Introduction
In 2010 Kaisu Lehtimäki made her story public. This was the first time in Finnish history when a woman who had been accused of fraternising with the Nazi soldiers and who had left Finland in the autumn of 1944 with the withdrawing German troops told her story to a large audience. She told her story in a documentary film entitled Auf Wiedersehen Finnland by the Finnish filmmaker Virpi Suutari and on the morning TV show as well as giving an interview to a major Finnish newspaper.Footnote 1 Her story appeared in many local papers too. In Finland, the recasting of history and public memory of the Second World War has been a political project that continued to the present day and has aimed at realigning memory with national identity.Footnote 2 In the country where the postwar national identity project is characterised by an acute quest for a consensual view of history and ‘obsession’Footnote 3 with war, Kaisu’s appearence broke the long silence that had followed her as well as the collective taboo that had prevented her becoming a part of the national memoryscape.
The context for Kaisu’s story is the Second World War and Finland’s troubled relations with the Third Reich. More than 200,000 alien military men traversed or were stationed in Finland over the three years when Nazi Germany’s occupation of Norway brought to the fore the need to transfer troops and munitions through Sweden and Finland. Diplomatic relations between Finland and the Third Reich had improved in the winter of 1939–40 and an agreement was reached that allowed Germany to set up supply depots along the Arctic truck road. Germany declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and Finland grew closer to Germany. Eventually, Finland became a co-belligerent with Nazi Germany.Footnote 4
When Kaisu’s story is read side-by-side with official national history – which denies the Nazi alliance – a cross-cutting and interrelated temporal order emerges, which reveals the selective nature of the writing of the nation’s history.Footnote 5 Kaisu’s account of the past, and unavoidably the present and future too, is examined in this article through contrapuntal reading, which offers ‘a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history and of those other histories against which, and together with which, the dominating discourse acts’.Footnote 6 I extend my reading of the Finnish nation to a subalternFootnote 7 presence that was once forcibly excluded. My reading of Kaisu’s performance recognises both the temporal processes of nationalism and resistance to it, hence its contrapuntal nature. The aim is to reveal the intermeshed, overlapping and mutually embedded histories of the nation and their temporalities. Reading Kaisu’s performance using contrapuntal methods allows me to rethink the temporal dimensions of the nation’s identity politics since the reading makes visible ‘a liminal signfying space’Footnote 8 that is marked by the heterogenious histories of contending people, subaltern temporalities and the tense locations of political differences.Footnote 9 I seek to show how the rhetorically fixed national identity is gained by manipulating the variety of coexisting temporalities.
Time has been discussed in IR from a variety of perspectives, although IR’s explicit interest in time remains a relatively new one. Kimberly Hutsching’s Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present Footnote 10 which examines the assumptions about time embedded in IR theories and their ethicopolitical consequences is a key text. Similarly, Andrew Hom studies how time is constitutive of the international system.Footnote 11 Furthermore, time has been discussed in the contexts of, for example, sovereignty,Footnote 12 memory,Footnote 13 security preparedness,Footnote 14 trauma and rupture,Footnote 15 change, tranformation, and political violence.Footnote 16 In the postcolonial and subaltern studies, on the other hand, there is an abundance of scholarship that explores the variety of temporalities and particularly shows the limits of hegemonic history writing.Footnote 17 This article derives inspiration from the postcolonial literature and, at the same time, seeks to contribute to the sudy of the connection between IR, time, and national identity. Its ambition is to show how any national ‘now’ is always already ‘disjointed’Footnote 18 and how this disjointedness implies political struggle. It seeks to show how Jacques Rancière’s discussion on politics contributes to the IR literature on time. I demonstrate how Kaisu’s performance challenges the linearity of the nation’s narrative of its progress in ways where ‘chronology itself, the sacred cow of historiography’Footnote 19 is sacrificed. The nation is considered to be a site of conflicting, or at least plural, temporalities marked by class, ethnicity, gender, and race.Footnote 20 In the article, Kaisu’s temporality and the political event she created are used to demonstrate the importance of the study of hegemonic national time and a variety of alternative temporalities that coincide with it. In order to accomplish this, I will trace Kaisu’s temporality in relation to the official national time and its memoryscape. By discussing her temporality, I will also problematise the collective denial that is at the heart of the Finnish nation. Furhermore, it can be shown how Kaisu’s narrative brings difference and contestation to the core of the nation whose political imagery is based on consensual history, and, therefore, talking about Kaisu’s subaltern history in this context is talking about politics.Footnote 21
I rely in the article, as indicated above, on Rancière’s understanding of politics that is characterised by the declassification of spatial orders as a precondition for politics, but I pay more attention to his theorising on the disturbance of temporal orders. From this position, when speech is acquired by those whose right to speak is not recognised they can produce spatiality and temporality that disturbs hegemonic representations of time-space constellations, namely ‘who are we?’ and ‘where are we?’Footnote 22 This kind of politics in the Rancièrian sense – which differs from police – is a matter of knowing who is qualified to bring forth a particular temporality and become visible as ‘politics revolves around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’,Footnote 23 whereas police constitutes a society where groups of people are dedicated to specific modes of action and places as well as modes of being.Footnote 24 Furthermore, I am interested in Kaisu’s agency too. It will be demonstrated that just as time has multiple dimensions so has political agency which is capable of producing ruptures as agency emerges from the body, voice and relationality.
