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Consciousness is often belated, and received history may mask the many alternative histories. The displacement / being out of place, or (e)migration, being stateless, which is a general human condition but so palpable in situations of partitions and wars, was recognised by the Balkans only when it happened there – i.e. 50 years after the South Asian example of the famous partition of India, in spite of the former non-aligned ideology. No-one else’s life can feel as real as our own. But various contemporary nationalisms, fundamentalisms rely on (post-)colonial discourses of other times, and trick their public. A narration is linked to a space, or “translates a space into a place”, utopia into topos. Non-aligned citizens had no narrative field for the concept of “partition” until its meaning fell on them as their own experience through “their” own bodies, territory, translated as culture and identity. It is in a way when it lost a territory (the Yugoslav space) and its referent other, its « good » other, the “non-aligned”, that the non-nationalist opposition in the former Yugoslavia earned itself a narrative field for post-colonial imagination. This is the “between” which is there. It is a spacing (écart) between a situation and its translation. In other words, the question of time is introduced. When we visualise the time dimension, we can see immediately how translation is negotiation, political talks, pourparlers, the use of which is to defuse (désamorcer; to deconstruct) violence of which there is no such thing as a zero degree (because, as Balibar has it, violence can at best be civilized).
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