as fixed with respect to an unstable field in motion; and it domesticates completely. In both normative accounts of the transition—from within and from without the region—the West, or Europe, or advanced capitalism, is already fixed, while it is Eastern Europe that moves. Eastern Europe is that which has been in transition, that which has undergone internal transforma-tion in order to close the gap that separates it from the norm. The system as a whole is secured in place by the presumed stability of the center. Since “freedom” and its cognates are the telos of both transition narratives, the one from within and the one from without the region, the complex traditions of radical rethinking and practices of “freedom” from within Soviet- era East-ern Europe appear erased or irrelevant, engulfed by the freedom of the mar-ket, as if this had always been the goal and ultimate wish. To put it differently, while “freedom” was an active field of political, ethico- aesthetic, and dis-cursive struggle within pre- 1989 Eastern Europe, then its putative achieve-ment after 1989 appears, in transitological narratives, as merely a passive opening to what Eastern Europe was said to lack, as a submission or an undergoing, whose success or failure might then be measured.23 Neoliber-

22. Aleksandar Štulhofer and Theo Sandfort, eds., Sexuality and Gender in Postcom-munist Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: Haworth Press, 2005), 16. For a nuanced approach to questions of temporality, geography, and sexuality, see also Joanna Mizieliń-ska and Robert Kulpa, “‘Contemporary Peripheries’: Queer Studies, Circulation of Knowl-edge, and East/West Divide,” in De- centering Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives, ed. Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska (Burlington, VT: Ash-gate, 2011), 11–26.23. For a discussion of some pre- 1989 contestations of “freedom,” and of the conse-


alism, in its cultural and discursive dimensions, offers and enforces specific parameters of “freedom” by appropriating and thus evacuating, or otherwise obliterating, traces of oppositional or simply incommensurate traditions that would give the word a foreign accent. Yet, in Lovetown, it is not simply the case that the referential context of “Polish national- heroic history” puts into question neoliberal “freedom.” “National- heroic freedom” is itself already disrupted and disabled by the queens’ double- accented language.

Returning multiple accents to stripped words, Lovetown dismantles these collapsed values to disarticulate “freedom” from that afforded by national liberation, by consumer culture, or by liberal identity politics. At stake is precisely the undoing of the self- evidence of the neoliberal idiom of emancipation and progress—along with an estrangement of the com-monsense equation of capitalism with imaginativeness (indexed by the heterogeneity of available commodities) and its verso: the conventional link between the former state socialism and the confinement of the imagination (visible in the homogeneous greyness of its aspect).24

Instead of representing either national or sexual emancipation, the transition to capitalism appears in the novel as an impoverishment. In the new world, one can no longer confuse “trees, No Entry signs, boulders, and monuments” for “imagined lads.” As in the old park at dawn, in this new world “no deceptions remain”—while it was precisely the potential for deception and fantasy that afforded real freedom. The new order is thus a kind of permanent daylight, in which everything appears in sharp outline, identical to itself and discrete. The protagonists’ tongues are perverse not only because they, quite literally, engage in nonreproductive and purposely obscene sexual acts but also because the words they utter fail to affirm the aspirations proper to good citizens, whether national or global. In being perverse, their language is not just outside the norm but, more precisely, outside the reproductive aim—at once in the sexual, economic, and sub-jective senses of reproduction—that anchors that norm. “The Great Atlas of Polish Queens,” in the second part of the novel, catalogs the bewildering proliferation of a “new type of human” (Lovetown, 203) that emerges along with the “free market.” “Today you can buy anything you want: your sex, your eye colour, your hair—there’s no place left for the imagination” (Love-

quences of the epistemological and semantic collapsing of radically distinct notions of freedom within transition narratives, see my “Gardens of Things: The Vicissitudes of Dis-appearance,” Intermédialités, no. 10 (Fall 2007): 147–63.24. See Boris Groys, “Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its Post- Communist Other,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008): 149–64.


town, 6). Instead of imagining and inventing outrageous stories, now one can simply buy one’s way into a recognizable identity, and this shift in avail-able modes of self- construction and survival is mirrored in the changing urban landscape: the park is being replaced with a shopping mall; “they’re burying their entire history” (Lovetown, 7).