War, abject bodies, and consensual national history
Kaisu is an elegant greyhaired slim woman who tells her story in the documentary and on the morning television show with a clear voice. She says that she left Finland with the Nazi forces in 1944 because she was afraid of a Soviet occupation. She did not have an affair with a German soldier, but rather saw the possibility of employment with the withdrawing German troops and, at the same time, escape the Soviet threat. ‘I escaped the Russkie’ and ‘was given the identity of Gretel Laubert for a short while during my escape’, she says.Footnote 25 Kaisu gives in the documentary and interviews detailed accounts of how she travelled through Norway with the withdrawing German troops to Germany, held a variety of occupations there, and saw the collapse of the Nazi regime and the total destruction of the German cities.
Feminist IR has drawn attention to bodies such as Kaisu’s in the literature where the role of women’s corporeality in symbolising the nation and its honour is studied, particularly in times of violence and war.Footnote 26 The abject figures of, for example, ‘comfort women’ who have been subjected to nationalistic violence and ‘female terrorists and torturers’ taking part themselves in violence and war have been also brought to the research agenda of feminist IR.Footnote 27 Recently, Christine Sylvester’s War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis Footnote 28 has opened up a new domain for the study of violence and war as a corporeal and a mundane phenomenon. She suggests that war should be studied as an institution whose actual mission is to injure the human body and destroy normal patterns of interaction. Due to the overtly abstract notion of war in IR starting with states, organisations, fundamentalists, security issues and weapons systems, ordinary people and their bodies are overwhelmingly absent in IR and its studies of violence and war, and consequently of postwar peace too.Footnote 29 Sylvester’s view resonates with Julia Kristeva’s quest for research that seeks concrete instances of ‘women’s time’. This type of research emerges from lived experiences and, thereby, can reveal alternative temporalities not heard in mass media or politics.Footnote 30
Kaisu is certainly an ordinary person and yet she does more than could be expected from the ‘ordinary’: her performance and temporality disrupt and destabilise, and as such, stand as guarantee for the reconfiguring of the space of the political. Kaisu’s speech act as such does not constitute the political contestation. Rather, the contestation comes forth through an ensemble of performance at a moment when there is an ‘opening’ in the national historiography.Footnote 31 In short, she exemplifies Sylvester’s point on the importance and unexpectedness of the mundane and corporeal in relation to war and to postwar national identity politics as well as Kristeva’s notion of alternative temporalities that rupture linear ‘normal’ time.
To understand the ways Kaisu has symbolically functioned as an abject who has not been ‘taken into account’Footnote 32 and how her narrative brings an anxiety to the core of the imagined unitary postwar Finnish nation, this article derives from the psychoanalytically oriented IR that examines the nexus between war and collective identity, memory, and history.Footnote 33 In this vein of thought, war and violence are seen to be a constitutive and, at the same time, traumatic event in the nation’s existence as it reveals the instability of the sovereign subject that was thought to provide security. Jenny Edkins argues that sovereign power cannot provide full security for its members. Instead, it sends individuals to their deaths in the name of the survival of the collective self. It is in this sense, that war and violence constitute a trauma in the nation’s existence: they reveal the unstable nature of sovereign power as a security provider.Footnote 34 The postwar moment that follows the war and violence is a potential moment of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of the ideology that has created the nation’s identity as the primary security provider loses its efficiency. In Jenny Edkin’s words, this is ‘trauma time’ when nothing is certain and no decision is assured.Footnote 35 In a similar vein, Peter Burgess summarises the characteristics of the national subject during this moment by arguing that ‘the subject is, … unstable, exposed, threatened and at risk’.Footnote 36 Hence, a new master narrative is needed to stabilise the identity of the sovereign power and to make the war and the collective trauma readable for the national subjects.
