Abstract
This chapter discerns the meanings of the absence, or void, in artifacts, in relation to the rhetorics of power, and then shows how resistance turned the absence into a presence during the 1989 Anti-Communist and Anti-Totalitarian Revolution. The Romanian holed flag of the Revolution is an iconic image that evinces the agentic action of excising the Communist symbol from the Romanian flag. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the new power again manipulated the rhetoric of absence in relation to a desirable political “silence,” which is exemplified in the first page of a national newspaper in Bucharest in 1990 that called for “quiet” times as opposed to the new cacophony of freedom of expression that the Revolution brought about. A return to the “quiet times” of Communism showcases the persistence of former rhetorical practices after regime change.
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Notes
- 1.
Personal account.
- 2.
Stijn De Cauwer, “Potentiality and Uprisings: Georges Didi-Huberman in Dialogue with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 186–99. The quote states that “Didi-Huberman posits Agamben against Deleuze, who theorises potentiality in line with Spinoza and Nietzsche, as a force in which ‘decreation’ is always intertwined with ‘creation’ and negation with the affirmation of something else” (p. 188).
- 3.
Personal account.
- 4.
The Communist Party Congresses took place every 5 years and received all the media’s attention.
- 5.
Andaluna Borcila, American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 47.
- 6.
See Noemi Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceauşescu’s Loss of Words: Memorializing Rhetoric in 1989 Romania.” In The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, ed. Vladimir Tismăneanu and B. C. Iacob, 441–64. (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2012).
- 7.
See Chap. 2.
- 8.
Quoted in Stijn De Cauwer, 194.
- 9.
Antonio Negri, “Uprising as Event.” In Uprisings, ed. Georges Didi-Huberman, 37–45 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016), p. 39.
- 10.
Cf. Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).
- 11.
Georges Didi-Huberman, quoted in Stijn De Cauwer, p. 194.
- 12.
Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 152.
- 13.
See Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991) and Andaluna Borcila, American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), for discussions on the role of the television in the events.
- 14.
Borcila, p. 2.
- 15.
See John Woods, “Why Is There a Hole in the Centre of the Hungarian Flag Today?—Photos, Video.” Daily News Hungary. 2018. Retrieved from https://dailynewshungary.com/why-is-there-a-hole-in-the-centre-of-the-hungarian-flag-today-photos-video/ (accessed March 2021).
- 16.
Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 1.
- 17.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture.” Rhetoric Review, 20, no. 2/1 (2001): 37–42, p. 37.
- 18.
Zizek, p. 31.
- 19.
Ibid., 1–2.
- 20.
Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press. 2013), p. 29.
- 21.
The psychoanalytical phallus is defined somewhat differently by each theorist; however, it is closely related to the figure of the father, especially in totalitarianism, where the authority is excessive. The phallus is the warrant of power, knowledge, and fertility, and through Decree 770, it conflates the functions of sexuality and procreation mudding the relationship between men and women. This concept can be discerned in monuments erected to the regime. In my analysis, I look at the propaganda materials, which are at once representative of the regime’s virility and articulated in language.
- 22.
Deletant, p. 42.
- 23.
Zizek, Introduction Note 1, p. 239.
- 24.
Removal or replacement of monuments was at the center of the protests of the summer of 2020. The role of the media in shaping perceptions is evident in the case of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which were perceived by 42% of the people as being violent and destructive of property, while less than 10% of them were so (ACLEDdata.com). Retrieved from https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/ (November 2021).
- 25.
William Watkin, “Agamben’s Impotentiality: Separation, Nonrelationality, and Destituent Potential in The Use of Bodies.” Italian Studies, 76, no. 2 (2021): 200–14, p. 209.
- 26.
Marin, p. S171.
- 27.
Cf. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).
- 28.
See Codrescu, p. 97.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 238.
- 30.
Ibid., 4.
- 31.
Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975 (New York: Schocken Books, 2021), p. 254. Arendt also maintained at the time she wrote that chapter (1962) that the only revolutions “for the sake of freedom” as opposed to bread were the American Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (pp. 251–2).
- 32.
Quoted in Watkin, pp. 209–10.
- 33.
Zizek, p. 1.
- 34.
Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (London, UK: Macmillan, 1988), p. 280.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 283. Spivak states: “According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given a chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?”
- 36.
Ibid.
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Woods, John. “Why Is There a Hole in the Centre of the Hungarian Flag Today?—Photos, Video.” Daily News Hungary, 2018. Retrieved from https://dailynewshungary.com/why-is-there-a-hole-in-the-centre-of-the-hungarian-flag-today-photos-video/ (accessed March 2021).
Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
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Cordali, A. (2023). Asserting a Presence: Rhetorics in Time of the 1989 Revolution and Early Post-Communism. In: Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18806-0_5
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