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The Balkans Geo-Psychoanalysis JANUS HEAD The Balkans Geo-psychoanalysis Dušan Bjelić All rights reserved. Copyright © 2021 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 109 JANUS HEAD ABSTRACT In the 1990s, Julija Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek developed a unique discourse within psychoanalysis - the psychoanalysis of the Balkans. Their cultural and political analysis represented the Balkans as a pathological region of nations suffering from the syndrome of an “archaic mother.” They propose in their different ways that the subject (nation) must radically separate from oedipal attachment to the attachment to nationalism as unemancipated Oedipus and subordinate to the authority of the symbolic father, that is, to the West. At the heart of such an approach is a conservative policy of labeling the Balkans as primitive behind Kristeva and Žižek loom self-orientalization and geopolitical de-identification with the Balkans as a precondition for their cosmopolitan and universalist identity. Keywords: Kristeva; Žižek; psychoanalysis; Balkans 110 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD The Balkans Geo-psychoanalysis he Mittel Land of Bram Stoker’s discursive space, replicates the dynamics production more broadly, I invoke some TDracula invokes both the Balkans of center-to-periphery identity formation basic concepts of Gramsci, such as and Central Europe, and Central Europe by shifting geopolitical pathology to the geographic and historical specificity as has been imagined as “a transitional zone eastern neighbor.2 In so doing, Balkan central to both intellectual labor and between proper Western civilization and nations not only orientalize the “other” the internal plurality of the subject. the unfathomable identity of Russia.”1 but also occidentalize themselves as the This concept of Gramsci, and others, are This transitional status is intensified in West of the “other.” Balkanism, as a system particularly resonant in today’s climate the Balkans, which, in addition to being of discourse-geography, accounts for of tension between the homogenization part of the East/West, is also seen as a ways in which the geopolitical ambiguity of global capitalism and the cultural bridge between the Christian North and of the Balkan space has been internalized diversity of immigrant labor, which has the Muslim South. And both Western and into the Balkan identity both through displaced the economic conflicts of glob- Eastern Christianity, as well as Islam, are self-orientalization and hegemonic al capitalism onto culture and identity. established in the Balkans, and their prac- representation.3 Gramsci’s work is also foundational to the tice coincides with ethnic and national This essay focuses on the Balkan interdisciplinary area of cultural studies lines. The Balkans was never colonized discourse-geography as a hidden con- (which includes Balkan and other “area” in the modern sense. Rather, during the tingency of the intellectual work of two studies). Many of the academics and centuries of Ottoman rule, strategies of Lacanian psychoanalysts, Julia Kristeva writers working in these fields are them- repopulation, religious conversion and and Slavoj Žižek. Their iconic status selves expatriates who identify with the polarization were introduced to control as global intellectuals and the sheer subaltern groups about which they write the territory, and Balkan people came volume of their work have generated an or from which they come and whose to perceive each other (and themselves) equally industrial-sized body of criticism. dislocation operates as radical resistance as both colonial rulers and as colonial However, most of that criticism has taken to the cultural orthodoxy of their host subjects. This inscribed ambiguity left their work at face value as stemming nations, the former colonial centers. the Balkan nation-states emerging in the solely from the tradition of the European The work of Kristeva and Žižek, th 19 century particularly vulnerable to discourse of rationality. In what follows on the other hand, offers a reverse, dissi- representational colonization by “proper here, instructed by Gramsci’s concept of dent response to exile which discursively Western civilization,” and to aspirations of intellectual labor as social praxis and its subjugates the Balkans and immigrants th “European” identity. Throughout the 19 self-empowerment through marginal to European symbolic dominance. Under th and early 20 centuries, the period of the geography, I bring to bear a specifically the sign of psychoanalysis of the Balkans formation of the Balkan nation- states on Balkan gaze upon Kristeva’s and Žižek’s their work promotes the internalization the ruins of the Ottoman empire, it was respective discourses on exile and uni- of the Balkans’ geopolitical location as common practice for the intellectual elite versality, emphasizing their own Balkan the other of Europe and produces a nega- to study in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or Istan- origins and the discursive geography of tive version of the Balkans’ subjectivity as bul—whichever imperial capital had ex- the region as dissonant infrastructure to failing Oedipus which pathologizes im- erted the strongest cultural and linguistic their self-proclaimed universalism and migrants’ subjectivity on the basis of the influence on a particular region. Because cosmopolitanism. incestuous bond with the lost space. This of the inherent ambiguities I have In conceptualizing their intellectual pathologization is achieved by invoking described, the Balkans, within its own 1. Tomislav Z. Longinović, “Vampires like Us” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 39-55. 2. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54.4 (Winter 1995): 917-931; hereafter cited parenthetically as “Nesting.” 3. See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); hereafter cited parenthetically as Imagining. 111 JANUS HEAD the Lacanian theory of the split subject as then she began studying with Lacan and absence of initiative, the sloppiness that a universal structure of modern subjec- incorporating his ideas on subjectivity redoubles an unprecedented brutality on tivity which replicates the cognitive split into her work on structural linguistics. the individual level, the arrogance of the between empire and colony as symbolic Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) one mafia and the scams of the newly rich.7 father and archaic mother. This universal of Kristeva’s doctoral theses, combined Her message to Bulgarian citizens is, scheme ignores the subversive role of Bakhtin’s Marxist theory of polyphony following her example, to “…undergo a geography and history in the formation in language with the Lacanian notion psychoanalysis or psychotherapy”(182) of Balkan subjectivity. This “situational of the split subject, a unique theoretical in order to join European civilization suc- intensity and sensitivity”4 lacking in position reconciling bourgeois aesthetics cessfully. Kristeva discursively reintroduc- Kristeva’s and Žižek’s work is central to with the revolutionary field of text. It was es the colonial paradigm into European Gramsci’s concepts of intellectual labor this work which definitively launched her geopolitics via her politics of signification and individual subjectivity. as the leading literary theorist of her time. in the same way the Lacanian split sub- In elaborating convergences in Kristeva’s “politics of signification” ject is articulated through her theory of Kristeva’s and Žižek’s work and in their discursively transforms intellectual labor poetic language. The maternal drive for personal histories, I acknowledge and from an agent of symbolic-material inter- the lost space supplies endless raw mate- account for divergence within those vention into a purveyor of desire for signi- rial for building the cultural capital of the areas, including in the circumstances of fiers and self-signification as a permanent French nation. their displacement from Bulgaria and source of revolt and creative negativity. Consistent with her theory of poetic the ex-Yugoslavia respectively. I argue, Her concept of “exile” as a state of cosmo- language and the prelingual state of however, that even with these differenc- politanism originates not so much from chora, the archaic drive for the mother es, each offers an exclusionary discourse her life in Paris as from her experience of remains underneath language as a of radical conservatism, framed in the herself as a liberated, fully Oedipalized permanent prelingual drive rupturing language of desire, as an idiosyncratic subject exiled from her maternal space symbolic conventions into new ex- form of intellectual labor. of birth: “exile is already in itself a form pressive forms. Language is central to of dissidence, since it involves uprooting Kristeva’s work on more than one level. Bulgarie, ma sous-France oneself from a family, a country, or lan- As a Lacanian psychoanalyst, she adheres guage…”5 She extends this concept of he history of Julia Kristeva’s to the principle that language is essential dissidence to the idea of “Oedipal revolt” dislocation from her Bulgarian to the symbolic order which provides T against the maternal space and posits origins is well known. She was born in the pre-existing culture and rules, forms that the subject exists in the tension 1941 and received a largely francophone the ground for the subject emerging between the joy of speech (desire for the education. After graduating
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