Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference

Abstract

the latter being a ready-made commentary. He is not afraid of being accused of instrumentalising the reasoning of the literary scholar. However, as one has to admit, his own voice is not a particularly revolutionary one. It boils down to rather staple diagnoses: the exhaustion of past worlds, untranslatability of ‘foreign’ forms of modernity, and, finally, new threats stemming from the neo-liberal politics. The most serious deficiency of this otherwise valuable book is the insufficiently exhibited methodological background. While Czapliński incorporates other voices into his own critical apparatus, ‘the suppliers’ of particular theoretical tools, freely used in the entirety of Poruszona mapa, are sadly left unmentioned. While remaining a comprehensive tale about the ‘affective map of Europe’, discussing such phenomena as ‘affective colonisation’, ‘social emotions’, ‘complicity in affects’, ‘shift of affects’, ‘diversified affective strategies’, and so on, the book neither acknowledges the names of any affect theorists nor clarifies any of the terms coming from the (quite abundant, after all) lexicon of the affect methodology. In Czapliński’s critical narrative a commentary on the affects changing the face of Europe remains the mere byplay, which is a pity, since it certainly poses another research challenge — one that has to be confronted in order to truly ponder and debate over the shape and future of the community.