The unexpected someone in Nobel history
- Pages
- 58-71
Abstract
The main intention of the article is to prove that the unique style of Handke’s creative individuality reflects his special life-saving SOMEONE, who resists in his negative dialectic the dictatorship of another pernicious SOMEONE who sets the false movement. In a remarkable symmetry to post-structuralist theories about the “totalitarianism of language”, Handke experiences in his own verbalized existence the pernicious power of some of this totalitarianism, seeking to free himself from it in a kind of poetic resistance to the dictatorship of those discursive practices of the Western world that lead to the “death of the subject” (Foucault). After Handke’s essays on Yugoslavia had been published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in 1996, where he supported the Serbs, he became persona non grata not only in Kosovo and Sarajevo, but also among the intellectual elite of the West. Therefore, the Nobel Prize came as a complete surprise for the author and sparked a furious protest from the world’s leading media giants. One of the conclusions of the article, based on a hermeneutic study of Handke’s works, reflects the author’s conviction that the great uniqueness of Handke’s creative phenomenology lies in his attempt to break out of the destructive gravity of some killer language in an effort to deconstruct it in search of the original proto-structure for the acquisition of the Other, in which there is still Someone Else with his Other “Me-Language”. Handke’s poetic evolution, or even revolution, is in keeping with not only post-structuralist attempts to “save the language”, such as in Foucault’s transgression, but also with the biblical warning that “Life and death are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18: 21). The innovative potential of this work lies in the attempt of hermeneutic penetration into the phenomenological eidos of Handke on the basis of the symbolic and at the same time dialectical method supposing that the Phenomenon of Handke is the living antithesis of the post-structuralist theory of the “death of the author” and that being is still “breaking through” into the narrative of modern culture. The work is relevant due to the scientific, literary and linguistic and cultural uniqueness of Handke, as well as the fact that it is a living proof of the connection between the cognitive potential of art and politics.