Postwar memory work is of primary importance when the mastery of the postwar anxiety is created and its collective effects are controlled. Since the nation’s identity is rendered extremely truncated, impossible, mutilated, and antagonistic during the war, collective memory work, and particularly history writing, functions as a tool to cement a closure. National history works to secure for a contingent nation the false unity of the national subject evolving through time. According to Prasenjit Duara, ‘the subject of History is a metaphysical unity devised to address the aporias in the experience of linear time’.Footnote 37 Furthermore, as a number of scholars have pointed out, the way in which wars are remembered and war history written is fundamental to the production and reproduction of postwar sovereign political power.Footnote 38
By 2010, when Kaisu told her story, the Finnish nation had largely sedimented a master narrative of its post-Second World War national history and location in world politics.Footnote 39 By coincidence, in the same year postwar ‘abject history’ got some official recognition when the Prime Minister’s Office and the National Archives of Finland commissioned a study on the children of foreign soldiers in Finland. It was the first officially initiated attempt to deal with the question of children fathered by foreign soldiers, and consequently the relations between Finnish women and foreign armies. However, Kaisu’s public appearance carried more historical weight than the officially commissioned reportFootnote 40 that was published a year later as her performance exposed her as a living container of residual historical material whose subaltern past made visible the disjuncture with the present view of the national self.
National memoryscape
Since the official relations between Finland and Germany were friendly and benign, the state apparatus did not instruct the Finns not to fraternise with the Germans. Many Finns benefitted from the presence of the German army: they undertook small-scale commerce and exchanged goods and services. There were also jobs available, for example, for professional translators and secretaries in the German military establishment.Footnote 41
Despite the initially collaborative relations, the women who fraternised with the Germans were later positioned as outcasts who deserved to be erased from the memoryscape of the postwar nation. Kaisu and the other women who were accused of fraternising with the Germans came to represent for the nation ‘shadows of other presences and pasts’Footnote 42 whose existence could not be reconciled with the postwar national identity narrative. The nation forgot the existence of the women: postwar collective memory work and its sedimentation, national history writing, produced closure of the identity narrative that sealed the women off from the memoryscape of the nation. Forgetting is indeed an integral element of memory work and national history writing. According to Larry Ray, ‘the nation is a mnemonic community whose raison d’être derives from both remembering and forgetting, especially where the past poses a threat to the unity of the nation’.Footnote 43 In other word, the nation ‘forgets to remember’.Footnote 44 In short, creating a symbolic grammar for war and violence and writing postwar history is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering.Footnote 45 National history is the outcome of a highly selective process where the memories of extreme trauma of war and violence are not remembered as such but rather selected to be remembered to only a limited extent and in a controlled manner as well as emplotted in such a way that they respond to certain expectations of genre and structure. Some events come coded as historically ‘real’, and they form a foundation for the master narrative of the nation. They are argued to be uncontradictorily remembered, documented, or reconstructed and, thereby, they are given a privileged place in a linearily and chronologically ordered sequence of significations.Footnote 46
What is typical of national history writing is that it produces causal and linear temporality where events are sequentially ordered. The time of the nation is progressive in the sense that the nation is seen to be a solid community which moves along the line of history in a teleological and linear manner. This linear temporality, Chronos, the measurement of time, seeks to produce a coherent and causal origin and a straightforward historical path of development for the nation.Footnote 47 In the linear temporal structure there is no scope for a bifurcation of the path, which the narrative takes through time because a bifurcation would threaten the already established ending, namely, the current state of the national order. The timeframe suggests coherence with time and equates the past with the present. In the linear temporality, war and violence are seen to have a first cause and this cause can be unambiguously traced back to a singular past.Footnote 48
