self-management

The interferences between historiographical procedures and the personal memory of the historian are a familiar problem for the historiography of the present time. The two cases of such interferences analysed in the present text are interesting in that, as contemporaries, they remember more than their scientific apparatus is capable of integrating. The incapacity to integrate into their presentations and historiographical analyses certain processes and practices that are nevertheless important in their time (and for that reason well remembered by the historian as subject), exposes the historian to the risk of suffering the effects of spontaneous or manipulated politics of memory, arising from the epoch in which he writes his narrative. Starting from the “excess of memory” in the texts of two eminent historians, we hope to be able to tackle some difficulties in the history of Yugoslavian socialist self-management.

Colonized and racially subordinated subjects enter the realm of ethics as violence, and that phenomenon becomes their appearance. They are obligated, in other words, not to appear. Colonialism, understood in these terms, is tragic in the Hegelian sense of a conflict between two conceptions of right. The settlers see themselves as having a right to the land; however it was originally obtained, the transactions by which the generation of settlers facing the indigenous or anti-colonial fighters acquired their possessions was part of a legal and as far as they are concerned just system. They thus have a right to their possessions in the colony. The indigenous or prior inhabitants argue, however, that the land was stolen from them through acts of conquest or trickery. They therefore have a right to its repossession. Even if the settlers decide to give the land back, there is a deeper ethical argument that even that act of good will isn’t their right.