An Answer Bouquet

I witnessed it all at first hand. In contrast to many avid thinkers from ex-Yugoslavia who were forced to take care of the business of survival, I had a lot of time in the nineties, to study and contemplate. I rarely found someone to talk to, most often in intimate circles. And the deductions were surprisingly simple. I realized that the archaic mechanism of banishing violence, the ritualistic search for the scapegoat, cleverly analyzed by Rene Girard, and the political ways of legitimizing this search that had not changed since the times of Plato, work just fine in the postmodern age. The globalizing processes only recontextualise it in a single but all important point: since the object of violence can no longer be found outside the (global) society, taking it out on the current scapegoat necessarily involves a deadly vengeful violence. Many thinkers that I studied later came to similar conclusions and all I could do was agree.
And yet I did not stop with solely deciphering the given version of the deadly software as so precisely derived by Jean Baudrillard. I was looking for a way out. I found it with Hannah Arendt, who revived the pre-platonic term of politics, where original violence is (was) not overcome by means of symbolization, but rather in opening space for people to communicate and work without fear of violence. Politics may thereby be understood as a means of mankind with which to break the bonds of the bidding mythological circle, drawn by a ritualized banishing of violence. Power and might are not necessarily nicknames for a rule of violence, masked by an appearance of inevitable necessity. Violence is not a prerequisite of the freedom of mankind, but a threat, which must be prevented from entering into the field of free action and communication.
Realizing that there is a solution was a great relief. But a short-lived one. The problem lies in the fact that we must want to realize this solution, and the military-technological complex, or “drive” as this deadly force was clearly defined by Martin Heidegger, does not have this wish. Not a very bright future then, and yet there is still a way out. It is portrayed in the Buddhist fable of two monks one of them deprived of all will and hope by the thought of a goal thousands of miles away, the other driven by this thought to depart at once.
The mental space in Slovenia was so crammed by the war that one was almost unable to move. I found space for the first step with Apokalipsa, where I still go to breathe freely. It is one of the few “liberated territories”, where in spite of the military racket, voices from the Balkans were still heard. And best of all – the inherited personal and institutional relationships from the country we used to share play no role in opening space and communicating there. The individuals that make up the Apokalipsa circle and have begun collecting works from the ex-Yugoslav territories are not driven by nostalgic recollections of privileges once held, but rather by a simple curiosity and a wish to understand and get to know. This is also why they go beyond the borders of the once common state that handed out these privileges: into Bulgaria, Greece, even Slovakia, Israel and Poland. The generation that was formed in Slovenia in the nineties does not carry the burden of the complexes toward Europe that the socialist generations had, despite open borders toward Italy and Austria. The messengers of this generation venturing into Serbia, Bulgaria or Macedonia do not travel in preselected “packet arrangements”, they have been turning toward the southeast for success and artistic comfort for over a decade. The nineties were a great market for artistically packaged “Balkan grooves”, but the profits were made in the west, on the stock market and on the fields.
It would be hypocritical to conceal that those who do turn their attention toward the south and east of Europe, tend to feel more at ease there, more like home. Where does this feeling come from, taken that Venice and Vienna are almost closer than Zagreb and Belgrade? A part of the answer must surely lie in the proverbially affectionate and hospitable peoples from this part of the world. But only a tiny, unimportant part, really, as we know just how carnal the passions that may hide behind these traits really are. We often turn to language for the answer. And the serbo-croat language that once had the same status in ex-Yugoslavia as international English does in the world today, still functions as a “native” language in these parts of the world, even though no side claims a stake on it. But are lingual similarities by themselves sufficient reason for benevolence? The case of the Germans and the Dutch (while not the only example) clearly shows that this is not so. And even though communication is surely easier between similar languages, the fact remains that the Slovenes mostly talk to the Slovaks, whose language is probably the most similar to Slovene of all the Slavic languages, in English. The fluency in other (“non-serbo-croatian”) languages is far more limited in Slovenia than the fluency in say English, German or Italian.
The Slavic proximity (which, to be sincere, is not felt toward the non-Slavic nations of ex-Yugoslavia in the same state) is not in itself that which makes us feel more at home in the serbo-croatian lingual field. I believe it is more a case of a common experience being coded into the language, that brings us closer even without words. A trauma of which we do not speak even though we should. And here we stumble upon a problem that I had often encountered in all the years of studying violence, one to which I had not so far found a solution.
The most relevant of explanations about the state of things in the Balkans and violence in general are relayed to us in foreign languages. Instead of attempting to get to the bottom of our own madness, as for example the Germans had done with the experience of Nazism, we pass the burden onto others. A self-contemplation, something quite apart from explaining away the horrors (we have plenty of that in autochthonous versions), is necessary in the very least because the etymological properties of the words for violence and peace have very different connotations in the Slavic languages than they do in English, German or French. Not to even mention the indispensability of the introspective view in understanding social phenomena and events. Perhaps the most typical common trait of all the Balkan nations is that we had never developed a worldview appropriate to our own experiences and languages.
Explaining the world goes hand in hand with attempts to conquer it and in this the nations of south-eastern Europe had never been very successful. All the joint Slavic ventures, not only the Balkan ones, had either been based on western dictatorships or were built upon the ideas of foreign theoreticians (Marx’s for example). As if we had no power to freely shape and realize our own ideas. And yet – who knows – perhaps the main problem of the world is the inability of conquering cosmogonies to face the borders that had made them primarily destructive, perhaps the time has come for hushed up experiences to speak up, even though they may not belong in the heroic discourses of great stories.