Lovetown is more than an excavation, however, or an ethnographic report on a vanishing world, and more than the staging of heterotopian reflection of multiple hegemonic contexts. It is also an experiment in seek-ing a language that would make this history intelligible without, by the same token, erasing it, without assimilating it into the already known—and, thus, it is also an intervention into the present. As the novel revels in the vul-garity of the queens’ language in order, in part, to guard against its easy appropriation,25 it also reflects on the likely failure of its translation into a shareable history. “There’s no way I can publish this,” the narrator panics during the first interview with Patricia and Lucretia. “Highway prostitutes, thieves, murderers, smugglers, kidnappers, spies—anything but this. Even though there’s nothing criminal going on at all. There just isn’t a language for this. Unless it’s arse, cock, blowjob or grunt” (Lovetown, 21, my empha-sis). The mode of writing that would be adequate to the queens’ history is in question throughout the novel. “The history of homosexual life here has yet to be written, unless you count streams of urine on a tin wall as writ-ing” (Lovetown, 26). If they could be read, those streams would tell the story better—as would the graffiti on old barracks walls; the “names and messages notched into the bark” of uprooted trees in their park (Love-town, 12–13); or the sperm- stained laundry from the public sauna that, after the first signs of HIV infections, was set ablaze to disinfect the space. If Lucia the bathhouse concierge were alive, muses the narrator, she could “decipher the . . . blotches on all those sheets that were tossed into the dirty linen basket, to reconstruct their history” (Lovetown, 65).26 Or maybe,

25. “I won’t wish you a pleasant reading, because Lovetown is a traumatic book, at once repulsive and pleasant,” writes the author in the preface to the latest, “uncensored” edi-tion. “May you vomit from delight.” Michał Witkowski, Lubiewo (Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2012), 7; my translation.26. José Muñoz has observed that such attention to ephemera is a specifically queer practice because “[q]ueerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.” See José Esteban Muñoz,


finally, it’s Mother Joan of the Homos, patroness of the Orbis bar, who “could have—no . . . should have!—written a book of the Wrocław streets. Every day she should have written the stories down on the bar tabs. . . . Story A: Two cognacs, one coffee, one strawberry torte with jam; story B: coffee and a pack of Carmens. . . . Oh, what has become of those bar tabs of 1988? Where are those stories now, sticky from sugary cakes and grimy with cigarette ash?” (Lovetown, 39).

On the other side of this extreme form of illegibility is the sanitized language of the new exchange economy, including the language of gay rights, as it interacts with the progressive narrative of Eastern Europe’s tran-sition and integration into European, and, more broadly, Western, political- economic sensibilities. Witkowski anticipates the risks of such a perfectly transparent frame of reception, of too successful a translation: “that which is private and unique will be silenced. . . . They’ll link it to the ‘struggle for equality’; they’ll make a ‘manifesto’ out of it, ‘the first Polish gay novel.’” This kind of recognition might finally carry not merely Polish queer cultures but Eastern Europe itself out of invisibility and give desirable evidence of progress. Such recognition is difficult to refuse, yet the cost of accepting it is too high for the author of Lovetown, a book invested in writing its protago-nists’ singularity. “It’s not gays from the middle class that interest me,” Wit-kowski explains, “but precisely those ‘repulsive, filthy, and naughty’ ones, because all that’s left to them is telling stories, language, making things up—and that has to suffice for an entire world. . . . They’re a slap in the face to whatever is totalitarian, general, universally binding, and sanctified.”27

Among the potentially totalitarian aspects of the new order is lan-guage itself when, stripped of multiple accents, it aims to be “universally binding” in advance—when the gap between words and possible ways of living those words no longer leaves space for the imagination. The assimi-lationist language of gay rights is such a language because it erases the singularity of “that which is private and unique” by translating it into the already available. Those who would like to turn Lovetown into a manifesto plead with the narrator- journalist:

Write a novel about us. Us Gays. . . . It should be a narrative about two middle- class, educated gay men, doctoral students in man-

“Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 6.27. Quoted in Aleksandar Hemon, ed., Best European Fiction 2010 (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press), 395–96.


agement and finance . . . and now they want to adopt a child. . . . Society, you see, doesn’t accept them, even though they’re well bred and well behaved, as the reader can tell. You can make the contra-diction even more apparent by giving them neighbours who have a wretched marriage. . . . Readers should be able to figure out on their own what an injustice it all is. (Lovetown, 155)

A properly didactic novel promoting recognizable progress would, thus, depend on instant intelligibility. It would domesticate queer life, including or especially at its most obscene and perverse, into the scenario of “well behaved,” bourgeois gay men who, in vying for respectability, argue for a more and more seamless inscription into the dominant.

