A concealed psycho-drama
As if a connective tissue, a geographical space allowed for a symbolic interaction of existing differences. It nurtured conditions for bridging over the internal binary logic and was granted, in the mutual reception of Christian West and East, the linguistic and cultural stereotype – Byzantine. Its sense of value represented the matrix through which, with its own cultural awareness, the Metropolis projected its forms of mysticism, all the contradictory fantasies of the ‘exotic Other’, making its irreconcilable Eastern origin more absolute, rather than making it more relative.
Thus a vacuum was created – the vacuum between the self-referenced and self-absorbed narratives of a non-Balkan Europe, and the glittering myth of the Hellenic culture of a non-European Balkans, the cradle of the European spirit and civilization. But, when, due to new relations of political power, the term ‘Byzantine’ was replaced with ‘European Turkey’6F, and this one with the term ‘the Balkans’ at the end of the 19th century, the exotic Others of the peninsula were given a marginal status of border subjects, with a sufficient Oriental contamination not to be accepted as completely European identities. Thus, through a “completely schizophrenic procedure”, Ferid Muhic says, “Europe split its own historical consciousness. It proclaimed one of its parts, the Balkans, as a Different-from-itself and ascribed to it all its traumas, syndromes, anxieties, psychotic nightmares; whereas it ascribed angelic attributes to its other part, reserving for it all the optimal ethical prerogatives. It simply objectified its struggle against its own pathological consciousness, instead of internalizing it” (Muhic; 2000/20:28).
What was ascribed to the Balkan subject as an ‘Eastern Other’ in the heart of Europe, was inspired by several factors, but mostly by the division of Christianity: the Western-Catholic on the one side (the one with a European mentality), and the Eastern-Orthodox on the other side (the one with a Byzantine and Oriental mentality). Therefore, the Balkan identity, created as a specific kind of human fate, was preordained to be the East on the West, and the West on the East. But, instead of accepting the role of the marginal, the Balkan identity has striven to make an impression of a central identity. And while the western metropolis considered the Balkan subject ahistorical, everything it touched, it turned to History. Here is the proof.
The boromeic knot
The preface of Rebecca West’s (Cicely Isabel Fairfield) travels of the land of the South Slavs, contains quite an illustrative instance on the thesis present in the intellectual (academic and political) circles of the civilization we believe we belong to – the attitude that the Balkans, i.e. southeastern Europe is the Id of the western European Ego.
“My life was marked by murders of kings, news-vendors running down the streets and shouting how someone turned a new page in history with a deadly weapon”, says Rebecca West (1990:28). Her childhood memory contained images of 1898 on the account of which she was able to reconstruct the murder of the Habsburg queen Elisabeth, committed by an Italian anarchist, and also the horrifying lynch of the royal Serbian couple – Aleksandar and Draga Obrenović7F in 1903, yet she failed to recall the murder of Franc Ferdinand8F in 1914 in Sarajevo, the center of the Balkans.
“I do not remember a thing about this murder” writes West. “Each detail of the death of Elisabeth is quite clear in my mind, and I do have a vague image of the massacre in Belgrade, yet I cannot, for the life of me, remember reading anything about the assassination in Sarajevo. I was engaged at the time, as if I were an idiot, I was a private person and was very busy. My idiotism felt like an anesthetic. While I was under it, I felt cut off from everything and felt nothing, although it could not erase the consequences. The pain was compensated for afterwards…” (West, 1990:34; my italics), in 1934 when the anchor person of a radio station announces the murder of Petar Karađorgjević. At that moment, as if the repressed unconscious, or a sudden look back from her childhood stage, West realizes that Yugoslavia, or more precisely Sarajevo, was her dream screen. That is why she recognized the news from Marseilles about the murder of the Yugoslav king in the heart of Europe, as danger (“I knew a new agony might begin with it”), and the term ‘the Balkans’9F as a territory of Freudian unconscious, an entirely realistic stage nowadays onto which the collective unconscious of Europe10F seems to be projected; its latent, symbolic meaning, its chthonic and demonic essence – that which must not be spoken of, according to the consciousness and reason of High Civilization. However, it can be dreamt of… recognized as a dream screen… That is how Europe protects itself from itself.
