This article considers how Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, and to a lesser extent Portrait with Keys, represents the city of Johannesburg and the state of the nation as an ever-shifting interregnal space that is at once seized in a perpetual state of uncertain becoming, but also implosion, collapse and decay. It contemplates how these narratives relate to the macro-politics of the post-transitional nation state as being in the throes of, what the anthropologist Robert Thornton describes as, a ‘constant sense of suspense’ (1994). Drawing on Double Negative’s allusive use of Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’, the article considers this motif as a symbol of transition and interregnum, not teleology, in writing the post-apartheid South African city. In making capital of Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1950), the article will read both literary city and nation in terms of Michael Titlestad’s conceptualization of the ‘mezzanine ontology’ (2010) as a descriptor of the condition of post-apartheid liminality.

中文翻译：

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书写城市过渡期：伊万·弗拉迪斯拉维奇 (Ivan Vladislavic) 约翰内斯堡的目的论和转型

本文考虑了伊万·弗拉迪斯拉维奇 (Ivan Vladislavić) 的双重否定以及在较小程度上的《带钥匙的肖像》如何将约翰内斯堡市和国家状态描绘成一个不断变化的跨域空间，该空间立即处于不确定生成的永久状态中，但还有内爆、坍塌和腐烂。它考虑了这些叙事如何与转型后民族国家的宏观政治相关，因为人类学家罗伯特·桑顿 (Robert Thornton) 将其描述为“持续的悬念感”(1994)。借鉴双重否定对保罗·克利的“新天使”的暗指使用，文章认为这个主题是过渡和过渡期的象征，而不是目的论，在写作后种族隔离的南非城市时。在利用沃尔特·本雅明 (Walter Benjamin) 的文章“历史哲学论文”(1950) 时，