A perfectly shareable, univocal language that leaves nothing to be deciphered, translated, or imagined, then, here becomes a potential night-mare.28 Working against such a language, the novel makes palpable the unfinished aspect of the post- 1989 transitions—and with it, the unfinished aspect of the translations it entails. The gap pried open by the juxtaposition of incompatible accents, which is the space of translation, here appears as the space of life itself.

Shared Dreams

Bibliothèque Pascal also stages the nightmare of a perfectly share-able language, and of a forcibly shared time that such a language produces and maintains, but it does so on the scene of gendered migrant labor. The film presents an aspect of the post- 1989 transition that is, on the one hand, countlessly recounted and, on the other hand, obscene, offstage, and barely visible because it is incompatible with the transition’s progressive narratives. Eastern European and Russian women’s (and boys’) entry into the transnational sex industry—along with other feminized, unregulated forms of transnational labor, such as domestic work abroad, participation in Special Economic Zones, or employment in the sex tourism industry at

28. Although I cannot consider it in detail here, György Spiró’s short story “Commission for European Standards: Literary (Draft 1),” which parodies the language of EU bureau-cracy as it might be applied to literary production, is another text that presents the dysto-pian consequences of instituting such a language to the letter. Spiró’s story may be seen to extend the apparently special case of gay rights as it appears in Lovetown to a more general apprehension of the kinds of revisions a common history would require. See Hun-garian Quarterly, no. 173 (Spring 2004) (English version); reprinted in Eurozine (2005), www.eurozine.com/articles/2005- 10- 03- spiro- en.html.


home—is a specifically post–Cold War crisis and an acute symptom of the transition: the fallout from the processes of both political and economic lib-eralization, and from the process of Eastern Europe’s uneven integration into Europe. While the causes are complex,29 the prevailing ways of fram-ing this phenomenon often reinforce notions about Eastern Europe’s pre-sumed cultural backwardness and mirror the temporal schema of its transi-tional status. The sensational figure of the “sex slave” in particular, a figure not only disseminated in many activist- minded projects but also encoded into law, makes migrant sex work intelligible as an absolute exception. An aberration on several registers at once—economic, legal, ethical, histori-cal, and racial—“sexual slavery” is a result of extreme poverty; an effect of inadequate legal frameworks and enforcement mechanisms; evidence of unthinkable depravity; an anachronistic reappearance of a problem con-signed to the past; and an echo of “white slavery.” Finally, because the former Soviet sphere is a latecomer to a system of transnational sexual exploitation that is already well established in other “developing” regions, the problem seems to have been both predictable and inevitable. While it actually represents a successful integration into the global capitalist sys-tem, the framing of the problem as an exception disavows its structural nature.30 Its alarmist representations in liberal human rights discourse aim to humanize the actually inhuman, affectless rationality at work in the neoliberal system that makes “sexual slavery” possible in the first place.31

29. These interrelated causes include political liberalization after 1989, which made bor-ders easier to cross, passports easier to obtain, and labor migration more widespread. Rapid privatization of the postsocialist economies, conducted in some countries as a “shock therapy,” disturbed established social relations. As the newly capitalist states eliminated programs that had guaranteed women’s social rights, such as childcare and maternity leaves, they also failed to protect women from new forms of gender- based dis-crimination in the labor market. The opening of borders and the new economic insecurity also intensified, or spurred new forms of, illicit activity. The wars in the former Yugoslavia exacerbated poverty and violence against women in southeastern Europe in a general sense and enabled the proliferation of smuggling and trade networks, including a sex trade that catered to foreign diplomats and UN peacekeepers. The collective nickname given to migrant sex workers from the region, the Natashas, is also a sign of the region’s distress and, curiously, is the female, unskilled counterpart to the “Polish plumber.”30. For critical- theoretical analyses of the structural aspects and effects of trafficking, see Anna M. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Elina Penttinen, Globalization, Prostitution and Sex- Trafficking: Corporeal Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Rutvica Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).31. For a more extended analysis, see my “On Not Being Moved: A Poetics of Witness-


Liberal discourse, thus, relies on appeals to the recognition of migrant sex workers as deserving victims in order to negotiate the terms of their readmission into human and political collectivity. Meanwhile, the neoliberal regime of production and reproduction always already, and matter- of- factly, incorporates them as its own essential elements.