This realization called to mind the image of Lacan’s boromeic knot – the three rings of string, three thoraces intertwined in firm unity. If one is removed, the entire construction falls apart, and it has a topological dimension. It is a three-dimensional body in space, a structure which finds the notions of boundary – center, inside – outside, or same – different, irrelevant. Therefore the three thoraces represent a connective tissue. The point of intersection of this triple unity is the place of the union11F. The union prefers an identity of differences and the unity – differences in identity.
But, to go back to the presumed ‘Euro-intellectual’ logic.
If we accept the Balkans as the Id of the western European Ego, then Asia shall be its Alter Ego, which leads to the conclusion that the topological interposition of the thoraces of the boromeic knot corresponds to the geopolitical positioning of the aforementioned regions, onto which the three order logic is reflected: the order of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Or, to be more precise: if Europe is the realm of the real, and Asia is the realm of the imaginary, the Balkans should denote the realm of the symbolic unconscious, something similar to Freud’s identity paradox, which (just like the knot) is not monolithic, but composed of self–compensating different samenesses. That ‘sameness of differences’ actually suggests that a subject from the Balkans could never be defined ego-logically, but topologically, because – as a middle thorax in the tangled up Eurasian knot – it is the part that buffers and softens the opposition between the poles; it is that which contains and is contained; that which is – at the same time – the center and the periphery, the ergon and the parergon of what is called the European spirit and civilization, but with a prominent Balkan feature. Why?
As a meeting point between different nations and religions, this historical and geographical chronotope has always been the landmark on which a rich cultural hybrid was built. Without an assumed or imposed hierarchy which generates insurmountable differences between the Occident and the Orient, the Balkan logic of ‘in-between-moment’ seems to develop specific strategies for pacifying the rigid identities. However, aren’t those the same strategies of the Other, the beheaded today, the other heading? Derrida says: “This question is as old as the history of Europe, but the experience of the other heading, or of the other of the heading, is presented in a completely new way… the emerging of the new, the uniqueness of the other today, should have been expected… it should have been anticipated as that which cannot be foreseen… in short, as that which we have no memory of yet (Derrida; 2001:20; my italics).
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6. As opposed to the prior name which, although it associated, it did not produce enough differentiating semas.
7. Here is how she noted that down in her book: “This murder remained somewhere in my memory as a half-shaded square… : a police poster from the front page of a newspaper, seen many years ago” (West; 1991:33).
8. The murder of the Austrian heir to the throne, the future father of the nation, is an event which was supposed to remain in the unconscious, as if it were a terrifying oedipal drama.
9. I knew nothing of the South Slavs, nor had I met anyone who knew them. All I knew was that they belonged to the Balkan people who have played strange roles in history… Once, in Nice, while I was eating shrimp in front of the small restaurant at the pier, I heard shots. A drunken sailor was leaving the bar next to us as the owner ran after him shouting: ‘Balkan! Balkan!’. He had emptied his gun in the mirror behind the bar. I was now faced with the flattering grace of the King from the documentary, who was also ‘Balkan, Balkan’, but who was also confronted by violence in his sound mind, confronted by imagination opposed to violence, an imagination which assimilates him as a destructive experience” (West; 1990:37-380).
10. In one of the most inspiring essays of the book The Kapitol Train Station (Kaptolski kolodvor) by the Croatian publicist Boris Buden entitled Inconscientia Iugoslavica, the following quotation by Mladen Dolar is taken as a motto: “Yugoslavia is the European unconscious, or, the unconscious is structured as Yugoslavia” (Buden; 2002:7).
11. Trinitas = Unitas