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Rethinking national temporal orders: the subaltern presence and enactment of the political

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2016

Tarja Väyrynen*
Affiliation:
Professor of Peace and Conflict Research and Director of Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), University of Tampere
*
* Correspondence to: Tarja Väyrynen, Professor of Peace and Conflict Research and Director of Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI) at the University of Tampere, Finland. Author’s email: tarja.vayrynen@uta.fi

Abstract

How the past is remembered is fundamental to the production and reproduction of postwar sovereign political power. However, Internation Relations’ (IR) explicit interest in the practices of remembrance, and particularly in time remains a relatively new one. This article seeks to show how Jacques Rancière’s discussion of temporality, subaltern history, and politics – which allows the study of parallel and enmeshing temporal universes – contributes to the IR literature on time. In this view, when speech is acquired by those whose right to speak is not recognised they can produce temporalities that disturb hegemonic representations of time constellations and reorganise the nation’s relationship to its past. The article analyses the moment of Kaisu Lehtimäki’s telling her war story in public, and understands it to be a material and symbolic event that shatters the hegemonic distribution of the Finnish postwar national history and truth.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2016 

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References

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7 The term ‘subaltern’ is elaborated in the work of Antonio Gramsci to refer to groups who are outside the established structures of political representation. I am aware of the critique presented, for example, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who argues that using the term too loosely is dangerous. For me, the term relates to the Rancièrian understanding of the political, namely, to those who form no part, those who are invisible.

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25 The direct quotations are from the documentary film, although Kaisu repeats their content in her morning TV appearance and newspaper interviews.

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30 Women’s time refers to female temporality that is devided between cyclical, natural time (for example, repetition, the biological clock) and monumental time (for example, the cult of maternity). They are different from linear national time that is defined by progression and teleology. Kristeva, Julia, Jardine, Alice, and Blake, Harry, ‘Women’s time’, Signs, 7:1 (1981), pp. 1335 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Rancière, Jacques, ‘The thinking of dissensus: Politics and aesthetics’, in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds), Reading Rancière (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 117 Google Scholar; On resistance, agency, and social transformation see Lovell, Terry, ‘Resisting with authority: Historical specificity, agency and the performative self’, Theory Culture Society, 20:1 (2003), pp. 117 Google Scholar. In Finland, the opening has been brought forth both individual calls for recognition from, for example, the children of foreign soldiers and the new generation of Finnish academic historians who have partly answered to this call.

32 Rancière, ‘Ten theses on politics’, thesis 4.

33 Bleiker, Roland and Hutchison, Emma, ‘Fear no more: Emotions and world politics’, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), pp. 115135 Google Scholar; Burgess, Peter, The Ethical Subject of Security: Geopolitical Reasons and the Threat against Europe (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Edkins, Jenny, ‘Forget trauma? Responses to September 11’, International Relations, 16:2 (2002), pp. 243256 Google Scholar; Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; Edkins, Jenny, ‘Remembering rationality: Trauma time and politics’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 99115 Google Scholar; Shapiro, Michael, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Väyrynen, ‘Keeping the trauma’; Väyrynen, ‘The Finnish national identity’; Weber, Cynthia, Faking It: American Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For a Freudian account see Schuett, Richard, Political Realism, Freud and Human Nature in International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)Google Scholar.

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39 The narrative states that the postwar years had entailed a careful and cautious balancing act between Soviet influence and the West. The Finnish integration into the EU in 1995 was seen as a ‘return to Europe’ and to ‘European family’ of equal, free, and wealthy nations. The EU was seen to be a peace project in which Finland could easily find its place, and even take a leading role, for example in civilian crises management initiatives.

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61 Haines quote refers to a larger Deleuzian view of the ‘capitalist body’ and ‘communist body’ and their temporalities. She writes that ‘capitalist corporeality separates communist corporeality from itself, by translating the infinite and common into the equivalent and privative; it transforms time into a ticking of the clock. Communist corporeality, on the other hand, takes the form of a process distributing and redistributing the surplus of potentiality in a construction of the common, a field of equality and a domain of wealth that refuses equivalence; time becomes the very power of activity.’ Haines, Christian, ‘Corporeal time: the cinematic bodies of Arhur Rimbaud and Gilles Deleuze’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:2 (2011), p. 116 Google Scholar. In my view, nationalism takes hold of the human body in a similar fashion as capitalism and produces disciplined corporeality and a linear timeframe whereas Kaisu’s performance brings into being corporeality that breaks the national(istic) order of things.

62 Rancière, ‘Thinking of dissensus’, pp. 1–17; Rancière, Disagreement, p. 32.

63 Bhabha, , ‘DissemiNation’, p. 308 Google Scholar.

64 Cf. Haines, , ‘Corporeal time’, p. 103 Google Scholar.

65 Guha, , ‘The small voices’, p. 12 Google Scholar.

66 Cf. Rancière, , ‘Thinking of dissensus’, p. 2 Google Scholar; Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

67 Rancière, ‘Ten theses’, thesis 6.

68 Rancière, ‘Ten theses’, thesis 7.

69 Cf. Rancière, ‘A few remarks on the method’, p. 116.

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