In Finland, the master narrative of national history hails into being a small and impartial country that fought alone in the Second World War against its mighty enemy, namely the Soviet-Union. From the late 1940s onwards, history writing sedimented a view where Finland had drifted towards its collaborative relations with the Nazi regime: Finland did not actively seek the collaboration nor did it form a coalition with the regime. The nation had no alternative other than cooperation with Germany. This ‘driftwood theory’ was soon replaced by a modified version where Finland appears to be a rational actor whose drifting represented a set of carefully selected moves where the country deliberated the options available to it and chose to appear as drifting. In addition to this, according to the hegemonic narrative Finland’s war against the Soviet Union was a ‘separate war’ where Finland held a unique position in world politics. The nation’s war against the Soviet Union and its alliance with Germany were specific events in the Second World War, not a part of the general warfare and the war’s alliance structure.Footnote 49
In 2005, President Tarja Halonen summarised the dominant view of Finnish history that is at the core of Finnish foreign policy doctrine and which has guided, for example, the history curriculum used in schools. In her speech at the French Institute of International Relation before an international audience she states:
To begin with, let me say a few words about how Finland has reached its present position in Europe, since this still influences our perspective today. European integration has been the answer to the experiences of the Second World War. The Finnish approach to integration must also be seen against the background of events that took place over six decades ago. In late summer 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union agreed on a division of Europe into spheres of influence. The following winter Finland had to fight off an attack by the Red Army in order to preserve her independence and avoid being occupied by the Soviet Union. We had to do this alone, without significant outside help. Five years later, in the summer of 1944, we again managed to stop the Red Army’s attempts to conquer Finland. Our country was not occupied at any stage, during or after the war. We lost part of our territory, but we achieved a defensive victory. We held on to our independence as well as our democratic political system and our economic system.Footnote 50
At the centre of the narrative there is a tiny nation who is at the mercy of the forces of world politics and whose survival is dependent on its capacity to take evasive action. In the narrative, Finland is a solid national subject that moves along the line of history in a teleological and linear manner from the Second World War to the present day’s European integration. The swerving moves are purposefully planned and their sequential order can be traced back to the prime mover. In other words, the cause of the nation entering the war can be unambiguously detected. The nation’s past makes its present possible as the nation has moved intentionally towards the present moment. The nation would not be where it is now without its singular past and history. In the case of Finland, the narrative sees the war and the postwar reparations paid to the Soviet Union as a necessary sacrifice on the nation’s path to becoming one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
This view brings into being ’national normal time’ where causality and the first cause prevail. In it, time is a succession of infinite ’nows’ which provide the nation with a sense of continuity. National normal time coincides with a particular spatial structure, namely territorialisation where the nation is imagined as a territorial entity with clear boundaries as ‘collective identities are produced as much through temporal boundaries as they are through spatial ones’.Footnote 51 Within the timeframe and its bounded spatiality, it is possible to maintain one hegemonic view of national history and a seemingly coherent identity narrative that relieves the anxiety of postwar temporal flux. In summary, in the teleological time of national history, the nation is a pregiven entity, subject, which experiences the war. The entity is territorial and its ‘past appears to evolve logically in only one way, creating one true past’Footnote 52 which, in turn, ensures the notion of one true national identity. Complex transactions between the past and present are reduced to a single teleological path. One past is privileged and other pasts excluded in this ‘either/or temporality’, which denies the existence of other possible timeframes.
However, the favouring of one past that is claimed to be true is not without its fissures, as there is a constant pull towards heterogeneous histories that threaten to bring difference and contestation to the core of the nation. A nation’s memory must be constantly reworked to substantiate the linear national past and the hegemonic historical identity narrative. By rejecting the heterogeneous histories, the linear national normal time keeps the residual historical material at bay. In Finland, the sanitised narrative has allowed the nation to keep its distance from the crimes of the Nazi regime. Residual material indicating Finland’s alliance with the Nazi regime would have threatened the unitary postwar national self and the closure of its identity narrative. Ultimately, the normalised Finnish national history writing hides the continuous process of nationbuilding and the possible antagonisms that characterise any nation.
