Archive! © Published in pARTisan #2’2004

Presentation by Valancin Akudović about a ‘partisan’ idea as a one of the main feature of Belarusian mentality. Conference in Clermont-Ferrand, France, May 7, 2003 

Whatever you say about the Belarusians, nothing will be true, said once Aleś Ancipienka, and that idea of his is far from being paradoxical. Well, actually, the same refers to Belarus as well… We have not yet managed to grasp our history or to find some common ground as to who’s there on the way?[1] That’s why whatever we say about ourselves, nothing will be completely true.

And it is not for nothing that the recently emerged Belarusian philosophical discourse has been haunted, apart from the problem of Belarus as it is, by the metaphysics of absence or negative thought or deconstruction and various analyses of the empty sign. Alongside what we call topical art discourse, it reveals our craving for total deconstruction and absence. In this context pARTisan, the title of the magazine representing topical art speaks for itself.

The partisan is both a conceptual metaphor and an archetypal hero for us. The partisan probably illustrates best the Belarusians’ ontological essence. Nothing has been able to profane the partisan’s sacredness, not even the Soviet partisan movement during World War II.  The partisan is the one who forever goes into hiding (hide-and-seek is the only national game of ours); the partisan is the one who always keeps saying, ‘There is no me’; the partisan is the one who only reveals himself in an act of sabotage (intellectual or aesthetic in our case) and then vanishes in his own absence.  I see the intellectual and aesthetic unity in the negative field, which has emerged at the junction of contemporary thought and topical art, as a landmark in today’s cultural life. No less important are the thinkers and artists’ attempts to conceive absence or nothing, no, the empty sign as the House of Being for the Belarusians.

[1] The first line from a Janka Kupała poem, in which the Belarusian classic endeavoured to raise the most burning issues of Belarusian identity.

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