Ozren Pupovac: Nothing Took Place but the Place: Đinđić's Yugoslavia

Taking an excursion from the strict domain of historiography, I will try to show how the problem of uneventment figures in another theoretical field, that of political philosophy. One of the exemplary moments here, at least in what concerns the history of socialist Yugoslavia, is Zoran Đinđić's Yugoslavia as an Unfinished State. Đinđić's analysis is, undoubtedly, a veritable sign of the times – being one of many scientific and philosophical works that were produced in response to the crisis that Yugoslavia was experiencing in the 1980s. At the same time, however, this attempt at a philosophical panacea is also a remarkable example of historical, or, as we can say with Badiou, evental revisionism. Đinđić's response to the destructive economic and sociopolitical tendencies that were visibly tearing the Yugoslav federation apart by the late 1980s was to question the very political foundations of the Yugoslav project. The source of the crisis of the eighties, in other words, spans back to the very act of foundation of socialist Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, according to Đinđić, was created as state without a clear dimension of legality and statehood – without a clear articulation of sovereignty to the political community. And moreover, it was created as an illegitimate political construction. Everything that took place in the event of 1943, the moment of AVNOJ and the emancipatory politics of the People's Liberation Struggle, represents but a set of particular political and historical circumstances, circumstances which fall short of proper political or juridical coordinates. The very act of foundation of Yugoslavia entailed no clear decision about political unity, let alone a decision to create a viable construction of a nation-State.

Now, if the ironic dimension of these conclusions already speaks for itself - as we can say that Đinđić's gambit to recreate Yugoslavia as a nation-State was truly 'verified' in the violence of the nineties, in the violence of nationalist projects which sought to 'finish' the Yugoslav State – a more interesting question here is the question of Đinđić’s method. Does Đinđić's evacuation of the emancipatory content of Yugoslavia reveal some more general problems pertaining to political philosophy in its encounter with politics? Does it reveal an obscurantist dimension of political philosophy, its structural incapacity for registering political singularity? In concluding my paper, I will try to offer an answer to these questions whilst formulating, together with Althusser and Badiou, the opposition between politics and the political.

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