Since the early 1990s the question of shared identity was always ubiquitous in the global massmedia and peer-to-peer networks. And now the lovely and subversive case of Janez Jansa pops up in our system of perception and sneaks into everybody’s attention. The only truly global common denominator of human culture is film, and now this – big screen – magic is abused by a group of rogue artists trying to steal what is already theirs…

vienna, april 2012
UBERMORGEN.COM

Our first guest blogger is Marcel Štefančič jr, Slovenian film critic, television presenter, journalist and the author of Janez Janša – Biography

Is it good for a man to have a name? Absolutely. Why? Because it protects him. From what? From slaughter. Take for example pets: people, their owners, give them names. Why? So that they don’t kill them. They don’t give names to pigs. Why? So that it’s easier to kill them. You can’t slaughter and eat a pig that you have given a name to. You give it a name in order not to kill it. When you give it a name you protect it from yourself. Ergo: we give each other names so that we don’t kill each other. In Last Tango in Paris Paul (Marlon Brando), an American in Paris, a former actor, boxer and journalist, gets involved in anonymous sex with 19-year old Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a revolutionary, who collects old, dusty, antiquarian things, but he sets a clear rule:

You don’t have a name. Neither do I. No names.

So, no names. Why?

Because we don’t need names here.

Later, when Jeanne suggests that she should come up with a name for him, he sighs:

A name? Oh Jesus Christ! Oh God – I’ve been called by a million names all my life. I don’t want a name. I’m – I’m better off with a grunt or a groan for a name. Do you want to know my name?

And then he tells her his name, more precisely – instead, he lets out an animal cry. Logical. Even more logical: in the end Jeanne kills him. Why? Because he doesn’t have a name. Because she hadn’t given him a name.