Within this contradictory historical and discursive context, Biblio-thèque Pascal will estrange the terms of both modes of belonging avail-able to women displaced by migration and sex work—the liberal one, which highlights the exceptional aspect of “sexual slavery” in order to overcome it and which holds out belonging as a deferred ideal; and the neoliberal one, which normalizes exploitation and presents it as the only available, and indeed already achieved, form of belonging. Bibliothèque Pascal resists both modes of what might be framed as collective dreaming. If liberal-ism dreams of common humanity secured through respect for dignity and recognition, and if neoliberalism proffers boundless prosperity for some secured through a forcible regime of dispossession and deindividuation for others, the film’s heroine insists on living through dreams and fairy tales that fit into neither mode.

In the central story of the film, Mona, the protagonist, has a child from a one- night stand with an outlaw who has a magical ability to project his dreams outward. A few years later, Mona is sold to Pascal, the owner of an elite brothel in the UK, where she is forced to memorize and enact scenes from literary classics. When she refuses to play Joan of Arc and is condemned to die as Desdemona, she is rescued by her dead father’s marching band, while her little daughter uses her inherited ability to project her dreams to show the dramatic rescue to Mona’s community back home.

This central story—belonging to Mona’s past but unfolded on- screen without voice- over, and thus as if in the present—is framed by the actual present- day scene in a drab state agency, where Mona must convince the social worker to return her daughter to her. Brightly colorful long takes and tracking shots of the central narrative give way here to a more muted and conventional ensemble of cuts and close-ups, in which Mona’s face can be scrutinized for signs of lying. While viewers must suspend their disbelief for the duration of the central story, the social worker does not believe it, and so Mona translates it into a more realistic scenario: she had gone to the UK to work in a brothel willingly but has returned empty- handed and mis-

ing Sexual Slavery,” in The Look of Human Rights: Narrative and Rhetoric of the Humani-tarian Image, ed. Georgiana Banita (volume in progress).


treated. But this version won’t serve her, either, so the social worker writes down what will be most credible to the state: she was a duped victim of a transnational trafficking ring with no role in her own misfortune; and, he adds just in case, she has come back “determined to mend her ways.”32

For Mona, then, there is no livable language that might also be straightforwardly shared, and what is shareable turns out to be unlivable. Instead of being able to tell her own story on her own terms, she has only multiple scripts to follow, which provide established means of intelligibility. Her speech is manipulated and constrained first by her captor Pascal and her indifferent clients, who literally put pre- scripted words in her mouth, and then by the state agency charged with disciplining her motherhood, so much so that the only words she is expected to speak are those that legiti-mate existing orders—that of neoliberal exploitation as much as that of the liberal state.

Words in general fail Mona. In its visual- affective register, Biblio-thèque Pascal constantly contradicts, or augments and distorts beyond recognition, what is being said in dialogue. Early at the brothel, Mona is “broken in” by a brutal, wordless beating. Moments later, a smiling Pascal comes to greet her in a perfectly earnest tone that also makes him sound insane: “Hi! How are you settling in?” To the uncomprehending Mona, the beating and the greeting both arrive out of nowhere. The fact that she doesn’t yet understand English, and so can neither know what he’s say-ing nor answer him, only magnifies her terror, because his pleasant affect is so at odds with her situation. Pascal and Mona occupy the same space, the same moment. Yet they are separated by a gap—a fault line within their respective modes of experiencing that moment—between what is shown to be happening (from Mona’s point of view) and what is being said (by Pas-cal). Mona and Pascal may both be enclosed in the space of the brothel, but they belong to distinct worlds. The calm greeting, uttered with no hint of malice, treats Mona as if she were a guest rather than a prisoner. It aims to mask—and, in the process, it also magnifies—the fault line between them.

32. This last version of Mona’s story mirrors that codified into law, both in the European Union and in the United States, where only those experiences that fit the narrative of innocent victim qualify for recognition and for subsequent protections, such as asylum. See, for example, Cristiana Giordano, “Practices of Translation and the Making of Migrant Subjectivities in Contemporary Italy,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 4 (November 2008): 588–606; and Dina Haynes, “(Not) Found Chained to a Bed in a Brothel: Conceptual, Legal, and Procedural Failures to Fulfill the Promise of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 21, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 337–82.


