The Human Being as Past (Realliteratur and Techniques of Forgetting after the Death of Avant-garde)

Abstract

The review examines the trilogy about time of VBV, which includes the poetic editions „Th:is.” (2000), “Will:” (2011) and “:was...” (2022), with the emphasis being the last volume, which appeared at the end of the past year. VBV's poetic texts are read through his ideas about “realliteratur” and the mediamarket “normalization” of modern culture, unfolded in a number of his theoretical observations. At the border between the poetic and the philosophical, at the point of coincidence and exchange between the two projects of the VBV, a new toolkit appears for revising the status quo, both literary and political. The meta-poetic resource of VBV's “:was...”, as well as his trilogy as a whole, allows to see in a new and heuristic way the problems of performative societies at the height of the 21st century.