Corporeal mnemonics
Kaisu reminisces in the documentary how ‘most of the Finns thought that the conditions in Germany would be better, but to our surprise, that was not the case’. She remembers how: ‘Hitler proclaimed that the Finnish girls can be treated as sisters-in-arms and can enter Germany.’ She spent several months in Germany and during the last months of the war in 1945 she was transferred to a transit camp from where she escaped back to Finland. In Finland, she was incarcerated in a detention centre administered by the Finnish security police. She was interrogated there several times. Her voice fails three times in the documentary film: when she apologies for the hardship she has caused her family, when she remembers the suffering of the Jewish population, and when she tells about her humiliation at the detention centre.
There are loops and tangles in Kaisu’s story. Furthermore, subtle bodily gestures and movements as well as changes in her voice indicate her ambiguous relation to the Finnish national identity narrative and its closures. Narrative loops and tangles indicate that her temporality does not coincide with the linear national temporality and the selective and constrained memoryscape allowed by it. ‘Do excuse me the suffering I have caused to you, but there was nothing else I could have done’ reads Kaisu from a letter she has written to her relatives on the 15 September 1944 where she explains her reason for leaving with the withdrawing German army. When Kaisu reads a letter in the documentary that she wrote almost seventy years ago, her time slows down and, as Henri Bergson writes about pure duration, her time ‘refrains from separating its present from its former states’.Footnote 53 Time loses its measurable and linear qualities when the multiple layers of possible pasts actualise in the act of reading the letter. Her reading of it consists of the memory of the event of writing the letter which, on the other hand, contains other memories that can be interpreted from her corporeal components as her body re-enacts the moment of writing, her mother’s reading of the letter, and the mother’s reaction to it. The reading of the letter in the present moment blurs the distinction between the past and the present moment as it brings the past to the present where they form an organic whole.Footnote 54 Her temporality is incomplete and continuously growing as there is no beginning nor ending to it.
Henri Bergson’s notion of time as a whole, durée, captures Kaisu’s temporality. Time is not, in the Bergsonian view, a linear and causal line where past precedes present and is succeeded by future, but a ‘surface’ where past and present exist symbiotically together and are in a constant process of becoming. Moreover, duration disturbs the linear and causal timeframe by setting the temporalities in direct confrontation where the future does not follow the present and past. When Kaisu acknowledges her past in the present, the fusion of the past, present, and future follows the acknowledgement. The past is not based simply on Kaisu’s direct experience, but it is a mosaic of what she knew firsthand, what she was told, what she imagined, and what happened around her as part of a historical process that she shared with millions of other people. Many pasts exist in parallel and some of them have been previously wiped out due to their disturbing qualities. In this temporality, the memory of the past can make the past out as not necessarily true, or the past can be misrecognised, as the past and present exist on the same ‘surface’, not in linearity, but repeatedly in flux, flowing from one to another.Footnote 55
Kaisu remembers the suffering of the Jewish population too. She describes in detail how the Jews were contained in small underground bunkers and how their bodies were malformed due to that. ‘I and some other Finnish girls encountered a Jewish woman who wore a yellow patch with the Jewish star. Her eyes were full of anguish and they were begging us to notice that she was indeed wearing the patch.’ She wonders what kind of suffering has caused such timidity in a fellow human being. Her voice becomes low and husky when she reminisces the suffering of the others. Her own hardship in war-torn and ravaged Germany seems to have only minor importance compared to the suffering of the Jewish population. When Kaisu mourns the suffering of the others, a splitting of the subject as well as temporality takes place. She is not Kaisu located here and now, but young Kaisu who glimpsed into the void of human existence. She loses her notion of herself as an autonomous subject and in control. As Judith Butler describes the event of mourning the other:
What grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others holds us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here, about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very ‘I’ who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.Footnote 56
When the autonomous ‘I’ rambles, the chronological timeframe loses its grip. In this splitting, the ‘subject is at once both inside and outside, self and other, virtual actual, recollection and perception and, indeed, past and present’.Footnote 57 Kaisu’s temporality is without a centre and it is expanding as is enlarges outwards towards the suffering of the others. Her temporality becomes a series of infinitely bifurcating pathways. Kaisu herself becomes a discontinuous entity who simultaneously exists in multiple temporalities. Here her time moves backwards in a nonlinear way to uncover the other pasts and the pasts of the others.
