In the European tradition, islands usually connote two meanings. On the one hand, they serve as a place where thinking individuals can isolate themselves from the nonsense of everyday life in order to practice true ‘care of themselves and others’ (Foucault) in peace and quiet. On the other hand, they serve as a place to which concerned societies deport their ‘human scum’ in order to prevent the contamination of their organism. The so-called Praxis philosophers organized summer schools on the island of Korčula from 1963 to 1974 to gain the support of Western philosophers for their humanist opposition to their state’s bureaucratized Marxism. This would enable their philosophy to get rid of the academic insularity that was allocated to it at home. Western philosophers, in turn, saw the Korčula summer schools as a welcome liberal island in Eastern doctrinaire Marxism, which supported their interpretation of Marx’s philosophy. Connecting with Eastern philosophers, they expected to rescue the humanist orientation of this philosophy from the capitalist mercantilism at home. But despite these attempts to affirm the ‘true humanness’ of Marxism, its insularity persevered and this article attempts to show why.

Nabokov and Sebald confronted the dark sides of their national histories and tried to exempt themselves from them. Nabokov liberated himself from its burden by escaping into levitation, whereas Sebald's willing exposure to its consequences ended in paralysis. Nabokov appears in his Emigrants as the equivocal figure of the 'butterfly man' who is simultaneously mobilizing and immobilizing. This is like the Russian writer himself, who used to adopt butterflies' metamorphoses as a writer and paralyze them as a lepidopterist. Contrary to him, Sebald was horrified by their immobilization and sincerely empathized with them. Eluding the detached position of an ultimate authority and making his author deeply attached to all kinds of 'nocturnal' creatures, he created an unreliable but indispensable narrative agency. If Nabokov was at pains to deaden the uneasy memories of his past in order to relieve the present of their contamination, Sebald took the other way around, adhering to the most painful of them in order to enlighten their subterranean existence. He was committed to manifest these deeply buried remnants via his protagonists and narrators, however this amounted to the expulsion of those among them that had no other choice but to stick to life in darkness.

Empires usually operate on the premise that only imperial centres are carriers of the historical progress of humanity, whereas imperial peripheries are far removed from this progress's blessing. According to John Maxwell Coetzee, the Dutch Empire considered South Africa as its own land, which deprived that country's indigenous people of their citizen rights. Like the residents of European imperial peripheries who were relegated to similar zones of historical indistinction, they were doomed to the twilight of legal illegality. Unlike the regulated area of historical progress, their state of exception was ruled by the whims of imperial officials. 'The security police could come in and out and blindfold and handcuff you without explaining why, and take you away to an unspecified site and do what they wanted to you', he wrote in Diary of a Bad Year (1977: 171). In his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee strategically 'unmoors' and 'deterritorializes' this peripheral state of exception, spreading its iconoclastic effects all over the 'sacrosanct' territory of history.

The British Empire's disintegration drove its many residents into an enclosure of illusions of sovereignty. As McEwan's works emerged amid such developments, his characters respond to the rising disintegration either by imposing control patterns on others or by taking the needy into protection. The novel Black Dogs focuses on the protagonist-narrator Jeremy, who is determined to redeem his adoptive parents' ruined familial intimacy. However, his considerate attitude to them is gradually disclosed by the author as an attempt to solidify his unbelonging self. His generous opening to them by means of a mobile plot that meanders through European history gradually turns into a self-protective consolidation. Indicatively, his plot's sleepwalking through historical perils recalls the ancient Greek love romances, whose readers were equally frightened by the whims of an unchained history. Yet unlike them, who used to attach themselves to the ups and downs of the imperiled lovers, Jeremy's addressees are attracted by his wandering plot that occupies the individual and collective territories of others. In a final twist, the author even surpasses this self-consolidating expansion into foreign territories by his clandestine plotting of an intertextual space and thus reveals the appropriative, conspirational character of his pact with the readers. A complicit alliance with them comes into being, which he keeps controlling and steering.

At the outset, a distinction is drawn between globalization, that takes the shape of a consensus imposed from above, and worlding, that takes the shape of a dissensus developed from below. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, globalization “polices” a political space, suppresses conflicts among its constituents, appropriates and translates everything into its own identity parameters. By pointing out the “political” gap between what is claimed and what is within the given space, worlding, in contrast. insists on disagreement. However, these two reconfigurations and recalibrations of human being-in-common are never diametrically opposed, but are interrelated and intertwined. Worlding can start as a liberating “politics” but, as soon as it institutes its platform of commonality, may slip into an imposed “police”. Since political disagreement necessarily aims to legitimize its unrecognized identities, a surreptitious perversion of dissensual politics into a consensual police is its inescapable ultimate consequence. Disagreement invents names and utterances, setting up new collectivities that solidify their identities by “policing” their spaces. Accordingly, one can conclude that worlding starts as an emancipating project that gradually turns into discriminating globalization. The continuous slide of one into the other impeded and disconcerted the political space of European modernity from its very beginnings, accompanying it like an uncanny shadow. This space repeatedly proliferated both its internal (intra-European) and external (extra-European) “zones of indistinction”, whose residents forged transborder alliances with the aim of its recalibration and reconfiguration.