Yet it is not simply the staging of a contest between visuality and language, in which the visual register might emerge as the truth of Mona’s condition and the verbal dimension as the masking and rationale for vio-lence. The film keeps both in play as competing realms for constructing dif-ferent modes of shareability. The visual, it might be said, lends an accent—by providing the affective context and narrative extendedness—to words that might otherwise pass for universally binding and reasonable. Just as in Lovetown single words are exploded to accommodate conflicting worlds, here too they come to contain multiple—mutually antagonistic yet simulta-neous—subjective positions. In a moment of almost tender intimacy, Mona asks Pascal, “Why are you doing this?” “What?” he asks. “This.” The deic-tic this refers, for her and for the viewer, to the entire sequence of events that has brought her to that moment. “This” is punctual, singular—her per-sonal catastrophe with no apparent end. Pascal’s answer reveals a different chronotope to be at work. If he didn’t do it, someone else would, only much worse. He doesn’t, in any case, do anything that isn’t in demand; he is only trying to adapt—a Caribbean street kid realizing his dreams in a Euro-pean capital. He has merely, ingeniously, found a way to insert his trickster dreams of survival into the civilized dreams of domination entertained by his clients—“the cream of society, the most sophisticated people.” Just like Mona, he implies, he has little agency to change the conditions of his sur-vival and his own inscription into existing systems of production. But unlike Mona, he knows to dream bigger.

The film’s magical- realist mode serves to make space for Mona’s unspeakable experience. Against the background of a new rationality—built on violent, interhuman exploitation justified by an appeal to objective, inhuman necessity, and on privation that presents itself as a (deferred) promise of plenitude—the film shows a series of scarcely believable events, dreams, and fantasies. It puts incompatible, temporally incommensurate worlds side by side, and, instead of resolving them into a unity, it magnifies their incongruity.

Through this juxtaposition, the film shows the very mechanisms of synchronization at work in any forcible construction of a common time. These mechanisms of synchronization—along with the temporal disjunc-tures they highlight—are discernible in the conflict between the central, apparently fantastic, story, on the one hand, and the framing, already pre-imagined and preimaged, narrative, on the other hand. By the time Mona is forced to accept the third, official version of her own story, the incred-ible events she has just recounted—unfolded on- screen for the duration


of the central narrative—have paradoxically become the most immediate and real for the viewer, so that their affective force clashes with the banal, matter- of- fact narrative that officially replaces Mona’s original account. The result of this clash is a potential indeterminacy concerning not only Mona’s agency in her own ordeal but, more importantly, an indeterminacy concern-ing the credibility and reasonableness of the state’s preferred version as well: if Mona’s eminently believable—because affectively and aesthetically compelling—central narrative can be dismissed as nonsense, might not the same be said about the state’s obligatory tale of spoiled innocence? If doubt can be cast on something the viewer has just endured and wit-nessed on- screen, why should the state’s maudlin story of sexual enslave-ment—composed of mere words—be deemed any more believable, any less fantastic? And, it might finally be asked, which is the fantasy proper, which is the perverse version of events: Pascal’s, or the brothel clients’, or the state’s, or Mona’s?

In Lovetown, perversity is easier to locate. It belongs to the sexu-ally marginalized queens, who use language to thicken apparently com-mon speech with accents derived from their experience. Their bodies, their practices, and their language are continuous in their perversity because they are obstinately unproductive of any value, either economic or rhetori-cal. In Bibliothèque Pascal, in contrast, what at first appears to be most perverse actually turns out only to reproduce the dominant order. In the brothel, the labor performed by disposable subjects such as Mona sustains their clients’ own capacity for labor, which includes their subjective sense of their own power and their capacity to function, precisely, as “the cream of society.” Her labor serves to reproduce, in other words, existing fanta-sies of Western European privilege as it overlaps with masculinist privilege through the concrete labor of a specific kind of sex work.33 In one scene, Pascal tries to kiss Mona, but she bites off his tongue. This is a sex slave’s rebellion: he had put words in her mouth, and so she interrupts his capacity to speak. At least for the moment, he is reduced to spitting out blood and pieces of his own flesh. If the brothel is a heterotopia, it is one that sustains

