Barbarianism and Its Discontents by Maria Boletsi (review)

In this innovative study of twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction, art, and political discourse, Maria Boletsi inquires into the category of the “barbarian,” asking not who is a barbarian but rather what kinds of critical work are performed when the terms “barbarian” or “barbarism” are invoked. A comparatist at Leiden University, Boletsi seeks to draw out the positive potential in a very ancient cultural term most often used as a negative ground against which civilization is figured. She foregrounds theory and method, relying heavily on deconstruction applied to the closed system of paired terms, centrally “civilized/barbarian.” Postcolonial theory, performance studies, and translation theory also come into play as Boletsi examines an eclectic but intertextually related collection of works—twentieth-century fiction, post-9/11 political commentary, poetry, art installations, and photographic performance art—each staging a “barbarian encounter” (9). Her aims are multiple, but a central preoccupation throughout involves discovering the potential for barbarism to be reconceived as a positive, critical operation.

The book begins with a brief introduction locating the project in a post-9/11 context, reviewing standard definitions of “barbarism” and “barbarian,” and emphasizing the ancient Greek etymological root of the word: barbarians are defined by their incomprehensible language. Shifting from a values-oriented approach to a performative analysis, Boletsi seeks the transgressive potential of the barbarian through several means: discovering the internal contradictions within discourses of civilization—places where they become incoherent, confused, or “noisy”—and teasing out the “energizing residue” left after the binary operation of pairing barbarism with its civilized other (6–7). The first body chapter, which also serves as a framing device for the book, takes up Franz Kafka’s 1931 short story “The Great Wall of China.” By virtue of the “piecemeal construction” of the wall, the barrier between the inside of civilization and the outside of the barbarian is never complete or secure. Boletsi proposes that Kafka’s wall, like the Tower of Babel, be seen, paradoxically, as a successful construction—an expression of the desire for barbarism of a kind that “protects civilization from entropic decline . . . and sustains the hope for renewal and transformation” (34).

The next chapter reviews post-9/11 political commentaries, many of which, according to Boletsi, offer a “new civilizational rhetoric” (40). Readings of Samuel Huntington, George W. Bush, Tzvetan Todorov, Wendy Brown, and Slovoj Žižek, among others, lead the author to conclude that “we need another semantic space for [barbarism]” (56). From contemporary rhetorics, Boletsi turns to history, offering a very wide-reaching chapter on the origins of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism.” With particular emphasis on ancient Greek material, the author offers a “tentative typology” of standards or normative categories through which civilization has been defined over the course of Western history. The list of eleven terms includes language, culture, political system, humanities/humanism/the human, and religion, among others (59).

Turning again to the twentieth century, chapter 4 brings the theoretical discussion of the terms in the first half of the book to a kind of climax through a detailed analysis of several essays of Walter Benjamin. Noting that three slightly different terms—Barbarei, Barbarentum, and Barbarismus—have previously been translated without regard to distinctions among them, Boletsi derives a notion of a “positive barbarism” from their interplay in Benjamin’s work, particularly in a 1933 essay, “Experience and Poverty” (121). The related discussion of translation theory and barbarism make this chapter one of the strongest: a center of gravity for the whole project. The fifth and sixth chapters offer analyses of literary and visual texts motivated by the “demonstrative repetition” of the topos “waiting for the barbarians.” Boltesi describes her mode of reading Cafavy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel of this title as “barbarian allegory” (140). The emphasis here is on the staging of untranslatability in each case: “Signs bear the promise of a language, the meaning of which cannot be fully determined” (161). Visual stagings of the scenario by South African artist...