In one of the most affective scenes of the documentary, Kaisu sits on the stairs of a grey wooden hut where she was incarcerated by the security police on her arrival back in Finland. She smokes a cigarette with a firm hand, but the viewer can see how her overtly upright body holds the memories of the past where the representatives of the Finnish nation interviewed her several times in the most humiliating ways. ‘Hautojärvi – that was his name – took me three times to special interregations where no notes were taken, and I can tell you, he was a brute’, says Kaisu and continues that ‘however, in front of Hautojärvi I did not cry!’. That particular layer of the past and its temporality is mainly beyond language and it is incorporated into her body in the form of pain and grief. For Kaisu, ‘what is “remembered” in the body is well remembered’,Footnote 58 as Elaine Scarry argues when she dicusses torture. The codified national memory skates along the flat surface of the past, whereas the past that is remembered in the body penetrates the deepest layers of human existence as Kaisu’s presence indicates. Kaisu’s body has indeed been inscribed by a variety of disciplinary practices as it has been located into the national order of things. The sovereign power has named her, medicalised her body, and subjected her to the mechanisms of surveillance.Footnote 59 Chronological national time has, therefore, taken hold of her body. Yet, Kaisu’s temporality writes itself out of normalised national time. The body is transformed by processes and does not only represent those processes, but experiences them as the lived memory constantly in flux and in the process of becoming.Footnote 60 The time of Kaisu’s body is in this sense immeasurable. As Christian Haine writes with reference to Deleuze, this type of ‘body time’ is ‘finite in that it manifests itself in particular modes of activity, but infinite in that it operates through a process of relation that is open, composing itself through contingent, inventive combinations’.Footnote 61
Enacting the political
Why are Kaisu and her subaltern temporality important? Kaisu is constituted outside and she is unaccounted for in the symbolic order of the nation. This outside, however, opens up the possibility, if not the necessity, for the enactment of the political as it composes itself through contingent, inventive, and interruptive combinations. Kaisu is important because her corporeal presence and her temporality resist symbolisation and as such they become stubborn remainders of the residual historical material that escape the linear and teleological timeframe of the nation. This remainder that cannot be symbolised by the existing interplay of political forces disrupts and destabilises and, thereby, restages the exclusion at the core of the Finnish nation in the ways Jacques Rancière sees it to constitute an ‘enactment of the political’. Politics in this view is a particular type of event that emerges with respect to the police orders.Footnote 62
Politics in Kaisu’s case is signalled by the enmeshing of the temporalities that create a moment of interruption, a moment where her temporal presence disturbs the national order of things. In Kaisu’s case, it is not just her speaking and the content of what she says, but also her (corporeal) temporality that disturbs the singular form of the national truth by introducing the political potential embedded in multiple parallel temporal universes. She offers an alternative history without it being specifically given as correct. The fusing of the national ‘true’ past with her past causes the resurgence of difference and contestation that destabilises the already established national, teleologically determined, ending. A discontinuity emerges between the nation’s present status and its myth of being a singular unitary subject. To paraphrase Homi Bhabha, Kaisu’s presence and temporality reveal the insurmountable ambivalence that structures the equivocal movement of national linear time.Footnote 63 Her durée provides the potential for the national hegemonic past to be made out as not necessarily true, and it is this that creates memory capable of activating a new future.Footnote 64
The moment of Kaisu telling her story in public can be understood as material and a symbolic time-place event that shatters the hegemonic distribution of the Finnish postwar national history and truth. Her presence enacts the wrong and exposes the ruptures that cut through the national body politic. It can be seen to force the nation to ‘stutter’ in its articulation when faced with this kind of subaltern speech and its destabilising power.Footnote 65 Kaisu’s discontinuous temporality brings forth the other pasts and presences as well as renders visible the continuous reimagining and reproduction required for the imagined unitary national identity. Her temporality shifts political judgment and action from sedimented criteria to unfamiliar contexts where the criteria for history and national identity must be negotiated anew. It introduces political dissensus that is not a discussion between speaking people who would confront their interests and values or who disagree with the presence of a common object, but rather it concerns the very capacity to the interlocutors to present the object.Footnote 66 In Kaisu’s case, the dissensus is about national history, its temporal orders, and national identity. Kaisu hence embodies the political where the political involves a conflict about who speaks and who does not speak, about what has to be heard as the voice of pain and what has to be heard as an argument on justice.