This book proposes a new departure point for the investigation of transnational literary alliances: the traumatic constellation of translatio imperii, which followed the dissolution of the East-Central European empires in the 1920s and the crumbling of the West European colonial empires in the 1950s. To prevent their breakdown, the former transitioned from a 'sovereign' to a 'disciplinary' mode of administration of their peripheries, the latter from the merciless assimilation of their colonial constituencies to their affirmative regeneration. This book treats Franz Kafka as the writer of the first transition, prefiguring J. M. Coetzee as the writer of the second. In a series of close readings, it investigates the particular ways in which the restructuring of power relations between the agencies in their fictions is a response to the delineated post-imperial reconfiguration of the new countries' governmental techniques. By displacing their narrative authority beyond the reach of their readers, they laid bare the sudden withdrawal of transcendental guarantees from the world of human commonality. This entailed an unstable and elusive configuration of their fictional worlds as a key feature of post-imperial literature.

Abstract J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello consists of eight “lessons,” which in their turn play host to seven lectures as given either by Coetzee himself or his fictional doppelganger. When a fiction consists of lessons that embed lectures, the latter are delivered simultaneously to the present direct addressees and to absent indirect ones. Both Costello and Coetzee refuse to accept the consensual illusion of their lecture halls by preferring to address a scattered and heterogeneous readership. Their lectures break the realist illusion by drawing attention to their unreliable performers who cannot act as unbiased agents of commonality. The best way to provoke dissent is to put emphasis on the consensual reality’s discarded “real,” such as violated children, exterminated peoples, or suffering animals. By responding to its call from an ever-new point of view and establishing a migrating point of view, Costello and Coetzee untiringly distance themselves from the artifice of reality that surrounds them.

After the First World War, state of exception became the dominant paradigm of government in Europe, reducing many distinct identities to bare life. Without having done anything wrong, they were calmly eliminated from their states' citizen rights, bereft of human status, and forced into a subhuman existence. Some prominent post-imperial writers turned these "positional outsiders" into the sources of their ethical commitment. They derived their literature from these outsiders' "zones of indistinction" (Agamben), i.e. the containers of subalterns whom the historical world has pushed into oblivion. Franz Kafka's authorial commitment to them is well-known. However, at the same time, he was aware of the insidious character of their literary redemption because the author who seemingly sacrifices himself for them, in fact enjoys the comfort of detachment that is withhold to both his or her characters and readers. Unlike their real sacrifice, his is merely performed. By exposing through his or her performance their fragility, the author betrays them. "I am not really striving to be good," writes Kafka, "but very much the contrary," to become "the only sinner who won't be roasted." I will explore the consequences of this political contamination of his narrative ethics.

Ever since its emergence, the modern concept of revolution rests on an ambiguity. While it insists on the present's intellectual sovereignty over the past, it cannot get rid of its pre-modern predecessor, re-evolution, which insisted on the present's genetic dependence on the past. From the very beginning of its historical trajectory, this concept inconspicuously interferes with the pre-modern concept of re-evolution as a cyclical return to origins. The cyclical logic never smoothly absorbs the linear one without simultaneously being displaced by its uncanny residue. In turn, the same uncanny leftover operates in the opposite direction, accompanying the putative liquidation of the cyclical logic by the linear one. This disjunctive conjunction of the present and the past characterizes the relationship between the events of May '68 and the theoretical work that followed it, known under the label of l'apres-Mai or post-May. Rather than being homely and familiar, the post-May thinkers' present was interrupted by the interventions of the remnants from the colonial past and the Holocaust. This is the point of departure for my interpretation of the ethical appeal of the indifferent in the works of Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot.

Recent developments within and beyond Europe have variously challenged the very idea of Europe, calling it into question and demanding reconsideration of its underlying assumptions. The essays collected here reassess the contemporary position of a perceived “European” identity in the world, overshadowed as it is by the long antecedents and current crisis of triumphalist Eurocentrism. While Eurocentrism itself is still a potent mind-set, it is now increasingly challenged by intra-European crises and by the emergence of autonomously non-European perceptions of Europe. The perspectives assembled here come from the fields of political, cultural and literary history, contemporary history, social and political science and philosophy. Contributors are: Damir Arsenijević, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Vladimir Biti, Lucia Boldrini, Gerard Delanty, César Domínguez, Nikol Dziub, Rodolphe Gasché, Aage Hansen-Löve, Shigemi Inaga, Joep Leerssen, and Vivian Liska.