[ Nenad Dakovic, Essay on the Ghostliness, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1993. ]

Recently published book of Nenad Dakovic, "Essay on the Ghostliness" is really an unusual philosophic event. It represents a gesture of resistance to the general degradation of values and devastation which we accept as our everyday fate today. In fact, Dakovic's book appears in the moment when philosophy becomes axiological luxury and is given up even by some philosophers whose priority now is political, ideological or national involvement. On the other side, one could say that the "Essay on the Ghostliness" comes out just when the ghostliness starts to be painfully obvious. In these parts, unquestioned semantic "identities" have been functioning for decades and they were our most fixed reality, the reality within the ghostly wreck of those "identities", whereas today, a number of repressed and forbidden, even ideologically and politically exorcised, ghosts are being imposed on us as our renovated and traditional "identity" at the same time.

Dakovic does not deal with the problems of current depressing situation, at least not explicitly. He is ready from time to time to warn his readers kindly, thou: "Good night and take care. It's war, for God's sake". However, it it's precisely this ostentatious exchangeablity or replacability of the real and the ghostly that is the main topic of Dakovic's book. This replacement is constantly happening to us, and maybe it represents the very essence of every event. Even what is apparently most natural, Dakovic claims, can be ghostly. "It is not this or that terrifying event that is ghostly but the 'reality' itself" (32). In fact, we live like Kirkegaard's desperate people, who are quite often unaware of their own despair, within always possible substitutions and the promiscuity of the real and the ghostly. "Public debauchery" is almost a constituitive element of the reality itself, which, at least in the field of politics ("and wider") is constantly prostituting itself with the young and the old ghosts.

Therefore, Dakovic's ghostliness is not a fiction or science fiction which would then be confronted with a fixed, stable REALITY OR THE TRUTH. Something much more complex is in question. The ghosts are, of course, a lie, but they are the truth of their absurd world at the same time: "Anyway, the fact that the ghostliness is the truth is the shocking thing" (52). That is why the ghostliness is not the subject of literary classification, "but the existential value, postmodern existential value without its weight" (30). That is why the subtitle of the Dakovic's book runs:"Essays on Postmodern Existentialism". So we should bear in mind that the author makes clear distinction between modern and postmodern existentialism. Namely, "postmodern existentialist constantly speaks about the impossibility, the unreality of existence. He is like a traveller who got lost in a country in which nobody speaks his language" (206).

Dakovic does not approve basically of ideological attempt to define postmodernism as "modern affectation" or as "conservative ideology". He disagrees with the idea that postmodern conditioning could be claimed responsible for even the smallest quantity of suffering in the world. Moreover, Dakovic thinks that postmodernism is, in fact, "the discovered strategy of those who suffer and are miserable". With the use of postmodernism destructive indicators come "on stage", the indicators which have been repressed and which have formed in a privileged way the unconscious as "an orphan without parents", as the abyss of suffering.

But repression is a part of human drama which starts with the language and in the language, within language game, or, better still, within the language as a game. That is why postmodernist conditioning coincides with the very creation of language. In the moment "when in the absence of the centre or origin, everything becomes language", in the very same moment the ghostliness is born together with illusions and simulachrums, together with hyper-reality and abysses of overpowering indicators. However, a game comes first, meaning that postmodernism is, above all, the expression of a certain "abundance of indicators" whose first traces have been written down in the language that suddently came into being.

As Dakovic refuses to classify the ghostliness as a particular genre, he remains open to quite varied "genre" approaches and combinations, conditionally speaking. His discourse is not burdened with any kind of exclusiveness and disciplinary "sanctions". Moreover, Dakovic's essays reflect a postmodernist eclecticism par excellence, which is rather ironic than "enlightened". This particular irony is, in fact, the irony of conflicts of different, frequently appearing unlinkable, "learnings" and "worlds". It differs considerably from the classic, Socrat-like irony which was also an instrument of methodic doubt. Dakovic's irony is, in fact, not initial but final effect of the previous textual production of differences, the effect of over-stylized differences.

And just at the moment when discoursive analyses objectively become tiresome or over complex, Dakovic starts straightaway with literary, textual or, if you want, "genre" breakings and cuts; with the game of analogies and broken mirrors. Then this approach, which is a bit unusual for us here, plays with the traditional genre preconceptions and logocentric fixed ideas with the help of gentle, well-meaning (self-)irony. Indeed, postmodernism without little irony and laughter would resemble, so to say, a main dish without the main ingredient. It is in a way impossible, isnt't it? However, take car. It's war - anything is possible!

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