In his On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin asks what memory can mean at a moment of danger. Suggesting that we all are at such a moment of danger today, I discuss what role and function literary memory can play or fulfill in an age marked by right-wing extremism, climate change, authoritarian governments, as that age in its complexity is represented in three contemporary, but different, Swedish literary diaries by Lars Nor & eacute;n, Ulf Lundell, and & Aring;sa Linderborg . In these works, each author claims to have become homeless, and that the world surrounding the writing subject has become threatening, but also generating acts of remembrance of the past. The three writers construe differing subject positions to make memory possible. Memory can further be related to class and gender, and it can be divided into personal or subjective as well as cultural or social memories. Aiming to understand what their respective memory work entails, I discuss the diary as a memory machine, and what the social dangers that these writers risk confronting could mean, and whether literature in the form of diaries can turn into a defense against cumulative moments of danger. And what role does the act of forgetting play? The memory work in the three diaries seemingly focuses the individual in an act of self -representation, and one must further ask if these representations are also intended as a defense of self and subject.

In 2011, during the occupation of Zucotti Park in New York, Occupy Wall Street arranged a public reading of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby, 1853. The widely discussed choice of this story points to OWS’s own politics: the movement said ”no”, but without forming any more specific demands for reform. This article, taking its theoretical lead from Judith Butler, Marcello Tarì and Michel Foucault, discusses if the self can be re-modelled. Bartleby and his refusal – “I would prefer not to” – is related to one other prominent no-sayer in literature: Stiller. Refusal is also the theme of Max Frisch’s novel Stiller, 1954, in which the protagonist simply refuses to acknowledge the identity that everyone, authorities as well as his wife, forces upon him. That way, he also refuses the society in which he lives, and its political subject in the form of the citizen. Stiller thereby illustrates Foucault’s theses that we must refuse who we are. Bartleby and Stiller can both be understood as examples of the obstinacy that Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt have emphasized as the basic form of resistance.

With Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” as starting point, this chapter discusses what silence could mean in modern art. While the chapter’s argument acknowledges Sontag’s emphasis on silence as a relation—silence is always related to sound in different forms—it refutes her view of the artist as a liberal subject administering, applying, and ultimately controlling the presence of silence, as being too instrumental. This chapter uses works by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Rancière, respectively, in order to articulate and emphasize the presence of silence in the work of art as a structural element, that the artist—whether painter, writer, musician, dancer, …—has to listen to and provide a form for. Works by American painter Agnes Martin exemplify how an experience of silence can be expressed in what Martin calls an “artwork which is also wordless and silent.” The activity that for Martin generates this silent work of art is “waiting”: both artist and beholder must wait for silence to make itself heard.

Does August Strindberg ever reach that pinnacle of Enlightenment called ”Mündigkeit”? It is of course Immanuel Kant, who states that “Mündigkeit” is the ultimate goal of the liberal individual, who thereby constitutes himself as a subject. But it is a strange word, this “Mündigkeit”: translated into Swedish, it means both the kind of individual, mature responsibility that Kant hinted at, as well as an institutional authority, even a government. Strindberg himself said that he “never wrote governmental poetry nor ministerial literature” (”Jag har aldrig skrivit regeringspoesi eller ministerlitteratur”). Still, Strindberg was always very interested in questions of government, how to govern both a state and oneself. My paper relates Strindberg’s late works to questions of governmentality, focusing on the presence and function of administrative discourses and practices in his works. My suggestion is that Strindberg verifies Michel Foucault’s hypotheses in The Birth of Biopolitics: ”And finally, the individual’s life itself— with his relationships to his private property, for example, with his family, household, insurance, and retirement— must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.”