33. Such an inscription into dominant fantasies—fantasies that eroticize geopolitical and political- economic inequalities and boundaries—is not exceptional but integral to all transnational sex work. For a related analysis focusing on post- 1989 Eastern Europe in particular, see Matti Bunzl, “The Prague Experience: Gay Male Sex Tourism and the Neo-colonial Invention of an Embodied Border,” in Altering States: Ethnographies of the Tran-sition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl, and Martha Lampland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 70–95.


the dominant order because it depends on the continuity of speech. The brothel called “Bibliothèque Pascal,” fantastic and perverse as it appears, is thus a site for the reproduction of perfectly normative subjects.

The film by the same name functions differently from the brothel, not only in its overall magical- realist mode as I have described it above but also in one scene in particular, where Mona emerges as the properly per-verse subject. After both the central narrative and the framing story con-clude, there is an epilogue: finally reunited, Mona and her child are sitting at a kitchen table. “How many spoons do you want?” she asks her daughter as she serves her soup. She appears to be the reformed mother that she had promised the state agency to become. As the camera lingers over the table, however, it becomes clear that there is no food. They are only play-ing house, and the child seems delighted to suspend her disbelief. And, as Mona and the girl move to the bedroom for a bedtime story, the camera slowly tracks backward to reveal their apartment to be merely a display in a department store. Meanwhile, in the bedtime story—now in voice- over—Mona tells her daughter yet another version of her ordeal: all the princes and princesses were taken from their fairy tales to some place very close to hell. But one princess escaped, because children would be sad without fairy tales, without hearing stories about something they would one day want to become.

Here again, words contradict what is shown: shoppers in other sec-tions of the store, solemn or solitary, testing the furniture, measuring the length of tables, reading brochures. Only this time, the words are Mona’s. They pervert the mundane scene of shopping into one of grown- ups bereft of their fairy tales, somnambulists in a sea of commodities.

Mona’s perversion lies in her simple appropriation of a department- store display, with no respect for its commodity aspect or the deferral of grati-fication it demands. She violates the future- oriented temporality of capitalist consumption and ignores the promise of plenitude. Unlike the shoppers, she is not trying on a potential life but living one, her child a willing accom-plice. The scene estranges the official version of the postsocialist transi-tions, which presents an image of a proliferation of goods having replaced a monochromatic world of privation. Here, privation belongs instead to the capitalist present—it is possible that Mona is deprived of a means of sub-sistence; and the shoppers are actually deprived of their imagination, now disciplined through desire for commodities. As the aftermath of Mona’s tes-timony to the state agency, the scene also lends a different accent to the promise to “mend her ways.” If the social worker was referring to her pos-


sible relapse into sex work, here her impropriety has to do with an insis-tence on her own dreams. Incorrigible, she has not given up the habit of imagining herself to be something other than what she is forced into. She is not reformed; she has not adapted to living out any of the collective fan-tasies projected on her.

Forged Present

“You’ll observe that I’m talking in the present tense so write it down that way,” Patricia instructs the narrator of Lovetown. “I’m talking like this on purpose so it feels like the reader was there” (Lovetown, 13). In its magical- realist unfolding in the central narrative and in the epilogue, Bibliothèque Pascal insists on the present tense in its own way, while the film itself is a projection of uncommon dreams into a common space. Both works dis-articulate the present in order to restitch it in such a way that the fissures between the multiple temporalities and chronotopes it contains are made visible. The sharing of time emerges not as an objective condition but as a subjective process, and contemporaneity—tenuous, provisional, and thick with accents—becomes distinct from mere simultaneity.

The terrain of struggle in which these texts participate is, properly speaking, that of the unfinished postsocialist transition of Eastern Europe and its integration into postnational, neoliberal frameworks. By virtue of this, however, this terrain is also that of the reconstructing global collec-tivity, where the political distinctions between native and foreigner, or friend and foe, are superseded—though not entirely displaced—by economically determined categories. The closed, apparently completed, hegemonic lan-guage of neoliberal freedom and progress—which draws on a unified tem-porality adapted to the exigencies of transnational capital—encounters its foreigners among the dispossessed whose economic and sexual exploita-tion, and subjective reformation, are modes of inscription into the now of globality.

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Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Translations (2014)

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