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Awards
About the Author
Jasna Koteska is a Professor of literature, gender studies and theoretical psychoanalysis at the University St. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia.She published over 200 articles, which have been translated into English, German, Hungarian, French, Slovenian, Serbian, Turkish, Albanian, Slovakian, Romanian, and Greek, and five books in Macedonian: Postmodern LiteraryStudies (2002), Macedonian Women’s Writings (2003), Sanitary Enigma (2006)Communist Intimacy (2008) and The Freud Reader. Early Psychoanalysis (2013). In addition, she is a national leader of the psychoanalytical network “Trauma, Memory, Reconciliation” initiated by the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) in Berlin.
COMMUNIST INTIMACY
Jasna KoteskaNew Academia Publishing, 2014
332 Pages
ISBN 978-0-9899169-7-4 Paperback
For BULK ORDERS, order directly from New Academia Publishing.
Queries: orders@newacademia.com
About the Author
Jasna Koteska is a Professor of literature, gender studies and theoretical psychoanalysis at the University St. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia.She published over 200 articles, which have been translated into English, German, Hungarian, French, Slovenian, Serbian, Turkish, Albanian, Slovakian, Romanian, and Greek, and five books in Macedonian: Postmodern LiteraryStudies (2002), Macedonian Women’s Writings (2003), Sanitary Enigma (2006)Communist Intimacy (2008) and The Freud Reader. Early Psychoanalysis (2013). In addition, she is a national leader of the psychoanalytical network “Trauma, Memory, Reconciliation” initiated by the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) in Berlin.
About the book
The book opens as a personal memoir―the author’s father, the famous Macedonian poet Jovan Koteski was a subject of massive police surveillance by the secret communist police of ex-Yugoslavia for 42 years out of 69 years of his life, in a well-documented case. His secret police file was maintained under the code name The Intimist (hence, the title of the book). The book continues as an academic enquiry into the mechanisms of the Eastern European police states in their relations towards the individual, the private and the public.
The American poet Allen Ginsberg publicly revolted against the imprisonment of the author’s father in 1986, when he was visiting Macedonia, which resulted in the release of the poet from prison in 1987.
Praise
“Her personal story and her father’s are emotionally compelling and her analysis of why Communist societies functioned as they did, in terms of surveillance and punishment, is quite original. She support her analysis with the works of others deftly (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Zizek, Judith Butler, Ivo Banac, Ben Fowkes, Katherine Verdery), and always in the service of her own thesis.”
―Herbert Eagle, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan.
“Communist Intimacy is a brilliant, provocative, and unique book. It is somewhere in between an intellectual exploration of the topic and a memoir, where Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Home-lands and Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days come to mind, as exam-ples of a similar genre. It is about the police state which can come in different forms, some communist, some capitalist, some monarchist, but the book’s argument is universal, and contem-porary.”
―Alla Ivanchikova, Assistant Professor of English, Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
“Jasna Koteska caused a true political storm among the Maced-onian public by talking openly about the case of her father, the writer Jovan Koteski, the reprisals he experienced in the period of the communist regime, and the difficulties her family experi-enced during the long systematic persecution.”
―Nikola Gelevski, Editor-in-chief of Templum publishing house and a writer.