The subject of identity instigates a debate every time someone asks themselves ‘Who am I?’ or when the question is presented to someone else. And if the question is asked by somebody else, the most common answer would be the giving of one’s name. We should in fact wonder if this mode of presenting oneself or simply calling out one’s name could provide the right answer to the question. I find that this way of presenting ourselves is not an adequate response to the question! Actually, to give someone a name ‘shows that place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word’ (Ludwing Wittgenstein), that is, we have consigned a place from which a person (or a state) is to answer in the future (3). Even though through the act of naming a linguistic engagement is expressed that provides cultural, gender, political and other identities, it is merely a beginning in the process of creating identity. After the naming is completed, the act of calling becomes important, that is, the way the name is used. That is why the use of the name places its carrier in a particular relation to the person who uses it. Naming could be part of the process of accepting an individual/group into a cultural, religious or another community, or represent part of the process of exclusion/elimination from said community. The name could therefore present a considerable burden to its carrier.
And this particular dimension of the name is successfully treated in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Not only that, but the play most vividly reflects the current political and other traumas of Macedonia today, faced before a real possibility: if it wants to take active and equal part in global politics, it is to assume another name and call itself differently rather than Macedonia!
Paradoxically placed in an identity without a name (from a position of the Other), Macedonians are doomed to quite a painful (collective and individual) situation of (international) invisibility and a frozen and delayed identity vegetation in perpetual crisis. This situation has produced a vulnerable (and not an unstable or ‘weak’ in a post-structuralist sense) Macedonian Subject.
(Kolozova, 2003: 303)
With this harsh comparison we wished to demonstrate how the use of a certain name also must generate certain social/political involvement that has to have an ethical dimension as well.
I hereby present the initial premise of my lecture: the loss of one’s name equals the loss of life (4)! I believe, in fact, that discarding one’s name is not possible in one’s lifetime. A name always represents someone’s – his or her – essence and is inseparable from their being as such. The creature (Romeo, Macedonia) lives in their name since names cannot be destroyed – the name does not lose its meaning after the object has been destroyed (Wittgenstein). Thus, in order to be able to describe a destructible (mortal, temporary) subject, names should be indestructible (immortal, timeless). Hence the name is independent from the existence of its object. ‘Something red can be destroyed, but red cannot be destroyed, and that is why the meaning of the word ‘red’ is independent of the existence of a red thing’ (Aphorism 57). Separating the name from its carrier and continuing life beyond one’s name is still possible, but it requires radical separation from all historical, familial and causal relationships stacked in the name, renouncing a series of identity categories (nation, sex, profession) and assuming others or new ones. Assuming a new identity is an alternative to death: if I am no longer Romeo, I must be someone else! Or, using the example with the name of Macedonia, it would imply substituting the name of the country with another. When Juliet is asking Romeo to be as a rose, she wishes to separate him from his name in the sense of all familial and causal relationships echoing from it. She wants him to change his name (‘O! be some other name’), which, according to Derrida, might mean two things: (a) assume another proper name, or (b) assume another sort of name that is not human, a name of an object, of something specific, an abstract noun: Romeo finally changes his name into an abstract noun – the noun love – and with this double aporia of his own name he loses everything: his name, his love and his life! In other words, in the play he does not manage to realize himself as an individual(ity), that is, his identity cannot be considered as a civic/democratic type of identity (5).
It is clear that in Shakespeare’s play Romeo begins to hate his name at the moment Juliet – in the case with Macedonia the role of Juliet is assumed by the international community and Greece – asks him to. Renouncing one’s own name, therefore, could only be wished through the call of the other, in the name of another; and if one applies this to the Macedonian case now, one would see that the play of the star-crossed lovers may not be as naïve as it seems. That is why any ironization of this naïve narrative in the context of a postmodernist paradigm would be extremely improper. The story of the star-crossed lovers is far more topical than the story of the miserable and indecisive Danish prince since it opens up a number of questions: if all names survive the death of their carriers, if memory could be destroyed, and the name erased or burned to illegibility (6) since ‘[h]e cannot want to do so of his own accord, even though this emancipation is nevertheless being presented to him as the chance of at last being himself, beyond the name – the chance of at last living, for he carries the name as his death’ (Derrida, 1992: 430). Katerina Kolozova is quite right to see in the forceful name-giving:
[T]he ultimate violence on the Subject through a fatal frustration of desire. It is achieved by negation, by completely eliminating its (‘Desired’) Subject. In all three cases (‘Macedonia’, ‘the Balkans’, ‘Southeast Europe’ – author’s note), the Subject (carrier) of this negation is a European Subject as a global and globalizing Subject. A simple geometric figure built of vectors of power in force in both cases (the case of Macedonia and the case of the Balkans/Southeast Europe) maintains a colonial submission/creation of the Balkans and the Macedonian Subject. These processes play out with the postcolonial world in the background, leaving an impression of striving to overpower and abandon the colonial subjectivity/subjectivization and that, quite paradoxically, through the process of globalization (ibid.)