As Rancière notes, political struggle is not a conflict between well-defined interest groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways.Footnote 67 He writes:
The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.Footnote 68
It is in this sense that Kaisu introduces political struggle to the core of the nation. She does not rupture the power positions, but rather challenges the classifications of those worthy of inclusion and those excluded as well as bringing forth a space for the appearance of a subaltern subject.Footnote 69 She enables herself and her kind to be seen and heard as speaking subjects and engages in a radical political practice that displaces the limits of social exclusions. Political struggle in this sense is not a rational debate between multiple interests, as noted earlier, but the struggle for one’s voice to be recognised as the voice of a legitimate partner.
Had Kaisu chosen not to expose her temporality, she would have remained invisible. Through enacting the wrong that is located at the core of the nation, she becomes visible. Kaisu’s appearance in the documentary and in interviews creates a moment of eruption that makes visible the violence that characterises the nation and its consensual history. The performance simultaneously stages equality and exposes the violent practice of a linear temporal national order, despite the latter’s constitutional presentation as the foundation for the unitary national subject. It is a moment when a particular political-temporal condition becomes the stand-in for a generalised nationalistic practice and, in doing so, reaches beyond its particular location and politicises the exclusion that was thought to produce closure in the nation’s identity narrative. Erik Swyngedouw notes that ‘the emergence of politicization is always specific, concrete, particular, but stands as the metaphorical condensation of the universal’.Footnote 70 A political sequence unfolds through the universalisation of such concrete time and space moments that are condensations of the universal political conditions. In exposing the wrong she suffered, Kaisu also presents herself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, as the stand-in for the nation in its assumed coherence.Footnote 71
Conclusion
I have suggested in this article that subaltern corporeal presences, such as Kaisu’s, can become the revealer of a nation’s temporal orders as subaltern pasts allow it to make visible the disjuncture of the present with itself. Furthermore, subaltern presences are characterised by a surplus of temporal potentiality that can reorganise the nation’s relationship to its past. The nation and its hegemonic history writing does not always want to recognise these abjected presences and their alternative temporalities as acknowledging them would introduce a bifurcation into the causal path of the linear and teleological national time. Their disruptive potential lies in the enactment of the political through the temporal disruption, namely in their capacity to evoke the question who belongs to the political community and who is cast out.
In Kaisu’s case, the abject had been able to ‘speak’Footnote 72 about the other pasts, but the nation has not wanted to hear what the abject wanted to say. From the perspective of IR, her case demonstrated that the universalising procedures of consensus history are infiltrated by fragmenting forces that disrupt the seemingly unanimous national order of things. In more general terms, her appearance in the form of an ensemble of corporeal performances in the documentary and interviews made her visible and produced agency that allowed her to make enunciations and demonstrations about the common, about who belongs to the common. She created a time-space event where politics appeared out of place, that is, in a place that was not supposed to be political. Ultimately, her presence signals the empty ground of the nation, the inherently split condition of a nation’s existence that prevents the subaltern presence entering into its teleologically constituted temporal order.
In addition to showing the empty ground of the nation and arguing for the ‘temporal polymorphism’Footnote 73 in the study of International Relations, I have demonstrated in this article the importance of linear normal time in the production and reproduction of postwar sovereign political power. By offering a Rancièrian understanding of the subaltern history and temporality, it has become possible to enrich the IR literature on time. Rancière has enabled me to show how the plurality of different articulation of time brings forth the multiplicity of the forms of interruptions and dissensus. In this connection, I have elaborated the usefulness of the contrapuntal method for IR as the method provides a means to listen and bring forth subaltern temporalities that the grand narratives of nationalism help to silence. It is in this sense I have contributed to the research agenda suggested by Christine Sylvester too: instead of directing the researcher’s gaze towards abstract systems, organisations, and ideologies, I have studied concrete instances of temporal eruptions that arise from the ‘ordinary’, the ‘particular’, and the ‘corporeal’, and yet stand for the universal.
Acknowledgments
For their useful comments on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank my research group Anitta Kynsilehto, Samu Pehkonen, Eeva Puumala, and Tiina Vaittinen and our extended research seminar on corporeality, movement, and politics (COMPORE) as well as three anonymous reviewers of Review of International Studies.
