An Essay on Creation and Destruction

/, Literature, Blesok no. 49/An Essay on Creation and Destruction

An Essay on Creation and Destruction

BalkanKazan 12F

There is yet another instance in the travels of Rebecca West which I find indicative. I would like for you to direct your attention to the last sentence of the following quotation, however not without the essential preceding context which is this: “It seems that violence was all I knew about the Balkans and all I knew about the South Slavs. I drew my knowledge… from the prejudice of the French who used the word Balkan pejoratively to signify a rastaquouère barbarian… Actually I knew nothing of the southeastern corner of Europe – (as if she is justifying her ignorance!) – and in the light of the fact that a multitude of events was streaming out from there… it meant I knew nothing of my own fate” (West; 1990:38-39, my italics).
The confessional tone of Rebecca West brings out to surface the European prejudice against the Balkans and its endogenous, destructive and combative subjects. Yet, is it not stigmatizations of such kind which produce mythical images of otherness?
Aren’t they the cause of a ‘sedimentary pseudo mythology’ with the help of which the concept of imaginative colonization is realized by the western European intellectual power? Is this how, in the absence of conventional imperialism, the culture of the grand European Self satisfies the need for a dialogue with itself, with its inner Other, its flawed self… However, the truth is irrelevant… all that matters is the illusion… the results of its narcissistic investment…
Nevertheless, this is what Slavoj Žižek’s – one of the leading theorists of otherness alive, and originally from the Balkans – thoughts are on the phenomenon. Among the most renowned cultural stereotypes of the Balkans he includes the stereotype of it as a part of Europe constantly haunted by the evil apparitions of the past – “the part which neither forgets nor learns, but continues to fight the battles of centuries, while the rest of Europe is engaged in the rapid globalization process” (Žižek; 2001:152). But, a vital paradox in the core of this stereotype cannot escape his sharp psychoanalytical eye – the one eternally haunted by the apparitions of the past has become, in the mind of those who have created it, the haunting apparition13F! How?
Western perceptions of the Balkans as a region of primitive, despotic passions, ethnic terror and intolerance – have created an imago which developed another extreme among the British conservatives, the opponents of the European Union. Some are conspirators of the thesis that “the entire continental Europe today functions as a new version of the Balkan Turkish empire, with Brussels as the new Istanbul”, which, by endangering the freedom and sovereignty, threatens to consume them in its own despotic center (Žižek; 2001:153). But, does the inherited ethnic and religious mixture from the Ottoman (actually from the Byzantine and Roman) Empire, really undermine the liberal-democratic processes in southeastern Europe? Isn’t the model of post-national states just an imported fabrication from the countries of the western world, a perverted image of their mono-national state concept, as if it were a concealed truth about the repressed ideological antagonisms between the West and the East? And isn’t perhaps this fear of the ‘Balkanization of Europe’ actually a fear of ‘Europe-ization of the Balkans’?
Just see how a point is made by a rhetorical question which, as if it were a continuous pondering with a time span of seventy years, confirms the ‘thesis of fate’ by Rebecca West: “Isn’t the Balkans of the post-Yugoslav era, that whirlwind of (self)destructive ethnic passions, the true opposite (of Europe), a photographic negative of tolerant coexisting of ethnic groups, a specific multicultural dream turned into a nightmare?”(Žižek; 2001:152; my italics). The paradox is far more than obvious. As is the truth, in fact.

The Great Nothing as Objet petit a

I will only spend a little bit more time on the European imago which defines the people from the Balkans as affective beings, closer to ‘nature’ rather than ‘culture’. The question is whether nature is really that opposite of culture, whether it is its own ‘Otherness’? The Latin words culture and civilization have a common root in colere, a word with great semantic charge: from raising and living, to nurturing and worshipping. However, according to Walter Benjamin, each document about civilization is at the same time a written account of its barbarism, so if that is why western logic has a non-defined and incomplete notion of the term ‘culture’, we can be certain that it fosters a strange uneasiness, almost abjection, toward the term ‘nature’. But, why should it, if nature is not the opposite of culture, when it is not its Other, but a weight creating an inner schism powerful enough to remind us that culture is not our nature, but what has come out of it, “what has complemented it in a way which is both essential and excessive” (Eagleton; 2002:120; my italics).
A great deal has been written about the affection and interdependence of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ of western and southeastern Europe. In the discourses of great western European ‘lovers’ – explorers and missionaries – the Balkans, as the most remote corner of Europe, has been given ambivalent descriptions: as the ‘kingdom of shadows’, something mysterious, yet tempting, as a wild mistress with a dark face which is the object of desire of all, Muslims and Christians, communists and capitalists; a half-familiar, exotic body, yielding to exploration and colonization14F. And, what is more important, it is within reach, in its backyard, right behind the wall and curtain of the sophisticated world, on the border between the forbidden and the permissible.
Thus created upon the strict rules of privilege and subordination, the Balkans has maintained the identity of a harem mistress until today. As long as this mistress allows her European master to enjoy the highest symbolic values, she can freely take upon herself the role of a mental vacancy, a Great Nothing, recognizable only as an internal object of desire. But, when that object/cause of desire decides to become an entity, when it decides to reach out for positive existence, its reaction will be looked upon as the awakening of the ‘objet petit a’, as a threat to the identity of the Great (European) Self caused by its barbarian Otherness15F. This is the root of the abjection Europe feels toward this Balkan ‘apparition’, toward the obstinate remnant of a long-denied past.
“I knew nothing of that southeastern corner of Europe… and that felt like knowing nothing about my own fate… My idiotism felt like an anesthetic…” wrote Rebecca West seventy years ago, in her travels of the land of the South Slavs. Haven’t her words intercepted the awakening of the Great European Self from amnesia of centuries, from its own unconscious?

#b
12. BalkanColdron
13. Aren’t the vagueness and changeability of the Balkan geography indicative of its ghastly status? It is as if there is no answer to the question’ Where does the Balkans begin?’ – The Balkans is always somewhere else, a little further away, in the southeast…” (Žižek; 2001:152; my italics).
14. If the Balkans is emotio (nature) and Europe is ratio (culture) then the wild should be tamed, colonized…
15. And, instead of materializing the lack of the subject, lower case a threatens to undermine its stability, widening the gap which serves as a reminder of the initial and never forgotten connection with it.

2018-08-21T17:23:14+00:00 August 6th, 2006|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 49|0 Comments