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Speaking/Naming
I have been carrying on a dialogue with Žarana and Nirman [with you, my
dears] on different occasions and spaces; announcing them [you], I myself have
been invited.
Being intensely concerned with questions of the Self and its relation to
the Other for various reasons over the last ten years, my separate and unsettled
self wishes and yearns to continue the conversation, to keep in touch, leaving
“the call on hold”. Nothing other than this metaphor that Homi Bhabha and
W.J.T. Mitchell formed when continuing their dialogue with Edward Said in
the book Edward Said Continuing the Conversation (2004) dedicated in his
honour, best responds to my will and desire. In which manner does “waiting
for a reply” touch me, or call you, or invite all of us? Or how does it signify
collaboration and togetherness? I had known Žarana for years; I met Nirman
by pure feminist fortune a few years before she passed away.
There are two unfinished projects still waiting to respond to: with
Žarana, El Taller and the public hearings of women, with Nirman, work on the
publication of a feminist history within the Balkans. They are, in the Derridian
sense, “my debts” to them [to you] but certainly something “in addition” for
which I am still searching for the right words. The meanings of words elude
me; never precise enough, never (ful)filled enough. How could you, I wonder,
come to me, how could the stories of you yourselves come to mean(-ing)?
How and to what extent does this loss [your loss] become the opening
of a possibility?
In her letter to the New York Times of October 2004, which she wrote
in honour of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler came to an answer regarding this
delicate issue concerning his work on mourning his friends and his “debts”:
“He “owes” them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could
not write without them; their writing exists as the precondition of his own;
their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is
animated and secured, the voice that emerges, as an address.” 24
Two titles appear before me, two ‘in memoriam’ voices by which I
honoured them [you] through a sense of ethical urgency: “Umijeće slobodnog
hoda” [Art of Free Motion] and “Ponovljena lektira – čitati i pisati kao žena”
[Repeat Assignment – Reading and Writing as a Woman]. Two single entries
24
Judith Butler, “Letter by Judith Butler to the New York Times - Jacques Derrida in Memorium”, October 9,
2004(a), Ibid.
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