The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius. His biopolitical vision emphasized the scientific basis for social reforms, and he was an active opponent to any kind of religious thinking. Hedenius also worked as a literary critic, and he would use that role to confront literary representations of contemporary society that did not fit in with his promulgation of rationality. Hedenius furiously attacked Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (1959). In her book, she challenges any harmonizing vision of society. She does it through representations of the body, and the gaze that does not shy away from the anguished and pained body, the body opening up and giving birth. The body in Trotzig’s work is also the tortured body of Christ. With the Swedish welfare state as a point of reference, this article explores the collision between what can be called a “rational modernism” and aesthetic modernism: Hedenius called Trotzig’s book “evil,” and Trotzig, when she commented upon this almost three decades later, saw Hedenius’s review as an authoritarian assault.

Allegorical Dreams, Playing Cards, Twigs. Strindberg’s Occult Diary

This article discusses August Strindberg’s The Occult Diary, 1896–1908, with an emphasis on its material characteristics. The text is analyzed as a form of training of perception: It is the visible that is being observed, the audible that is heard. The Diary is also an archive, which assembles text, paper clippings, playing cards, twigs, and quotes, and like all archives, it generates its own logic: The Diary functions as an adding machine, fed by Strindberg with incessantly new observations. At the same time, the Diary is marked by administrative measures, which ultimately regulate its balancing act between privacy and publicity. In the Diary, a type of writer emerges: the writer who cuts and pastes, who administrates both his life and his writing.

Artikeln diskuterar August Strindbergs Ockulta dagboken, 1896–1908, med betoning av dessa materiella egenskaper. Texten läses som en träning i perception: det är det synliga som iakttas, det hörbara som avlyssnas. Dagboken är också ett arkiv, vilket monterar samman skrift, tidningsurklipp, spelkort, kvistar, citat, och som alla arkiv genererar det en egen logik: Dagboken fungerar som en additiv maskin, vilken Strindberg matar med ständigt nya observationer. Samtidigt är Dagboken försedd med administrativa åtgärder, vilka ytterst reglerar dess balansgång mellan privat och offentligt. I Dagboken framträder en författartyp: författaren som klipper och klistrar, som administrerar sitt liv och sin skrift.

I april 1970 möttes jazztrumpetaren Miles Davis och rockgruppen Grateful Dead för fyra spelningar på Fillmore West i San Francisco. Något var på gång att hända på den samtida musikscenen. Jazzen hade under det sena 60-talet börjat närma sig rockmusiken, och hippiekulturen hade gjort rocken alltmer mottaglig för kreativa improvisationer. Ett växande politiskt patos förenade också musiker över genregränserna. Vad var det egentligen som hände de där kvällarna i Kalifornien? Ulf Olsson lyssnar sig tillbaka till ett avgörande ögonblick i 1900-talets musikhistoria.

Trots att August Strindberg fortfarande ter sig som svensk litteraturs stora namn, har hans sena verk ofta avfärdats som undermåliga. Paradoxografi syftar till en annan förståelse av dessa sena texter, deras egenheter och motsägelsefyllda karaktär. Istället för att läsa dem som behållare för reaktionära idéer och ideologier, i linje med forskningens återkommande betoning av idéer och världsbilder, undersöks hur skrivandets praktiker konstruerar ett subjekt. Författaren ses som ”reaktiv”: Strindberg reagerar närmast fysiologiskt på olika stimuli. Hans texterläses som apparater, vilka producerar vissa effekter. Återkommande inslag ärdagboksformen, listor, nonsens, fragmentering, anteckningen, kommentaren:effekter vilka blir oerhört viktiga i 1900-talets litteratur. Centrala verk iundersökningen är Ockulta dagboken, En blå bok I-IV, de språkvetenskapligaarbetena, men också verk av mer traditionell skönlitterär karaktär (Ensam, Syndabocken). Dessa sena texter har gemensamma drag i den ofta taggiga stilen, i försöken att underminera den rationella vetenskapens ordningar: Strindberg skriver en paradoxografi. Därigenom formulerar han viktiga aspekter av de samhälleliga möjlighetsvillkor som litteraturen möter under modernismens era. Samtidigt skriver Strindberg i en tilltagande medvetenhet om att döden väntar, och delar av de sena verken kan läsas som studier i ”konsten att dö”: som försök att rädda ett subjekt som samtidigt ifrågasätts av skrivandets moderna praktiker.