"In thousands of poems you seek a worldwide retrospective of crime and death" : ethical, activist and intellectual rigour in Jure Detela
"U hiljadu pesama tražiš svetsku retrospektivu zločina i smrti" : etička, aktivistička i misaona oštrina Jureta Detele

english

2020

volume 24, issue 1

activism   anarchism   literary studies   pacifism   Slovene literature   socialism

Universita degli Studi di Trieste

The article presents the transformative potentials of Jure Detela's political thought on the basis of the texts that emerged from his social activism. In the period of the student movement, Detela established himself on the political left; his initial works are marked by a socialist political perspective, and later he became receptive to the political ideas of anarchism. In the 1980s, Detela was the first in the Slovenian public sphere to criticise imprisonment as the predominant mode of punishment and to demand the abolition of the death penalty. He developed arguments against the death penalty on the basis of an understanding of the interrelatedness of personal and structural violence. In the complex context of the disintegration of the Yugoslav socialist system and the accompanying sociopolitical changes, Detela began to conceive the Pacifist Alliance social movement. His concept of pacifism is very close to A. J. Muste's concept of revolutionary pacifism; in both cases, pacifism is intertwined with justice - Detela disdained the search for peace without it.

19.10.2021