A Problem with Yugonostalgia: Yugoslav Socialist Experience and Post-Yugoslav Left

Abstract

This article deals with debates on Yugonostalgia among leftist scholars and activists in the post-Yugoslav societies and their diasporas. The majority of them insist on the political and intellectual futility and theoretical incapacity of Yugonostalgia. Taking the persistent capacity of Yugonostalgia to generate social, political and intellectual debates as a symptom of our own political present, I argue for the epistemological relevance of discourses on Yugonostalgia for (self-)reflection in the production of intellectual knowledge in a post-socialist society. Two related issues emerge from these debates as central to the post-Yugoslav left’s “problem with Yugosnostalgia” – the first is the epistemic status of the experience of (state) socialism, and the second is the political potentiality of emotions in the specific post-socialist context. These questions are not only crucial for our understanding of Yugoslav socialism as a political project and the lived experience of ‘really existing socialism’ as inseparable from that project, but also for the ways in which the social theories that shaped that project live their post-socialist (after)lives.