Der ewige Augenblick .Ismet Prcics „Shards“ und die Gegenwart des Krieges
Perpetuating the Moment.The Ever-present War in Ismet Prcic’s “Shards”

Summary/Abstract: Ismet Prcic’s “Shards” (Black Cat, Grove Atlantic 2011) reenacts the Bosnian war as a conflicting state in perceiving time: Time seems to be absent or suspended and only therefore, paradoxically, becomes visible. The text uses reiterated and reduplicated sequences to oppose the linear concept of time, to highlight states of in-between: The narrator suffers from dissociation and depicts past, future, and present simultaneously. Based on this observation, the essay analyzes the temporal fragmentary power of war conflicts in a rereading of Paul Virilio’s media-philosophical approaches. War as an optical phenomenon and vision machine separates between the perception and the representation of events. The traumatic conflict of the “Shards’” protagonists is mirrored in the clash of literary forms: fragmented experience, remembrance and oblivion cover up the border between documentation and narration, memoir and novel.

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